GURPS PDF Challenge Review: The Broken Clockwork World

Let's do the TL;DR first.  Hey, do you like Isekai anime? Or Stranger Things? Have you considered a story where characters go from our world into another, or things from another world spill into ours? Have you considered making the other world a broken, clockwork, steampunk work with some sumerian elements?

That's it. That's the book. You literally have all the support the game offers you (aside from a couple of steampunk robot-monsters, and a very deep discussion of portals) in the above paragraph.

I'm exaggerating a little, but that was definitely my first impression and it barely got better on a deeper reading. It's not good. It's frustrating because I want it to be good, but it let me down completely.  This book fails as a setting book.  It's passable as a "campaign elevator pitch," which you shouldn't be paying $3 for.  I would give this one a miss.

Breakdown

The book is broken into 4 chapters

• Two Worlds in Collision, two pages which introduces you to the broken clockwork world
• Interactions, which is two pages on how you get there from here
• The Broken Realms, which touches briefly on the technology of the setting, and mostly goes into 4 specific critters
• Campaigns, which discusses how you might use the material.

What's Wrong with the Clockwork World?

Let me briefly summarize the Clockwork World: it's a steampunk setting, with physical justifications and technobabble to justify why it is a steampunk world and why it will stay a steampunk world, and then it notes that it is Sumerian, has a small blurb about the theology of the setting and notes the active intervention of gods at some point.  And then some unspecified cataclysm happens, and now everything sucks.  The Gods are gone, and you can sometimes fall through cracks in the world and end up in our world, or vice versa.

Okay, so what do I do with it?

The Campaigns section briefly touches on this.  The core idea is that you either have things fall out of the BCW and players interact with it ("Stranger Things,") or players fall into the BCW and have adventures ("Isekai anime").  It discuses approaches from 0 to 200 points.

 

But the book immediately starts to fall apart when it explains its world. It basically doesn't.  It offers some hints at more lurid descriptions and throwaway lines about how varied everything is, but for the most part, we're left to do the heavy lifting ourselves.  

 

Say we want to introduce a pretty princess as a narrative hook for our story? What does she look like? The book seems to suggest that they're somehow culturally locked into a Sumerian  approach to things, but surely their steampunk technology has innovated their approach to things. How have they merged? Book doesn't say. The book mentions that the setting has advanced thims things like newspapers and revolutions and robot horses, but that it's still bronze age priests and kings. How does that work? Book doesn't say. It's either an anachronism stew, or we're left to do the heavy lifting of making it work for ourselves.

The book feels like it sells itself on being such an outlandish pitch, but "outlandish pitches" are interesting because they're supposed to explore something outlandish.  Other than a few descriptions of clockwork skies and gasmasked riders in desolate wastelands, the book does very little to integrate the stranger elements of the setting: what do characters look like? How has their culture fused with their technology? What sort of factions are there in the setting? You can see hints of it (the Iron Lion seems to be a clockwork temple guardian), and it's not that Phil can't do it (he has an entire sidebar in one of his Steampunk books on what people look like). So why is it missing here? Why isn't he laying out his vision for us?

Maybe the reason is wordcount. That was the stance of the Chaotic GM, but I say it's worse than that. I think the problem is priorities. About a third of the book is dedicated to "interactions." It discusses what first contact would be like, the portals between worlds (including, and I'm not kidding, the dimensions: "between 8' and 30' in diameter"), that the exact number of active gates is unknown, that some portals permit 2-way traffic and some don't, the fact that you can't lop your arms off with the portals, and how long they last (there are transient gates, intermittent gates and periodic gates). Then it talks about totally-not-magical-spells that will let you crossover, and "psychic interdimensional communication" that will let you send messages in dreams. Then it talks about the government's opinion (they're super suspicious and trying to keep it a secret, natch) and the fact that there are rogue, don't-follow-no-rules renegades that slip in and out of the two worlds: you know, the PCs.

