Pulp Alley gets Medieval on your @ss

Mark and I played our second game of Pulp Alley, Wars of the Roses style. A dispute over a borderline sees the Percies and the Nevilles square off.

Scruffy scottish mercenaries move in. 

Photo quality (and some of the scenery) was a bit iffy, sorry!

We liked that the game felt different to standard Pulp Alley. A major part of this is that not everyone is toting a missile weapon, so melee becomes a much more significant factor. This introduces extra tactical challenges: you need to think carefully about where to place your archers, how you move to avoid shooting.

Mark's billman is feeling a little lonely.

Mark's leader is swarmed by the gang of mercenaries. 

They went down like flies, but took him with them!

We're using a number of the settings from Pulp Leagues,with a few little modifications here and there.

• Gritty. No character rolls over d8. This keeps characters more in the realms of realism. It also means your crummy foot soldiers have a better chance of rolling the knights.
• Heartless. If you down a character, you can discard a card to remove them from play. The knife through the visor here. We're playing you can only do it in a brawl, and if you haven't gone down yourself.
• Primitive. Or half of it. You can't run and shoot.

A few other mods.

• Crossbows may only shoot once per turn.
• Some Fortune cards are removed from the deck.
• Some abilities are not available (bursts, etc. No holy hand grenades here!) For the moment, we're outlawing the use of Armoured. That may seem strange, but we feel that it will make it too tough to kill the big characters.

In sum, we liked it quite a lot. We liked the differences from vanilla Pulp Alley: it felt medieval-ish. Also, the setting will provide lots of fodder for the crafty multi-player scenarios we love!

Expect to see plenty more of this coming your way.