[4e Eberron] Pulp Noir Fantasy?

[Andrew Ellis Troubio]

I keep hearing these words mixed together when describing this world. I like the concept but I am looking for specific examples that can sell me and players on the idea.

[Mikeythorn]

I spent a lot of time being very dubious about those words too, the thing that finally swung me in favour of Eberron's flavour was reading some of the short Sharn Inquisitive newspaper articles found here (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/archeb/si).

[wraithform]

It's difficult to give an example of a theme or style that runs throughout a piece, as they're a bit....ephemeral.

The best way I can describe it is that the DM is encouraged to paint the game as a 1950's black and white film (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir) (think the Maltese Falcon) with Indiana Jones or The Phantom, the Spider or Doc Savage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine) as the main character...except it's in a world of magic-prevalent fantasy that borders on steampunk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura).

So "pulp noir fantasy" is more a mood or feel that the DM could strive to create, and certainly one that the authors attempted to infuse in the books..

[Avin]

Nothing in Eberron hints Raymond Chandler or Dashell Hammet. Maybe Wotc has a very different notion of what noir is...

Being a fan of the noir genre I call this bull...

[Seroster]

What about it is noir as opposed to pulp heroic?

[Inyssius]

What about it is noir as opposed to pulp heroic?

What about anything is noir as opposed to pulp heroic?

Serious question.

[Seroster]

What about anything is noir as opposed to pulp heroic?

Serious question.

You mean, even, say, The Maltese Falcon?

[MCArt]

What about it is noir as opposed to pulp heroic?

I remember that in 3e, Eberron deliberately disemphasised (and in some cases outright abandoned) alignment as a factor in the politics and religion of its setting, which the authors considered a major departure from the classic Lawful Good heroes vs. Chaotic Evil monster villains of past settings.

Beyond this, I don't know. They seem to have moved away focus from things like murder mysteries and political intrigue that were actively encouraged in 3e, and none of the Eberron adventures scream "noir" (as in Hardboiled mystery novel "noir") to me.

[Enlightened]

Noir in regard to Eberron means, for example:
You never know who you can trust.
No one is as they seem.
Gold Dragons can be evil.
Vampires can have hearts of gold.
You just don't know.

[Jim Hague]

Noir is all about the ambiguity - there's no real heroes, or if they are, they're deeply tarnished. Betrayal is expected, a given. Noir is grim necessity and brutality.

Pulp, by contrast, is basically optimistic - heroes are heroic, villains are villainous, and while there's a twist, the heroes can always extract themselves through luck, pluck, and skill.

Noir is anti-heroic, pulp (specifically hero pulp, which is the common usage) is inherently heroic. They're both great genres, and I love 'em, but mixing them is chancy at best, like putting an acid and a base together.

[Oni]

I always thought of it as adequate shorthand for adventure and weirdness + darker tone and moral ambiguity and conspiracy + magic and elves.

Anytime you start combining things, you'll have some dilution of the individual components purest essence, so while it may not be noir in the sense of straight noir I think it certainly has recognizable elements of it.

[Andrew Ellis Troubio]

Iit's in a world of magic-prevalent fantasy that borders on steampunk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura).

So "pulp noir fantasy" is more a mood or feel that the DM could strive to create, and certainly one that the authors attempted to infuse in the books..

It's funny you mention Arcanum, because one of the first things I thought of for totally ripping off basing the first encounter around was the opening airship crash.

[Gnomick]

There's a few airship crashes in the official Eberron adventures too. In a memorable one, there is a fight in mid-air aboard two plummeting airships. They crashed into each other, there were sky pirates whipping around on soarsleds, and the elementals powering each ship broke free and started fighting each other (with lots of collateral damage).

I think originally the phrase "pulp-noir" was supposed to describe a spectrum. Eberron can be used for over the top pulp action, OR morally ambiguous noir intrigue. For pulp, it introduced action points and emphasized big set-piece battles, rather than static dungeon rooms and the old reliable boring full attack. For noir, it threw black and white morality out the window, so you couldn't automatically trust a cleric of the Silver Flame, and couldn't kill Hobgoblins on sight.

