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.

Into the Boneyard

So the premise of the Mysterious Airfield is that it's one of those old airplane boneyards where people ditch old planes. I don't know how accurate or well-researched everything was, but it was accurate enough in the beginning that I wondered if this was a real location.  Then we got into psychic children and strange, alien portals and I went "Ah, no, fictional." (Or is it...?) the first portion of this chapter is about the location itself, and it goes into some pretty surprising amounts of detail, such as how much damage it would take to destroy a building and how much damage a fuel tank will cause if it explodes, and so on.  The chapter ends with a map that I would have expected right after this section, but alright.

The second section of the first chapter, though, is what took this book from "Sure, okay" and sent it over the moon.  It goes into the history of the Venus Field.

• The Post-WW2 Boneyard
• The Cold War Experimental Lab
• The Rogue Agency
• The Super-Villain Lair
• and then Relics of the Past

Okay, first up, I am a huge sucker for a sense of the passage of time.  I want to hear about the various personalities in a dynasty.  I want to get a sense of how things are flowing. I want a setting to feel like it's alive and in constant motion.  This does all of that. It flows in a way that makes perfect (if quite cinematic) sense.

But it does something else too.  See, each of these moments in time get a bunch of hooks for each.  This means you get a lot of use out of this location: you could pick a time period and run an adventure then, or you can run an historical campaign throughout the whole thing.  And because you have this stack of history behind it, you can explore that history.  Even if we set it in the modern era, or in the Supervillain Lab era, or what have you, the players can explore the past of each era, and these layers build atop one another like the dust of history: to understand why there was a supervillain lair, you have to understand the dark machinations of the rogue agency, and to understand how a rogue agency got here, you need to understand the psychic experiments of the cold war.  It's a really great idea, and an amazing use of three pages that takes a ho-hum concept and really ramps it up to 11.

The (Psychic) Kids are Alright

Finally, we have a one-page description of various people that might be in the Venus Field.  It's not entirely clear when they would be there, but I think it's mostly the Boneyard/Cold War Lab Eras that we're talking about.  They're not much: just a name and a paragraph outlining a brief, simplistic stereotype.  But honestly, that's enough. I don't need detailed stats for every character.  For example, that there's a Patrick Pollard who's an old mechanic that will tell stories already says volumes.  The Monster Hunters can meet a Patrick Pollard in a nursing home who can tell them about the experiments, or give them insights into the origins of the dread psychic villain who goes by the name of Angel, but that he knew as Angela Simons.  Or they could meet him during their infiltration of the bone yard.  Or they can bump into him while playing as psychic kids trying to escape the lab.

This sort of thing is very valuable, because coming up with a few names and a few basic sketches of personalities (especially in minor background characters) is often one of the most difficult parts of session design, and so every little bit of help goes a long way, and also helps ground a GM more thoroughly in the setting.

Conclusion

So, like I said, I love this book.  One of the things people often need is inspiration from an unexpected angle, something that will give their story some zing and make the players sit up and notice. The Green Madonna had a burning dwarf, and this has an airplane graveyard, which are things that absolutely exist, but not something you'd necessarily think of as a location for an adventure.

It's also very tightly done in its 10 pages, and I wasn't left feeling like it was particularly underserved or that it was an overwritten Pyramid article, and as I mentioned above, it's the sort of thing you wouldn't buy as a standalone, making it a perfect thing to toss into a bundle.  It's a good book, and well worth the price.