Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > Roleplaying in General

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 07-13-2019, 08:13 PM   #1
Michael Thayne
 
Michael Thayne's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2010
Default Review: The Floor Plan series

A few months ago, I posted a plea for sources for hex maps of modern locations suitable for use with GURPS. A few people recommended various products on RPGNow, some of which I bought and which turned out to be decent, but many were kind of meh—the scale would be off by a factor of 1.5 or so, or it felt like the author had slapped some geometric shapes together and called it a [location type] without much regard for how real locations of that type are actually laid out. So I was very curious when I saw SJGames had come out with PDF versions of something called the "Floor Plans" series over the past two months.

Short review: the Haunted House and the Underground Lab are both amazing. Both are somewhat misnamed—the "Haunted House" is a huge mansion with lots of well thought-out details like servants' quarters and a servants entrance, and it doesn't have to be haunted if you would rather it be, say, the residence of a super hero or villain. Meanwhile, the underground lab is actually an Atlas F launch facility, and comes in two version: an AFAICT quite accurate "real" version, and a "decommissioned and converted into a mad scientist's base" version. Unlike some other hex maps I've seen for scale, the furniture in both is actually consistent with 3-foot hexes, making them appropriate for a GURPS games.

Unfortunately, I can't quite recommend the other offering, the Mall of the Dead. At a micro-level everything is fine, the problem is that there isn't enough mall. It's only slightly bigger than the Haunted House, when in the real world, it's commonplace for a single department store within a mall to be larger than the largest mansions in the world (excluding actual palaces and odd cases like the skyscraper in India used as the private residence of a single family). Really, rather than trying to give you an entire mall, this book should have been designed as a set of representative segments of mall.

But this shouldn't distract from the Haunted House and Underground Lab both being totally great resources. So glad to have bought both of them.
Michael Thayne is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 08:19 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.