Pyramid #3/116: Locations

[Kromm]

As the saying goes:
It's all about location!
(The rest is fine print.)

— from How to Sell Sushi

Coming up with "crunch" is hard – all those stats, all those rules! – but that's nothing compared to the effort needed to create a truly memorable backdrop for adventure. Engaging locations defy being turned into formulas and procedures. Fortunately, there are resources that help, like the GURPS Locations and GURPS Hot Spots series. But you can never have enough, which is why this month we bring you Pyramid #3/116: Locations, featuring:

Al-Phasmaq, the City of Ships

By Christopher R. Rice and J. Edward Tremlett

Low-tech cities, especially fantasy ones, tend to get a little cliché. Most are quasi-medieval walled towns with the usual gamut of guilds and services. The port of Al-Phasmaq has walls, but that's where the similarity ends – in fact, even those are a little different! With its mysteries and conspiracies, it's also more than just a stopping place . . . although it could become a resting place for adventurers who get too nosy.

Eidetic Memory: The Haunting of Film House

By David Pulver

Sinister old houses make great locations for GURPS Horror and GURPS Monster Hunters adventures – or for any campaign where the merely creepy can become terrifying in the flicker of a frame. Film House is no exception. And unlike a lot of "haunted houses," this one gets scarier over time, because the coroner might carry away the corpses, but they all leave a little something behind.

Croatoan Point

By Christopher R. Rice and J. Edward Tremlett

Once humanity ventures out among the stars, there will no longer be dangerous walled cities filled with itinerants – right? You wish! Well, at least science will displace superstition and talk of monsters, yes? Nope. As visitors to this spaceport on the galaxy's edge will discover, the universe is ancient and unfathomably large, and every question answered brings two new ones. Facehuggers are nothing compared to facestealers.

The Pharos Lighthouse

By Carolyn and Steve Stein

Sometimes it's nice to visit a location grounded in reality. The Pharos at Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is such a place. Here you'll merely face saboteurs, spies, smugglers, pirates, murderous treasure hunters, Evil Man Was Not Meant To Know (okay, I lied), and – worst of all – tourists. A spectacle so vast the eyes fail to comprehend it and words are inadequate to describe it is surely worth it.

As ever, the intrepid Steven Marsh opens and closes the festivities, his Random Thought Table providing a nifty way of looking at locations that can breathe life into anything from a bus stop to a city-state.

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Store Link: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG37-2716
Preview PDF: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-2716_preview.pdf

[J. Edward Tremlett]

really looking forward to reading the Hill House and Pharos articles. They sound really cool and useful :)

[doctorevilbrain]

The preview PDF doesn't show anything.

[SteamBub]

Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain

The preview PDF doesn't show anything.

Might be working now, downloaded a few minutes ago and it was fine.

[doctorevilbrain]

Nope. I only have trouble viewing PDFS on this website.

[Steven Marsh]

I'm not sure what to say . . . I've tried to download the preview on two different devices (a tablet and a desktop computer), on two different computer networks, and both times I've been successful.

If you want to send me an email, I can try to troubleshoot this . . . but — without more reports — it sounds like something specific to how your PDF-viewing option is interacting with our system, rather than anything more widespread.

[doctorevilbrain]

I downloaded it again, and I didn't see anything, then I saw something on tv and the PDF appeared. I guess I had to wait. The screen was white before the image appeared, then it was white after I moved the screen back up to read something after I had read it. I don't know why the writing disappeared.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by doctorevilbrain

I downloaded it again, and I didn't see anything, then I saw something on tv and the PDF appeared. I guess I had to wait. The screen was white before the image appeared, then it was white after I moved the screen back up to read something after I had read it. I don't know why the writing disappeared.

That sounds like a rendering issue, you ight have a memory issue. Try restarting the computer and opening it up before you do anything else.
Also see if there is an update for the PDF reader your using.

[Rasputin]

Question: does anyone have any random tables or lists for quickly generating quirks, perks, and features for locations (p. 39 in the Random Though Table)? I found this to be a fascinating idea, but am pinched for ideas to keep from repeating the same ones over and over again.