Tetsujin no Llama

The advent of a new Hot Spots volume has reminded me of a question which comes up from time to time: Why buy an historical GURPS book when you can just look up stuff on the web?  It's not just potential customers who ask this. It's a question which keeps the GURPS editorial staff up at night. Not surprisingly, I have a multi-part answer to that question: 1) The premise of the question is flawed. Contrary to what some might think, not everything is on the web. Some material is, obviously ("China is over there.  Farther. Little to the left. Up. There."), but certainly not all or even most. The depth of research in GURPS historicals is frequently such that the authors have to pick up dusty old books and page through things which haven't been digitized and exposed to the web for free nor are they likely to be any time soon, or to hit up journals and new books which are still behind paywalls or are undigitized and available only through libraries. You can Google for...

The cat is, if not out of the bag for my latest GURPS project, then at least peeking out of the mostly closed box. In the wake of the slow revival of GURPS as it has emerged from the shadow of the Ogre, I did GURPS Boardroom and Curia , then I did a DF project based on idea suggested by Kromm. My intention at that point was to do something non-DF, but a second DF project strongly suggested itself, after which I again wanted to do a non-DF book. Then a third DF project wouldn't get out of my head. But now that that's out of the way, I've put the Terribly Responsible Historian hat firmly back on to do a new Hot Spots . I shan't say much about this, save that: a) It's something I've wanted to write for quite some time; I was rather gung-ho about it even before the Ogre hiatus. 2) It's different in certain significant ways from the ones I've done before. * In any event, it's back to research and cartography. *: What ways? Who can say? Maybe i...