Pyramid #4/1 Fantasy/Magic I

 

I didn't review Pyramid when it was out, but maybe I should have.  Still, it would have been a constant process, while this new Kickstarter version is more of a one-off deal, which makes reviewing it a more reasonable proposition, though I don't know how useful that will be to you, dear reader: either you backed it and you have it, in which case the only point of reading this will be to see whether I agree with you or not, or you didn't, in which case you have no access to it, but presumably you'll be able to access it later, in which case this review might be useful to you.

I'll review each article separately and then collect everything together in a single TL;DR review.

Overview

Rating: 4 stars

So, if I go over each article, I find there are none that I actively disliked.  I didn't really look over the RPM one, as I don't use RPM (I'm also rather skeptical of the need to write up so many spells for a system that's supposed to be flexible and free-form), so I didn't count that in my average as a "zero"; if I did, then the issue drops to about 3 stars, but that feels unfair.  I found at least three "I will use or look into this immediately" articles, and 3 more I would strongly consider using, or would strongly recommend to others.

I don't know what the final price of this issue will be, but given its size, it's almost certainly worth your time. It's obviously more worth your time if you're into fantasy, but I'm not running any fantasy at the moment, and I still found a lot of useful stuff.  This is up there with some of the top Pyramid issues from #3, and I definitely recommend it.

Article Breakdown

Toxic Grimoire, by Aleksei Isachenko

Rating: 4 stars

Despite being an ardent fan of Sorcery, I have a soft spot for vanilla magic, and I especially like colleges that integrate well with the world and offer subtle solutions that make for an interesting character.  Poison and disease often interest me as mechanics, because we regularly see Resistance offered to them, and lots of detail given to them, but nobody ever seems to use them.  The problem with poison and disease is they're generally passive threats: either the GM thinks to hit you with them, or he doesn't.  If he does, then it was worth your points to buy that resistance, and if he doesn't, then it wasn't.  Having a magical college, though, makes them an active threat.  Villain mages might regularly use it, and PC mages might access it and regularly create poison clouds or similar effects, and being resistant or immune becomes an interesting tactical option.

I especially like how the college integrates existing poisons.  For example, Glandular Eruption allows you to use a venomous creature's poison against itself, or Venom Missile lets you turn an existing poison into an attack. This means the GM is rewarded for using existing poisons or creatures in his game, and PC mages will run around with cobras and vile vials of poison, which is great and exactly what I want to see.  It also means that the Poison college "scales" with the world: a poison mage in a TL 8 world with polonium or some advanced, synthetic nerve agent is more lethal than a TL 0 mage who only has to some nasty herbs, which is likely to be balanced by the cures that are made available.

This scaling, though, doesn't extend to the generic attacks, like Toxic Ball, which inflict a generic amount of toxic damage.  There's a lot of important rule information that's been pushed into the Cost of the spell for no reason I can fathom, and the main one is that Resistance to Poison acts as DR against these spells.  Now, I'm not sure I like that much. Poison and disease have always been associated with an HT roll to resist; why should these be different? I'd have to dig into the matter more closely, but I suspect the author wanted to avoid unnecessary rolls, but I'm not sure this was the place to institute some new rules: poison is typically balanced around having high HT; an HT 6 person with Resist Poison +8 is less vulnerable to poison than an HT 20 person for... some reason.  So I think I see what they were trying to do, but I disagree with it.

I'd definitely use this college, were I running a fantasy game, but I gotta ding it for the misuse of Resist as DR.  Also, this work of art is fantastic. SJGames is really upping its game here.

Utatsumi, by David Chart

Rating: 3 stars

Advertised as a new magic system, it is not.  It is, instead, a discussion of poetry in Japanese culture, and a concept I recognized as wabi-sabi, though I don't think he was specifically shooting in that direction.  This might seem something of a dry topic, but I adore traditional Japanese culture, and I found myself hunting for ways to integrate this into my current games, and I'd probably look for a way to integrate it into Cherry Blossom Rain if I was running it again, but it's rather specific and wouldn't fit everywhere.  The mechanics offered are more of a shorthand, something like "if your mages cast magic by writing poetry, they just write poems instead of doing funny things with their hands and saying funny words.  If this takes awhile, maybe give them some limitations." It offers a bit more support for Ritual Path Magic, and it acknowledges Sorcery (Yay!), but this article is more of a discussion of a cultural element and ideas as to integrate it into GURPS as a magic system then it is a fully realized system.

I suspect I'll never use this, but I want to.

