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

The Adventure

The Adventure consists of 5 sections.

The Setup

The setup risks being superfluous in a book with a very tight word count. It launches into a discussion of the sort of character that sounds so implausible that they must be real (I've got a long list of "implausible-sounding but real" characters from history), so I went to double check, but I couldn't find anything. So, I presume he's our Indiana Jones stand-in.  He's the old friend of the adventurers, and his death kicks off the adventure.

I applaud evocative descriptions, and I think it's good not to let your flavorful and implausible character dominate the actual adventure, and I don't think people are going to mind reading it.  But they also can't do anything with it, and it's half a page to a page or largely redundant information. This wouldn't be a problem except we have a very tight word count. So every time I note something as underwritten, there's a part of my mind that goes back to this section and says "But did we have to know that Sam Butler was a skilled jazz and blues player? Why was it so important for us to know that he served in the French Foreign Legion as an American? Was that really worth not squeezing out another couple of words here?"  

So I don't object specifically to how awesome Sam Butler is; this is, after all, an Indiana Jones adventure.  Taken on its own, he's a decent way to set up the story, but unlike with the Green Madonna where every character introduced in the intro is either directly plot relevant or in the plot as an NPC the PCs can encounter, Sam Butler stops being relevant as soon as he dies, and so this feels like wasted word-count.  I think you could replace the first page or so "There's this old family friend who dies" and sprinkle whatever  additional context the players need at the relevant parts. I like that I have a sense of who Sam Butler is, and I like "the dead NPC" concept quite a lot (I use it in my own games).  But we've got such a tight wordcount that I'm left wondering whether this was necessary at all.

I suppose I'm complaining less about the section than the fact that tight, strict word counts have a suffocating effect on this sort of adventure filigree.

The Characters and Zone Rouge

The next two sections discuss how to adapt GURPS Action to this pulpy adventure, including a reference to Pyramid #3/8, discussions of how various lenses would work and how Sam Butler might have known them (which, for example, finally draws a thread between why it's relevant that Sam played the blues, but it's enough to discuss it here, I think). It also discusses Pulling Rank and how Pyramid #3/8 discusses how it's different.  A lot of this is just quick references to an existing work, but I feel it's fair to point this out.  This is a cliffhanger adventure, so you need cliffhanger material, and that exists, and you need to reference it.

Zone Rouge is also good, and it made me check the author.  Yup, this is classic S. A. Fisher.  From what I've seen of his material, he runs his adventures less in a strict, narrative way so that you can see every scene shot by shot like a cinematographer, but more as an exercise in improvisation.  Zone Rouge discusses what France is like during WW1 and offers a variety of random encounters or issues the players might face.

Taken together, this is largely what sold the adventure to me. In contrast with the Setup, this is a a single page that punches above its word count when it comes to how much impact it'll have on the adventure.  It creates a historical backdrop that is, in and of itself, interesting to explore and layers the adventure itself over the top of. This is a stunningly good use of setting, something a lot of adventure writers (myself definitely included) forget. It'll be up to you to figure out how to use it, but it's a great way to add meat, which allows you to remove a lot of detail from the rest of the adventure, because you've provided a core meat to the adventure that the GM can use to fill out any "blank" spots.  Well done.

A friend of mine would run GURPS and one of the players, unfamiliar with GURPS, would describe his adventures as "Action Documentaries," because they were a lot of fun, but also the player learned a lot of things from the game.  This section reminded me of that strong point of GURPS: how its well-written supplements merge with tight mechanics to create a fairly unique experience in the RPG world, and this adventure, in a lot of ways, exemplifies that.

Events

The adventure references Pyramid #3/17, for understanding what Paris looks like at the time.  And then it essentially does the "Adventure as outline" approach to adventure-writing. We have a series of one to three paragraph quick references to what happens.  The events themselves paint a wild adventure that follows the correct pulse of adventure: the price of knowledge is danger, the reward for knowledge is more danger.  So you get a constant flow of "find a thing, get attacked, attack leads you to finding another thing, you have to fight again" and so on. It works.

There are a couple of problems I have with this section.  First, I don't think Fisher understands what "BAD" is.  I see bits like:

A Per-based Soldier roll, at BAD -3, helps avoid the hazards in the Zone Rouge

(Though, to avoid a quibble, this is actually from  Zone Rouge, not Events, but it's illustrative, you'll see a lot of references like this through the section).

But BAD is not "a modifier" it's the modifier. Here's what Action 2: Exploits says on the matter

 Looking up and assessing these penalties can be time-consuming... When the team is poised to blow the vault door or raid the villain’s mansion, it’s boring and frustrating for things to grind to a halt while the GM consults rules and tallies modifiers... As an alternative to detailed modifiers, the GM can set a single difficulty – the Basic Abstract Difficulty (BAD) – that covers all aspects of a particular phase of the adventure.

The whole point of BAD is that I don't want to stop what I'm doing and go back and check the adventure to see what the modifier for a Per roll is, or what what the difficulty for breaking into an airplane is. I usually just declare an adventure to be BAD X, and then it applies to everything.  If and when it changes, note that. Like the initial battle over the journal seems to be BAD -2, and then the actual encounter with the Templar's Gold seems to be BAD -5.  Just say that.

In my mind's eye, I see an interplay between Fisher and the Editor.  Fisher writes "A Per-based Soldier roll, at -3, helps avoid the hazards in the Zone Rouge."  And the editor says "It's Action; use BAD." So Fisher amends it: "A Per-based Soldier roll, at BAD -3, helps avoid the hazards in the Zone Rouge."  

There are also lots of bits where knowing the BAD would be useful:

Butler has hidden de Molay’s journal in a drawer under the pilot’s seat. This is locked. Lockpicking will be handy!

