GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: GURPS Action Adventure 1: Templar's Gold

 So, here we are, the PDF challenge completed!

This has one chapter;

• The Adventure: which is the adventure.

I was really looking forward to this adventure, and delighted to see it unlocked. The actual thing didn't quite live up to my expectations (I liked Green Madonna better), but it's not bad. The adventure is somewhat barebones, you'll need a good knowledge of Action to make it work, and the adventure suffers from an incomplete understanding of Action's core mechanics, but there's nothing really deal breaking here, and it makes up for it in rich historical context and detail that, I think, really sells the adventure. Recommend

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: DF 23: Twists

 This is the last PDF unlocked by moolah.  The other one needed to be unlocked with total backers.

This has one chapter, Strands in the Braid, but the one chapter is pretty cleanly broken into three parts to the point that I thought it had three chapters.

• Lords and Ladies: Titles and Status in DF
• Demons and Darkness: Horror DF
• Sufficiently Advanced: So I heard you wanted guns?

It's a good book. It tackles the things it needs to tackle in a very DF way, and you'll walk away with more knowledge of how GURPS works, and how to expand your DF game. I think you're better off having it than not having it.  That said, I get the sense a lot of people had higher hopes for this than it could match.  It will not give you courtly games out of the box, or DF Monster Hunters, or DF: Galtar.  It will point you in the right direction to make those yourself! But you'll still have to make them yourself, you'll just have a little more guidance in doing so.  I think that's going to disappoint some DF fans.  I found it okay, but I have very high proficiency levels with GURPS that a lot of people in the DF community don't (as DF is often a gateway into GURPS). I still think its worth getting, as I said, but modify your expectations.

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: DF 22: Gates

In the home stretch now! Only two left to go after this.

This has an actual chapter structure!

• Gates and the Campaign: How to use Gates in a DF Campaign
• Gate Rules: The metaphysics and game mechanics of Gates
• Sample Destinations: Some places the gates could lead.

All in all this book was better than I expected. I went into it with some trepidation, as I've not had an especially good experience with GURPS and portal realms. This largely seems a working of Portal Realms material into DF and it covers what it needs to.  I walked away concluding that I probably wouldn't use Gates in a DF game, but more thoughtful about thinking about gates in Psi-Wars.  It's a very niche product, and I doubt most DF games would use it, but if you're interested in portals, it's actually a very good companion to Portal Realms, and I'm glad I have it.

A Sorcerous Obsession

 

Sometimes, I just can't get something out of my head.  Back in the good ol' days of the blog, it would end up as a blog series.  Lately, since I need to curate my material more, I hesitate to just brainstorm on the blog, but perhaps that's a bad approach.  After all, the point of this blog is to blather on in a way that gets my juices flowing, which helps me to think, and helps you to think about your own setting, and often starts a conversation. So while this post may or may not result in some changes to Psi-Wars, it will be useful for me to get some thoughts straightened out, and perhaps to inspire you as well, dear reader.  Consider this less of an "article" and more a musing.

So here it goes: The though I can't get out of my head is "Does Psi-Wars need magic?"

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: GURPS Encounters: the Mysterious Airfield

We're nearing the end! Only three more to go!

This book has two chapters:

• The Venus Field Air Force Base: which details the base, its history, and ends with a map
• Base Personnel: Which briefly sketches a few personalities, little more than a name and a little snippet on personality.

I love this book! It's not the sort of book I would have expected to love. It's not the sort of thing that makes me cry "I need to use this right away!" but it will almost certainly see some use eventually and it's made me rethink how I write particular things.  I still quibble that the PDF challenge is sucking a lot of oxygen out of the idea of a revived, kickstarted pyramid, so I think it's debatable if this would have been better as a pyramid article or a Challenge PDF, but the authors really made the most of the extra breathing room given to them by being a Challenge PDF.  I think it wouldn't have been as nice as a pyramid article.  In either case, this is the sort of thing I want to see in  Pyramid or Challenge PDFs: something I didn't know I wanted. If I know I want a thing, I want to just buy it. If I'm going to buy a bundle, I want to find rare treasures in it, and the Mysterious Airfield is a rare treasure.

Recommend.

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: How to GM GURPS: High Powered Origins

 Next we have the next in the series of How to GM GURPS, and it's the second time Christopher Rice has tried his hand at it.

This has one chapter:

• Great Power which offers said advice.

I think I've managed to pick up a reputation for being a harsh critic.  I don't actually like giving negative reviews.  See, other than a few dedicated fans, I don't think most people bother to read extensive reviews of an RPG book, not unless it's put right in front of your face.  But authors read them, because they want that feedback, and nobody likes to have a negative review. I've noticed even a crack about an otherwise good book will frustrate an author.  I feel that, man. An author puts their heart and soul into a work, often spending months on it, and then some guy reads it in a day and says "Ugh, garbage." I don't want to give the impression that I feel that way, or that I'm dismissing someone's hard labor.  So if I'm going to complain about a book, know that I'm not doing it callously.

