Tetsujin no Llama

For a long time, I’ve maintained that GURPS, despite its reputation for complexity, is actually pretty simple in play. I was thinking recently that I should see if I can express the fundamentals of playing GURPS in a short, easily digested form, and so here I am.   This does not address a more general “how to play rpgs” for those who know nothing on the topic. How to approach GURPS, at that level, isn’t necessarily a lot different from how to approach D&D or TFT or any other RPG system. It doesn’t get into optional and campaign-specific sets of rules or equipment. Rather, this is stuff applicable to playing GURPS no matter what the campaign is. It also doesn’t address how to build GURPS characters, which is a vastly more complicated topic. Rather, this is about how to engage GURPS rules when you’ve already got your character sheet and are sitting at the table to play. It’s a trifle over 1000 words, which I think isn’t too bad.   How To Play GURPS Most of what you’ll need t...

A few days ago, I dropped this random gag:   I shall make a character for an RPG who has powers related to artistic creativity, but instead of music and song, they come from arranging cheeses and cured meats. A charcuterie bard. — Turhan's Bey Company (@turhansbeycmpny) December 21, 2021   But then I remembered that there's absolutely precedent for food-based magic:  So, then, obviously we can have food-based bards in GURPS, right? The best approach I see is modifying the Enthrallment skills (p. B191). However, rather than requiring Public Speaking at 12+ as a prerequisite, a charcuterie bard requires Cooking and Professional Skill (Food Stylist) at 12+; see Ferrous Metal Food Fighting Guy for a bit on the latter. The skills are used by preparing and feeding an audience with tasty, tasty foods. The elements of food in question cost a minimum of 1% of COL per target, though higher quality ingredients provide a bonus (use costs and reaction bonuses for styling, GURPS Lo...

In his review of GURPS Action Adventure 1: Templars' Gold, Mailanka introduces the charming phrase "action documentaries" to describe adventures which also contain interesting educational content. You play a fun adventure, but you also learn stuff you didn't know before. And that's a marvelous idea, particularly for a game as frequently entangled in history and real world concerns as GURPS . So naturally I started thinking about how one would write such a thing. To start with, it's probably best to attach such an adventure to some existing product line. For the 20th and early 21st century, that's clearly the Action line. While I wouldn't write it, there's room for such things around more obscure corners of WWI (the war in Africa, for example), some of the less European, more Asian parts of the Russian Revolution, events around the end of the Qing dynasty, the settlement of WWII ( The Third Man or intrigue around landing Trieste as part of Italy...

A recent review of Spies of Venice (largely fair save for a crack about Wikipedia) noted that it didn't talk a lot about using the material in a game. This is true, and not surprisingly it's for reasons of space. Spies of Venice is intended largely as a tool for world-building, providing ideas and information on actual historical practices of intelligence gathering and counterintelligence, whether for use in an historical campaign or, more likely, an historically flavored fantasy campaign. However, since word count is limited, there has to be a focus on stuff which can only be provided by specialized research (into sources well beyond Wiki-freaking-pedia) rather than things the GM could plausibly extrapolate on their own. But if I were to talk more about adapting the material to other campaigns and settings, it might look something like this: Intelligence Agencies One of the things Spies of Venice underlines is that there weren't intelligence agencies as such in its day...

I don't necessarily intend to post about these in anything like a systematic fashion, but I'm inclined at the moment to post some brief thoughts about at least some of the entries in this year's GURPS PDF Challenge. To start: GURPS Action Adventure 1: Templar's Gold.   Despite being part of the GURPS Action line, this is a bit historical rather than modern, set in the aftermath of WWI. The heroes set out in search of a lost treasure in the still dangerous former battlefields of the recent war, pursued by enemies after the same thing. This is a relatively straightforward adventure (it's ten pages; what do you expect?) but it reads like one which would be satisfying, probably a good game for a con, though there are hooks to more adventures to follow up on what it begins. There are, alas, no maps, but the descriptions give a good sense of place, particularly of the devastated Zone Rouge , and the few NPCs who get many words are quite well drawn. Indeed, the only real ...