But at what penalty? It doesn't say.  In fact, the whole section for Paris-Le Bourget Aerodrome (as one example) references skills with no penalties.  So what's the penalty? Well, I would infer a -2, from the fact that when we get penalties, he uses the words "BAD -2" (though I see -3 in quite a few other places, so perhaps it's BAD -3?) They're not in reference to these, this BAD is not listed in anyway that would imply it's meant to cover all penalties.  Obviously, it wasn't hard for me to infer one, but the adventure should really specify it. Hardly a deal breaker, but it's something Fisher could improve upon.

The other problem has to do with the nature of the outline structure of the adventure.  Everything in it amounts to quick suggestions that sound good but, in my experience, risk tedium in practice. An example:

If more than half of the goons are put out of action or driven off, their leader will flee to a nearby biplane and try to escape (he and his backseater both have Piloting-13 and Gunner-13). If the PCs notice, they may follow in the two-seat Black Eagle for another chase scene. A couple more two-seaters are ready for flight near the hangar, so additional team members can join in the chase, though they’ll be restricted to using handheld weapons or simply following the mook to his destination. For vehicle stats, use the TL6 biplane on p. B465.

Setting aside the fact that this sort of thing makes me wish I had more biplane stats (we actually have quite a few in HT), I've run aerial chases and they can be pretty boring.  You roll pilot, they roll pilot, you roll better and eventually, you roll five better and you catch up.  Of course, you can shoot at them, but then what you really need is Dogfighting Action (pyramid #3/53) and you can make the chase scene much more dramatic with The Thrill of the Chase (pyramid #3/112), but we don't even get a reference to them here.  There's this consistent habit throughout the adventure to suggest that there is action here, but not to specify what takes that action to the next level.  Have a chase here, fight some mooks here, have another chase, fight more mooks. We get the stats on the mooks, and we get references to the stats for the vehicles, but no suggestions as to what makes those particular moments more exciting than "We shoot" or "we fly."  And this is where I start to grit my teeth, remembering Sam Butler's elaborate description and thinking "But perhaps that word count would be better used here."

There is one exception to this: the battle climaxes with a confrontation of a tank, and we get a detailed description of the stats of the tank, and we get a discussion of some explosives and some likely ways to defeat the tank if the players have trouble.

This section is the core of the adventure and it has the requisite action moments, and it is more than just action: there is at least one interesting NPC, and when you combine it with the more intricately designed events from Zone Rouge, and you've got quite a serviceable and fun adventure.  But to really make use of it, you need to apply your own knowledge of GURPS Action.  If you've read through as much as I have, it's pretty easy to say "I know what you mean" and "I can fill the gaps here." If you're new to Action, though, you might get a little lost, or find some of the fights seem overly easy or uninteresting.

Aftermath

So the players get the gold, get rich, and then die.  Unless they figure out the curse! Which they will. And then it's revealed: if Butler had given away half of his treasure to charity, he would have lived.

I found this very unsatisfying and thematically dissonant. "Give half of it to charity" feels like an obvious way to get around a "curse" on a Christian treasure. Like, of course.  But, worse, it retroactively paints Butler in a bad light.  We set him up as this really swell guy, but evidently he died because he didn't give enough of it away to charity? Of course, the adventure doesn't call that out, and if you're pressed, I'm sure you can think of all sorts of reasons for it: he's nice, but he just didn't get around to it, or he had more pressing concerns at the moment, or he gave some to charity, it just wasn't technically enough to stop the curse, and anyway if he didn't die we wouldn't have the adventure. etc.  But the theme of this curse is that it will only kill you if you are selfish.  That's the theme.  A selfless, "good man" wouldn't die from the curse. But we set up the whole of Sam Butler as this selfless good guy who was enamored of chivalry and puts his life at risk to defend other countries, but the curse killed him anyway? It's an unfortunate and, I think, unintentional implication.

I would have gone with a different curse, one that wouldn't create this thematic dissonance. I'm not sure what, but something more obscure, like "Put at least one of the gold coins in the votive box as an offering to god, but it has to be in this specific cathedral that was important to the templars, but fell into ruin centuries ago." That has the high weirdness we might expect from a magic and be the sort of thing Butler never could have known or done by accident, and it wouldn't have this unfortunate side effect of implying "Hey, maybe Butler was a bit of a jerk."

Conclusion

After reading this, I came to two conclusions.  First, we need more word count for these.  I suppose I get it.  I mean, I have Lair of the Fat Man, but I've never run it. Nobody buys big, 30-page adventures so we get these abbreviated adventures bundled in a challenge, but after this and Green Madonna, I'm willing to entertain the notion of buying and running a 30-page adventure. This is why we have frameworks like Action and Dungeon Fantasy, and Dungeon Fantasy Adventures sell, so why not Action adventures?

My second conclusion is that Fisher is a better HT writer than an Action writer, and that I'm okay with that.  Neither this nor Mercenaries were stellar at advancing the mechanics of Action and this could have used a better understanding of Action mechanics or references.  What we get, instead, is lots of references to real-world things, and I'm fine with that. What makes Fisher's stuff great is the real-world grounding.  Sure, yes, I'd like to know if I should be using BAD -2 or BAD -3 for Templar's Gold, but I can figure that out myself pretty easily.  What I would never think of would be what Zone Rouge would look like, or who the Apaches were and how they would be relevant to this adventure.

Is it a good adventure? It's alright. It's a little bare-bones, and you'll have to fill out the meat yourself, but he's written up a pretty good recipe for doing that and given you the ingredients.  It's less of a "out of the box" adventure that Green Madonna was, but (while I found the curse unsatisfying), it doesn't just stop mind adventure. It builds to an appropriate climax and then rounds it off.