Help with pulp prices
 

I have a pulp adventure in the works but I'm really struggling to find a good source for 1920-30's prices.

I'm speaking as broadly as possible, from Rent to food to the cost of a gun. I like to give my Players free reign to do as they please and then drop a steaming pile of plot on their living room floor, then watch them cry as they try to get the stains out.

And please can we hold back on the sarcasm, I know how to google, I have searched for info in old threads. I'm really just hoping you guys have ran similar games and have a few links bookmarked.

It's a world adventure kill the mummy, foil the cults affair, if that's helpful.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

GURPS Classic: Cliffhangers has 4-5 pages of generic prices for the 1920s and 1930s, but to a first approximation you can just divide modern day prices by 10 or so.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

For generic prices, take a look at http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1930s.html . For example, in 1939 the average yearly income was about $1700, a car cost about $700, and a house cost about $3800. They suggest dividing current prices for consumer goods by 12, but that's obviously not right for any of those three things!

I believe that most editions of Call of Cthulhu have tables of prices for the era between the World Wars, which will cover a lot of what you're looking for.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

An old Sears mail order catalogue would be perfect for this. Here is one from 1912
https://archive.org/details/catalogno12400sear

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

Pulp Guns 1 has slightly more detail on price conversions from historical US$ to GURPS$. If you run into historical prices in British £, the exchange rate during the period was pegged at US$4.85 to £1.

If you want lots of prices for the period, a department store catalog is really useful. You can sometimes get them as PDFs on eBay, or as used books via the http://used.addall.com/ search engine.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

I'm British, so there'll be no luck in me finding any of those anywhere. (Unless you edit your post while I'm writing this :P)

I didn't expect such a rapid response, Would any of you know about travel fare at the time? Train between cities or a steamer to asia/europe? or even just the cost of fuel, which I know wasn't always oil based gasoline or Petrol.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

Dan Howard posted a link to a scan of a Sears catalogue, which I'm downloading. The best sources I know for British prices are the various editions of the Army & Navy Stores General Price List, which are available as used books - I've taken up collecting them. However, they are not cheap, except for the 1939-40 catalogue which was reprinted a few years ago.
There are some prices for that in GURPS Cliffhangers, and the CoC price lists, I think.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

All in all, thank you guys, that's set me :)

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

I'm not sure what it's source is, but this page has prices for a variety of items, including travel and fuel: http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/priceguide.html (links at the bottom will take you to other useful info on the era).

As a point of interest, according to Wolfram|Alpha, $1.00 in 1936 was roughly equivalent to $17.36 in 2015.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

A factor of about 13.5 between 1925 and 2014, according to the CPI calculator maintained by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Re: Help with pulp prices
 

Measuring Worth explains the various ways of calculating changes in prices, and will do them for you.