Review: GURPS Realm Management

I liked it. More space
is dedicated to the title
of the book than to the
art on the cover.

Boardroom and Curia introduced metrics for objectively measuring an organization, but one shortcoming that occurred to me when looking at that book is there wasn't a lot of advice of how to bring to bear the power that an organization might provide for or against a party of PCs. It included ideas on how to administer it, but to what ends was not very well defined and required a lot of legwork from the GM to make executive calls. Realm Management, though focusing specifically on polities specifically, does a lot to address these shortcomings (and even mentions advice for leveraging the introduced mechanics in this book with the content of Boardroom and Curia.) Overall, it's an exciting long awaited book, very mechanically dense to the point where just reading it straight through is a bit of a slog, but if you, like me, were itching for some more rigorous administration mechanics, I'm sure you'll be satisfied. Below the fold is a more detailed review.

Review: GURPS Furries

Yiff

 Skipping just a smidgen away from regularly scheduled micro-book reviewing, I've decided to look at a book that is a bit more substantive and a bit more recent. This book, on the face of things is about running a game with anthros. I feel like it does an ok job, but also GURPS Template Toolkit 2 does more for exotic types. So, in brief, if you need help designing exotic races, I'd recommend Template Toolkit 2, and if that doesn't completely satisfy you, then you might want GURPS Furries to fill in a few of the blanks that the previously released book does not address, or that are further extended. A bit more detail after the jump.

Review: Reign of Steel - Read the Sky

As of this time, it
seems unavailable
for purchase but can
be found on w23?

 Reign of Steel is one of the interesting lines of GURPS settings, which to summarize, is a post-apocalyptic nightmare where each continent has one A.I. that has decided, for whatever reason that humanity must be destroyed. All of these AIs work together with this common theme, but each area is it's own unique Hell on Earth. Read the Sky is a short adventure scenario inside this backdrop, built for 200 point characters from the Will to Live book, or with modifications, characters built from Action 1. All told, the book is 11 pages, with a title page, an intro page, one page of back matter, leaving 8 pages of content, almost 4 of those are devoted to simple, but helpful maps. The main stab of the thing is explained in very straightforward, and mechanically helpful terms, though I feel it's a little skimpy; that's what you get from a roughly four and a half page adventure. Besides the maps, the illustrations are good, but in my opinion, the adventure feels a little mundane to me, and to repeat myself, a little sparse. This might be a good book to buy if you are already a big fan of the Reign of Steel line, otherwise, easily missable.

Review: Hotspots - The Incense Trail

Title Page

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.

Table of Contents

Review: Action 6 - Tricked Out Rides

Cover page

 I don't recollect if I reviewed Action 5 even while I was taking a break from blogging, but I thought it might make more sense to tackle this one because it isn't exactly out yet, so maybe the decision making content will be more helpful for a consumer. I dunno when it might be out, and it's not very long, but I think it's a fantastic resource for being so short. Let's take a closer look.

Review: How to Be A GURPS GM - Ritual Path Magic

Apparently it's not
for sale yet, so the
link 404s.

 So, a while back, Steve Jackson Games did an experiment on Kickstarter that involved trying to get enough people to buy in to "unlock" finished products as a stretch goal. If enough people pledged enough money, you could potentially get several short books for a very small amount of money. How to Be a GURPS GM - Ritual Path Magic was among them (when you italicize a title that has an italicized word, do you reverse the italicization of that one word?) Bottom line, I think it's helpful. Coming from an angle that I already have a decent system mastery of RPM, it isn't vital for me, and frankly, I'm neither here nor there on the system for reasons outlined in this post from Mailanka. To be fair, it can be a good system, in my opinion if it's used for the right type of game and setting. However, this isn't supposed to be a post editorializing whether Ritual Path Magic is a good system or not (I hate to say it, but, "it depends.") but whether or not this writing is worth your time. To summarize, I think it can be helpful if you need to get up to speed quickly with the system or if you get hung up on the vagaries of the system; if you are a master though, there is little of value (though "little" is more than "none.") Let's take a closer look.

Review: Pyramid #3/120 - Alternate GURPS V

It's good enough!