The Demonic Temple of Felltower, by Peter V. Dell'Orto

Rating: 3 stars

Ever since DF came out, we've lost the esteemed Mr. Dell'Orto to it, and he's probably the greatest authority on the topic with the possible exception of Kromm himself.  I've been following the Felltower series more as an interested observer than a participant.  This is an outtake from his Felltower stuff, and reads like it, which isn't bad.  It is, however, ultimately a single encounter.  I like the imagery of an abandoned(?) demonic temple occupied by crocodile men, but you're not going to get more than a single session or two out of this and you'd have to fit it into an existing campaign.  Still, the creatures added are nice, and it looks like a reasonable, if simple, setup.

I suspect I'll never use it, but if I ran DF, I'd be interested in pulling it out for a random encounter to spare myself some prep time.

Healing and Purification Ritual Path Magic, by Christopher Rice

Rating: NA

I don't really use Ritual Path Magic and I'm not really a fan of that system, for a variety of reasons, so I just skipped this article. 

Fraxinetum, by Matt Riggsby

Rating: 4 stars

I'm a fan of Matt's since I started digging into his Hotspot's series.  I think he's probably the most underrated GURPS author, as people look at his material and go "Ugh, the real world" but as Kenneth Hite loves to say, "The real world is more interesting than anything you can come up with on your own."  Fraxinetum is a good example of that. When I heard of the title, I thought it was a funny, fantasy name for a castle, until I recognized the author and searched for the term on Wikipedia, only to discover it was very real.  He outlines the history of it, and the broader context, and I found myself saying "Isn't this the same era as the vikings" and, indeed, it is and he talks about it.

Fraxinetum gives me the same feeling I get from all of Matt's work: "I should really run a historical campaign using this material!" but then I never do.  Then the next thought is "Actually, I could use this as inspiration for something in my campaign, even though it isn't set in this historical period."  This latter thought always makes Matt's material more useful to me, but it also means that often his actual research is irrelevant to me, as once I've seen the title and know what it's about, I can get the gist of it from Wikipedia.  The main reason I like Matt's stuff, though, isn't the research (unless it's deep research that's not easy to find on a digest like an online encyclopedia), but his advice on how to use it or integrate it into GURPS.  Here, that information is sparse, so I have to ding it from perfection to merely "Very good."

Tactical Looting, by Sean Punch

Rating: 5 stars

I didn't expect to like or need this article, but I did.  I played quite some D&D 4e, and people often observed that you could have one encounter, use your dailies, and then rest, and be refreshed for the next encounter.  The primary counter to this is time management, but most modern RPGs dispense with this as "boring," though if you dig around,  you'll see the fingerprints of time-management gameplay all over GURPS, which makes me think it's a bit of a forgotten feature of the game.

Tactical Looting is about bringing time-management into a dungeon crawl, often in a very intense way.  At one point in the article, he (half-jokingly) suggests a 17 second time limit.  Imagine playing through a dungeon in 17 seconds! Or, if you want a bit of a longer time limit, a one minute dungeon.  What does that look like?  A very tight and fast design, to be sure, and I don't know about you, but I'd be very curious and interested in trying.  I'm quite sure that if I were in my RPG society, if I proposed such a game as a one shot, my table would be packed.

You can't do that, though, unless you have tight rules.  Say it's a 4-hour dungeon.  How much time does it take to walk down corridors or arrange an ambush or loot some containers?  Punch has you covered.  This brings the article up from "good" to "great." The idea itself is nice, and in my experience, many Pyramid articles are just someone's idea, but ideas without the elbow grease behind them to make them work are cheap . Tactical Looting has the elbow grease to make them work. So not only do I want to run this, I can.  I don't have to do the work myself or figure out how to make it work, it's all there.

"But Mailanka, you don't run DF!" Well, for a one-shot like this, I could.  And I'm frankly tempted to: the One Minute Dungeon.  But the concepts and mechanics described here can work in other settings.  I'm about to run a Heist, and this sort of thing fits perfectly with that.  A salvage operation in After the End would as well.  So not only is this a nice idea that makes me want to run this as a one-shot and gives me the support I need to do so, it's a flexible idea! Mind you, it doesn't outline exactly how it would work in other settings and genres. I could ding it for that, but I mean, word count restraints; I can figure out how to put it into Psi-Wars on my own. Other than that petty "It's not 100% perfect for me"  complaint, this is a "killer app" article that sells the entire issue, frankly.

Stilpnotita, the City of Lamps, by William J. Keith

Rating: 2 stars

This is fine.  It's an article about a city built into the elemental plane of Earth, with portals to the elemental plane or Water and Air. It mentions some interesting locations, discusses some of the politics of the setting in brief, and talks about its economy and culture. I don't know why it's called the city of lamps, though, other than a snippet that talks about there being a "constellation" of lamps.

Look, I like spirits with cool names like the Deep King, and I like underground cities, but this feels like a weirdly specific setting that I'll never use.  It's not a bad read, I have nothing to complain about, it's just going to be one of those articles that a month from now I've forgotten about.