With that in mind, I say: This is not a good book.  In fact, I spent most of the time after reading the book coming up with counter advice and poking holes in the advice, and then being flummoxed that it was written the way it was and analyzing how this happened.  Of course, that sounds dramatic, like this is a trainwreck of a book.  I promise you, if you have this book in your collection, it will not give you cancer.  I have read worse advice than this. But it's not worth your $3. Give it a miss.

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: Space Atlas: Grissom

 

Next in our challenge round-up, I have Grissom, the latest (first?) addition to our Space Atlas (for 4e, at least).

It has one chapter:

• Why So Stubborn? Which details Grissom. It includes a map.

I like it.  I would welcome more books like this. In fact, I suspect it's probably the most underrated development of the PDF challenge.  That said, it's not setting my world on fire.  I'm not having mad dreams about trying to write up an entire set of campaign framework around it.  On the other hand, I would absolutely use it. Is it a recommend? Yes.

How Big is Big: Giants and Ogres

 So I've been working on the Psi-Wars take on ogres (the monsters, not the tank), and I ran into the problem I always run into with SM, which is that I don't really understand scale.  I think most people don't.  So I thought I'd whip up a quick guide, mostly for myself, to get a sense of how things will work.  This borrows some art from Cardboard Heroes and the GURPS DF line, and I mostly use material from Combat Writ Large from Pyramid #3/77.  I've also created this handy (but terribly pixelated) guide that I found useful.  I apologize for the production values!

Let's break these down. For each SM, I've listed the mass for each coming from four difference sources: GURPS Template Toolkits 2, GURPS Bio-Tech (which is just the average mass for someone derived from the build chart at ST 10, and then all additional values are derived from the biotech multiplier), then the size chart from the alien design section of GURPS Space, and then values (generally) derived from GURPS Spaceships.

Each entry also contains ST values.  These are either based on the standard formula for deriving ST, or using a cinematic treatment from Template Toolkits 2 or derived from a listed ST value. In the case of Spaceships, this is the listed spaceship ST halved, as the listed values are for unliving vehicles.

I've also included some scales for ST and movement.  The low end tends to be based on the actual values you would realistically expect, and the high end comes from taking the heaviest weight (almost always the animals from GURPS Space) and then using the cinematic rules from Template Toolkits 2, so it's closer to "the maximum for a stop motion dinosaur of that size" than anything remotely plausible for a humanoid giant.  Treat it as an absolute maximum upper bound, and lean towards the lower bound, especially as you get to larger SMs, which get increasingly silly.  The cinematic movement is based on the rules from Template Toolkits, which are how fast the character would move  if they were just a normal human "scaled up" to that size. In reality, we'd expect completely different movement mechanisms at larger sizes, and we tend to picture giants moving more slowly, so the real values will typically be lower than this. I rather like DF's "Just move 9 on all giants."

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: 2-Page Dungeons

This very tightly designed work has, unsurprisingly, 5 dungeons:

• From a Sinking Ship: Get the magic medallion from a terrified rat before the ship sinks into the sea, or the skeletons get it.
• The Blasphemed Shrine: Fight some demons, I guess.
• A Cold Day In: Fight a dragon in a fragile ice cavern
• All Along the Watchtower: Kill the orcs and seize the tower before they can raise alarm
• The Floor is Lava: THE FLOOR IS LAVA!

Each dungeon comes with a detailed map.

I think this is actually a neat concept, and if you run DF, my guess is you'll almost certainly get some use out of them.  The actual execution of several of these dungeons is off, though, and I'll get into ways they could be improved. Is this a buy? Well, for the price, sure!

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: Renaissance Venice: Spies of Venice

 So Spies of Venice is the latest  in what looks intended to be an ongoing series given that we have a new series tag associated with it. It has 5, count them 5, chapters in this 10-page book:

• The Secret History: The Origins of Renaissance spycraft
• Agencies and Agents: Details on Venice's spies were organized
• Techniques and Missions: What they spied on, and how.
• The Post: How Venice facilitated communication throughout renaissance Europe
• Characters and Campaigns: So you wanna play a spy, huh?

I'm not going to do a big breakdown of the book, because I feel about this book the way I feel about most  Matt Riggsby books: it's good, it's niche, I'd like to use it but probably won't, and when I do use it, I'll find it useful, but also wish there was more material to cover the specific thing I wanted.

I always get a nagging sense that I could work out most of this on Wikipedia, but Matt collates it all just enough, and integrated GURPS just enough, that you feel it's worth buying, especially at the very cheap price tag. The real benefit to me of a Riggsby work is more that he, like Kenneth Hite, points out an element of history that's especially worthy of further investigation into as a gamer, gives lots of pointers for expanding it, and integrates just enough that you could probably run it out of the box (even though you won't).

