Pyramid is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with
a loose linking theme. This time it's combat: fighting of all sorts.
Combat Writ Large (Sean Punch) deals with large things: trolls,
giants, killer robots, and so on. This is a collection and expansion
of existing rules, and while there's a focus on the hex-grid combat
that many GURPS players like there's plenty of good material
elsewhere. When I next have an outsized monster in a game I'll
certainly want a copy of this available. All of this is given in terms
of relative size modifier, so the same material can be used for tiny
combatants too. (Not that I would be translating
The Small Folk
into GURPS. Really.) High value, medium applicability to my games.
Low-Tech Armor Loadouts for the New World (Dan Howard) is an
extension of GURPS Loadouts: Low-Tech Armor (on which I was a
playtester, and boy it was hard work). It gives detailed armour for
Spanish conquistadors and their foes in the Americas. Medium value,
low applicability: I'm not planning any games set in these cultures or
regions, and generally I don't need this level of detail anyway,
though it's certainly nice to have.
Eidetic Memory: Ancient Egyptian and Roman Armies (David L. Pulver)
is an extension to GURPS Mass Combat which gives details for those
two armies, the specific units they can include, and some typical
combinations of those units. High value, low applicability: Mass
Combat is one of those supplements that I will find indispensable if I
ever have PCs involved around the edges of a big battle, but the
situation doesn't seem to have come up yet.
On Target (Douglas H. Cole) extends the Aim manoeuvre, a usual
combat tactic but sometimes a bit of a poor relation as it's resolved
quite simplistically. This replaces it with a skill roll, based on the
Guns skill but with some different modifiers. High value, medium
applicability: I will probably offer something like this in my
Weird War II game, which has seen some
notable sniping incidents, but for Torg it
would be too cumbersome.
It's a Threat! (Christopher R. Rice) brings back memories of the
Monstermark from White Dwarf #1-#3: it boils down adventurer and
monster statistics into Offensive and Protective ratings, and combines
those to give an overall Combat Effectiveness which should give some
indication of how much of a problem an encounter will be. Medium
value, low applicability: in a complex system like GURPS there has to
be lots of room for the GM's discretion when it comes to weird powers,
and I'm not running a dungeon bash at all.
Random Thought Table: Faster, Combatants! Kill! Kill! (Steven Marsh)
is, as usual, short on game-mechanical detail and long on ideas. It
suggests various ways in which combat can be made to run faster: by
having a defined breakpoint after which minor bad guys will give up if
they aren't seriously hurting the PCs, restricting descriptive bonuses
(we're looking at Exalted here, which specifically rewards players
for flowery speeches about what their PCs are up to), and having a set
of random rolls prepared for NPCs to save time at the table. High
value, high applicability; it'll be easy enough for me to add some
pre-generated rolls to my NPC listings.
Pyramid 77 is available from
Warehouse 23.
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