Supernatural Energy, by Rory Fansler

Rating: 5 stars

This article wasn't what I thought it would be.  It was better.  

First, this article is mostly about magic-as-advantages, which I'm always a fan of. It offers some alternatives to Magery and ways of thinking about building mages, and a new Control Magic advantage and some techniques. Taken together, you have the minimal basis for an alternative to Sorcery, if you want it.  This is fine, and by itself I'd give it a thumbs up and tag it with a "I'm probably not gonna use it, but I want to" three star rating. 

But then it answered a question I hadn't even realized needed to be asked.  That question is this: "You know how mages in Vanilla magic can draw power from minions, or power stones, or places of power or storms or whatever? How does that work if you're running magic-as-powers?"  He introduces several new rules to allow for Gathering External Energy that should have obvious utility for any "powers-as-advantages" system like, oh, I don't know, psychic powers.  Like, why can't Psychic Vampires draw literal psychic energy that they could use to power their abilities from the emotions of others? That seems a totally reasonable idea!

So this is an article that I will be immediately using, like Tactical Looting above, giving it an instant 5-star rating.  I will note, though, that it's a fairly tight and focused article. Other than this alternative-to-sorcery and these rules for Gathering External Energy, there isn't anything else.  This is enough for me! But you might be surprised by its brevity, given its high rating.

Pandemonium, by Michele Armellini

Rating: 2 stars

This is fine.  It's an Infinite Earths setting with a medieval world filled with demons. If you want to run a not-Warhammer, this is a great choice, and if you want to cross-over your TL 8 Infinity Agents with not-Warhammer, and you don't want to run Banestorm, you can use this.  It's about as sparse as you'd expect for a pyramid article: it doesn't have demon stats and only points you in the direction of existing demons (which isn't a problem; we have demons enough in GURPS). There's no new magic system here, no weird new tech, just an idea "What if demons invaded around 1000 AD? Here's some ideas" and that's it.  It's fine.

I have no problems with it and found it a pleasant read, but I doubt I'd use it.

Fusion Alchemy, by Christopher Rice

Rating: 5 stars

Yet another pleasant surprise, I assumed this would be a discussion of Internal Alchemy, given Rice's recent foray into Wuxia, and it is, but it's more than that.  It continues Rice's exploration of using metatronic-like rules for alchemy, arguably extending the concepts of Ultra-Tech drugs all the way back to TL 3 magic or TL 8 mad science.  It supports reasonable costs for both, a wide variety of effects (using advantages, an approach I approve of), forms and durations, and then creates a detailed pricing chart for everything and then adds a system for using all of the above as a form of Internal Alchemy? Magnificent.

I'd have to double check this against the ultra-tech drug-creation system.  It merits a deeper study, and after I've dived deep, I might come back with a worse opinion... or a better one! But I'm tentatively giving it 5 stars, because it makes me want to dive deeper and because if it works as well as I hope, it'll become my default drug-design system which is very pertinent for some of the stuff I'm trying to write up right now.

The Cube, by Steven Marsh

Rating: 3 stars

I had forgotten that one of the reasons I liked Pyramid in the first place was Steve's oddball ideas, and he does not disappoint.  This is a small, right article on a weird room structure.  It's a puzzle where the players move about a room that they can "control" to flip it on its sides and move it down a larger room to line up the doors inside the room with doors outside the room to escape.  It's a whackadoodle puzzle to toss randomly into a dungeon, and frankly a very interesting idea.  It's a one-off, and it's not something I'll likely ever use, but if I did, it would be something people talked about for quite awhile.  I'm torn between 3 and 4 stars, but I'm leaning towards three because, as good an idea as it is, I think most people won't use it.

Random Thought Table: (Lack of) Speed Kills, by Steven Marsh

Rating: 4 stars

This article dovetails nicely with tactical looting, and articulates well one of the unintended consequences of being a dick GM that plays gotcha with his players in that it can slow your game to a crawl, and how terrible slow games are. There's an apocryphal quote where someone describes D&D as "the game where you argue for four hours before you move the little men even once" and I agree that this is a problem: you want to get to the meat of the game as soon as possible, revving up the fun as soon as you can.  Some of the advice here is about time-saving measures, but a lot of it is about framing the session in such a way as to prevent hesitation that stems from uncertainty: if the players fear they missed something, they'll dawdle checking everything again and again, and if they're afraid they will miss something, they'll plan and plan and plan without ever going through on the heist (or the crawl or whatever).  At some point, you have to prod them forward.

I like the advice, and I think people need to read it, and it got me thinking about how I want to handle certain things in upcoming one-shots, but for more experienced GMs, it likely reads less like sage advice and more like musings on a topic you've revisited several times before, so it's not an essential article, but still a good one.