Pulp magazine

Pulp magazines (often referred to as "the pulps") are inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 through the 1950s. The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed; in contrast, magazines printed on higher quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges.

The pulps gave rise the term pulp fiction in reference to run-of-the-mill low quality literature.

In their first decades, pulps were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks cost 25 cents a piece. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were best known for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of "hero pulps"; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow, Doc Savage, and The Phantom Detective.

Justice, Inc. (role-playing game)

Justice, Inc. is a role-playing game designed to simulate the adventure stories in the pulp magazines of the 1930s.

It was one of the first non-superhero applications of the point-based game system that had been developed for the Champions superhero game. The generalized point system would eventually be published as the Hero System, following in the footsteps of Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing System, but preceding GURPS as a non-genre-specific game system.

Publishing History

Justice, Inc. was published in July 1984 by Hero Games, and was written by Aaron Allston, Steve Peterson and Michael Stackpole. The two-volume set included a rulebook and campaign book containing a discussion of the pulp genre, the "Empire Club" campaign setting, a timeline of real-world events of the 1920s and '30s, and several pulp adventures.

Two supplements were published: