Savage Worlds and the Explorers Guild [RPG]

The second adventure in my RPG system/genre hopping plan finished over the weekend and was good fun.  This time, the system was Savage Worlds and the genre was 1930s pulp.  The PCs were newly-minted members of the Explorers Guild.  In the first session, the annual meeting of the group was interrupted by a zeppelin attack and the theft of the recently-unearthed Pandora's Box by a masked crew led by the Phantom Marauder!  The PCs, a merchant seaman (and Brooklyn boxer) named Sam, a pacifist scholar named Benjamina, and a dashing swordstress named Victoria, traveled all the way to the deepest jungles of the Amazon in a race to secure a key to Pandora's Box before the Phantom Marauder and his henchmen could get their menacing hands on it.  Along the way, they handled a bomb on their plane, fought river bandits, survived one of their own getting nearly chomped to death by a crocodile (Sam), and then one of their own getting gutted nearly to death by a booby-trapped temple (Sam again!).  But the clever heroes managed to blow up/stab the massive "Crocodile God" of the stereotypical natives and recover the key, thus saving the world from the evils of Pandora's Box.

I used The Eye of Kilquato! scenario as a basis for the adventure, but with plenty of modifications.  I ran it very much in the vein of classic serials and Indian Jones-type movies, with lots of travel montages, cliffhangers, and larger-than-life (if not blatantly offensive) caricatures of foreign cultures.  I think the players had fun with a very different style of gaming, and I thought Savage Worlds was a good fit for the system as it featured just the right amount of mechanics to keep things working without getting in the way of the fun.  It was everyone's first time with it, but I could imagine using it again for other genres.

Next up:  post-apocalyptic mutants run wild in Gamma World . . .