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Showing posts from July, 2020

2020 GURPS Challenge PDFs: Deep Night and the Star

Yes, this is one I wrote. Not going to on at any length, but I'm not sure I ever pointed out that this is a worked out version of an adventure seed I wrote some time back for the Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2 Kickstarter. Dungeon crawling plus a little cosmic horror and outer space. And it's nominally part of the Wellsprings of Creation setting outlined in the Pyramid Dungeon Collection .

2020 GURPS Challenge PDFs: Tricked-Out Rides

The GURPS 2020 PDF Challenge PDFs have come in (for me, anyway), and while I don't see myself doing systematic reviews for them all, I do want to comment where it might be interesting or useful. GURPS Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides is a very brief treatment of cars for the GURPS Action line. It's quite simple: basic stats for a range of cars from subcompacts to vans (with useful stats like ramming damage figured for you), a range of options (ranging from the mundane like higher fuel efficiency to the cinematic like ejector seats), and a handful of examples. Frankly, this is what I need out of the Action line. Not a full, realistic design system, not even an abstracted design system like the Spaceships series. This covers 90% of my vehicle needs for a modern-day action campaign. Throw in a few options for cheap, old, and poorly maintained and add maybe two each of trucks, motorcycles, and helicopters, and I'm covered. Ships and airplanes, while they would certainly make appea

Incense Trail Additional Material

The GURPS 2020 PDF Challenge is on and as of this writing we've already got half the PDFs unlocked. These include both of my contributions to the project, including GURPS Hot Spots: The Incense Trail . For those who haven't looked it up yet: the Incense Trail (one of several names for it) encompasses a collection of routes leading from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean and Persia, initially carrying a variety of immensely valuable aromatic resins but later incorporating control over trade around the Indian Ocean. Here are a few things not included in text. Here's a satellite image of the environs of the warehouse/fortress of Sumhuram, with x marking the proverbial spot. While the condition of the wadi it overlooks surely changed over time, it was likely less silted and more accessible to the sea in antiquity. And one can see that the hills start not far away from the shore; a lot of Arabia Felix had that kind of narrow margin. Here's a map of the fortress itself, fo