I recommend GURPS Aliens by Chris McCubbin to any GM looking to add some interesting alien races to his campaign. Many of the 20+ aliens included in this tome would make great additions to fantasy worlds. The background info provided on all these dudes fit together like its own jigsaw campaign world. You could seriously run an awesome alien-tastic campaign using your favorite generic or sci-fi rules and this book. Or say you're Traveller PCs manage to misjump their ship off of your campaign map. Just flip open this book and have them appear in a subsector dominated by one of these people.
Do you like cheesy sci-fi and horror flicks from the 50's? Then GURPS Atomic Horror is right up your alley. In addition to standing on its own feet as a source for a quirky B-Movie campaign, this book also makes a great campanion for the sci-fi/horror rpg Spaceship Zero. Author Paul Elliot always struck me as one of the cooler people to hang out at RPGnet. He often went by the handle mithras over there. He's got some very cool stuff on this page.
If you haven't read E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series of novels then do yourself a favor and check them out. Lensman IS space opera. It's that effin' simple. You ever heard of the Green Lantern Corps? Howzabout the Jedi Knights? Both were inspired by the Lensmen. And the GURPS adaptation is pretty darn good. I could nitpick an item or two, but I doubt I could do better myself. Golden Age scientifical fictionary adventure at its bestest.
GURPS The Prisoner is the best fan-guide-as-rpg-book I've ever seen. Author David Ladyman does an excellent job of providing a meticulous resource for fans of the seminal British TV series while avoiding the common trap of assuming that your game must adhere closely to the licensed property.So what GURPS books are in your game library? Any particulars stand out as favorites?
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I think non-GURPS players looking to plunder the wealth of the GURPS library should mainly focus on
ReplyDelete(A) The GURPS sourcebooks for those genres they actively play or are considering playing. Hard to go wrong with these; books like GURPS Space and GURPS Time Travel are little all-in-one libraries of high quality.
(B) The GURPS sourcebooks for almost any kind of history they want to toy with. You CAN go wrong with these (a few of the GURPS historicals, like GURPS China for the most glowing example, are stinkers that should have not been allowed to press), but for the most part the batting average is higher than any other publisher on historical material that focuses directly on gamerly needs and game-table topics.
(C) The oddball GURPS titles that were not originally meant, by their authors, to be GURPS material. These include such oddly-subversive works as GURPS Goblins, GURPS Fantasy II, and GURPS Black Ops.
(D) Toss-off "stuff" books like the Space Atlas series. Nice plug-and-play modular material that any GM interested in the genre can get real use from, usually very light on game-stat filler and heavy on the real stuff: setting/character/adventure material.
This was the advice I'd give at conventions back when I was a GURPS writer and/or SJ Games editor and/or company booster handing out foam frisbees for the fun of it. Now that I am, personally, a non-GURPS player who plunders the GURPS library for my campaigns, I can happily report that the advice has held up nicely ... the above describes those books I've kept, compared to the dozens of GURPS books I've allowed to slip away from my shelves as trading fodder or dumpster filler.
There's gold in them thar hills, but they're big hills :) Also, folks who dig the GURPS plundering should pay attention to the modern incarnation of Hero Games; newer books like the recent versions of Fantasy Hero, Star Hero and Pulp Hero are, in their own way, successors to the throne for ultimate all-in-one gamer libraries plunderable by those who don't dig the system in question. They do weigh more, though.
What GURPS are in my library? A lot, especially considering that GURPS is probably my least favorite game system to actually run.
ReplyDeleteGURPS Cabal and the two Alternate Earths books are must-keeps for me. GURPS Illuminati and the Prisoner will need to be pried out of my cold, dead hands before my corpse is put into the ground And I recently snagged a copy of Black Ops that I won't be giving up anytime soon either - it's what I always wanted "Conspiracy X" to be.
Gurps High Tech for historical data on technologies.
ReplyDeleteGurps Wizard for magic character archetypes (Overlord FTW!).
Gurps Vehicles, just to remind me how much of a crunch nut I used to be.
GURPS Timeline, and GURPS Roman Empire.
ReplyDelete(and, sadly, GURPS Bunnies and Burrows. I won't admit I own it, and won't sell it either.)
As a sad joke once when I was a rabid fanboy member of the old BBS, I wrote a document which would have been a quarter of a project I referred to as "GURPS Deliverance". Some of those ideas were borrowed and better used elsewhere. Fortunately, SJGames never pursued the movie rights for a fantasy setting.
