Review: Hotspots - The Incense Trail

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This is challenging for me because the Hotspots series is not exactly my favorite. This one is written by Matt Riggsby (and several others in the series are as well.) And I do like his work. This book is very dense with historical information about the Incense Trail, going several millennia BCE to almost the Common Era. It is 11 pages long, and subtracting the title page, contents, intro, and back matter, 8 pages.
The book is extremely informative, or at least, feels that way, but it has next to nothing mechanically useful for GURPS specifically; take that as you will, if you want some reading material about a prehistoric to iron age middle eastern trade center, it might be useful to you regardless if you are reading for pleasure or a campaign in any other system; if you specifically want help with stats for things like caravaners, or the tools and finances of the trade in GURPS terms, you're served better by other books, like many of the Low-Tech supplements. This supplement does cross reference several other GURPS books for ideas and recommendations though, several belonging to the third edition of GURPS, which doesn't necessarily preclude them from being useful in GURPS 4e, what the majority of games are run in nowadays, but it might require a simulacrum of elbow grease to do some simple rote conversions if you want to use anything from these books as written in the fourth edition.

Overall, this book might be useful if you are running in a setting based on the given time period and geography, which could be really interesting. I might want to run something in that backdrop one day, so if nothing else, this short, inexpensive book impressed the inspiration upon me.

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