Then people, being people, started mixing and matching. They started playing two-fisted pulp heros in a world of morally ambiguous noir intrigue. They started playing morally ambiguous noir anti-heros in four-color pulp adventures. They started injecting their noir games with pulp's over-the-top action. Now it's a big soup called pulp-noir.

Also, both pulp and noir had their heyday in the 1930s. So a lot of people just take it to mean they should run Eberron as an analogue for 1930. It works out OK too. The War To End All Wars just ended a few years back. There are new sparks threatening to ignite the world in war again. There's lots of re-drawn national borders and uneasy alliances. Lots of emerging new tech. There's a cultural revolution and a turning of the age.

[Skywalker]

Eberron is low on pulp and noir on the whole, though it has more nods than any other D&D setting.

As for "noir" it is a very difficult term to define mostly as it is more to do with a style of filming that commonality of subject matter. As such, I wouldn't expect more than a few tocuhes in the books, but you could add a lot of "noir" through the style of play.

[Mercurial]

I kind of see it and kind of don't. I don't really feel like what I've read of Eberron evokes noir very well (I have admittedly read fairly little), but I do feel like it's one of the easiest fantasy settings to tweak in order to get a noir feel out of it. But for me, that actually does mean making the setting feel more like the 1930s. I'd completely replace bows and crossbows with guns and try to describe a visual style that evokes a fantasy-spun 1930s metropolis. But that's just reskinning; much of the setting and its history work as-is.

I've already got a campaign I want to run, a grim postwar tale of veterans, "heroes" of that terrible war, being drawn into the seamy underworld where espionage and organized crime intermingle.

[jacobkosh]

What Skywalker said. Noir is incredibly difficult to define, especially inasmuch as it's largely a visual style mixed with a certain outlook on the world that varies between who's talking about it. I've read it argued that The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep don't qualify as "real" noir because the protagonists are pretty unambiguously heroes who do things for (mostly) the right reasons, as opposed to something like Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice, where basically everyone is corrupt and the world is a nightmare of greed, jealousy and assorted human frailties.

That said, to answer the OP's question, however one defines noir, it is probably supported in Eberron. Put simply, the world is meant to lend itself to the construction of twisty stories where what is happening on the surface may conceal several layers of motivations and competing interests - stories with potential for misunderstandings, for manipulation and betrayal and surprising reversals - and DMs are encouraged in the setting materials to construct those kinds of stories.

As for pulp, the 1930s feel can be emphasized or deemphasized as appropriate, but in game terms I think the world encourages DMs and players to focus on fast-moving action, rendered in broad strokes, in lieu of "how many crampons can I fit in my backpack" grit.

[Jonas Albrecht]

If I might take an overly simplistic stance...

The World is Noir.

The characters are Pulp.

[jacobkosh]

To expand on the other half of the equation, pulp, that's also kind of hard to define. I mean, the term literally refers to the content of 1930s cheap-thrill magazines, so it's natural and understandable for people to use and understand the term as shorthand for a "30s flavor", but in practice those magazines ranged the gamut from mysteries to boxing stories to historicals to fantasy to science fiction to weird horror.

So to me, pulp basically equals fun, crowd-pleasing adventure storytelling, with heroes and villains who are slightly larger than life. The goal is entertainment; fidelity to some standard of realism or authenticity comes in a distant second if it's a concern at all.

In Eberron's case, I think the intersection of pulp and noir naturally suggests a 30s flavor, but if that isn't to someone's taste, looking at actual pulp stories suggests plenty of alternative flavors.

It could feel like the chaotic revolutionary France of the Scarlet Pimpernel, or the post-Eighty Years' War Europe of the Musketeers, or Restoration England, or the Wild West, or the Spanish Main. Hell, even modern gangland Russia. If we look at pulp stories, it seems that they gravitate towards any sort of unsettled, chaotic time period after the demolition of a longstanding status quo. I don't know how deeply the Eberron designers thought of that when they were making it, but it can be analogous to any one of those things.

[Durandal]

If I might take an overly simplistic stance...

The World is Noir.

The characters are Pulp.

You know that's what I always figured. My basic plot is mixed up winding conglomeration of plans within plans and people plotting to make sure they get their way. The PC's however are larger than life heroic archetypes that cut through all this paranoia and ambiguity and end up being big damn heroes.