 

 

"The GM should have Gates behave however suits the plot." -- The Broken Clockwork World, p 5

Two pages might not sound like much, but it's a third of the book (discounting the ad, the cover and the table of contents), and none of it matters to me. That one quote above is all you need to say, and it's basically inferred: "these two worlds are connected, people can get back and forth, see Portal Realms for ideas!"  Then use that wordcount to elaborate even a little on the factions, some example city-states (just a blurb!), some minor commentary on fashion, or at least a list of inspirations so I can see what you're trying to do here (Is this Nier Automata? Dishonored? Stargate but Sumerian?).  Toss me a couple of names and agendas.  Give me something to work with here. The point is, this book had the space for these details, at least some of them, in brief, but chose to spend that wordcount on unecessarily details descriptions of portals and their use.

The book fairs a little better if shift focus from the BCW and onto our world.  Then the lack of detail doesn't really matter because we can infer most things from our own world.  You get a list of monsters that can come across, the means by which they would come across, and how people would react to them. If you would actually like to adventure in a broken, clockwork world, this book is nearly useless.  If you want some weird, clockwork things to impinge on our world, you could do worse than this book. But that rather defeats the purpose of the book, doesn't it? The Madness Dossier wasn't sold as a book about going to a world where the world was ruled by mad, Sumerian gods, but as a book about a conspiracy to prevent some reality quake from destroying our timeline, and so the details of History B aren't really important.  This is a book about the Broken Clockwork World, but you can't actually use it to run games in the Broken Clockwork World.  That's a big mark against it.

 

In a sense, this book, and its choice on emphasis, would have been fine if it had been Generic Steampunk World.  We know what that looks like, we have tons of books on it, tons of works to draw on. The deep discussion of Interactions would be warranted, because that would be the one thing you'd need to explain: There's a steampunk world connected to ours, here's how to get there.  Instead, we're sold this outlandish premise, and then told to do all the heavy lifting ourselves.  

 

This is a peeve of mine, because you invariably get people who love the idea, and work themselves into a lather trying to make it happen and/or defending it, when there's no substance behind it to merit that devotion.  See, for example, Rifts. By putting out a title with an outlandish premise, the author immediately gains your attention ("it's not just a steampunk world, but a Broken, Sumerian Steampunk world! Do you love steampunk? Do you love the Madness Dossier? Do you love post-apocalyptic settings? Then come on down, only $3 a ticket!") but then immediately backs out (because realizing an outlandish setting takes a lot of work!) and blames the word count and/or your own lack of creativity when called on the problems in their design.  This book is the RPG equivalent to clickbait. 

 

Enough

I've written and rewritten this review.  I could go and complain even more.  Why does the book insist that "mystical templates" are inappropriate when this was clearly a setting with active gods and supernatural powers are clearly present.  Why does it discuss the fact that (unnamed, undescribed) factions that seek to repair the damage caused by the breaking when you don't even tell us what the breaking was? Why is this a post-apocalyptic setting with zero references to After the End? Why is there a discussion of (mystical!) priest powers with no reference to Divine Powers? Why is there a whole section on "rituals of transition" when the Gate spell is right over there? But I have to stop somewhere.

I don't like writing negative reviews.  People put time and energy into these books, and at $3 a pop, it feels mean-spirited to pan a book.  But this is bad. It left me frustrated and one of the reasons I've had to re-edit it is to bring my rants into some level of coherence.  If  you want to know more of my complaints, just ask me, I'm sure I'll give you an earful.

I think the biggest problem with this book is the effect I'm seeing it have on others. I see people praise the book, and I get it: it's a great premise. But the insistence on fixating on useless details and ignoring all the things that would actually make the setting useful while shrugging and saying "Work it out yourselves" is pretty iconic of the failure of many GURPS setting books. I have no doubt the people enamored of the premise will bristle at my condemnation of this book, but know this: I am among your number. I love the premise. It's a great premise.  But demand more of a setting book than a premise and exhaustive detail on its magical portals. If this gets revisited with the treatment it deserves, I'll happily revise my opinion, but for now, my opinion is this: don't waste your money on this book. Go buy an overpriced drink with some friends instead.