The latest issue of sporadic GURPS fanzine The Path of Cunning is out, and I'm in it! My article looks at libraries, and how to model them in GURPS - which makes it sound more complicated than it is.
Basically, I drew on the existing Organizations rules to highlight some key aspects of libraries that a) are likely to come up in play, and b) distinguish one library from another. How comprehensive is their collection? How readily will they let you in? How easily can you break in? And so on. I also throw in an overview of the staff you might meet in a library and what they actually do.
You can find Issue 4 (and the previous issues, also worth a read) here: https://tekeli.li/path-of-cunning/
You really wrote an article about librarians? Now you just need one about leviathans ;).
ReplyDeleteJokes aside, congratulations! Being in a fanzine must feel amazing. Never played the Generally Unplayable Role Playing System myself, so can't really comment on the article itself, but nice to see this blog (and you) still alive and kicking.
Sorry Alan, for some reason your posts got flagged for moderation! Thanks, it's always lovely to get comments and I do indeed have a nice warm fuzzy feeling for getting something published.
DeleteI find it quite playable myself, honestly. Roll 3d6 and add something, mostly. Chargen and vehicles seem to be what mostly turn people off. Was there anything particular that kept you away from it, or has it just never come your way?
Oh yes, and I must get round to a leviathan-themed post at some point. You're right, those are sorely lacking. Abject failure to play up to the theme on my part.
DeleteIt never really came my way. I started with 40k RPGs (still running them until this day, over a decade now), then Pathfinder, Mage: the Ascension, Eclipse Phase, some others. But I never tried GURPS, and no one in my gaming group proposed it, and as a dedicated GM it always fell on me to pick a system and I generally went with ones that caught my attention.
ReplyDeleteI know GURPS has it's dedicated fanbase, but from what I heard everywhere it is quite hard to run, even compared to something as crunch-heavy as Eclipse Phase or 40k RPGs. Maybe one day I'll try.
For some reason this comment shows as Anonymus, but it's me; sorry for confusion.
DeleteActually running GURPS can be very easy. Players say something, ask for a skill roll, see what happens next. The problem is that it's front-loaded: before you can play, you need to generate a character. Before you can do that, you need to know the system well enough that you don't design, say, a warrior without Combat Reflexes. Before you can do that, the GM has to choose which bits of the system are available in this game. It's hard to get started just from the books.
DeleteIf I were starting GURPS now, I'd get the basic set plus the first couple of Action PDFs, and run a modern action game with the character templates to make generation much faster. (One could also do Dungeon Fantasy, but the dungeon bash is well served already by other games and GURPS can do much more than that.)