Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement
containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's
things to make the players say "that's amazing".
Crafting Imbuements (Christopher R. Rice) extends the Imbuement
system, a method for allowing individuals to make any piece of
equipment they carry special in some way, into crafting skills: in
other words the Imbuement user can now make a supernaturally good item
that's usable by other people. In other words it's yet another
approach to an item-building system, and it's not just as the author
of one of the others (The Daughter of Necessity, Pyramid #3/46) that
I think this feels unnecessary; it doesn't seem to me to add much that
the other systems didn't already provide.
Dungeon Fantasy Goes to War (Matt Riggsby) fills the gap between the
small-unit fights of a typical dungoneering party and GURPS Mass
Combat, by listing various historical and faux-historical units in
terms of their cost as Allies, their basic stats (which template to
use and how to modify it), and their Mass Combat stats. If your hero
might be followed around by a file of hoplites, a barbarian war party,
or a plague of locusts, that's covered here. Monstrous allies get less
detail. Matt suggests a low frequency of appearance for these allies,
or the game becomes about them; I'd be more inclined not to worry
about their point cost and use them in one-shot adventures. (Those of
us who played the Lone Wolf books may recall the way that, for a
while, our hero would be sent off at the start of the book with an
escorting military force… all of whom would be killed off before he
got into the "real" adventure.) Designer's notes
here.
Eidetic Memory: The Harvest – Invasion Earth (David L. Pulver) has
secret cooperation with aliens starting in the 1980s, which turns into
invasion in the modern day. There's a lovely backstory involving the
nature of hyperspace and the resource the aliens are interested in,
and listings for conventional tanks, submarines and fighters upgraded
with supertech to go up against the aliens. Alas, there's no room for
development of the actual shape of the campaign, but I find this
intriguing and I could certainly see myself building on it.
Götterdämmerung (William H. Stoddard) is a puzzle-world for the
Infinite Worlds setting: it has super-powered heroes with a variety of
sources for their powers, deriving from distinct underlying realities.
This makes for four separate "clusters" of superpowers and a
distinctly mixed setting; again there's not much room to develop what
might actually happen here, but it has potential.
Many Lives, One Adventure (J. Edward Tremlett) explores reliable
reincarnation in an epic fantasy setting, with PCs having an eternal
task and a power linked to it. This isn't an overall campaign frame,
but a setup for examining particular incidents along the journeys of
specific souls. And gods are, of course, capricious.
Random Thought Table: The Sense of Ahhh (Steven Marsh) examines what
makes things epic. It's not just more stuff, it's a different sort
of stuff: maintaining the sense of scale by putting humans in the
picture at the same time as cosmic forces, and making even
side-effects different and strange.
There's nothing here that immediately inspires me to run a game based
on it, and only Steven's piece makes me say "wow", but there are
quite a few articles that I'll mull over and probably steal from.
Pyramid 102 is available from
Warehouse 23.
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