I love GURPS. Between my collection and the others in my household, I think we have a large proportion of the 3rd Ed books. We have less of the 4th, not because I don't like it but because we're not using it much at the moment. (Two players in the current group prefer much lighter rules.)
ReplyDeleteI've run several Illuminati University campaigns. The book is worth it for the setting even if you don't want to use the rules.
I've gotten a lot of mileage in non-GURPS games out of GURPS Horror (3rd Ed.) Ken Hite's writing is brilliant as always and the genre advice applies to any horror game.
Not as much as some folks, but more than most of the sane ones.
ReplyDeleteI've got a few favorites in my library.
ReplyDelete1) Reign of Steel. Every 'Robots take over the world' scenario you can think of. GURPS: Robots could be included with this.
2) Traveller: Far Trader. Who ever thought that reading a part of the book teaching economics would be fascinating?
3) Uplift. Based on David Brin's classic series. The section detailing the creation of alien species can be used with any other SF RPG.
4) Steampunk. I love steampunk.
5) Traveller: Starports. Written by the late, great John M. Ford. Yes, there's more to starports than the bars.
6) Alternate Earths. A half-dozen well-thought-out 'what if?'s
7) Mars. With a foreword by Robert Zubrin. Need I say more? Okay... Backgrounds for various stages of Martian colonies with additional section for War Of The Worlds and Steampunk.
8) Dinosaurs. Foreword by Robert Bakker. He's the ZZ Top paleontologist you might recall seeing on various PBS shows. Details on the various forms of life that've appeared on the Earth in its billions of years.
I have over a 100 GURPS books, I enjoy them very much.
ReplyDeleteMy favourites:
GURPS Atlantis. My first GURPS book, and an excellent example of why I enjoy the GURPS books so much. Many of them have expanded my ideas of what roleplaying can be, beyond space opera or dungeon crawls.
GURPS Lensman. Excellent RPG adaptation of one of the most fun ever space opera series.
GURPS Mars. A whole book on Mars, another of my favourite subjects.
GURPS Y2K. Again, expanding my ideas of what RPGs could be about. The real Y2K was (thankfully) a big yawn. But it would be interesting to play trying to survive in a world where Y2K was really the End of Civilization As We Know It.
GURPS Russia. Medieval Russia, a subject rarely covered in RPGs.
GURPS Voodoo. Very innovative horror/conspiracy setting.
Other favourites:
GURPS Alternate Earth 1 and 2
GURPS All-Star Jam 2004
GURPS Illuminati
GURPS Greece
GURPS Egypt
GURPS Places of Mystery
GURPS Old West
GURPS Steampunk and Steamtech
And of course...Transhuman Space, which in my opinion is simply the most innovative SF setting ever.
Oh yeah - GURPS Russia. That's a great book. I used it years ago to build a fantasy kingdom for a D&D game I was running. I consider that one of the better historical books in the line - certainly one of the most unique on the market. Everyone does an Egypt book, or a Rome book, or a China book. Even TSR did a Celts book and a Vikings book back in the day. But I don't think I've ever seen a game-reference book on medieval Russia anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteMy only complaint is that I would have liked it to cover all the way into modern Russia. But that's a complaint I have with most of the GURPS historicals - that they seem to stop before I can use them in a Steampunk, WWII or modern conspiracy game. A petty complaint, I know, but it's mine.
GURPS Bunnies and Burrows
ReplyDeleteBecause you're not a *real* roleplayer until you've faced down Farmer MacGregor. :)
But I don't think I've ever seen a game-reference book on medieval Russia anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteThere are two others (not counting some distantly-Russian-inspired D&D and Warhammer material). Predating GURPS Russia (and mentioned in its bibliography) is the Australian FRPG called RUS, which is basically ... Well, imagine Encounter Critical, but instead of claiming "true scientific realism," it claims "true Russian fantasy." The levels of success (and research) are comparable. Art's about the same, too. A fun book on its own merits, but its own merits include nothing relating to Russia (it even goes so far as to point out that to play RUS, you need pencils, dice, and a map of old Russia ... becaus the game itself doesn't provide one).
More recently, Mark Galeotti's "Mythic Russia," from Firebird Productions, provided a very contemporary and well-researched Russian high-mythic-fantasy FRPG (the game RUS advertised itself as, but never was). It and GURPS Russia go well together on any gamer's shelf :)
I was involved in another Russian-fantasy project with the late Ed Simbalist jr ... but alas, with Ed no longer with us, the fate of that book is still uncertain, even though it's fully drafted and has even seen a playtest campaign come and go. I expect I'll publish it eventually (I'm very happy with it and it does things with the material that no other book, including my own, has before) but I'm not sure on the details.
