UK-based Crooked Dice Game Design Studio is set to launch 7TV: Pulp, a tabletop skirmish game inspired by American cinema serials and pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, later this month.

The 7TV games simulate a live production of a niche TV series in a tabletop wargame format where players direct their stars and co-stars. Initially, these cinematic style skirmishes borrowed heavily from shows like Doctor Who and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., however the latest iteration of 7TV is embracing the tropes of classic pulp fiction, which has allowed for a greater range of gadget and cliffhanger cards to play with.

7TV: Pulp is the product of a unique collaboration between Crooked Dice Game Design Studio, developers of 7TV and 7TV: Apocalypse, and creative writing students from Edge Hill University.

Crooked Dice owner, Karl Perrotton, and academic and games writer from Edge Hill University, Peter Wright, met at the UK Games Expo in June 2017. Their mutual appreciation for Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Burroughs and other contemporaries, as well as their own attempts at creating a detailed 7TV campaign featuring adventurers in a mechanical mole sparring with Atlanteans and cultists in a hollow earth, led them on a creative journey to produce 7TV: Pulp.

The scope of this project was daunting for Perrotton and Wright in its early stages, considering they were busy with 7TV: Apocalypse and full-time academics respectively. They realised that adapting serial film and pulp fiction would require creating larger-than-life characters (cast), varied locations (setting) and diverse scenarios (scripts), which is why they called on the creative writing team at Edge Hill University to assist.

Perrotton said the primary purpose of 7TV: Pulp was to produce a highly entertaining, absorbing and fun skirmish game with an authentic sensibility that could be developed by players in the same way as the core 7TV game.

The students involved in development researched 52 cinema serials and produced over 100,000 words of notes, thoughts, observations in an attempt to distil the essence of ‘pulp’. The development team reportedly settled on six genres, including: amazing tales, aliens and weird science; crimebusters, hardboiled detective business; gangland stories, think criminals in warehouses; mystery theatre, typical world domination fare; thrilling adventures, raiding tombs and treasure hunting; and weird menace, mad scientist experiments.

Some of the first archetypes defined range from heroic stars like occult investigators and space aces to covert operatives and eccentric inventor co-stars. These good guys can take on alien tyrants, eldritch horrors and diabolical fiends who are aided by deviant doctors, femme fatales and hulking henchman. And that’s just scratching the surface.

The boxed game, 7TV: Pulp, will launch at UK Games Expo 2019, 31 May – 2 June.

The set will include:

Director’s Guide – 44 page rulebook covering all the skirmish rules

Producer’s Guide – 28 page rulebook to help you enjoy block-busting chapters of 7TV:Pulp

Casting Guide – 32 page rulebook to help you build your casts

213 profile and unit cards

45 countdown cards

20 gadget cards

20 maguffin cards

25 peril cards

20 plot point counters

31 MDF status and objective tokens

1 acrylic blast/arc template

1 pewter maguffin token

6 six-sided dice

So, what film will you direct for Pinnacle Pacific Pictures?