GURPS 2013 Wish List

[Grouchy Chris]

What's on your wish list for new GURPS material for this year? I don't mean things that are already known to be in progress, such as GURPS Vehicle Design or Discworld. Why waste wishes on things that are already happening? No, I mean things that aren't even planned, as far as public knowledge goes.

Here's mine.

GURPS Horses. Horses and mules get a lot of use in my fantasy campaign, and I could use some more guidance. What kinds of different horses are there? What kind of care do they need to keep them healthy? How do they react to being ridden or led into various kinds of environments? What are some riding-specific techniques I might want to try? If a horse suddenly becomes riderless in battle, how would someone else gain control of it? And so on and so on. If this book also covered riding on elephants and griffins, that would be fine, too.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy N: Urban Adventures. I don't run a DF campaign, but I do borrow a lot from the material. Answering the question "What kinds of mayhem can a squad of medieval fantasy commandos accomplish in city?" would be useful to me. And who knows, I might run DF again in the future.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2. Even easier to borrow from. I always want more monsters.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 2. Ditto.

GURPS Survival. How do you stay alive when you're in the wilderness with no more equipment than you can carry? What are the obvious dangers, and what are the subtle ones? What kind of toll does failure take on your body? Yeah, I know, we've got basic rules on this, but I want more detail.

GURPS Pulp Adventures. A worked example series on fighting Nazi robots, evil cultists, and mysterious sorcerers while recovering ancient artifacts in exotic locations. This isn't because I want to run a game like this, but because I want to play in one.

GURPS Character Assistant V2.0. The current version is…how old? I don't know, but I know that I find it slow and clunky. I'd like to see it load faster, crash less often, and be easier to navigate.

GURPS 1001 Task Difficulty Modifiers. Yeah, mostly I just make them up as I go along, but sometimes I would like some guidance. Is this worth a whole book? Maybe just a Pyramid article with general guidelines and some examples I can calibrate with.

GURPS Cool New Magic System Built on Mundane Skills. If I'm ridiculously good at Armory, I want to be able to create a magic sword, if I'm that good at Artist I should be able to draw a picture and have it come to life, and if I'm that good at Pickpocket I should be able to swipe the crown off the king's head at his coronation without anybody noticing. Basically, magic comes from understanding how the world works really, really well, and in game terms that means using absurdly high skills to overcome absurdly high TDMs.

What's on your wish list?

[Jovus]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

GURPS Horses. Horses and mules get a lot of use in my fantasy campaign, and I could use some more guidance. What kinds of different horses are there? What kind of care do they need to keep them healthy? How do they react to being ridden or led into various kinds of environments? What are some riding-specific techniques I might want to try? If a horse suddenly becomes riderless in battle, how would someone else gain control of it? And so on and so on. If this book also covered riding on elephants and griffins, that would be fine, too.

I recently wrote some rules for overland travel with horses and other beasts for use with Dungeon Fantasy; it doesn't cover a lot of what you just asked, but you might find it useful. In addition, some time ago S.E. Mortimer wrote a Pyramid Article about the economics of horses that's available as a free sample. Neither treat horses in combat, though.

As for what I want in GURPS books, at the moment, though this is liable to change:

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters and Adventures 2 because, well, yeah, the OP says it all.

A rewritten GURPS Magic that doesn't require reading between the lines to figure out how old spell descriptions and effects interface with the new rules. Bonus points for including a cool alchemy system and enchantment system still, too. (These are already covered by Thaumatology, I'll admit.)

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Random Encounter Tables, with tables for overland travel in various terrains, aquatic travel, underground travel, etc. etc., including stats of enough new monsters to make it worth having and guidelines for modification or writing your own. This is sort of an expansion on the above DF M2 wish, and I know for sure it won't happen unless I write it, but hey, a man can dream.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Locations: Anything in this series at all, really. It would be really cool to be able to build a hexcrawl and just plop stuff right in.


Perhaps I'm somewhat focused at the moment.