Despite being quite interesting, it's rather dry: more la Carre than Fleming, though there's a whole paragraph for if you want James Bond in the Renaissance!  Of course, there's nothing wrong with pointing out that spycraft in the Renaissance mostly consisted of being in someone else's court, listening to what people said, and sending messages back to your king while worrying that people might read your mail. But the whole of "This is what you do with it" is less than a page.  This is a report for a history teacher with a one-page "oh and you can run this in an RPG too" tacked on at the end to justify it as a gaming supplement.  I would really appreciate more thought put into how to integrate these sorts of things into a campaign, both serious and cinematic, but where would you cut page-count for it? Once again, I feel like 10 pages is too small unless just the historical information is enough... which is a bit of an open question, because I bet you if you doubled page count, Matt would fill it with more history, because there's always more history.

A friend commented on Renaissance Venice "being doled out piecemeal." I checked, there is no other Renaissance Venice books I can find or even more Pyramid Articles, so it seems to be this + Hotspots: Renaissance Venice.  Are we going to get more? Do we want more? If we want more, would it be better as a single volume? Would you buy a big book on just Renaissance Venice? I'll be honest, I'm not sure I would.  But I feel like between Green Madonna and this, there's surely some hunger for an historically-authentic-if-improbable cinematic swashbuckling GURPS campaign framework, and such a series would make a great springboard for books like this, because you could point to that specific work and specific templates, the way Osiris Worlds was able to point to Steampunk.  There's a lot of works that sort of thing would make more useful, and it would expand the GURPS framework line in a good direction that fits what a lot of people seem to want to use GURPS to do (ie, historically-authentic-but-somewhat-improbable cinematic historical gaming).

Is it a good book? Sure. It's a Matt Riggsby book.  I don't feel like I wasted my money.  Is it probably going to rot on my shelf? Hmm... I'm not sure. I don't think I'll run Venice anytime soon, and I suspect I won't dive in to reference it anytime soon, but just reading through it made me think about things that will influence what I write moving forward.  Should you buy it? Well, if you like historical stuff, then sure, it's good. I wouldn't call it a must have, or beg you to petition SJGames for more, as I would with Greed Madonna, but I don't think you're wasting your money either. It's solid.

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: Infinite Earths - Osiris Worlds

 Next on our list, we have Infinite Earths: Osiris Worlds, a collection of Egyptian-inspired Alternate Earths.

This has two chapters:

• Ancient Egypt in the Infinite Worlds: which discusses general concerns, such as interesting dates, cultural familiarity and languages
• Three Key Worldlines: This is what you're here for.  The worlds are:
• Osiris-6: Aliens built the pyramids!
• Osiris-3: Akhenaten and his ghoul armies ravage the world.
• Osiris-7: If you put a woman in charge, you get a  world of clockwork swashbuckling.

I wasn't really interested in this going into it, and after reading it, I'm modestly impressed at the quality.  At least, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Is it good? I don't know.  I think it angles more towards "It's fine." It does the job it sets out to do and I see no major holes.  The book does amount more to "writing prompts" than "detailed worlds" but at least they point you in the right direction. Would I recommend buying it? No. But to be fair, I wouldn't recommend most Alternate Earth books.  I'm also not particular into that genre; I get the sense a lot of that comes down to reading the timeline and then arguing about the plausibility of a particular extrapolation and if that's what you see, only really Osiris-7 is interesting.  The other two are more "interesting adventure ideas" more than detailed worlds.  You can live without this book, but at the price, you're probably not wasting your money either.

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: the Green Madonna

 

So, I don't buy adventures, generally speaking. I just make my own. I've been making my own for ages, and thus I underestimate the value of an adventure for acting as a good worked example, or for even grabbing me by my belt and shouting "I am awesome, run me!"

That's what The Green Madonna did. It's amazing. I could wax poetic in so many ways about this book. If you like Swashbuckling at all, you should get it.  The only downside is that, surprise surprise, it's too short.  I read through it, enrapt, and then it suddenly just cuts off and I was left flipping back and forth through the book to figure out where the next part was.  Presumably, you're supposed to do it yourself? But if I were Pulver, I'd just make the Green Madonna part 2, but I suspect that won't happen, because this one won't receive any attention, because nobody buys adventures.

I Heard You Like Swashbuckling?

The first reason to get this book is because swashbuckling is awesome.  I used to play lots of 7th Sea, and I still play it today, but the problem with 7th Sea is that it's a crap system set in a funhouse-mirror of Europe that makes you want to dig out your research of the era, but you can't, because it may or may not fit into the funhouse mirror version, so you end up just researching more of Theah, which is useless geek knowledge, rather than real history, which is useful nerd knowledge.

I always thought GURPS would make for a more satisfying swashbuckling experience.  The combat system plays well with swashbuckling action-by-action duels.  There's often a criticism that GURPS is too realistic for Swashbuckling, but that stems from a misconception that swashbucklers swung on chandeliers and slid on banisters just because it was cool, but most of my experience with swashbuckling adventure was that they were closer to the modern Action genre: high-flying action grounded in a gritty foundation.  If someone was swinging on a chandelier, it wasn't just for kicks, but because he needed to get across a gap and the chandelier was the only means he could see. And also, 7th Sea doesn't actually encourage this either, and GURPS actually does, if you dig around enough in GURPS Martial Arts, which you should be doing anyway because you need fencing to make your adventure work.

