Tetsujin no Llama

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

Some weeks ago, while I was getting the mail, I saw that someone in the apartment building across the street had thrown away a sort of coffee table/storage unit. It was in pretty good shape except for a badly scuffed surface, but what struck me immediately was the shape. It was a hexagon. And for certain persons, like me and anybody likely to be reading this post, that means gaming. It was time to salvage and upcycle, mostly using stuff I already had lying around. Here's the table when initially salvaged. In addition to the essentially cosmetic damage to the top, it had also clearly been owned by a smoker, but some time to air out fixed that.  The first step was putting a wooden rim around the edge of the tabletop. Tape around the edges, 3/8" square dowels cut at 60 degree angles to the right length, some wood glue, and clamps take care of that. The centers of the dowels are marked and some small pilot holes drilled for something I'll be coming back to later. Then the

 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