One of the organizations statted out in GURPS Boardroom and Curia is a superhero team, the Mid-City Defenders. That was a sort of throwaway idea, a compilation of superhero team tropes intended to outline the kind of organization a superhero team might be and using that to illustrate how stats for it might look. For no particular reason (seriously, no particular reason; this is not a tease and nothing I'm working on is related to this), I was reading through B&C and thought that as an exercise, I might stat out one of the members. Moreover, to illustrate the flexibility of the core text, I thought I'd limit myself to the Basic Set. So here, then, is the Terra Cotta Warrior, a ~1000 point four-color superhero for GURPS.   Terra Cotta Warrior (1014 points) Age 2225/90; Animated Statue; 5' 7"; 350 lbs. ST 35 [250]; DX 15 [100]; IQ 12 [40]; HT 16 [60]. Damage 4d-1/6d+1; BL 245 lbs.; HP 50 [30]; Will 15 [15]; Per 12 [0]; FP 30 [42]. Basic Speed 7.75 [0];...

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 ...

 On the off chance that anybody reading this isn't already more than aware, I've got two works in the 2021 GURPS PDF Challenge over on Kickstarter, both of which have been unlocked. So a few words about those: GURPS Renaissance Venice: Spies of Venice is a sequel to GURPS Hot Spots: Renaissance Venice , and it's the one I'm most fond of. It's a description of Venice's characteristically sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the 15th and 16th centuries, touching on such topics as historical and international context, high-level organization and administration, secret communications, and black ops. This was an absolute delight to research and write. It's interesting on its own merits , actionable for games, transferable to other low-tech settings, and (and this is the part that gives historicals an extra level of fascination for me) it's all true . It has all the human texture of real events and institutions, with everything from assassinations in the d...

 I've been playing with some of those dice designs, experimenting with different dyes in the epoxy. These are the basic Starfleet dice with a mixture of blue/red/yellow alcohol ink and steel mica, which I grabbed thinking it was black and was going for depths-of-space kind of look. Definitely not what I was intending, but not bad. One of my minor dissatisfactions with SJ Games is that they've never produced a lot of GURPS swag. There was a round of t-shirts a while back and I gather there are some dice bags on the way, but nothing like what they've done for Munchkin, Car Wars, or even Fantasy Trip. Now, I can't help you with that, but I can at least make my own GURPS -themed d6. True to the game's generic nature, each face has a different style of number. And more of the d6s9 in various different colors. They're mostly various mica colors swirled with a semi-transparent black. I quite like all of these. Oh, and what's in that transparent one? Yes, it...

 I've been talking to SJ Games about some writing for them for the near future, and in lieu of saying anything true or interesting about it, I can now announce the falsehood that my next project will be a collaboration with Peter Dell'Orto , GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Locations: Orc Ninja Dungeons of Venice . As you know, Timmy, Venice is a city built on pilings, landfill, and small islands, all at sea level (or, in times of very rough weather, slightly below). Common belief is that it's essentially impossible to dig down in Venice, since the water table is inches or at best a couple of feet below the surface. However, during from a little after the Fourth Crusade to the 17th century, when Drebbel submarines were used to clear out the tunnels, orc ninja were able to use this as cover. Extensive semi-aquatic dungeons were constructed from the Arsenal to the Rialto, allowing them to pass unseen around the city using snorkels to survive the trip, while painters like Titian and Gior...

 I've been working with making dice out of epoxy, which is fun, but I've been fascinated by custom dice designs and making your own molds. Fortunately, the internet is a fountain of information about it, and I'm fortunate to have had most of the pieces kicking around already. Design your dice in the software of your choice (used to that; dice are easy to build), 3d-print (doing that for years), and make molds by pouring some kind of rubber around them. While I went a somewhat different direction, this video from Dice Witchery was particularly useful for me. The main problem I faced was that I absolutely could not get platinum-cure silicone rubbers to cure no matter what I tried, so I ultimately used a polyurethane rubber, and I've got a tin-cure silicone rubber on deck for further mold-making. But this isn't really about technique yet. This is just proof of concept. Can I, in fact, make reusable molds in order to make my own dice designs in resin? Signs point to ye...

