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.