Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement
containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's
death, and what might follow.
Necro-Psi (Christopher R. Rice) is a new psionic power group
for interacting with the spirits of the dead: reading their auras,
seeing the last thing they saw before they died, animating and
controlling corpses, and taking on a shadowy form. This seems at times
like a TV series pitch, and doesn't really fit with the feel of the
other psi powers as I've used them, but for a more cinematic game it
could work quite well.
What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger (Scott Rochat) gives you
points for killing monsters, just like classic D&D; they can be spent
for one-off bonuses, and even integrated with the Combat Effectiveness
Rating from Pyramid 77. I just don't see the, er, point.
Eidetic Memory: Soul Reapers (David L. Pulver) presents the idea of
a psychopomp as a playable character in a Monster Hunters or
Horror game, from the gothic Death of Sandman to the modern
iteration of the shinigami in Japanese mythology. (Naturally, not all
the souls they take will be willing to go, so they have plenty of
nifty powers.) This seems really to deserve an entire campaign
or at least adventure dedicated to it, rather than simply mixing a
Reaper with other sorts of PC that fight monsters.
The Slaughterealm (J. Edward Tremlett) is a pocket dimension into
which people are kidnapped, and then forced to fight to the death. The
rules are arbitrary, and in effect this is a framework over a series
of dungeon bashes, with only a half-page box explaining how people
might escape without completing the series of challenges; to me this
feels like a whole pile of Not Fun.
Random Thought Table: Death and How to Avoid It (Steven Marsh)
defines eight levels of "seriousness" of death as a campaign setting,
from absolute certainty that it is the end to its being an entirely
alien concept.
This is a bit of a disappointment to me: there's nothing I'm likely to
use immediately, though a necro-psi could potentially fit into my
1960s psionics campaign (as a foe) if I restart it, and several
items are depressingly mundane. Pyramid 99 is available from
Warehouse 23.
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