GURPS PDF Challenge Reviews: GURPS Template Toolkit 3: Spaceship Crew

Following the unlock order of the PDF challenge, we come now to Template Toolkit 3: Starship Crew, which turns out to be exactly what it says on the tin.

The book is split into two parts (nout counting the introduction).

• Job Openings (a list of templates)
• Assembling Crew (suggestions for using the templates)
  

Briefly summarized, this is exactly what you'd think it would be, providing us with several templates for building a spaceship crew. It's also very good, which means that we're batting 3 for 3 with the releases and reviews.

Also, as an side: this is some of the best art I've seen in a PDF.  SJGames invested more than I would have guessed into these PDFs (though you'll see some art re-used as you go through all of the PDFs).

With that, there might not be much more to say about it, but if you know anything about my process, you likely know I find this a very interesting book.  But I think it's more interesting than you likely realize, because of what it signals about the intentions of GURPS.  Why is it a Template Toolkit, and what can you do with it?

Breakdown

So, we have our two chapters.  The first covers "Everyman Advantages," which is familiar to anyone who has used a GURPS Campaign Framework: it's an abbreviated list of "all acceptable advantages and disadvantages and skills".  However, it's intent is more to give you a basis on "what traits are always acceptable."

Then it moves on to the templates.  Each Template is 150 points, and has two lenses: Legendary, for a heroic version of the template for +50 points and Multi-Role, which is intended for other templates; it's sort of our "cross-class" template, so if your Helmsman is also a Commander, you take the Helmsman Template, and the Commander Multi-Role lens. This also costs 50 points.

The Templates are:

• Commander ("The Captain")
  
• Helmsman ("the Pilot")
• Operations Officer (the guy with all the Electronics Operations skills who tells you what's on scope and that another ship is hailing you)
• Tactical Officer (the guy who shoots the ship's weapons)
• Engineer ("The Scotty")
• Medical Officer ("the Bones")
• Science Officer (more the guy who answers questions about weird phenomenon and gets samples from planets than the guy reading your radar)
• Security Officer (for shooting people)
• Loadmaster (Someone's gotta load cargo on...)
• Steward (The guy who talks to passengers and makes them happy)

Chapter 2, "Assembling Crew," discusses different power levels, and it includes an "Omni-Competent" lens, also worth 50 points. It also discusses different genres in very broad terms (I think the book would benefit from sitting down and discussing the different genres in more detail, while it actually just implies a great deal across the whole book). It also discusses where you can find some of the more obscure perks and talents.

Taken together, the book covers everything from Firefly to Star Trek, giving you templates for handling any typical "Captain and Crew story," whether that captain and crew are part of the gloriously heroic navy, sinister pirates, or cunning tramp freighters dodging the law.  It also covers everything from 150-point "heroic, but not that heroic" characters to cinematic, 300-point legends that saved the Federation from a great alien menace.

The Minimal Viable Template Book

In a sense. TT3 replaces GURPS Space in same the way GURPS DF 1 replaces Fantasy.  GURPS Spaceships has templates in it, but they follow the mold of early 4e templates, not the "modern" template approach of Late 4e GURPS (GURPS 4.5?).  Thus, most people tend to forget that Space has templates (and in any case, they cover more than just the starship crew; for example, they include thieves and space knights), but I suspect Space will continue to see more use than Fantasy does, because most people have a pretty static view of how they see Fantasy and they don't need a book to tell them that, while the GMs of sci-fi games all have wildly disparate ideas on settings they could be running, and space offers not just support for that, but rules for generating biologically plausible aliens and astronomically plausible planets.

Those familiar with my approach to setting and framework design doubtless know what I'm going to say next: if you combine this with a few other books,  you have everything you need for 90% of "captain and crew" space adventures.  Everything else is just details.  The real strength his book brings over the templates in Space is tight integration with the rules of GURPS Spaceships.  Spaceships outlines a "base" set of rules for how to handle spaceships, different roles characters would take on, and these templates largely fill those roles.  In a very real sense, there is a "game" already present in GURPS Spaceships, which these Templates plug into. If Templates Toolkits 3 is "GURPS Space Adventures 1: Captain and Crew" then GURPS Spaceships and its various supplements are "GURPS Space Adventures 2: How to run the game and have fun."  The Engineer integrates with the SS repair rules, the Helmsmen with the piloting rules, and so on.  If you whip up some planets from Space, some aliens from Space, pick a TL and grab some gear from Ultra-Tech, Bob's your uncle, you have a space campaign, and you're basically three iterations into what I did with Psi-Wars.

