GURPS PDF Challenge: Boardoom and Curia: Tomorrow Rides

 We're entering the final stretch.  Only three left to go!  And today, we have the maddest of the bunch: Tomorrow Rides!

The executive summary is this: you can skip this. I like it, but that's more a matter of personal taste.  It's not a bad book, by any stretch, and it's quite a creative work that will interface well with Action 6, but there's nothing in here that you need, and it won't do much for any game but offer a bit of flavor and background on a couple of things.

The Breakdown

The book breaks down into two chapters: "History," which introduces us to the origins of Tomorrow Rides, and "In the Campaign," which is the nuts and bolts of how it will work.

"History" introduces us to Jody Macht, the now-blind founder of Tomorrow Rides. It explains that Tomorrow Rides came out of a desire for Jody Macht to vicariously enjoy the squeal of tires and the thrill of the chase now denied her by her accident.  It explains the cleverly named "Mach Two" facilities, and briefly touches on other sorts of campaigns this might fit into.

"In the Campaign" explains how one can get access to the sweet rides available from Tomorrow Rides, gives us a stat breakdown of the organization, the codes they use for their rides, some suggestions on how you can randomly generate a tricked out vehicle, and speculates on what their ultimate motives might be.

And that's it.  Tomorrow Rides is an organization that can get you access to really cool cars.  Everything is just a greater detailing of that concept.

Sorting through the Wreckage

Before I go on, I must explain my fondness for Steven Marsh. See, Steve is a madman. I was a subscriber to the digital Pyramid #2 (and had a couple issues floating around of the original, physical Pyramid), and I believe I might have even been there when Steve took over.  But he's been there for a long time, I'd daresay 20 years, and I believe that the Pyramid #2 had weekly issues, and he had to write a column for all of them.  It's became something of a running gag for him to pick a topic for a column in Pyramid #3 only to realize that he'd already covered that.  He scraped the bottom of the barrel long ago and, devoted man he was, he got out a shovel and started digging.  He's descended into untold depths and every once in a while, returns with some unfathomable treasure, like this book.

Steven Marsh comes up with the most wild, off-the-wall stuff I've read.  Not in the sense of mind-bending concepts, that's more Kenneth Hite's bailiwick.  No, Steven Marsh is the sort of guy who says "Hey, you ever think about this?" and focuses on something relatively mundane and manages to squeeze something out of it that you hadn't considered.  Only a mind like his could have thought "Hey, we need some organization whose sole purpose in life is to give you wild rides."

But his flailings into the unplumbed depths in search of topics nobody has covered results in hit-or-miss results.  This is a miss, I'm afraid.  It's not a bad concept, but what are you going to do with it?

The niche for this is to explain where your cool cars come from. But, uh, I wasn't casting about for that.  Do I need to know where the cool cars of the Fast and Furious Crew come from? Does James Bond need a unique organization just for him? No.  If you're playing Action, which this is most well suited towards, and you want a spy-car, you just put in a request and your GM gives you one or he doesn't.  Where it comes from is a foot note at best. It's a bit like detailing the temple that gives out healing spells in DF.  That's nice, but most people don't really care.

Unless the organization matters.  For example, if that Healing Temple has a particular agenda, or a dark secret, or some way to interface with it on a daily basis, or some way in which its healers are unique, then it starts to matter.  Tomorrow Rides doesn't really have any of that.  The cool vehicles it offers are generically cool.  It has stats, but they don't really matter: Tomorrow Rides isn't going to be going to war.  Nobody is trying to undermine them.  Whether or not they can react to a sudden threat from another organization isn't really relevant.  And they don't really have any agenda other than "Make sure you do something cool with this vehicle," which you were going to do anyway.

As I read the book, I found myself thinking "This feels like the Saturday Morning Cartoon I never knew I wanted to play." But then I realized I still couldn't play it. There's no ranks, no org chart, no internal agendas. Other than the people who drive for them (who are more like associates than people who work FOR Tomorrow Rides) who do they employ? Presumably auditors, consultants, mechanics, likely some drivers of their own. What do they want? There's a section that discusses Tomorrow Rides as a mad conspiracy, but what I mean is more of a day-to-day basis, the adventure hooks that Tomorrow Rides faces.  "If I work for Tomorrow Rides and I get a call from them, it's to..." what? Drive a car? That's a given.  What else? Rescue the daughter of a great car scientist from the clutches of the bloodthirsty Racer V? Make sure that Tesla Motors doesn't steal that government contract out from underneath us? Go to the Bermuda Triangle and raise up the lost wreckage of a WW2 sub carrying experimental Nazi atomic engines that we want to load into a race car? There's nothing.

Look, the point of an organization book should be how to play with that organization. That's why we have stats: to know what its limits are, and how best to manage it.  Does the Loyalty of its employees matter? Does how well they're paid matter? This book is like a City Stats book for a City that you'll never go to: it's a nice read, but you can't do much with it.

I don't think it's a bad book. I don't regret owning it or reading it. It inspired me and made me think of things I wouldn't have on my own.  That's why I like the mad-lad Steven Marsh. Now that he's been liberated from the shackles of Pyramid, I hope he brings more of his crazy to GURPS, because we could use it.  Reading about Jody and the possible conspiracies and ruminating on the possibility of Tomorrow Rides having a time machine is fun, but you don't need this book.  It won't rev up your Action game, it won't add a new faction to your Supers game, it won't give your Monster Hunters game an unusual edge that they couldn't already access, and it won't give you new technology for your sci-fi game.  All it will do is give you a couple of names and details you can toss around about where your heroes got their car, and perhaps a bit of a twinge at the missed opportunity for running a game centered on Tomorrow Rides itself.  If you like that, then by all means, get this book. But for most of you, I think you can safely skip it.