A total puzzle
Viewed from another angle
Is suddenly solved— Some philosopher
A cool thing about
GURPS is that it's as much a toolkit as it is a game. With a bit of work, you can use it to play through a situation from almost any angle you like – not just the viewpoint of "a few genre-appropriate characters doing traditional RPG stuff." That flexibility is the focus of
Pyramid #3/84: Perspectives.
"Perspectives" is a loaded term. Here we take it to mean different scopes and scales – whether in terms of time, space, or headcount – as well as alternative outlooks on the same situation. As this month's issue of
Pyramid shows, there's no "one true way."
- Kromm's The Long and the Short of It looks at what you can and can't afford to ignore – and some rules pitfalls to avoid – when timeframes are extremely long or short, or settings are very big or small. Because one-hour mysteries are nothing like generations-spanning chronicles, household dramas are worlds away from galactic-scale epics, and none of the above is exactly your standard campaign.
- How can you guess who was behind The Disappearance of Father Cohen? That depends on how you look at it: Was he the victim, the hero, or the villain of this evil and twisted plot? In this month's Eidetic Memory, David Pulver offers a horrific Gordian knot just waiting for investigators to delve into it. Who's really responsible for these not-so-random deaths – and why?
- Although the PCs play a key role in battles run using GURPS Mass Combat, there's no way to translate their individual abilities directly to troop statistics . . . until now. Christopher Rice's Heroes on the Mass Scale offers a straightforward conversion from character traits to TS, special classes, mobility, features, quality, and more.
- While most companies pride themselves on their long-term planning, The Elvey Institute takes "the long view" to an extreme. What dangers will the world face 200, 400, or 1,000 years from now – and how can we prevent them? Steven Marsh details how the Institute can act as a Contact, Enemy, Patron, or employer, with plenty of sample plots and full GURPS Boardroom and Curia stats.
- And you'll want to shift your perspective to face our usual features, including a Random Thought Table full of ways to shake up your setting assumptions and an Odds and Ends that turns the Elvey Institute on its ear.