The alternate GURPS issues of Pyramid have generally been the better ones, and this one is pretty good as that goes. I forget whether it's the odd numbered ones or the even ones I liked more from the first four, but this one feels like third place of the whole group; neat thing is, whether or no
t the odd or the evens were my two favorite, the placement of this issue doesn't break the pattern. Hooray for that, I think! Let's take a closer look then.

Review: Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 4

15% cover art.

For better or for worse, the Dungeon Fantasy Monsters line has been a little bit inconsistent in what to expect from the titles. Better because sometimes you get cool surprises; DFM2 had some really neat stuff. Worse because sometimes you don't know that there is cool stuff under the covers; I didn't get DFM2 for forever because it sounded pretty boring from the title alone. This book though, Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 4 - Dragons is everything it says in the title; it's monster dragons 4 (for) Dungeon Fantasy. Ok, let's take a closer look.

Review - Hall of Judgement

Store Link

In a meta-GURPS way, this is kind of a special, potentially paradigm changing book; it might be the first major third party GURPS (technically, Dungeon Fantasy RPG) supplements completely endorsed by Steve Jackson Games. Its potential success or lack thereof could have an impact on future third-party supplements, so in that particular vein, it's a pretty exciting book. I backed the kickstarter at some level, forget which, but the one that gets the hard copy and the digital copies; I'm informed that my hard copy is in the mail, so this review is mostly based on the contents of the digital media. I doubt the physical media will have a world changing effect on my opinion, but if it does, I certainly will revise this review.
With that segue complete, I'd like to say now that despite the book not looking like something I wanted, I bought the book, and I was not surprised; it was very much what I expected anyway: a pretty down-to-earth dungeon delve with some Norsey trappings. I knew I am not particularly fond of most of those things and I still bought it hoping that maybe it would defy my expectations; it didn't. It was exactly what was advertised. So if you read the blurb on warehouse 23 and you like what you read, you might like this; if you read the blurb and you don't like what you are seeing, there is a good chance you won't like it. In any case, let's take a closer, more detailed look; let's see what I liked and didn't like, and paint a clearer picture of my conclusion.

Review: Horror - The Madness Dossier

Approximately 5% of this
counts as cover art.

There was a sale on horror themed books on Warehouse 23, so I bought this one on a whim, and I liked it. It's a setting book for a high power horror game where the players take part in dealing with world ending threats while having to keep things a secret. It plays with outright action elements by giving high powered combat threats and psychological horror by giving players mechanically meaningful ethical dilemmas. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and how it felt like a bit of an interesting departure from my standard "find problems, get rid of them," games with engaging restrictions. Let's take a closer look then.

Review: Pyramid #3/115 - Technomancer

Last month's pyramid.

So, it's been out a whole entire month. I've liked this issue so much, that I went and got the two other Technomancer books in the sale on warehouse 23 that's ending soon. I need to write something, and I don't have a lot of time, and I'm not feeling well, so hey, a review of something I really really liked for the first time in a while. To summarize the theme of this issue, it is updating the GURPS 3e setting of Technomancer to 4e. The articles have a bunch of different ways to integrate it with existing material. Even though the issue is focused on Technomancer, it is interesting in that a lot of the content is setting agnostic, and useful without that book. Feel free to keep reading and I might explain why.

Review: Thaumatology

Cover art that takes up over
50% of the cover!

This is a long, pretty important book. It's pretty useful for anyone that cares about magic of any kind in their adventures and campaigns, and it is big. That is redundant but true. It's also a pretty entertaining read for people that like reading over mechanics, but it is a bit like drinking straight from the hose. Reviews try to answer a few hard subjective questions about whether a book is "good" or "important" or whether the reviewer would "recommend" the book, and my answers to those questions, Re: Thaumatology are somewhat nuanced. I think the book is a very dense exploration of a lot of topics, and for people that like reading manuals, it has a lot to pick through and ruminate over. In terms of application however, I personally haven't found it fundamental to my games or mechanical navel-gazing; there are a few extraordinarily valuable gems of worth hidden inside, but for myself, I had this feeling that the book deep dived often on things that were superfluous, and when it reached a place where it got interesting, it was disappointingly shallow. Finally, despite that, I think it is worth recommending, but specifically if one has already found a magic system that they like and want to fine tune it; the tools only help slightly for spinning something up brand new whole-cloth, and personal opinion, many of the standalone systems in the book are easily eclipsed by the regular Magic from Basic Set in terms of huge catalog; Sorcery for a semblance of "balance," or Ritual Path Magic for solid fundamental mechanics for a flexible system (with a slippery power curve.) However, if you have found a system you like, this book can help fine tune them into something that matches your specifications and expectations even better. Let's take a closer look then.

