Pyramid 4/2 Modern Action Review

Having finished Pyramid 4/1, let's move on to Pyramid #4/2.  As before, I'll give you a TL;DR summary first, which I'll write after I've written my review of everything else.  Then, after that TL;DR review, I'll break every article down.

Overview

Rating: 4 stars

There's no articles here, unlike Fantasy, that I just won't read because I won't use the underlying system.  There were several articles that I found immediately useful and/or very well written.  There were, however, several "useless" articles, and a one that I would consider badly written (though it still had value).

As with the Fantasy/Magic issue, there's more than enough good material in here to justify your $5 or whatever its final price will be.  Particualrly stand-out articles include the Checkpoint and Highway Stars, which I think anyone running a modern (or even only "modernish") campaign will find useful.

Article Breakdown

Into the Forbidden Zone, by J. Edward Tremlett

Rating: 5 stars

Okay, so my rule for ratings suggest that 4 stars is either something I'll immediately use but find flawed, or something I really want to use, but currently can't.  By that definition, this article should be 4 stars but it's so gooood.  Look, I'm a sucker for ruin porn: for vast desolate landscapes filled with the wreckage of past aeons, and this details three real world examples.  I knew of one of these three, so the other two were new to me. The topic alone is interesting, enough to get three to four stars out of me, and "Places of Mystery" style posts are always fun, but as I noted in my review of Fraxinetum, if I can google it myself, you lose some points, because all you're really doing is highlighting something I should research, which is nice, but not worth that much to me.  You have to give me more to make it worth my time.  

And this does! Each one comes with very detailed adventure seeds that goes a long way to writing the adventure itself, which means it's synergizing with me. Mr. Tremlett knows once he's written the word "Butugychag" that I can just research it myself. So, he doesn't waste my time or his word count with more than just a brief summary of the location.  Most of the word content is spent on using the location.  So if I want to run a Monster Hunters adventure, I can whip this article out, look at Butugychag, read up on the Evil Ground storyhook, and then have a solid beginning to an adventure, and I can fill out the rest with wikipedia details and stuff borrowed from Monster Hunters. And it's generic.  What if I don't want Monster Hunters? What if I want Horror, or Action, or I even want to strip it down and use it for Psi-Wars? It covers a variety of genres; it doesn't explicitly go into SF, but I wouldn't actually expect it too, but it still provides some core inspiration.

This article knows what it needs to be and does it very, very well.  My only complaint is that it doesn't fill pages with gorgeous ruin porn photos, but I guess I can search those on my own too. We do have file size to worry about, after all.

The Pheonix Program and Pheonix: Birds of Prey, by S.A. Fisher

Rating: 4 stars

I have a soft spot for Vietnam gaming: when I was in high school, some tough-guy military nerd ran a Vietnam campaign in GURPS 3e, and he ran it in the style that he understood Vietnam to be, which essentially boiled down to a sequence of murderous horror scenarios against an omniscient, omnipresent vietcong. It was high school, he didn't know what he was doing.  I played a character named "Spooks" inspired by an episode of Quantum Leap I had seen, whose core feature was Danger Sense and Intuition.  As a result, I was the only character to survive ambush after ambush, which meant I was the only character to make it through the aborted, ramshackle campaign. I made Lieutenant, somehow. The point of this story is two-fold.  First, it piqued my curiosity, so I collect GURPS Vietnam material despite the fact that I'll probably never play it again and, second, I'm keenly aware of how stupid that campaign was. Having read these articles, I think I understand why it was stupid, and it goes beyond high schoolers being dumb.

These are two articles, and I'm not sure why they were split up; likely it has to do with how the Kickster was structured, but they're back to back, so you can just pretend they're one article, which is how you should treat them.  The first half details a specific counter-insurgency program in detail, including what is objectives were, what its opponents were, how it operated, and what sort of people worked with it.  The second half is about building characters to fit into it.

This is not enough to run a Vietnam campaign.  It outlines other books to add, such as SEALs in Vietnam, and it recommends a few others, like Special Ops and Pulling Rank and City Stats.  I'd toss on High Tech and the GURPS Action Series, including GURPS Action 7: Mercenaries, which the second half recommends.  But let me explain why I think this article is actually vital to a good Vietnam campaign, or at least your first campaign.

So you're a dumb highschool student. You want to run GURPS Vietnam.  What does your game look like? Well, probably like Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, but these aren't actually honest depictions of that war, but anti-war films that seek to criticize the war.  To understand how the war actually worked, what soldiers would actually be doing, you need context, and that's what this article provides. Once you have all the pieces, you can see what sort of characters to build, what those characters would be doing, and get a sense of what their opponents would be.  It even includes a structure for essentially generating random adventures in a broader campaign context.  If we had had this, our understanding of that war, and how to run it effectively as an RPG campaign, would have been greatly enhanced.

