Skip to main content

GURPS Books I'd Like To See (Which I Might Not Write)

Peter has a post up about GURPS books he'd like to see. I got to thinking about that with the caveat that I'm trying to limit myself to works I likely wouldn't write myself. Here's what I'm thinking.

  • Recent But Non-Obvious Historicals. Shawn Fisher's adventure in the 2021 PDF Challenge is a good start, but I'd like to see more stuff set in and around, say, the Long 19th Century and maybe into the Cold War. But I'm not interested in, say, the American Revolution, Napoleon, the ACW, or the WWI, or at least no those conflicts writ large like the GURPS WWII series. Give me stuff related to the 1939 World's Fair, the formation of nations around South America, the Great Game, short-lived republics and nigh-independent states around Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, Danzig was a city-state between the World Wars and Trieste was briefly independent in the aftermath of WWII; surely something can be done there. It's possible that there is a very small audience for this kind of thing, mostly consisting of me.
  • A Core For Classic Star-Faring SF Adventure. Semi-classic, anyway. By which I mean something in a Star Trek/Gaean Reach/Killjoys/Star Wars/Farscape/Starship Troopers vein than something more modern. I've long felt that science fiction adventures could and should be a core strength for GURPS, but somehow that hasn't worked out. DF has sucked up a lot of air (I am not innocent here), Transhuman Space stays inside the solar system and has no aliens, and Infinite Worlds deliberately avoids space travel. There's the Spaceships series, but we're lacking in anything beyond that. I'm looking for star atlases, setting-focused equipment and vehicle guides, locations, etc. 
  • Related to the above, I want Doug to magically conjure Mission X into existence. No pressure, Doug.

I'm sure there are plenty of ideas to which I'd react "oh, that too," but this is what comes immediately to mind.


Comments

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,

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

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