A resurrection of bold, mythic storytelling across time and genre.
Sword & Sorcery, Sci-Fi, and Savage Worlds collide in reconstructed cycles of lost history and raw imagination.
Radial Lore exists because “pulp” is no longer an accurate word for what is being built here, either in practice or in intent. Pulp was a material condition before it was an aesthetic: cheap paper, rapid turnaround, disposable culture, and a brutal economy of attention. Writers operated under hard constraints—word counts, editorial mandates, market churn—and what is now remembered as pulp coherence was largely accidental, emerging over time through repetition, rivalry, and shared cultural pressure. To call Radial Lore “pulp” would be dishonest. It is not constrained by paper, shipping, rack space, or the economics of five-cent magazines, and it is not improvising blindly in the hope that meaning eventually accretes. It is being built deliberately, with tools pulp authors never had, toward ends they often only gestured at.
The need for a new name is structural, not cosmetic:
“Pulp” implies ephemerality, linear consumption, and cultural disposability. Radial Lore implies architecture. It names a method rather than a genre: a way of constructing fiction that assumes longevity, cross-pollination, and re-entry. This is not an attempt to abandon pulp’s legacy, but to complete what pulp began and could not finish. Where pulp gestured at myth, Radial Lore engineers myth. Where pulp relied on accumulation, Radial Lore relies on design.
“Radial” is descriptive, not poetic fluff:
Radial Lore is organized around a central mythic engine—a shared cosmology, logic of power, and symbolic grammar—from which stories extend outward like spokes. These stories are not sequels in a chain and not entries in a closed series. They are nodes. Each stands on its own, yet gains additional meaning through proximity to others. A rumor in one text may be a foundational event in another. A footnote becomes a setting. A minor antagonist becomes a god, or a corpse. The straight line is rejected in favor of orbit, echo, and recurrence.
This is where Radial Lore most sharply diverges from historical pulp:
Pulp universes accreted; they were not designed. Continuity was often accidental, contradictory, and repaired retroactively by readers rather than authors. That chaos produced energy, but it also produced fragility. Radial Lore is planned—not through rigid outlines or locked canon, but through foundations laid first: geography, metaphysics, cultural logic, historical fault lines. Stories are written to stress those foundations, not overwrite them. Contradictions, when they exist, are diegetic—products of bias, propaganda, mythic distortion, or lost history—not editorial negligence.
Audio is not an adaptation layer in this system; it is a primary weapon:
Pulp was trapped in text because it had to be. Radial Lore has no such excuse. Every work is conceived with voice in mind: cadence, breath, rhythm, silence. Audio editions are parallel manifestations of the same material, capable of carrying authority, menace, or scale that prose alone cannot. Narration, sound design, and music function as lore-bearing elements. A spoken line can confer legitimacy. A recurring motif can operate like a sigil. This is the reclamation of myth’s oral dimension, something pulp could only approximate on the page.
The world itself is not a backdrop but a load-bearing structure:
Setting precedes plot. Cultures, economies, and belief systems exert pressure whether or not the narrative foregrounds them. This is why Radial Lore aligns naturally with magazine-style releases rather than monolithic novels. Magazines enforce density. They privilege fragments, codices, essays, side tales, and experimental forms. Each release is a cross-section, not a chapter, exposing different layers of the same underlying mass.
Radial Lore is neither nostalgic nor futurist. It is post-pulp:
It retains the excess, immediacy, and aesthetic violence that made pulp dangerous, while discarding the industrial limits that made it brittle. It replaces linear inheritance with radial expansion, disposable reading with revisitable structure, and solitary consumption with layered engagement across text, sound, and artifact. The goal is not to recreate a lost era, but to build something that could not have existed within it.
This system is not closed, and it is not precious:
Radial Lore is designed to expand over time, not only through official releases but through structured contribution. The Homebrew Gaming Initiative exists to allow others to write into the radial field without fracturing it: new nodes, cultures, and stories that obey the same foundational logic while stressing it in unfamiliar ways. This is not disposable fan fiction; it is participation inside a living mythos.
To support that expansion, Radial Lore includes internal guides:
Books within the various series that function as manuals on worldbuilding, tone, power structures, and myth construction. These texts teach the method as much as the material, explaining how coherence is maintained, how contradictions are handled, and how new elements can be introduced without collapse.
Not everything is meant to be surfaced cleanly:
Some texts are designed to be found. Hidden books and embedded artifacts—Jantaran Sapphires, Ornithane Scrolls, and others—serve as structural pressure points, revealing deeper strata of the world to those already inside it.
All of this prepares the ground for further forms, including modular TTRPG material. These modules do not treat the setting as static scenery but as a volatile system players can disrupt, exploit, or break. Expansion is not an afterthought in Radial Lore. It is the point.
At present, The Vandyrian Codex—alongside other projects under the banner of Primal Sword & Sorcery—remains in active early development.
The Codex is a living archive. Its realms will expand, fracture, and deepen over time.