So why isn't it five stars with glowing reviews from me? Well, it's because I probably won't run it.  I don't have time for a Vietnam campaign, and it's not very useful outside of a Vietnam campaign.  I mean, I could stretch it a bit to describe an imperial counter-insurgency on a jungle planet might look, but this isn't a generic counter-insurgency article.  I would certainly buy that article!  But this isn't it.  Does that mean I wouldn't recommend it? No, I would definitely recommend it if you want to run Vietnam, or you just want to understand more about that war.  It's a great pair of articles, it's just that most of you probably won't get that much use out of them.

Three Steampunk Monsters, by Phil Masters

Rating: 4 Stars

In my heart of hearts, I was hoping that this would expand Master's Broken Clockwork World.  Yes, I bashed that one in my review, but most of my complaints had to do with the lack of critical details. One of those critical details was cool monsters.  Alas, this doesn't make monsters explicitly for BCW... but that's probably for the best, as these are useful in any Steampunk Campaign, not just one singular world.

When I glanced through the article, my first thought was that these were just rip-offs of Horror Monsters: we have the Galvanic Creature, which is "just" the Frankenstein Monster, the Vital Metamorph, which is "just" "the Swamp Thing" and the Tyrannical Tulpa, which is "just" the, uh, Tulpa.  But when I read closer, I realized that initial impression was only half right, and these are actually very good.

These definitely draw from GURPS Horror; he even cites the pages he's drawing from. But, first, these aren't characters, they're monsters, and they're written as stat-blocks, and those stat blocks are defined in unique and interesting ways.  They're not just the monsters from Horror, Mr. Masters used those as a foundation from which to create fully realized monsters with unique abilities and powers.  Then he gave them personalities and two of the three are genius monsters.  Nothing here is a Monster Of The Week, everyone one of these could be at the heart of a conspiracy.

For example, the Tyrannical Tulpa is a manifestation of what every communist revolutionary secretly fears the capitalist is: this mustache twirling, virtually omniscient Prince of the Earth who manipulates everything.  It is that fear made manifest.  It mostly acts as a wicked spirit that pervades things, but can manifest as this super-human slasher-type character unless it actually has access to the machinery of industry, its capital, in which case it can manifest as a giant machine-monster of doom.  This is a wonderful monster.  Fighting the Tyrannical Tulpa is like fighting the Dracula from Castlevania, complete with its "Final Form," except it's not Dracula from Castlevania so people don't know what to expect!  They won't even realize what it is at first.

The Galvanic Creature is similarly well done.  I'm less sold on the Vital Metamorph, who comes across as a solid rendition of a B-movie horror monster paired with the mechanics of a growing threat that can trick the hunter into thinking its dead.  It's not a bad monster, it just doesn't shine with the hellish glory of the other two.

So why not five stars? Well, they're pretty steampunk, so I probably won't use them soon.  I can certainly draw inspiration from them, and they're a great "worked example" of how to build such critters from GURPS Horror (I appreciate anyone who is willing to go back to the pre-campaign framework books and continue to draw from them: your Monster Hunters campaign should be using GURPS Horror, not waiting on another monster bestiary).  If you're running a Steampunk campaign that focuses on fighting monsters, this is a must have.  If you're just running horror or anything supernatural, it's worth a look.  If you're running something else (like DF) it won't help you much. That last, the specific nature of the article, is the only thing that keeps it from perfection.

Secret Masters, by Rory Fansler

Rating: 2 Stars

This one is a disappointment.  I was definitely looking forward to it, as running campaigns with secret masters, or where players are secret masters, such as GURPS Cabal, or even certain flavors of Psi-Wars, is very much the sort of thing I like to do.  But there are problems with traits like Illuminated that only really make it useful in very specific sorts of campaigns, and it feels like I'm hunting for justification for the point cost, or looking for ways to make the traits more worthwhile.  I was hoping this would be an article that would fix a lot of that.

It wasn't. 

The article lists a series of traits appropriate to secret masters, but doesn't really address issues with them, and raises new ones.  For example, it suggests Illuminated, and notes that "the GM may decide that there are no supernatural beings to communicate with", which is true, but how should we compensate the player for that reduced value? The answer is... nothing. It's not even addressed.  

