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.