Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement
containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's a
third issue on the general theme of Spaceships (the GURPS subsystem as
well as the overall concept).
Since I'm running
an SF campaign at the
moment, I'm evaluating the articles here particularly in terms of how
useful they'll be there.
So You Want to Build a Spaceship (Roger Burton West and Timothy
Ponce): I first seriously noticed Timothy's work in Pyramid #3/79,
when he wrote an article (basically "orbital mechanics for gamers")
that I'd been mulling over for years but not quite getting to work. He
was also very helpful during the playtest of Meltdown and Fallout.
So when I had the idea for this article ("what if I want a spaceships
game that feels like X rather than generic SF") but not enough genres
to make it work, he was the obvious guy to ask for collaboration. It's
probably pretty obvious which of us wrote which section, but they all
got tossed back and forth and improved by the process. (I've already
used this to design parts of my current game.)
Battle for the Earth (Michele Armellini) is a scenario for GURPS
Mass Combat: aliens have invaded several major cities on a near-future
Earth, and scrappy human forces strike back at them. It's not much to
do with spaceships, but it does seem as though it should generate a
number of interesting close-up scenarios as well as being a
challenging, lopsided wargame. Not much direct applicability for me,
though.
Blackbeard Station (Ted Brock) is a pirate haven with its own jump
drive, though it's still restricted to a single star system. This
needs some hefty assumptions about how trackable ships are in order to
work, though I may be able to hack pieces off it for use in my current
game.
Eidetic Memory: Hazard Rates (David L. Pulver) looks at what happens
when space traders are deliberately seeking illegal cargoes, rather
than (as the Spaceships 2 system assumes) occasionally stumbling
across them. There's a full 36-entry table for illicit goods (some of
which, such as psychotronics, may not exist in a given setting), three
examples of full-ship charters with complications, and some
suggestions about mail contracts (and adventures arising from them)
for settings where the ship is the fastest means of communication.
This is definitely getting used in my current game, where two of the
PCs' activities are inspections of merchant ships and rendering
assistance to civilians in distress.
Strange Objects in Disrepair (J. Edward Tremlett) lists three
wrecked alien vessels: they're all intriguingly alien in a pleasing
way, though they have potentially massive implications for the long
term of the campaign. Since there are no known aliens in my current
game, I won't be using these. Honest.
Random Thought Table: You Gotta Get a Gimmick (Steven Marsh) looks
at starfleet-defining gimmicks (cloaking devices, TIE fighters, etc.)
and considers ways in which they can be kept isolated to that power
even once they're discovered: they can't be understood, they only make
sense in the context of their own society, they have morally repugnant
requirements for use, and so on. And of course there are suggestions
as to how to get round those restrictions once the time is right. I'm
not generally doing this sort of gimmick (fleets have different design
philosophies but basically the same basket of available tech) but as
always it's thought-provoking stuff.
So apart from the one I wrote, that's one immediately useful article,
two that I can use with a bit of tweaking, one that has little to say
to me and one that's not designed for this kind of use but will affect
the flavour of the game. That's pretty good going, and I think that
many other games involving spaceships will be able to use even more of
this material. Pyramid 93 is available from
Warehouse 23.