From our sunny home
Outward into the heavens
To worlds round the stars— A cosmic explorer
Roleplaying campaigns require settings – and with few exceptions, settings need
details to be interesting. "The story of the people with no background in the land with no place names" is rarely very exciting or memorable! Creating and elaborating on a world is a lot of work, however – especially when it's a literal world hanging in space, around its own distant star, to be reached using speculative technologies. You really can't assume
anything in that case, which can mean a lot of long nights (and caffeine) for the GM.
Fortunately,
GURPS has always been good about providing resources to help out.
GURPS Space offers systems for working out the details of faraway star systems and planets, and of alien races and their civilizations. If you go further back, you'll find the whole
GURPS Space Atlas series. And now there's
Pyramid #3/79: Space Atlas:
- What do you get when you combine hermaphormorphic parahumans, fringe religion, a civil war, a psi-disease infestation, and self-aware colonies of altered humans living with dinosaur-like creatures? The answer is Ostara, a world tailor-made for exciting adventures. David Pulver headlines this month's issue, providing a believable history for this strange planet, plus full planetary statistics, two racial templates, a new disease, and three unique examples of fauna.
- Every sci-fi game needs the occasional "mystery star system" where things are spooky and strange, and Christopher Rice's The Vanishing Sun will certainly leave your players scratching their heads. This system appears on no charts, draws travelers from across the galaxy, converts people into eternally young "Quicksilver-Born," and even features a massive, enigmatic cube floating out by the asteroid belt. Better start untangling these puzzles now!
- History and myth are rife with oracles – strange, special folk who offered insight that seemed to lead people to their fate. Introduce this concept to your games with The SkipTime Hub of the OceanWe. J. Edward Tremlett's OceanWe can divine the choices any person or race should make, and their motivations aren't even sinister. But the source of their abilities is also the catalyst for a division within the OceanWe – one that may turn bloody, drawing in half the galaxy.
- In many campaigns, the specific details of travel time are handwaved or simplified: your reactionless rockets or warp drive get you there "in time." But if reaction mass, orbital transfers, and delta-V are important considerations at your gaming table, you may need more than what even GURPS Space and GURPS Spaceships provide. Halfway to Anywhere tackles the math of orbital mechanics head-on, with clear formulae, guidelines, look-up tables, examples, and more.
- How would your campaign change if faster-than-light travel was impossible . . . except via one specific artifact of limited use? Homeword Unbound introduces the Archway, a gate capable of transferring one person from anywhere to Earth – always back to Earth – with whatever gear he can successfully "visualize" coming with him. This unique artifact has the potential to change a campaign in unexpected ways.
- And at the edge of the map you'll find our usual features, including a Random Thought Table to help the GM maintain the sense of awe and wonder, and Odds and Ends that shed more light on the OceanWe and the Archway.