Issue #3 of the GURPS fanzine The Path of Cunning is out. It contains some notes I wrote on Cold Shard Mountains . Part of it expands on how it runs contrary to the premise of the Dungeon Fantasy line, and some of it gets into the sources of some of the ideas I used as the basis of parts of the setting, including this:

With the addition of a pressure pot, I've got the basic technical infrastructure for dice-making mostly in place (just need to figure out polishing; my attempts so far have been...unsuccessful), so i can concentrate more on the artistic side. Several of my latest have been more work on dice representing places using the Terrain2STL-based technique described here .  First, the cliffs of Moher: When my lovely and talented spouse and I visited Ireland, we stopped at the cliffs at a spot near a Medieval tower, which I added to the landscape. Monument Valley: This one likewise needed a little help. The section of Monument Valley I did here included West Mitten Butte, East Mitten Butte, and Merrick Butte. However, the resolution of the GIS data was sufficiently coarse that it excluded the chimneys on the Mitten Buttes. I had to add them back in. This involved a lot of dry brushing to get the layered earth tone effect. And the Grand Canyon:   This needed no help on the modeling. Prin...

At the GURPS session of today's Fnordcon , there was a question about how much research a GURPS book required. The answer is, of course, that it varies with the length and nature of the book, but I'd like to point out another key factor: the author.  I write historicals in large part because I've got a social science and humanities background. I'm already oriented in various historical periods and in the language of history, archaeology, and anthropology. There's basically an investment of research humming along under the surface there. Consequently, I do less research specifically for any given work than one might think. Indeed, there have been some things where there's a specific place or idea that comes up in my reading which looks like a good idea for a GURPS work and only a fraction of the resulting work comes from research specifically for it. The rest is contextualizing and providing background from stuff I already know.  Consequently, I can write somethi...

I've been seeing some things crossing my Twitter feed about somebody making up a magic combat wheelchair (see the #CombatWheelchair hashtag ) for the current edition of The Other Game (tm). So, naturally, I thought about how GURPS would handle it. GURPS being GURPS , it potentially handles it in several ways. I'll delve into how to deal with it as a piece of equipment intended for use in Dungeon Fantasy -flavored campaigns and using the basic magic system. Wheelchairs are addressed briefly in the core rules. A wheelchair (p. B142) provides ground Move = 1/4 ST, with limitations like movement on staircases, through narrow doorways, and so on. High Tech (p. 226) has full weight and cost stats as well as rules for powered ones, but let's consider the fantasy chair. The first issue is making it self-propelled. Hard to fight if you're rolling your chair around with your hands. However, it can probably be made self-rolling with the Dancing Object spell ( Magic , p. 144). I...

Over on the forum, somebody asked me how much frankincense and myrrh cost in antiquity. Well, we don't know. We never get as much price information as we like out of history. There's the occasional mention of this or that product being worth its weight in silver or gold, but we can reasonably believe that those are descriptions written by political, cultural, or philosophical commentators trying to give an idea of how expensive things are, not people who have actually done an economic analysis and discovered that the material in question is, by coincidence, exactly the same value as silver or gold and not, say, one and a half times the price of silver or three quarters of the price of gold. We know it was valuable, but not how valuable on the level of individual purchases. But for the convenience of the GM, we can use those comparisons to establish some ballpark figures. Mind you, this is based largely on GURPS rather than historical sources, so it's not something I would h...

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 .

Read over another one. Unsurprisingly, Phil Masters's brief description of a steampunk world in dangerous decline is inviting and evocative. I can see the epicycles in the sky, and I'm imagining adventures, because this deserves to be built on.

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...

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...