[whswhs]

I've actually seen several different types of book that could be called a "setting":

A quick sketch of a game world, one that gives a rough idea of what's where and a starting point, but expects the GM to fill in all the details for the particular campaign they want to run, included as part of a book that also does other stuff, such as a genre book or rulebook

A comprehensive atlas of a game world, with maps and statistics and information on all the important people, within which a GM can pick a location and make up adventures

A detailed guide to a smaller setting, with a whole series of built-in possible plot threads, predesigned character writeups, significant locations, and connections among them, so that you have a bunch of encounters waiting to happen, any one of which could turn into an adventure

A guide to a smaller setting with a preplotted adventure running through it, with all the details presented in the specific order in which they'll be encountered during the adventure

Now, GURPS certain has the first, in profusion: my own Roma Arcana, the various Alternate Earths, and a bunch of shorter sketches from various supplement for both 3/e and 4/e. And it has the second, at least in the form of Transhuman Space, which is an incredibly well worked out milieu. I think a case could be made that GURPS Cabal (for 3/e) and GURPS Banestorm (for 4/e) are sufficiently detailed to count as examples of the same thing.

What it doesn't have is an example of the third or fourth. But there aren't many good examples of either of those. I've used the old RuneQuest supplement Griffin Mountain, which is the third, and White Wolf's Midnight Circus, which is sort of a miniaturist variant on it; I've offered to run Beyond the Mountains of Madness (for Call of Cthulhu), and I understand there's a comprehensive campaign book available for Pendragon that's well thought of. But it's a huge labor to come up with such a product. And you really need to have fans of a specific world before it's profitable to write a book of this sort set within that world. GURPS fans have more diverse tastes than that; I think any such book would risk being a niche product. I mean, "I want to play a RuneQuest campaign set in Glorantha" lead pretty easily to "here's the remote land of Balazar, filled with adventures waiting to happen"; but "I want to play a GURPS campaign" doesn't lead directly to "set in . . . ." Any one setting you pick is going to appeal to only a subset of GURPS fans.

And if you take the same idea and shrink it to 32 pages or so, then either you'll be giving just a quick, low-detail sketch of the setting, or you'll be giving a single adventure with a single plot . . . which is a different type of product.

Bill Stoddard