It is also great at letting you switch between each. Last session I had a fight on top of a lightning rail between the heroes and the shadowy organization trying to hunt down the McGuffin. This session I had them sleuthing around the city, picking up clues and shaking people down for info (most of those being shaken down weren't even all that bad, most were regular working stiffs who were mostly just talk) as they tried to unravel the mystery of the group that attacked them last session. The end of the session was a very pulpy showdown with someone I have set up as the main villain (he's not though) where he makes his introduction before beating a quick escape through a group of henchmen.

Next session will be decidedly more pulpy with them taking a job (from the main villain, but they don't know this) that ends in an ambush by my red-herring villain. This one I'm hoping to end on a noir note by ramping up the suspicion around the guy that hired them and maybe get them to question his true motives.

So the setting seems to support both quite well especially in the way that Jonas puts it. The setting tends toward noir while the PCs tend toward pulp.

[Alvin Frewer]

What about it is noir as opposed to pulp heroic?

Noir is about ulterior motives, and selfish desires, and almost no one doing the good thing "just because." Most motives are selfish, and therefore appear evil on a large enough scale. All the kingdoms are looking to re-start the war so they can claim the crown. Each of them has an internal faction that's looking to maintain or upset the balance of power in ways that don't look good for the general populace. The various dragonmarked houses are all about making money, and doing whatever it takes to do that. There's also conspiracies galore, from the dragons who might have noble purposes to various demon cults who decidedly don't, and undead cults which range from functional to secretly devious, but are all around creepy.

Eberron does this by removing the importance of alignments. "Good" churches espouse good things. But that doesn't mean church leaders aren't using their power to blackmail people, having people killed, stealing magical relics, or sleeping with the king's wife. Conversely, that vampire pays his taxes and knows a lot about the underworld. He seems nice enough and keeps his fangs clean as far as you know. Then there's that nest of demon cultists who just might leave YOU alone if you cut the right deal.

Each story/adventure has multiple angles. The guy that hired you wants the magic binky to get revenge on his associate. His associate might know about it and has sent some thugs to stop him (which is now you). Neither one of these guys are clearly good, and both might seem evil with the right framing (see above). Additionally, you might have a third and completely unrelated faction involved, maybe they want it just for the power.

[SorcerousMelnibone]

Just tell your players Eberron has trains.

Trains = Noir!

Also: airships = pulp.

[Future Villain Band]

Well, Thrane in my campaign is going to be taken wholesale out of The Berlin Noir trilogy (http://www.amazon.com/Berlin-Noir-Violets-Criminal-Requiem/dp/0140231706), specifically March Violets, so that's why I call it noir.

[NeoVid]

On a side note, I've heard Eberron described as being able to tell the sorts of stories that, in the real world, would be set from the 18th century up through 1920 or so...

So after a second of thinking about that, I realized I seriously want to see a Wild West Eberron adventure. Now, where would that be set...

[Future Villain Band]

On a side note, I've heard Eberron described as being able to tell the sorts of stories that, in the real world, would be set from the 18th century up through 1920 or so...

So after a second of thinking about that, I realized I seriously want to see a Wild West Eberron adventure. Now, where would that be set...

The 3.5e Eberron game I ran was set in a lawless frontier town where dragonshards had been found in the mountains, in Droaam. It was wholly based on HBO's Deadwood. I used the same town to kick off my current game, although I didn't attribute the larger campaign world to Eberron.

[Xylarthen]

Were someone to ask, "What's the 'sword and sorcery' genre that inspired the original D&D game?", a reasonable response might be that it's sort of

"pulp noir fantasy"

-- because it in fact originated in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales
-- and because there's a characteristic "darkness" reminiscent of film noir
-- and in the field of heroic fantasy, there are a number of ways in which the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are rather akin to those of "hardboiled detectives" as analogously opposed to the "parlor mystery" genre of Tolkien and other refined Britons.

In the case of Eberron, I think the usage is meant rather to evoke responses to responses to cultural artifacts of previous generations -- much as "steampunk" is at a remove from the science fiction of Jules Verne or Rudyard Kipling.

I don't really see much "noir", but the cinematic context may suggest how "pulp" is being interpreted. I think it's less literally a reference to Thrilling Wonder Stories or Spicy Adventure Stories than to the likes of "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow".