Designer's Notes Designer's Notes

Well, I did say that I'd have something up about the relationship between Guilds and Boards and Curia in a few days. It turns out to be a surprisingly DN-heavy issue (my article and Stoddard's on Back To School). Between Guilds, Boardroom and Curia, Mass Combat, and City Stats, GURPS has a lot of different ways of describing organized entities, suitable to various purposes. It's interesting how both Bill and I demonstrate that, coming at the question from different directions.

And another Car Wars piece in this one. My only regret is that the Brandon Moore art isn't available in a publicly available place, so I can't link to it. He's really quite good.

Comments

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...

2020 GURPS Challenge PDFs: Incense Trail prices

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...

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...

Tetsujin no Llama

Search This Blog