But GURPS also grounds itself in history in a way that 7th Sea doesn't, and in a way that swashbuckling adventures really need to.  Mind you, it's a somewhat silly history, full of improbably conspiracy theories and implausible shoutouts to real life people made larger than life.  This features an interpretation of Isaac Newton that crosses action cinema with GURPS Cabal and keeps just enough realism to make you wonder just how plausible it is.

This book makes excellent use of existing works to show you where the skeleton of a swashbuckling framework exists, which is another reason it's a great book: if you run this, the problems you'll need to solve to make the adventure work can largely be solved by works that exist, which this book mostly references, and once you've figured out how to make decent swashbuckling characters and how to handle them in a game, you can run any swashbuckling game you want.

Or Maybe a Little Raymond Chandler?

The structure of this story, and the characters within it, are amazing.  Whomever wrote it clearly has a solid grasp of how to make adventures work, and likely has studied the classics. 

It starts with a burning dwarf pirate bursting into a tavern room shouting for help and then is followed up by gang of ruffians bursting in to finish the job on the dwarf and kill everyone. FIGHT ENSUES!  You've immediately got the Raymond Chandler solution of "Burst into the room with two guys with guns." There are two reasons for this: the first is because everyone likes action, but the other is to trigger the "ball of yarn" mystery: these two guys have clues which will lead you to the next clue, which will lead you to the next clue.  This adventure is very much structured like a ball-of-yarn mystery.

It also features a great cast, such as the aforementioned Isaac Newton, but also Lady Champagne, the  beautiful, tragic, one-eyed femme-fatale who will bedevil the party.  Or she would, if the adventure continued. She, of course, needs to be rescued from sinister, torturous Spaniards. But will the players regret rescuing the dangerous damsel? They'll probably have mixed feelings on it.

There's also a lot of backstory that goes into the adventure. While not explicitly mentioned, this context will allow the GM to improvise more information drops and clues as necessary, as the players will start only with the knowledge of someone killing a poor, burning dwarf and the nebulous promise of treasure somewhere at the end of this adventure, and everything else they'll have to pick up along the way.  All told, the adventure is written in a very dense way that will naturally pull the players from encounter to encounter following a Hitean pulse of thriller adventure: the reward for facing danger is information; the price of learning information is more danger. So the players will face a challenge, then learn something new, then suddenly face another challenge, which will lead them to some new information, and so on.  It's an excellent structure for an RPG.  And it has the information density beneath it to allow the GM to dribble along those interesting clues.

The Good, the Bad and the One-Eyed Damsel

I suspect that David Pulver is as much a fan of Jack of All Trades as I am.  If you've never heard of it, you should watch it for the intro alone, but also because Bruce Campbell is awesome and its a great piece of 90s camp. But it's exactly the sort of story that would feature a burning dwarf, a beautiful one-eyed lady, and lots and lots of sword play.  It has a similar energy and it winks at you with some of its weirder elements.  It's fun. But it layers this with the additional research and depth that we'd expect from a great GURPS work.  This is amazing and I want to run it right now.

Some nitpicks.  The first set of guys who start a fight in the bar justify their actions by claiming the person who hired them said "No Witnesses." When the players interrogate him later, the book suggests that he thought the lady who hired them was just a jilted lover; they didn't actually know why she hired them. Like... wow. You were going to kill an entire room of innocent people over a lover's spat? I'm actually okay with that, but guy, put Bloodlust in their character write-up! I suppose that was the intent of giving them Bad Temper.  Second, at some point, a spanish officer refers to Lady Champagne as senorita. First, that should actually be señorita but I'm not going to knock 'im for that.  But I'm pretty sure a señorita is unmarried, and Lady Champagne is referenced as a widow or a married woman several times, which would make her a señora. There's a modern trend to refer to all older women as señora and younger women as señorita but this is not set in modern times, and also, I'm pretty sure Lady Champagne isn't a teenager.  Maybe she's just super-cute? But again, this is a minor nitpick.

What is a real detriment to the book is how it just cuts off.  I remember thinking "This is too good to be true, there's no way they can fit all of this goodness into a single 10-page supplement" and indeed they couldn't.  The adventure is:

1. Encounter the burning dwarf and fight the pirate brigade
2. Go to the Sloop Zion, encounter Isaac Newton, fight the inquisition
3. Go to the plantation of Lady Champagne, rescue her from Spanish officers
   
4. Find the map in the Green Madonna that points you towards the lost treasure on a far off island that's the remnant of Atlantis, and Lady Champagne offers to join you
5. Roll credits

Like... what? I flipped and saw the advert on the back. Like, one more page! Give me the map! Give me something! Don't leave me like that! I suppose the idea here is that the players now have the Green Madonna, which is the treasure and it's a clue to "the next adventure!" but it's so obviously tied together that if this happened in a theater, the audience would riot! I rioted! Point 1 is Act I; points 2-4 are Act II, where we set up the big payoff.  Going off to find the treasure is clearly Act III.  So why is it missing?