But that's a complaint I have with most of the GURPS historicals
See GURPS China for why.
GURPS Bunnies and Burrows
ReplyDeleteThe only GURPS book that I still GM games from at least once a year.
I was always hopeful that someone would do a "GURPS Romance of the Three Kingdoms" as a more focused, and more definitive, sourcebook.
ReplyDeleteBoth RoTK and "Outlaws of the Marsh" would make for good RPG sourcebooks.
See GURPS China for why.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever even seen a copy of GURPS China. When you say it's bad, is it because it tries to squeeze all of Chinese history from the Qin empire to the Communist revolution into a GURPS Third Edition sized book? Or is there more to its badness than that?
I don't think I've ever even seen a copy of GURPS China. When you say it's bad, is it because it tries to squeeze all of Chinese history from the Qin empire to the Communist revolution into a GURPS Third Edition sized book?
ReplyDeleteFrom _prehistory_ to the revolution, in fact :) And yeah, that's most of the problem. It's one of those flaws that won't manifest at all for an armchair-gamer or a collector ... the book isn't written poorly or anything. But it scrapes itself so thin that it's functionally useless for actual historical _campaigning,_ since in many cases entire dynasties (dynasties that would be very different for gaming purposes) are "covered" by a single whiz-by paragraph. Some of these periods are those that gamers would have special interest in, too.
Contrast with the wisdom of design in GURPS Japan, where the book focuses on two specific and most-gameable periods, and there you have a book that invites further research without _requiring_ further research. You can run a campaign with it. With China, you basically have a brochure to take with you to the public library. Not a bad book in general terms, but an unforgiveably worthless RPG worldbook.
Having GM'ed campaigns with both books, I retain a measure of respect for the work put into each, but of the two, GURPS Japan is an excellent worldbook. In play, the only function GURPS China ended up having in our GURPS China campaign was the character-naming page. :/
GURPS China would be comparably useless in a Steampunk or any modern run, because while it "covers" the necessary eras, it "covers" them only by glossing rapidly past them, because in 128 pages, the more you cover, the less you actually provide.
GURPS Russia was, naturally, modeled on the GURPS Japan approach, because I always design for the gaming table, not the bookshelf ;)
Mmm, GURPS. I've got quite a few, but I certainly don't have 100. Egad.
ReplyDeleteI concur with the ones mentioned here so far.
GURPS Age of Napoleon - Along with GURPS Scarlet Pimpernel, it fills a lovely niche that no other resource I have does (though Precis Intermedia's Colonial Record strives for it, and has a nice system).
S. John's spot-on with his analysis of GURPS Space and GURPS Time Travel. And thank you for GURPS Russia - it allowed me to put together a pretty groovy GURPS Vikings crossover adventure...
While I still enjoy GURPS, those sourcebooks really work as a supplement for any other game system. I've used them for D&D, genreDiversion i, D6 Star Wars (of all things), LUG Star Trek, FVLMINATA...
Here's wishing along with donm61873 for a "Romance of the Three Kingdoms"-style revision of GURPS China. Okay, maybe it'll never happen, but it sure would be nice. I haven't seen the original, but I've heard vague criticisms...
GURPS China would be comparably useless in a Steampunk or any modern run, because while it "covers" the necessary eras, it "covers" them only by glossing rapidly past them, because in 128 pages, the more you cover, the less you actually provide.
ReplyDeleteAh. Well, there it is.
I haven't seen the original, but I've heard vague criticisms...
ReplyDeleteBut again, to stress: I think it's a decent book, just not an okay RPG book (and that's the standard I judge a worldbook by).
As a readable primer on China as a whole, it's a fun thing to flip through, truly. Collectors, armchair gamers, casual readers interested in China ... any of these might enjoy and praise GURPS China.
GMS and players: not so much.
Just to be clear, because I know it sounds like I'm dissing it pretty hard. I'm doing so only in gaming context, because, for better or worse, that's where it lives :)
(Oops - apparently my wife was logged in...)
ReplyDeleteThat's cool. I appreciate your honesty on the subject, and I know your intention isn't to slag anyone.
You're right, though - a GM/player has very specific needs from a gamebook, and if said book can't provide said roleplayer with the ability to immerse into a setting, get some sense of what it's like to live and act in the world it purportedly describes, it's not so useful. Well-composed, perhaps, but failing to meet the need.
Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
ReplyDeleteHelp, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!