Thus, if you want to run a sci-fi campaign for GURPS, this is a must have for your campaign, and at $3, it's pretty affordable.

Wait, a Template Toolkit?

I found the choice of Template Toolkit to be an odd one at first, but after reading it, I understand it.  But I also think it likely says something about the future of sci-fi support in GURPS.

A Template Toolkit exists to help you create your own templates.  This is not a book for creating your sci-fi templates, it is sci-fi templates. So what gives? Well, they only look like sci-fi templates, they actually are toolkits.  A proper campaign framework makes assumptions about a setting that this book does not. What is your TL? Is FTL available? What sort of campaign are you running? Are their aliens? Cybernetics? Psychic powers? This book tries to offer support and suggestions for all options.

But then, if it's trying to cover all possible aspects of captain-and-crew game, why isn't it a full PDF treatment? Why is it a ten page, $3 PDF? This is where we get into "the future of sci-fi in GURPS." A lot of people have asked for the space opera equivalent to DF, not in the sense of Space Opera, but a full campaign framework for science fiction.  But such threads making the request immediately fell to arguing over what sci-fi.  See, Blade Runner, Aliens, Terminator, the Expanse, Star Trek and Star Wars all fall within the very broad domain that people mean when they say "sci-fi." Though purists will forever argue about what actually merits the lofty title of "sci-fi" ("Star Wars is more space fantasy" they'll say), the point is that what people popularly think of as sci-fi covers everything from the rigorously researched Atomic Rockets to the "Space Fantasy" of Star Wars.  This is not true of fantasy. Oh, sure, sometimes the setting is dark and moody, sometimes it's sunny and bright, sometimes it has elves and orcs and sometimes it has lizard people and deep ones.  But they almost always mean guys with swords killing monsters and taking their stuff, and if you want more, you can build upon that foundation. There are other forms of fantasy (urban fantasy, the whimsical fantasy of Xanth or Gulliver's Travels) but thanks to the ubiquity of D&D, most people don't use the term "fantasy" to include those sub-genres.

The net result is there's no easy, obvious "one size fits most" campaign framework that you can put under the umbrella of "Sci-fi," and these tend to get shorter treatments:

• if you want Cyberpunk, there's a Pyramid article for you, and you otherwise use GURPS Action at a higher TL.
• If you want planetary romance, you dig out "The Dungeons of Mars" article and upgrade your DF to include the elements found therein.
• If you want to play a bug hunt, you dig out Monster Hunters, take MH 5: Xenology and, depending on your power-level, Sidekicks and and Ultra Tech and build-your-own X-com or Aliens.
• If you want Captain-and-Crew, you grab this, Spaceships, Space and Ultra-Tech and get to work.

I don't think we're going to see more support than that.  We might see some specific settings (Reign of Steel, Transhuman Space), but I wouldn't hold my breath for "GURPS Not-Star Trek."

Heroes of the Galactic Frontier

Those deep into their Mailanka lore have likely stumbled across Heroes of the Galactic Frontier.  I was working on that before I started this blog and Psi-Wars.  The idea behind Psi-Wars was to introduce you to the idea of this with a "simpler" version in the form of not-Star Wars and, well, here we are, still working on Psi-Wars (though in my defense, Psi-Wars as it was initially conceived of, as an example of campaign framework design, was done in the first year; everything else has been people asking for more setting material and refinements to the framework).

HotGF was meant as a "not-Star Trek" and "not-FTL." It was meant to take the core gameplay of Spaceships and turn it into a workable game.  With TTK3 out, that's less necessary, but still an interesting project to work on.  Assuming I'm right and we don't see a different implementation of GURPS Captain-and-Crew pop out, I might, but it'll be quite a distance off.

But even without my work on it, I hope you can see how you can use this to build your own campaign fairly easily. At this point, you have pretty much all the tools necessary. Yes, they're scattered across a variety of supplements (and I think that's one of the things people appreciate about watching me do it, is I might think of an article that they didn't), but it should be pretty doable at his point, thanks to TTK 3.