Because they ran out of room, obviously.

What are we supposed to do with these 10-page supplements if they don't give us what we need to run things? It's frustrating.  I'm not going to disrecommend this over it, because holy crap, what is there is awesome and uses those 10 pages as gloriously as it could.  I wouldn't actually trim down on anything to make the room for a third act.  Given a choice between those two options, I choose for what we have here.  But why do we have to have these artificially limited page counts? They're not saving on paper and ink.  If Pulver knows what happens in the third act, let him write it!  How is this a good model.

If it were up to me, I'd go ahead and create a full campaign framework for swashbuckling (though you can certainly stretch and bend Action to cover a lot of it) and include the finished version of this as the main adventure.  What we have no is a piecemeal where we can gather up individual little bits and stitch them into a campaign which is... well, that's just how people who don't run frameworks run GURPS, so that's fine. I just wouldn't have expected a piecemeal adventure where I have to write the third act on my own. I can! I was just surprised to see that it expected me too.

I would definitely pay for a part 2.  Are you listening Pulver? Punch? Evil Stevie? Give me a $10 version of this adventure, I'll plunk down for it, I promise.

EDIT: Or $20.  Or, like, kickstart it and offer a deluxe, signed version for $50.  I'll pay.  Give me part 2. I'm serious.

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: DF Encounters: the Ring Fort

 Carrying on with the PDF 2021 special in order of how they unlocked, we come to DF Encounters 4: the Ring Fort, which I almost missed for some reason.

DF Ring Fort is a very simple book with one chapter:

• Hlifborg Ring Fort: which details the ring fort.

That's it.

I have mixed feelings about the Ring Fort.  When I saw it, I had no idea what it was doing in the DF line.  After reading it, I'm still not sure what it's doing there. Does this mean I don't like it? No, not at all.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  It feels like a strange book that doesn't remotely fit in the line as the line currently stands, and I think it undermines a lot of the conceits of DF. If I used this in DF, I would end up reorienting DF around how this book is designed.  I think I'd have a better experience for it! But what you end up with is a realization that GURPS Low-Tech with Magic is an awesome way to run GURPS, and that DF isn't the only way to run GURPS.  In a DF book.  But would anyone have bought or used this if it wasn't a DF book?  Well, it's in a freaking package deal with a book on the spies of Venice, so yes, I think people would have acquired it, more than a thousand people, in fact.  So why is this DF?

I have some theories, but the core takeaway is that this book is worth your time even for a DF campaign. But you should definitely, definitely consider getting this one even if you don't like DF. It's up there with Wilderness Adventures for broad usefulness.  It's a definite recommend.

A Brainstorming on Psi-Wars Animals

 I mentioned blog discipline recently, and what I mostly meant was not discussing what I'm actually doing.  Some of it is because it's behind the scenes stuff for Undercity Noir, so I can't very well talk about that, but there's a lot of bits that will certainly end up on the wiki at some point, so why not talk about those some?

In this case, I've been tinkering with animals.

The Problems with Space Animals

These are a bit of a bane for me.  I've discussed them before, but in brief, and the rubber-to-the-road reality of beasties in Psi-Wars is tricky.

First, there's the fact that most of them are meaningless as encounters.  A tiger is already a questionable threat to a starting DF character; they're not a threat at all to an average Action character... provided they have their gun on hand (Catch them unarmed in the jungle, and then we might talk).  To a Psi-Wars commando, a tiger is a joke.  The poor thing can't even hurt him.

Space Opera lets us get around that somewhat.  After all, if there's a space tiger, you just assume it's about as much of a threat to you as a tiger would be to a fantasy character.  This is, after all, a redress of tropes: a space knight is just a space opera reskin of a knight, and so a space tiger is just a space opera reskin of a tiger.  But as noted before, the expectation in Psi-Wars is that we at least pay some lip service to physics, at least offer some technobabble as to why something works the way it does.  For example, we expect that a 2 lb rat will not have ST 100.  They might in Supers, or even Fantasy, but not in Space Opera, at least not without some excuse ("Their natural tactile TK").  If a serpent can deflect blaster fire with its scales, what the hell are those scales made out of? We have to have answers.

Once we have answered those questions, we need to stop and figure out how people ever got out of the stone-age.  If an alien race developed on a world of giant, armored space mammoths that can go toe-to-toe with a tank, why would they also develop tanks? Either the mammoths would have killed them all or demolished their civilizations, or the race would have domesticated these space mammoths and use them as tanks. In a sense, Avatar is totally correct: if that's what your wildlife looks like, then you can have a TL 0+10 society based on your master of the planetary biosphere alone.

