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Hudson & Brand: Inquiry Agents of the Obscure


Mysterioso

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It's quite interesting to see that UK television has such a smaller profile in the States. 

In Australia we have a wide smattering of local television programs, but all the major worthwhile programs tend to be from the UK and USA in equal proportion. We have the occasional few which could inspire GMs, such as Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries which is set in 1920s Melbourne and surrounding regional/rural settlements, which feels very much like a typical BBC style murder mystery series in the vein of something Agatha Christie would write. Australia was much more British-centric pre-WW2 I guess.

In Australia many people tend to view USA great for big block-buster productions, and the UK better for low key television dramas. Obviously HBO and similar productions are blurring this quite a bit.

One of the main television networks, the ABC, broadcasts predominantly Australian and British content, so we do get a fair bit of UK shows. The BBC has often produced many dramas set in Victorian England, which keeps it a popular era in many minds over here.

Ripper Street is a great series at present, which could easily inspire many GMs to run a Victorian Mythos campaign. Penny Dreadful is another one, perhaps a tad melodramatic, but it really captures that Victorian Gothic flavour.

I agree that Jazz Age 1920s USA is less familiar overall, yet the 1930s USA  remains widely known due to the many iconic Pulp publications (thank you Mr Spielberg for Indy Jones and the like). So I think finally publishing Pulp Cthulhu is a great move, although a republished Gaslight Cthulhu should really in order as well for CoC 7E.

 

Edited by Mankcam

" Sure it's fun, but it is also well known that a D20 roll and an AC is no match against a hefty swing of a D100% and a D20 Hit Location Table!"

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On 05/10/2016 at 7:01 AM, Mankcam said:

It's quite interesting to see that UK television has such a smaller profile in the States. 

In Australia we have a wide smattering of local television programs, but all the major worthwhile programs tend to be from the UK and USA in equal proportion. We have the occasional few which could inspire GMs, such as Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries which is set in 1920s Melbourne and surrounding regional/rural settlements, which feels very much like a typical BBC style murder mystery series in the vein of something Agatha Christie would write. Australia was much more British-centric pre-WW2 I guess.

 

At the risk of dragging this thread even more off-topic (sorry) ... I agree in general with what Mankcam has said above about Australian TV -- historically, the content that is made locally is generally not genre-oriented enough to be of much interest as a source of gaming inspiration. However the last few years have seen a bunch of really interesting short series being made by our non-commercial broadcasters (i.e., our ABC, SBS). In the last year we've had Cleverman (an interesting show about Aboriginal myth and lore in modern-day Sydney), The Kettering Incident (a sort of spooky alien abduction type thing in the wilds of the Tasmanian bush) and Glitch (people who died years or decades ago suddenly re-appearing in a small town in rural Victoria, seemingly tied to dark deeds in the town's history). And if you stretch the net to include streaming-only content there is also the new series adaptation of Wolf Creek made by Stan.

So ... the interesting Australian-made shows ARE actually out there (at the moment at least) ... but do many people watch them? Probably not ...

 

Dean (from Adelaide)

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