Review: Powers - Enhanced Senses

The decadent illustration
on this cover is an eye
pictogram. A sumptuous
bouquet to pique
your imagination.

I was on the fence about this book for a while, and then on a whim when I was a little bored and in the mood for some GURPS reading, I decided to get it. Somehow, it precisely met my expectations; that it would cover the material it meant to cover but not in the way I wanted. I will not say it is a bad book though; I will say that I think it could have been perhaps more interesting and perhaps more helpful if it took a slightly different path. What it is is a small explanation of sensory advantages and how they might be impacted by applying different powers, so if that is what you want, then it might be a book for you. Let's take a closer look.

Review: Pyramid #3/114 - Mind Over Magic

I noticed for the first time
that the cover art doesn't
cover the entire cover.

This is a relatively new issue. A lot of issues I review with a bit of retrospective behind it, but today, I'm going to review something that isn't even a month old. That's fine. In short, I think this is a pretty take-it-or-leave-it kinda issue with a lot of niche usage stuff, and to be frank, wasn't a big hit for me. Oh well, maybe someone else will like it. Let's take a closer look then.

Review: Pyramid #3/113 Dungeon Fantasies

Take A look if you want.

The newest pyramid out today is a Dungeon Fantasy issue. This is an impromptu review because I'm on vacation right now, but whatever. Let's see if this issue is good or not then.

Review: Action 1 - Heroes

Impressive ratio of cover
art to text.

So, I've never reviewed the Action books for GURPS. Reviewing the first book in these series is always a bit tricky because the majority of the content is the templates, and I kinda think that reviewing the templates is a different thing than reviewing the books, but I kinda need to go over the templates to go over the books. In any case, this book is pretty solid and manages to do what it needs to do as well as it can do. To know what I mean, let's take a closer look.

Review: Power-Ups 2 - Perks

Take a look if you want.

The first book in the power-ups system was about an entirely new mechanic. After that, the rest of the series turned into a kind of catalog of fill-in-the-crack spackling for all the mechanical elements that might have been missing from the catalogs. Some are better than others, and some are pretty forgettable. Among them, Perks is probably in the latter category for myself. I like to think of it as a learned lesson though nonetheless, because most of the issues I take with it are remedied in later Power-Ups books which are more interesting in all the ways that this one isn't. So, let's take a closer look.

Review: Pyramid #3/33 - Low Tech

Get it, or don't.
I'm not your father.

Low-Tech is the realm where I run most of my games, so this is a useful issue for me. Among other things, it includes the famous Deadly Spring article, and some good expansions to Low-Tech Companion 3. Whether or not this issue is valuable to you specifically though might depend on what elements of a game really matter to you, so let's take a closer look at the issue.

Review: Fantasy-Tech 2 - Weapons of Fantasy

Get it!

About a month or two ago, I reviewed the first volume, itself a pretty good book, especially if you are the type who prefers fully developed "catalogs" to "toolkits" for designing new equipment. In short, while the first installment ranges from "ok" to "good" to "nifty," this book is almost a must buy. Read further to find out why I think so.

Review: Fantasy-Tech 1 - The Edge of Reality

Catomaton

I specifically bought this book when Fantasy-Tech 2 came out and caught my attention, and I thought it would be weird to have book 2 and not book 1. In the end, both books are pretty good for a fantasy setting where one wants more exotic equipment. The stuff is useful and unique, while, for better or for worse, pretty grounded in thoughtful "what-ifs?" That is to say, the stuff is cool for a "realistic" fantasy setting, but all the same, I'd kinda like to see some really gonzo stuff in a later installment if the series continues. Anyway, let's take a closer look then.