Once we feel we've answered that question well enough, then we must turn our eye to how did they get here? If I say that Moros has giant space centipedes of doom, that's fine and totally allowed. But what if you're not on Moros? Then you can't encounter one.  And that's also fine, but that sharply limits the utility of a bestiary.  If I create 20 neat critters for Moros, then when you got to Sarai or Samsara, then those 20 critters just disappear and I've wasted my time.  Better would be to create creatures we can use in a variety of places.  So, how do they move around?

In essence, these are questions of utility ("why do they matter?") and complexity ("I don't want to create or memorize an entire world's worth of critters per planet, no matter how realistic it is").  There are also questions of thematic integrity.  Setting aside the realism of "several unique clades per planet," we would expect that when various races go to the stars, they bring something of their biosphere with them, so we can start to define the setting's animals in terms of specific ecosystems we want to explore.  The Tamjaran (Keleni) Clade. The Stygian (Ranathim) Clade.  The Glorian (Human) Clade and so on.  Not everything necessarily needs to be bound to a specific race, of course: there are worlds or regions with sufficiently interesting creatures that they're worth of independent discussion: The Arcadian Clade; the Zirata Clade; the Leviathan clade; the Hekatombian clade. But how do we define these as distinct without either getting too far from the familiar and without crossing our wires too much. How many flavors of space dog and space cow can we have before it's too much?

GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: Action 8 Twists

 I've not been feeling well, and I'm not actually all that excited about the GURPS 2021 challenge, if I'm honest.  I said it before and I'll say it again: this is a better model for Pyramid articles than for GURPS supplements, and you'll doubtless hear that over and over again: I would be happier for half as many books with twice the length.

The art is nice, though.

So we can break out GURPS Action 8: Twists into three sections

• Part of Something Bigger: Higher wealth, status, and social adventures in Action. This is the reason I wanted the supplement.
• Things Just Got Weird: Genre-bending Action. This one is bad, a false promise.
• No-Tech Thriller: Removing all that sweet tech from GURPS Action. Surprisingly good!

It's a decent work, but each of these sections needed to be three times their size. Worth your money.

Patreon Poll: The Phoenix Cluster -- Part I

 

Are there plans to add parts of the Galactic Fringe to the Atlas, or otherwise add areas of Westerly influence to the setting? I know to some extent it's supposed to be "fill in the blank" But I think the setting struggles somewhat with a lack of properly Westerly settings, outside of the asteroid belts (which is a different type of Westerly)

-- Mavrick

EDIT: Quick aside, but speaking of polls, if you're a backer, we have the monthly Release the Balloon People on Patreon and Subscribestar. Vote on what you'd like to see added to the wiki!

The Westerly are an interesting ethnicity in Psi-Wars, and one that I'd like to revisit in more detail as I explore their culture, but they pose a bit of a problem in exploring.  In a lot of ways, they fit the "Barbarian" niche of the setting, not in the sense that they are primitive, but that much of history was written not by powerful men ensconced in towers with legions of scribes writing their every deed, but often by "hard men of the desert," great waves of resilient, "uncivilized" men who hard learned to survive in the shatterzones beyond imperial reach.  A lot of history fades from view as we move beyond the gates of the cities that civilization so loved, but that doesn't mean the people beyond those gates didn't matter.  They mattered a lot.

The Westerly exist on the low end of the political power spectrum. They are the tribesman of desert worlds, the crochety miners in asteroid belts, and the religious pilgrims of remote worlds on the edges of civilization.  They don't seek to rule, and they don't create heroic conquerors with amazing psychic powers or technological prowess to whom paeans will be sung for centuries to come.  The result, though, is that just as they fade from the view of history, they fade from your view.  If you read this blog, or frequent the wiki or the discord, you can likely name at least one Maradonian Great House, and probably several; you can likely name at least one major Shinjurai world, and perhaps even discuss some of the features of their royal family.  But you probably can't name any Westerly tribe, or a miner clan of Grist, or even a single name of a major Westerly figure.

I had intended to flesh them out more as I got to the specifics of planets, as that's where they tend to "live," not writing their name in the stars, but in the soil of the worlds they inhabit.  But I might never really get to any of these worlds.  I mean, it's been years, and I've barely detailed a few worlds.  So far, I've mostly succeeded at painting broad pictures of the galaxy.  Perhaps I need to paint a broad picture of the Westerly, or give them a place where there culture is so obviously dominant that we can afford to discuss the broader strokes of Westerly culture in a way that makes it easier to discuss the Westerly more broadly.

But such a place already exists!  It's the Phoenix Cluster.  I had always envisioned at least three major regions in the Galactic Fringe, beyond the edges of the galaxy: the Draco Super-Constellation (the home of the draconic Mug), some place from which the Scourge staged their invasion and in which they can still be found, and the Phoenix Cluster.  I originally imagined the Phoenix Cluster as beyond the Glorian Rim, with the world of Exile as a "bridging point" between it and the Rogue Stars. I pictured them as a stand-in for Space America in a WW2 metaphor, where the Alliance was Space Europe and Cybernetic Union as Space Russia. They even showed up as a mention in the Fourth Templar Chapter poll (which was a bit of a disaster).  But if there was ever a part of the galaxy dominated by the Westerly, it would be that one.

