Saturday, September 24, 2016
Classic Era Ship Deckplans
The Shipscribe naval history site has an amazing library of ship deckplans from the classic era of the Mythos. The collection is drawn from the 1920 edition of the "Register of Ships Owned by United States Shipping Board" and includes dozens of ships ranging from 4000 ton wooden steamers to massive 13,000 ton steel passenger and cargo haulers. The listings are an incredible resource for any kind of pulp-era gaming.
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4 comments:
Those are fantastic! And immediately call to my mind the Morrison Company's freighter "Vigilant," from The Call of Cthulhu.
They're also suggestive of, say, Indiana Jones-era ships like the "Bantu Wind" from Raiders of the Lost Ark or the "Venture" from King Kong.
What a goldmine! I’ll add this to the SS Semiramis plans from Propnomicon’s 2011 post. http://propnomicon.blogspot.com/2011/11/tramp-steamer-plans.html and
http://www.louislamourgreatadventure.com/PongaJimMerchantMarine3.htm
This puts me into mind of a pulp story I read many years ago, The Painted Man (1926) by Howard Pease (no, not the recent novel by the same name). I hadn’t thought of that book in over (ahem) 40 years. In making this post I actually turned up Pease’s bio on Wikipedia and was happy to find he was prolific, you might enjoy some of his works. If you can put a bit of mythos into them, they might make fertile ground for scenarios. A lot of it, like The Painted Man was what we call today “young adult”, but it had a good deal of realism and nautical accuracy but toned down the violence somewhat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Pease
Download The Tattooed Man https://archive.org/details/tattooedmantaleo00peas
a listing of Pease books https://archive.org/stream/BooksByHowardPeaseReviewed/safr_glines-don_books-by-author_180815_access_djvu.txt
For a little extra fun, see how many of these you have read http://www.artofmanliness.com/2009/06/02/the-essential-man%E2%80%99s-library-adventure-edition-part-one-fiction/
It now occurs to me that the sea stories of Howard Pease (starting with the Jinx Ship 1927) may have been the inspiration for Milton Caniff’s comic strip, Terry and the Pirates, which began in 1934. The young Todd Moran makes a close match to Terry Lee. Interestingly Terry and the Pirates was one of the inspirations for cartoon series Johnny Quest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_and_the_Pirates_(comic_strip)
That link for 'The Tattooed Man' leads to a page that says it is no longer downloadable due to content issues.
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