I’m a latecomer to the sword and sorcery (S&S) subgenre of fantasy literature. Growing up in the 80s and 90s I read Tolkien, Dragonlance and the Drizzt novels, and plenty of other high fantasy books. It’s only later in life that I’ve come to delve into Leiber, Howard, Moore, and other early fantasy writers. They’ve helped me to understand the importance of Appendix N and how it shaped early fantasy RPG rules and tropes.
Jeremy “Father Goose” Shuman’s Pulp Heroes draws on those inspirations to help bring a more solidly sword and sorcery approach to Dungeon Crawl Classics characters. The zine is not a full setting book. Rather, it’s designed to help players and Judges craft their own swords and sorcery tales in a setting of their creation or utilizing other published settings.
Designed to support DCC Lankhmar and other third-party DCC publications, Shuman tweaks the character creation process to focus like a laser on S&S tropes. This includes a completely updated character creation process that utilizes the “Sezrekan method” (roll 4d7 for attributes, dropping the lowest roll), a custom occupations chart, new Birth Augers, and new Benisons and Dooms.
The zine also reintroduces 0-level PCs into the DCC Lankhmar system by including 0-level class features for S&S settings. The zine removes both the cleric and thief classes and reskins the the demihuman races: elves become cultists, dwarves become soldiers, and halflings become assassins or pirates. Each class then starts at 0-level with a couple of the normal class features. A smattering of additional rules rounds out the zine, including Beginner’s Luck and new AC options to better reflect S&S characters who don’t wear the heavy armor of high fantasy.
If I have two criticisms of the book it would be the typesetting and the lack of a table of contents. The font is a little small for my aging eyes, and the font justification shifts randomly, which I find distracting. And while page numbers are cited in the character creation overview, a table of contents up front would help users find specific rules more easily.
Those complaints aside, the content is fantastic and will be a boon for anyone looking to infuse their DCC campaign with classic sword and sorcery adventuring. Pulp Heroes is a worthy addition to the pantheon of DCC zines!