Then we add Illuminated Master, which is a 30-point trait that... whew, okay, it has some issues, so let's make this its own paragraph. First, it allows you to buy a mess of traits "even if they're not normally available." Well, there's usually a reason traits aren't normally available, like this would suggest that Psi-Wars characters could buy Independent Income, but the reason Independent Income isn't available in Psi-Wars is because we handle wealth differently, we don't worry about how much time you spend "at work" so whether your income is "independent" or not isn't relevant.  You might say "Well, okay, then they can't have that trait," but then what's the point of Illuminated Master? If all it does is let you have traits you can normally just buy then what are you paying 30 points for?  It also lets you buy Rank in other organizations without having a Duty, and it represents some sort of control mechanism, like you can do a Pulling Rank move on other organizations despite not belonging to them.  That's a neat trick, but I'm not convinced Rank is the right means of using it.  Finally, and this is more amusing than a problem, it suggests that Illuminated could be a prerequisite, and then lists Illuminated as one of the traits that it could let you buy.  This is less amusing when it suggests that you might need an Unusual Background to buy it, but all the trait is, from what I can see, is an unusual background that lets you buy other traits.  I'm not a fan of charging a lot of points for the right to buy a trait, like the ability buy real (not courtesy) rank in an organization you don't belong to strikes me as a perk at most, so why am I paying 30 points for the privilege, or worse, 30 points for the trait after 5 points (or more!) for an Unusual Background? This doesn't feel well thought out.

Then it adds a few new traits like Obscure (Traces) which is a legitimately neat concept, but it feels like what Zeroed already does, for less, or Oracle (Networked).  Finally, it has some techniques, but these have some issues too, like Plausible Deniability which allows you to apply a penalty to an Influence Skill to penalize an investigator to prove your culpability.  So, what, you use Sex Appeal to tempt somebody into not checking your luggage and... what? They get a penalty to investigate the smuggling? or just the fact that you talked a guard out of checking your luggage? If the former, what if you apply different penalties to different Influence rolls (like a Sex Appeal at -4 when you bought your illicit goods, -2 on the border guard, and -3 when you sold the goods, what's your investigation penalty?) and if the latter, does the penalty change on each specific aspect of the investigation, like it's only a -2 to realize you prevented the guard from checking your stuff, but a -4 to figure out where you bought the goods?  Is the GM supposed to track the varying penalty for each and every Influence Roll you make throughout the entire campaign?

The article feels like one of those where the writer liked the idea  of Secret Masters, and wrote up some neat sound traits that seemed to fit, but didn't put any thought into the difficulties of running such a campaign.  This makes the article a grab bag of broken bits that I'd have to polish myself and think about, but I certainly couldn't use as written.  It's not a lost cause, so it's not one star, but despite being a topic I'm very interested in, I have to pan the article.

The Checkpoint, by Michele Armellini

Rating: 5 Stars

This is a breakdown of how checkpoints work.  In theory, it's written with modern campaigns in mind, but as it explores the principles, you can apply it to a wide variety of settings, though obviously some of the materials would have to change. This alone would make it worth your time: Checkpoints will show up in Psi-Wars, or After the End, or Monster Hunters or Action.  They'll even show up in DF, though likely in a very different form.  It tackles hastily constructed checkpoints, and thoroughly hardened checkpoints, and the reasons why checkpoints exist and what their purposes could be.  

But then it tops itself, and gives discussions of the personalities and possible traits (and how those traits might affect the functioning of a Checkpoint) that various personnel might have: how is a Checkpoint with a Hidebound Commander and Perceptive Sergeant different from a Checkpoint with a Paranoid Commander and a Greedy Sergeant?  That's the sort of question you didn't even know you needed answered, and already Michele has you thinking about not just the physical security of the checkpoint, but the social security too!  Not just how you can fight your way through, or sneak your way through, but also how you can talk your way through.

This is a good example of a stellar pyramid article: it covers a topic that's useful to everyone, the sort of article that you're very glad you have, but probably wouldn't have paid for if it was a single book.  Though, I must confess, I would pay for a book filled with security protocols, like a book on How to Do A GURPS Heist.  Very relevant for me right now.

The Company, by Sean Punch

Rating: 2 Stars

This is fine.  This is the organization of Kromm's Action campaign, which makes it an interesting curiosity, as it gives you some insights into what Kromm is running, but beyond that... Have you ever read Aeon Trinity? Or any game that has a good and wealthy organization that seeks to right the wrongs the world, and is otherwise rather vaguely defined?  That's the Company.  You don't need it, there's nothing really here that will make or break a campaign.  You could certainly use the Company in your campaigns, but you could also just make up your own.  It's not a bad article, it's just not particularly useful to me either.

