Skip to main content

Silk Road Miscellaneous Comments

GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road is, at long last, out, after languishing for some months behind the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game. There's a more substantial bit on this forthcoming, but I've got some other thoughts that didn't make it into that, so...


The Silk Road is something of a departure from previous Hot Spots volumes. Instead of a single city, it covers a large, more vaguely defined, and much more culturally diverse region. In the pitch I sent to SJ Games, I described it as being more like GURPS Conan than any of the previous Hot Spots. It's more about trends and areas than specific people and events. And I think that actually makes it a much better setting for setting adventures. It's more of a sandbox (indeed, the Taklamakan desert is one of the world's biggest sandboxes) where the GM is relieved of the weight of specific historical events. And the specific nature of this region and its time make it easy for anybody from that time (or, at least, any sort of person, from Vikings and Berbers to samurai) to plausibly show up as PCs. GMs and players alike are frankly spoiled for choice.

People modestly familiar with the term "the Silk Road" may be a little surprised by the temporal coverage. A lot of the really basic mentions of the Silk Road in the West talk about Marco Polo and the Mongol empire. But that's really just when the West, which had previously been a mere appendage to the China/India/Persia trade, started to get more hooked into the old trade routes of Asia. By Polo's time, the overland silk routes were in decline. The real story, I've found, is in the ancient and early Medieval periods.

I have some vague ideas about follow-ups and companion pieces, but the problem with Hot Spots in general is finding sources covering the right mix of topics for the right places and times in languages I can read. An explosion in Silk Road scholarship over the past couple of decades has been invaluable for this book (particularly mad props to Lin Xinru, Valerie Hansen, and Susan Whitfield), but it's more difficult to find sources for the places I have in mind, which haven't been subject to quite so much attention in English-language sources. What I said some time ago about why GURPS historicals are still useful in the age of Wikipedia still stands, but, damn, that's a lot of interlibrary loan.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Nattering About Writing Historical RPGs

omeone made the mistake of asking me to expand on some things I'd said about writing historical rpg material, so you all must suffer for it. I write a lot of historical rpg stuff as well as entirely fictional setting material. So why make historically themed games rather than just making stuff up? Well, because it's an effective way of achieving the purpose of writing settings and adventures in general. The purpose of settings and adventures, I would aver, is to give players things to do in a convincing context. Convincing context doesn't necessarily mean realism. Players have different levels of understanding of what's "realistic" in different situations and are more or less sensitive to how closely those situations adhere to reality. For example, I'm a history and culture guy. Put me in SF campaigns (which happens with some regularity) and the specifics of how reaction drives, orbital mechanics, and subatomic physics work entirely escape me. I don't,
Post a Comment
Read more

Stuff I Wouldn't Do With Purchased Minis

One of the great things about the advent of 3d printing, when it comes to gaming, is that it allows me to take more risks and try stuff I wouldn't do otherwise. Take, for example, experimenting with painting techniques. Maybe I want to see what an unusual color scheme would look like or try doing an odd way of achieving an effect. Factory-made miniatures are expensive. Too expensive for me to risk it. Which, as someone who's not very good at painting minis and needs lots of practice, is one reason I've never gotten into them. I don't feel like I can afford the implied expense of getting better. Enter 3d printing. With the right files, I can print as many minis as I can like and mess around with them to my heart's content. Mess one up? That's fine. Resin isn't cheap , but it doesn't cost nearly as much as pre-made molded plastic. I can take it as a learning experience and move on. Which brings me to messing around with some Car Wars minis. I'd been m
Post a Comment
Read more

Ferrous Metal Food Fighting Guy!

(This is something I wrote up some years back. I'm putting it here so I can find it more easily when I want to. Though it's rather silly, it's also where I came up with the idea of high-quality materials which don't provide a bonus to the craftsman's skill, but do add to the margin of success, a mechanism which later appeared in the crafting rules in GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 .) One of the things not to be found in GURPS 4e is extensive rules for competitive cooking. If two cooks of steely resolve rise up to face one another across a cooking coliseum, the GM can only fall back on hand-waving and contests of skill. This article fills that much-needed gap. GURPS chefs can now stage furious contests wherein they construct fanciful dishes, the more elaborate the better, and prove whose cooking rules the day. To the kitchen! Procedure These rules provide guidance for attempting to cook complex dishes and comparing their quality when the cooking is done. A che
1 comment
Read more