Florence, 1559: a city of opportunities for men who have the guts to pursue them. Here, struggling artists find rich patrons, visionary architects create their dreams, ruthless mercenaries get lucrative contracts, and shrewd merchants become as powerful as kings.
Ever since the times of Cosimo the Elder, the bankers, the Medici, have ruled this city. Sure, way back then it was still called a democracy, but the art, the armies and the votes were all paid with Medici money. The words of the heretic monk Savonarola shook the consciences for a brief time, bringing back a glimpse of the Republic; but the Emperor and the Pope put the Medici back in charge, with Duke Alessandro.
Upon the Duke’s assassination twenty-two years ago, the merchants and lords of the city enthusiastically welcomed young Cosimo, the barely seventeen years old son of the mercenary warlord Giovanni delle Bande Nere, who had never lived in Florence. The nobles saw him as inexperienced, weak, and an easy puppet to manipulate.
Happy Holidays, Fiasco fans! As a special seasonal gift, we’re finally releasing Chris Bennett’s infamous Los Angeles 1936 for everyone to enjoy!
“I needed a drink. I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.” —Raymond Chandler
In Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, circa 1936, the sun-blinded streets would just as soon put a knife in your back. And all the diamond-edged glamour of a Hollywood starlet can’t save you from a fall off a 30-story building. Enter the black and white world of smoky nightclubs and faded apartment hallways, where every crime is shot “on location.” There are many grand dreams waiting to be unraveled. Are you ready to enter the labyrinth?
Originally released only as a Gen Con special exclusive, Los Angeles 1936 is one of the first and best Fiasco playsets. Chris wrote the initial version before the game was even finished, and his enthusiasm and forward thinking are partly responsible for the current Playset of the Month model.
Chris has been one of the biggest supporters of the game since the beginning, and is a true friend to Bully Pulpit. Thanks for all your help Chris, and for letting us keep this playset to ourselves for so long!
Bully Pulpit Games is looking for an artist! And not just any artist–we need someone with an uncommon style to work with us on our new tabletop, pencil-and-paper roleplaying game Durance.
Durance is set in a penal colony in the distant future. The art for the game consists of the sketches of a Marine Lance Corporal who is observing her strange and often terrible surroundings, telling the story of daily life in this remote and brutal outpost with pen and ink.
Our artist needs to be accomplished at sketch art. The look we’re after is observational slice-of-life, but the lives being observed are set in a gritty, industrial future on a remote planet. The individual pieces will have a pulled-from-a-notebook quality and will, as much as the text itself, introduce readers to the futuristic colony, her citizens, the convicts, and the lives they lead. As the artist on this project, you’ll be taking the lead in establishing the look and feel for this setting based on art direction and references we provide.
The art will be naturalistic and we are vigorously avoiding a typical RPG, animation, or comic book look. We want the pieces to really showcase what our imaginary Marine is observing day to day around her. Sketching styles vary and we don’t have a particular visual look in mind, as long as it is well-crafted and communicates the feel of the game.
If this sounds exciting to you and you like the idea of working on a tabletop, pencil-and-paper roleplaying game, please get in touch! Send a link to your portfolio to art@bullypulpitgames.com. If we like what we see, we’ll follow up with the complete art specifications. BPG is responsive, easy to work with, and we pay on time.
The Brookmarket Zoo was a world-class institution, visited by locals and travelers alike. In the late 20th century, it was an iconic zoo, admired and beloved. Its animals were content, its visitors happy, its staff respected. Chairman of the Zoo Board, D.E. Hitchcock IV, welcomed people to the grounds with beaming pride, as his father had for a generation before.
Now, D.E. Hitchcock is dead. The community takes the zoo for granted. Attendance is down. The zoo withers.
The zoo keepers grow desperate. Money is tight. Other, more successful zoos in other cities sniff around the place, looking to take away animals and staff. A proposed expansion project might drum up new interest in the zoo… if the city approves the new zoning plan. But rumors persist that a multiplex is offering more money to buy up a chunk of the zoo land, displacing animals and staff forever. Are these the last days of the Brookmarket Zoo? Or can someone with powerful ambition change things for the better?
Some people have been asking lately how we finish Fiasco games in just a few hours, so we threw together a little video with some hot tips on playing Fiasco at a breakneck pace!
