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Originally Posted by desorto
Honestly, Banestorm was a terrible example, and I ought to have said fantasy gaming in general, at least in the opening.
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Fair enough! :-)
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Originally Posted by desorto
On the other hand, a mix of sample adventures, interesting background color, and quirky tweaks to add a new twist to genre books are certainly the ones that I am likely to get more mileage out of.
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I sympathize with what you're saying, but my personal suspicion is that you probably won't see much more of these than what we've already got. Again, this ties back to GURPS' generic nature. Simply put, adventures for GURS are very hard to write, and unlikely to be super-popular. Quite a number of authors have indicated that they find it difficult to create adventures for GURPS campaigns, given the wide range of possible character types and settings. Take fantasy, for example. D&D gets away with publishing "fantasy adventures" because it actually encompasses only a very narrow range of fantasy, defined as "a fantasy setting where all the characters are fairly combat capable, and we know the level of supernatural power and activity quite accurately".
To do the same sort of thing in GURPS, an author must balance against a much wider range of abilities (a combat challenge can range from grossly overpowered against characters with no combat skills to a complete pushover for characters focused on combat, and it's easy to have both characters in one party), and the author must prepare for a wider range of magic power, as well (a setting where GURPS Magic with all the spells, 50 point Powerstones, and Magery 6 are the standard is
radically different from one where Path/Book Magic is the default system).
Even when an author creates an adventure sufficently generic to be broadly useful, it still is less likely to be generally accepted by the readership. Even a generic adventure will need tweaking to fit any particular campaign setting, and work to lead the campaign towards it. And GURPS GMs seem to be more likely to prefer creating their own adventures anyway, probably as a result of the greater number of worldbuilding GMs in the first place.
Interesting background color has the same set of problems as adventures, really. How do you make it generic enough to fit into most campaigns without stripping out everything that makes it
interesting.
Genre twists have the issue that they're almost impossible to fit into an ongoing campaign. Even a good one, that makes GMs sit up and say "Ooh! I want to run [i]that[i]!" have to contend with the inevitable "but I'm already running
this" follow-up.
Of course, I'm not saying that any of these things make inherrently bad articles. I'm saying that I don't think the reason we
don't tend to see them is due to excessively narrow themes.