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Background
Sometimes, economics necessitate a certain approach. For example, if the Hero Games people see that adventures – certainly ones set outside of the Champions world – don’t sell enough copies to make a tidy profit, they won’t publish many of them. That’s exactly what happened with the Pulp Hero line. However, always ready to support their own products and please the fans, Hero Games has published quite a lot of short adventures for the setting in PDF format, appropriately dubbed Hero Plus Adventures. The electronic scenarios were pretty successful and thus, the decision was made to publish 15 of them in a single, nicely-bound book called Thrilling Hero Adventures.
Most of these scenarios are geared towards a single session of play, but many come with notes that should help game masters to build on their foundations to create a longer-running campaign. One neat addition are the ‘Adventure Links’ boxes that list the other adventures in the book that might be tied to the specific scenario. For example, the box on the first page of Curse of the Vulture-God makes clear that Nazi Death-Zombies of the Congo, Spears of the Tisangani and Valley of the Spider Queen all also take place in Africa and lists two other adventures as possible tie-ins.
Review
There’s 15 adventures here, most of them about 6 pages in length, but with extremes of 4 and 15 pages. All of them fit the pulp genre perfectly. There’s a nice, varied selection in here, and most of the pulp staple can be found within these pages: Nazis, nazi zombies (they seem to mean more business than the ones in the hilarious Dead Snow, though), golden idols, serpent people, pterodactyls, ancient artefacts, vast valleys, voodoo, weird science, giant apes and – of course – female aliens. Connoisseurs of the genre will have to admit that Steven S. Long has been able to include almost all of the must-haves, while most of the adventures provide plenty of opportunity for ROLE-playing, investigation and discovery.
About 35 pages are solely consecrated to the ‘Inner-Earth’, another prime example of the pulp genre. This is, of course, more of a mini-setting than an actual adventure, but the Adventure Links section lists several adventures in this book (as well as locations out of another Pulp Hero supplement, Thrilling Locations) that can easily be dropped into the Inner-Earth. The geography is mostly tied to distinct caverns, but the entire setting does feel a little different from the one found in Hollow Earth Expedition because of small details. A lot of room is made for NPC write-ups and we would have liked more descriptive text, but there’s tons of adventure seeds in this chapter. Our favorite inclusion is the Nazi expedition that has been trapped inside of the Inner-Earth. All of the members are detailed, which should make the GM’s job very easy.
Thrilling Hero Adventures closes with about a dozen pages of ‘expedition rules for Pulp Hero’, featuring advice on using native employees (such as bearers and guides), soldiers, outfitting, obtaining supplies, expedition travel and encounters. It’s not exhaustive by any means, but it’s a very nice and useful addition that would not have been out of place in the Pulp Hero setting book itself.
Thrilling Hero Adventures features a nice cover with appropriate fonts by Sam Kennedy. There are more maps than actual illustrations inside, but those that can be found are above average art, which is good, because GM’s who are running a Pulp Hero campaign are guaranteed countless hours of gaming fun with this excellent adventure supplement!