Tales of Menace & Mystery – The Pulp Action Role-Playing Game

Core Rulebook by The Yellow Hand

Welcome to Tales of Menace & Mystery, a game of Pulp Action set in the adventurous era of the pulp novels and serials from the early 20th century. Menace & Mystery will allow you to perform the fearless stunts of the daredevil flying ace, fight crime as a bold masked vigilante, or uncover conspiracies as a hardboiled private investigator, all in the style of movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, books like those by Dashiell Hammett, or radio serials like The Shadow. You will fly across the world on zeppelins and clipper airplanes, uncover forgotten civilizations at the core of the Earth, and tangle with the Mob using your trusted .38 Special.

Tales of Menace & Mystery is an exciting, brand new adventure-filled role-playing game from The Yellow Hand, set in the vibrant, action-packed pulp era of the 1930s, and features a unique campaign setting centered around the popular magazine with the same name. In the periphery, a masked vigilante known only as The Ghost is lurking, who may come to involve the PCs in some of his adventures. The game is powered by the proprietary STAR System, also seen in Draconicus – The Fantasy Role-Playing Game.

The STAR System

The STAR System could be referred to as a “mini-dice pool system”.

At its most basic level, Natural Abilities and Experience are ranked 1-3 stars. This indicates how many dice are used, mostly in so-called Task Rolls: to resolve tasks, or to resolve a fleeting situation with a non-permanent outcome.

For any Task, Players can choose to use their Character’s Natural Abilities (basic characteristics) OR their Experiences (learned skills), whichever is higher, but if they lack relevant Experience, their Natural Ability might be penalized.

All human characters use d10s. If you roll more than 1 die, you pick the highest one.

All tasks are assigned a Difficulty Rating (DR) ranging from 1-10 and you need to beat that rating to succeed.

In terms of outcomes, if you succeed and roll a 10, that’s a Critical Success. If you succeed and hit the DR, that’s a Significant Success. If you fail and hit the DR, that’s a Significant Failure. If you fail and roll a 1, that’s a Critical Failure.

There are also open-ended Task Rolls, i.e. rolls without a Difficulty Rating, which produce a lasting (i.e. non-fleeting) outcome – typically objects. The die result for these rolls produce a score 1-10, which reads as a Quality Rating (QR). The QR is analogous with the DR, so to break an object produced with a QR of X, X becomes a Difficulty Rating, and you need to beat X. For example, you could tie a knot (a Task) and produce a QR of 9 when rolling for it, and that means a person trying to undo the knot (such as a person tied up with it) would roll against that 9 as a DR, and have to roll a 10 to escape.

In addition, in combat, the system scales by assigning different dice to different creatures. A squirrel might use a d4, a human uses a d10 and a monster like a T-Rex might use a d20. A god-like being would use a d100. The scale remains 1-10 though, and 10 is always the highest roll you can record.

Tales of Menace & Mystery – The Pulp Action Role-Playing Game is available through DriveThruRPG in Print and PDF.

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