Why haven't I gotten to it? Well, I wanted to detail the rest of the galaxy first, but that seems to be taking too long and I'm getting caught up in details as I seem to not heed my own advice against getting bogged down in details when there's broader work that hasn't been done yet. So why not detail it now?

And while I'm detailing it, why not do it together? In a lot of ways, the Fringe is the place for players to stick massive chunks of the setting in if they want.  If you want your own space empire, or an ancient and fractured kingdom that's slowly dying, with little relation to the rest of the galaxy, the Fringe is the place to do it.  So if there was ever a place for audience input, it's out on the edges of the galaxy, where we're more free to play.  I also feel like I've not had many polls lately, and I could probably milk it for a few months, because you can't do a single poll on an entire region.  But that would be great, because we could explore lots of elements of setting building, and have an entire section of the setting that was poll driven and that addressed this lack of the Westerly, and introduced a rather important political playing piece as well.

So, this will be a multi-part set of polls, with the first today. I'll try to do the rest monthly, as we revisit previous poll entries to get more clarity, or expand on parts of the setting.  The most likely result of this will be simple entries on the Galactic Atlas, but we'll see how complicated it gets. The link should appear in your applicable backer site.

"Hey, I didn't know I needed that!"

 So, I finished the third session of Undercity Noir a week early, as one of the players couldn't make it on the normal day.  We finally met the client and his girlfriend, and the introduction is finally finished, and the players have been released into the world.  But an interesting thing happened during the negotiation: "I didn't know (X) was such an important skill!"

GURPS has this at the best of times: because it has so many skills, people can easily overlook them. However, these characters were built from templates, and I checked, and all the traits they were asking for were present. And one of the characters had all of them, because he followed his template closely and so he just had them without realizing they would be so useful, and the result was a rather amusing moment where the Bounty Hunter sighed and started to explain to the Con-Artist how to do her job. But in a sense, it fit.  So this felt more like players realizing certain skills had more value than they realized, not that they didn't realize they were options.

Will

I think they realized this was important, given how many successfully resisted the Keleni Telepathy of the femme fatale, but I just want to point out to anyone poking at Psi-Wars that Will is very useful in a psionic game.  I know, seems obvious, but I've had it come up in previous playtests.  I'm not saying you should jack your Will up to 20 on every character, but I am saying you'd get your points worth if you did.

Psychology

So this was the core trait that surprised people.  I had set up meeting the contact as a mini-action scenario (as I like to run the first few sessions as sort of a preparation of how the game will actually play out) and so when it came time to collect all the clues and plan how best to negotiate with the target, I noted that Psychology was one of the skills they could use for this, which I thought made sense, and also caused quite a scramble. Which surprised me, because Psychology is one of the most popular skills in my games, but I sense most players come at this from a different context.

I tend to build my games as very NPC heavy, with layers and layers of intrigue and mystery.  I do this for several reasons, but a lot of it comes down to the fact that I cut my narrative teeth on anime, romances and dramas.  I just like large casts of colorful NPCs with detailed and nuanced motivations.  And in particular, in a Heist, there's a major clash of personalities.  It's not just "the cops" that are coming after you, but a specific detective; there are rival gangs, and they have specific leaders; there's always some new guy added to the crew after the fact, and you need to assess if a good fit; there's the target of the heist, who has a specific personality and blindspots.  Having psychology allows you to construct a profile, to learn the context of why people do what they do. If you combine it with Empathy or Body Language, you know what they are feeling and why. So with players familiar with my games, it seems to come up a lot. I'm not saying it's a must have, just that people knew to my games seem surprised at how useful it is.

Holdout

This might actually be missing from some templates, but this came up very quickly, and it makes sense. A lot of previous playtests have been about soldiers or space knights who walk around in full armor, but this is in a city with lots of Imperial Security, lots of camera, lots of angry gangsters.  Carrying a holdout blaster or a force sword into a club carries a lot more risks, and rewards, than it does in most games.  So this has been quite a schooling for me in how holdout works.

Observation

I see some people complain about Observation.  When do you use it? When don't you? For some of them, it feels redundant if you have Perception.  But to me, Observation is about picking out details discretely. It's also about picking out pertinent elements of something, such as when you "case a joint." It's also cheaper than Perception, so to me it's always been a no-brainer, but I'm surprised by the number of people who don't have it in my group.

Running, Climbing and Jumping

It didn't come up in this session, but like with Psychology, I think a lot of players skip these.  After all, your ability to run really comes down to your Basic Move, Climbing seems pretty niche, and Jumping can default to DX if strictly necessary, so in the intense prioritizing that most PCs will do, while Acrobatics gets a vigorous nod, these parkour skills get less of one.  When is it going to come up, after all?

