Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement
containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's
things that go wrong for player characters.
Mad as Bones (Christopher R. Rice) is another sanity system for
GURPS, following the Stress and Derangement mechanics from GURPS
Horror and
my own lightweight approach.
This one repurposes fatigue mechanics, including the long-term fatigue
system from GURPS After the End, to assess stability costs for
various hazards. I'm not entirely convinced that bringing in a whole
new meter for PCs that events can wear down is a great solution, but
if you want this kind of mechanistic approach it's competently done.
Monsters' Minions (Michele Armellini) lists stats for various sorts
of low-level bad guy working for a bigger villain: the nameless
minion, the muscleman, the collaborator, and so on. They're not very
generic, but they do fit the sort of modern-ish occult-ish horror-ish
campaign that I like to run, so I'll get some immediate use out of
them.
Eidetic Memory: Spaceship Malfunctions (David L. Pulver) is some
lightweight rules for when malfunctions should happen (randomly rather
than as a result of battle damage, which I suppose has its own
mechanics already but I'd like to have seen integration of this with
the core system's simple "working/not working" status) and a long list
of the sorts of things that go wrong with different parts of a ship:
it's not just the drive breaking down, it's the drive leaking
radiation as the result of a software problem. I'll definitely be
using these in my spacefaring campaigns.
Designer's Notes: The Silk Road (Matt Riggsby) adds to that recent
publication (which I'll review soon) by extending the history of the
Tarim Basin after the routes declined, as far as the modern day, with
suggestions for adventurous things to do there. It also adds some
mythical creatures that don't fit the historically-based book but
might be handy in a more fantastic version.
Random Thought Table: Complications in a Certain World (Steven
Marsh) starts from the premise that uncertainty of result is what
makes games interesting: if you know you're going to get to where
you're doing, the excitement comes from what goes wrong on the way and
how you deal with it, from showing off rarely-used skills and giving
the GM a means of feeding in new clues. (I'd add: "at what cost", i.e.
what resources had to be expended to make it there, and therefore
aren't available for the next step.)
Central Asia/Silk Road map (uncredited) is a 51 megapixel low-detail
map from the Caspian to China (and because of the company's anti-DRM
policy, it's possible to use PDF tools to extract the image file and
do useful things with it, like zooming in to an area of campaign
relevance). Routes and major terrain features and settlements are
marked.
Spaceship malfunctions are the prize here, and the minions will be
useful to me Pyramid 103 is available from
Warehouse 23.
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