Derelicts on Ice, by Carolyn Ivy Stein and Steve Stein

Rating: 2 Stars

This is essentially a collection of fictional ships that have been trapped in ice for various reasons.  Each has a secret and a treasure that fits the genre of the era associated with it (nazi submarine has nazi gold, pirate ship has pirate treasure, steampunk vessel has cthulhu on it, etc), which gives the heroes a reason to visit it.  This is alright, and so you can see them as a series of highly specific story hooks.  This fine, even good.

I do have a problem with the fact that it doesn't really talk about the dangers the crew will face.  It does have some brief asides about the dangers in the area, like "There are animals, yo," but, like, what are the risks of collapse in such a vessel? How dangerous is it to fall into the water? What sort of animals might we expect? I mean, I can do all of that homework myself, sure, and there's the limits of word count and genre to consider, but what I'm left with is a sequence of passable hooks, most of which I probably won't use, for a very specific sort of scenario that contains very specific dangers that I don't know or understand.  I think a set of three hooks and a deeper discussion of some of the considerations of actually exploring such a derelict would have made this a more useful article.

The Hunter's Reliquary II, by Christopher Rice

Rating: 4 Stars

I'm a little torn on this article.  I liked it well enough.  I felt like the Amulet of Orlock was a little over-the-top, the Sword of the Rood a little generic, but I liked the Deadman's Gun and John Dee's quill very much. Mostly, though, this article pointed out the existence of several articles and books on artifacts and relics, which are pertinent to Psi-Wars and other things I like to play that, somehow, I had missed.  This is not something the article set out to do, but it is nonetheless something I took away from it.  You do need to know those other articles (for example, to answer the question of how to get one of these relics), which limits it utility if, I dunno, you're not a collector, but why are you buying Pyramid if you're not deep into GURPS? So I won't ding it for that.  As a result, the article is probably 3 stars, in that it's a catalog of neat artifacts that may or may not be useful to you, but they're sufficiently generic that you can find use for at least one in almost any sort of campaign ("the Deadman's Blaster"), but I personally got a lot out of the article, so I'm giving it another star.

El Rancho Fin del Camino, by Matt Riggsby

Rating: 2 Stars

This article is fine.  There's nothing wrong with it, but I'm not really hunting around for the stats of a farm house and barn.  There's nothing here I didn't really know, or needed details on.  It's  a painfully generic ranch full of the sorts of details most people don't bother with when they visit a ranch or a farm.  It'd be like getting the layout of Luke's farm on Tatooine in excruciating detail. Like, cool, but what do you think I'm going to do with it? It does offer some story hooks and some building stats, so I know what it would take to blow it up.  So that's nice.  I won't give it one star, because it's not actively bad, but if it had never been published, my life would not really be diminished.

Highway Stars, by Roger Burton West

Rating: 5 Stars

This is amazing! So, recently, I had started working on "Cars" for Psi-Wars, and I quickly ran into the problem that there's really just not that many statted up.  You can pick out the handful in GURPS Basic, and a couple more in High Tech (but these are mostly military vehicles). There's a bunch of sports cars in various Pyramid articles, but what do generic, mundane vehicles look like? What I wanted is a Grand Theft Auto collection of everything from sports cars to, I dunno, scooters and big rigs

That's what this article is.  It's not just the coolest cars, like the Aston Martin, the Porsche 911 or the Chevrolet Impala, it's also lame cars, like the Mini, and the Toyota Prius and even pavement scooters!  It even goes the extra mile and gives us a couple of adventure seeds and "Ethnic Cool Cars."

I'm sure this sounds tedious, but if you have this article, Tricked Out Rides and the other pyramid articles on cool cars, you've got everything you need to run an Action game featuring load of vehicles, and you can extend that to any setting that might have cars.  This is a very useful resource for me, and I have no doubt I'll revisit it often.

Getting Paid, Heroically, by Steven Marsh

Rating: 4 Stars

Yay!  Steven Marsh! Alright, this time, we're discussing why heroes might get paid. That topic by itself is mildly interesting. He points out that we don't generally talk about this in common media today: most of our heroes on cinema are altruistic, or don't talk about their paycheck.  Spider-man does it out of sense of social obligation, and Bond does it out of patriotism (and happens to get a paycheck), but most of our modern heroes don't turn up after the job is done and ask for a paycheck.  He discusses some of the considerations and reasons for why you, as a GM, might want to create a campaign where your supers or your action heroes seek payment for their services and what dramatic elements that might bring into a game (and kudos for keeping the discussion framed towards how it will play in the campaign, as opposed to getting bogged down in discussions of payment methods). To me, what really sold the article is his discussion of economics and how much to pay them, and why.  This was also directly useful to me.

It's a good article, and well worth your time to read.