Skip to main content

More Hints, More Rumors


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 it just means that it's not about either Florence or Constantinople. Oooo, cryptic!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spaced Out Rides

(This is the kind of thing I'd have sent into Pyramid   back in the day, but that's not an option now, so here we are.)   The GURPS Action series is the gift that keeps on giving for a lot of modern-and-later gaming. GURPS Action 2: Exploits has rules for sneaking around, running away, and all kinds of other activities which can be easily transplanted to cyberpunk and other high-tech settings. GURPS Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides provides more of the same for its topic, giving an easy framework for describing and even designing common types of vehicles without all the math and paralysis-by-analysis of GURPS Vehicles. Pick a standardized vehicle type (van, compact car, etc.) and apply modifiers (rugged, tinted windows). But, of course, it’s limited. It’s just ten pages, after all, so it’s great for common passenger vehicles for the modern(ish) era. But higher-tech vehic...
Post a Comment
Read more

G$ --> DND GP

A GURPS $ is worth 1.27 D&D 5e SP, which is interesting because in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the typical $1 coin is a silver piece. And a D&D GP is worth about $7.87 in GURPS. So, where does that come from? A while back, I cautioned someone considering using (among other things) GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice  in a non-GURPS game that prices listed in the extensive lists of trade goods were expressed in GURPS $, which might not have obvious conversions into other game systems. But if one wanted to convert GURPS prices into D&D or vice versa, how would that work? It crossed my mind to take a "basket of goods" approach. Economists measure inflation not by picking a single commodity, like the price of gold or oil or wheat, and seeing how that changes over time, but by taking the combined value of a set of common commodities. This provides a more comprehensive picture of the cost of living. Perhaps gas becomes less expensive while the price of whe...
Post a Comment
Read more

dVikingNames

This 2015 dissertation by Dr.  Paul Peterson  is the kind of gaming resource actual academia provides to us. The work contains a list of 517 Viking nicknames and their meanings. They start on p. 127 if you just want to skip ahead. Cool, no? Shane Ivey over on Bluesky suggested bringing a d517 to your next D&D game. And having a random table of Viking names is a great idea, actually. But. 517 doesn't break down into die rolls well. It's the product of two primes, and that does not translate into rolls on dAnythingyoumighthaveinyourdicebag. But its really close to 512, which is a straight-up power of two, and that you can roll. Indeed, if you just ignore the last five items on the list (sorry, enn ǫrvi, ǫrvǫnd, ǫrvǫndr, Øxna-, and øxnabroddr), you just need 3d8, or roll a d8 three times, treating each roll as a separate digit to generate one of 512 possible rolls and looking up the corresponding value. Roll, say, a 5, 7, and 1? That's 305, or lunan , meaning little blac...
Post a Comment
Read more