This supplement updates and expands the Sparrial race, from the
original GURPS Aliens, to fourth edition.
Disclaimer: I received playtest credit in this book and
therefore did not pay for it.
Sparrials first appeared in
a short piece in Roleplayer #10 (May 1988),
and were expanded in four pages of GURPS Aliens (1990). If you've
heard of them at all, though, it's more probably through
the Space theme of
David Morgan-Mar's Irregular Webcomic, which was derived in part from
his Amber Nebula campaign.
Sparrials are small furred aliens, arboreal omnivores with a
preference for meat. Their culture is entirely based on getting one-up
on the other guy, usually by means of theft. Played badly they can be
every annoying stereotype about the thief who steals from the rest of
the party and gets everyone into trouble, rolled into one. Played well
they can be a bit more interesting.
This book has three major sections of roughly equal size: game
mechanics for characters, Sparrial culture, and equipment specific to
the race. The racial stat and skill template is simple enough, with
mention of skills and other traits that they often, but not always,
learn. There are notes on physiology, names, and psychology,
particularly focusing on the implications of racial kleptomania and a
sense of smell so sensitive as to be effectively emotional telepathy.
There are brief notes on how to alter them for use in other campaigns
(e.g. as an engineered slave race, or primitive sparrials at the time
of first contact), even in a fantasy game. There's a fully-detailed
100-point Sparrial Pilot template, and a 140-point sample character.
The Culture chapter goes into more detail about how the sparrial
tendency towards individual dominance relationships maps into their
society and daily life; this includes adventure seeds based on
sparrial psychology. Finally, Gear mentions the sort of equipment that
sparrials tend to carry, with notes on pets and riding animals. A
sample spaceship is perhaps less useful, unless your interstellar
campaign includes TL11^.
The main support is for sparrials as PCs in a game world that contains
multiple alien species, much in the style of the Free Trader campaign
for Traveller. Racial kleptomania, and sparrial psychology in general,
wouldn't work well in a game with any sort of formal structure
(government agents, military, etc.). In their fairly limited niche,
though, they can provide a reasonable amount of amusement, and even
some insight into an alien mindset. Just don't let the group's
extrovert play one, as then he'll have a constant excuse for being
annoying.
I don't have an immediate use for this but I'll certainly consider
sparrials if/when I run another "lowlife" space campaign. Aliens:
Sparrials is available from
Warehouse 23.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.