[ErhnamDJ]

GURPS Naval Combat

GURPS Magic Powers

I would also love to have the horses book, as well as more Dungeon Fantasy Pyramid articles. I would particularly enjoy some more options for barbarians and martial artists, since those templates are pretty weak. Give them some different Talents at least they can swap out for. Maybe have some options for templates of different races. The cat-folk martial artist could get its own stuff, as could the dwarf barbarian, and so on.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by Jovus

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Locations: Anything in this series at all, really. It would be really cool to be able to build a hexcrawl and just plop stuff right in.

Locations don't need to be DF related. I want a book of generic low-tech locations that can be dropped into any setting from DF to historical. My castles book was supposed to do that but I also want inns and taverns, temples and abbeys, wind and water mills, iron mines, shops, various workshops (smithy, bakery, glassblower, potter, etc), houses of various sizes, theatres, senate houses...

At a bare minimum I want a complete set of floorplans, a sketch of the building exterior, and a description of all the rooms. Other inclusions could be a brief description of prominant occupants (NPC stats are optional), furniture layouts, and some adventure seeds.

I want to be able to print out a page or two and use the building "as-is" in a game with a few minutes' notice.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

I also want inns and taverns, temples and abbeys, wind and water mills, iron mines, shops, various workshops (smithy, bakery, glassblower, potter, etc), houses of various sizes, theatres, senate houses...

IIRC, I pitched something like that a while back. That was also when I pitched Fantasy-Tech, so it never went any farther than that.

[Jovus]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Locations don't need to be DF related. I want a book of generic low-tech locations that can be dropped into any setting from DF to historical. My castles book was supposed to do that but I also want inns and taverns, temples and abbeys, wind and water mills, iron mines, shops, various workshops (smithy, bakery, glassblower, potter, etc), houses of various sizes, theatres, senate houses...

True, and the only reason I haven't picked up your Compact Castles is because it would find use in my next game, and that seems a bit premature. However, a DF-centric Locations book (line) could include things like how to deal with the place as a 'dungeon' - what traps, even monsters; what skills, etc - and could easily include places that wouldn't fit a generic low-tech location book, like a crypt of a lich king or magma flats or whatever.

Not but what the low-tech location book wouldn't be useful anyway.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Jovus

True, and the only reason I haven't picked up your Compact Castles is because it would find use in my next game, and that seems a bit premature. However, a DF-centric Locations book (line) could include things like how to deal with the place as a 'dungeon' - what traps, even monsters; what skills, etc - and could easily include places that wouldn't fit a generic low-tech location book, like a crypt of a lich king or magma flats or whatever.

That could probably be handled with genre-specific lenses. Just about any building would have a floor plan which could be used in a historical or DF campaign, and would have largely the same description and stats (doors here and here, cooking is done here, the scriptorum is over there, walls have DRx/HTy, etc.). Another paragraph or three could provide less realistic adventuring suggestions: a secret door (marked X on the map) doesn't exist in the realistic version but does in a cinematic/adventuring/DF version, the depression in the floor is a baptismal font in the real version or a sacrificial lava pit (with such-and-such stats) in the unreal version, and so on.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

IIRC, I pitched something like that a while back. That was also when I pitched Fantasy-Tech, so it never went any farther than that.

I submitted a couple of proposals that aren't likely to see any progress in the near future. I'm thinking that if I want my locations book I'll have to write and publish it myself - like the castles book. Maybe a series of small ebooks each covering a similar theme: taverns, workshops, dwellings, religious buildings, etc. The castles book is getting close to 100 sales so I'm committed to writing another one of those too.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

I'm thinking that if I want my locations book I'll have to write and publish it myself - like the castles book. Maybe a series of small ebooks each covering a similar theme: taverns, workshops, dwellings, religious buildings, etc.

If you haven't come across them already, you'll want Oliver's Dwellings and May's Buildings Without Architects for domestic architecture. Both are quite unreasonably useful.

[Armin]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

GURPS Character Assistant V2.0. The current version is…how old? I don't know, but I know that I find it slow and clunky. I'd like to see it load faster, crash less often, and be easier to navigate.

Technically, it would be v5.0, but otherwise I agree with you. That's why I'm in progress on it right now. No particular ETA, but it's coming along.

Armin