In Action, they come up all the time.  Action is about chase scenes, and chase scenes use these skills. Sure you can drive too, but there's always a point when you'll want to run.  This didn't actually come up this session, but the previous session and I think I already mentioned it in my thoughts on that session, as this pleased the player who took them, and they really made a difference: the Bounty Hunter who had minimal investment couldn't keep up, but the Assassin with maximum parkour not only caught up to the target, despite having a very late start, he managed to cut her off before the Bounty Hunter arrived. That tickled him pink.  I mention this more because if you're a budding Action player, be aware of the value of parkour skills!

I think if I finish my Cinematic Chase Framework, that'll help people more intuitively integrate chase scenes, as there's a lot of details in chase scenes that can get lost in the "Look just roll Running until it's obvious who will win." Getting a little help in creating the sort of dynamic chase scenes we see in action movies will make the utility of Climbing, Jumping and Acrobatics in chase scenes more obvious.

Thoughts on Campaign Framework Skills

I'll leave you with one last observation I've had with people interfacing with campaign frameworks in general.  In my experience, most GURPS players learn to tune out the garbage and focus on what matters. GURPS itself encourages this, because you can't even use Beam Weapons in a fantasy game, or Magery in a "Hard" Sci-Fi game.  Thus learning to filter the useful from the useless is a very important skill in a veteran GURPS player.

But part of the process of creating a Campaign Framework is pre-filtering the skills that exist, and adding additional utility to the skills that remain. Once this happens, another element of GURPS starts to rear its head: its emphasis of subtle utility. GURPS has a tendency to narrow down and focus on all the possible things a skill (or advantage) can do, and then emphasize those.  For example, in a typical White Wolf game, Brawl is the skill you use to punch people, and Medicine is the skill you use to heal people.  GURPS, by contrast, introduces a ton of nitty gritty techniques for Brawl and differentiates it into three different skills to determine exactly how you fight; Medicine breaks out into Diagnosis, Physician, Surgery, etc, and one begins to realize the power of knowing exactly what's gone wrong with someone's health, how to prescribe exactly the right dose, and how and when to use surgery to fix issues.  GURPS brings these nuanced details into view a lot better than other games, which can take some people by surprise, as they tend to dismiss a lot of GURPS skills as one-note or niche when it turns out, especially in a Campaign Framework, they can have a lot of value. This is not meant as a defense of the GURPS skill system (it can be exhausting to work with sometimes), just as an observation of what I notice happens with players when they interact with the details of a Campaign Framework.

Wiki Highlight: Hackers and Bloodsiders

It's been a rough month for my health, and Undercity Noir has dominated my attention, but my blog discipline has been slipping.  My apologies for that.  Even so, I do have more material on the wiki. In case you missed it, or wanted some "Creator commentary" here we go.

Hacker

Fulfilling my last "Release the Balloon People" poll, I've released the Hacker cross-training power-up. This represents a sea-change in how I'm handling cross-training: instead of treating it like the Specialist Skill-Sets from Action, I'm treating them more like the Cross-Class Templates from DF, though not in the sense of literal cross-class training.  Instead, I generally find I prefer creating a list of things you can further invest in.  Rather than construct a character by picking a base template and 5 or so highly determined micro-templates, I'd rather you picked One Big Template and then One Big Power-Up, because this is conceptually simpler.  You might be a Cyborg + Space Knight or Psychic + Con-Artist. Similarly, I'd rather see Hacker + Assassin.  This also works very well for the "side-kick" templates I've built: you can take a 125 point "mini-template" and grab a 50-point power-up template, and then fill out the other 75-125 points with additional skills and advantages from your template.

In my experience, when I make characters with templates, at some point I already know what I want.  Following the details is nice, but eventually I get it and I'm tearing off on my own.  I suspect less experienced players eventually do the same, and they'll want more things from their advantage list than fits into the default value, more skills than they can afford, etc.  So, I feel like hitting fewer "high concept" templates like this works a lot better for this sort of character creation.

So you can see the Hacker template and the new, updated cross-training templates here.

Bloodsiders

So quite some time ago, I released a list of criminal organizations in Psi-Wars, and offered up a poll for who you wanted detailed first, and the House of Bastards won handily, so naturally I did the Bloodsiders first.  Why? Because they were pertinent to Undercity Noir and half the characters took some sort of relationship with them so they needed to be expanded.  The result took more time than I expected, mostly because of their Mythos.  They have street magic that's steeped in their superstitions and urban folklore, so I needed to create the set of stories and oaths they would acquire from this.  This makes it a "minor philosophy," and largely a subset of the Divine Masks.

The Undercity Bloodsiders are descendants of refugees from the Umbral Rim who gathered together to form new bonds in the crowded undercity of Kronos.  They recreated their own vision of the culture of the Umbral Rim in those mean streets, and the resulting criminal gang is a savage group of bloodthirsty punks with a fixation on the occult and their own strange tales of the Undercity.

You can check out their organization here and you can check out their mythology here.