Steve Jackson Games' GURPS 2020 PDF Challenge

[theothersarah]

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

but the Reign of Steel adventure is good (I see the lack of robotic adversaries as a feature rather than a bug - this is Zone London, after all).

Yeah, it may not be as exciting to some people because it takes place in one of the more gentle parts of a particularly rough setting, but it gave me a bit of inspiration about what life in Zone London may be like and what hazards you would face there.

In the future though, I wouldn't mind a perhaps longer and more involved, more "Terminator"-like adventure in Zone Denver or Zone Vancouver. That may be a bit more what some people want out of the setting.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

They have not all gone out.

All surveys have gone out.

If you are having BackerKit issues, please contact BackerKit for support. For assistance with the PDFs or questions about the campaign, help@sjgames.com is the place to send email.

[Kromm]

A few people have mentioned "Why is Starship Crew in the Template Toolkit series?" I thought I'd explain our thinking over my second coffee before work. Gather round . . .

First, it's obviously not a Supporting Cast supplement! That series is for collections of named, fully built NPCs that come with backstory, setting info, adventure seeds, and important gear . . . like Age of Sail Pirate Crew. Had I offered a ready-to-go crew with stats for a ship of a specific type and TL, notes on setting elements (say, with references to a Space Atlas volume), and ideas for how to use them, we'd have called it Supporting Cast.

It could be a Space supplement. That's fair. But I looked over Space and saw that it already had templates for crew. Those aren't bad, but they were created pre-Template Toolkit 1: Characters, and I feel it shows. I didn't want to show up the contents of a key book by offering a direct contradiction and portraying it as "support."

We could've started a new series – Professions, Templates, whatever – but we already have tons of series. We probably have too many series. And at any rate, this Kickstarter was meant to show off existing series (Action, Dungeon Fantasy, Hot Spots, etc.). "Support for a wide variety of series" was one of the mission goals.

In the end, we put it in the Template Toolkit series for the same reason why Divine Favor went in the Powers series, or why Instant Armor went in the Low-Tech series: A series that features somewhat involved systems and subsystems needs worked examples within the series.

But wait! I'd argue that Starship Crew is truly a toolkit, too, because it's a set of tools for creating crew for almost any setting of any TL, with almost any power level, realism level, tech assumptions, and social assumptions. It's a collection of trait lists, templates, and lenses to use as tools to create the specific templates for a campaign, and I'd call that a "toolkit."

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Kromm

But wait! I'd argue that Starship Crew is truly a toolkit, too, because it's a set of tools for creating crew for almost any setting of any TL, with almost any power level, realism level, tech assumptions, and social assumptions.

I've recently started a Transhuman Space campaign set in the Royal Navy, and it was interesting to compare the Starship Crew templates with the PC crew of the main ship. The crew is small and the positions are based on the Spaceships 8 crew list for an LSDV-5, so there isn't a close match, but there's a lot of general agreement.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Kromm

But wait! I'd argue that Starship Crew is truly a toolkit, too, because it's a set of tools for creating crew for almost any setting of any TL, with almost any power level, realism level, tech assumptions, and social assumptions. It's a collection of trait lists, templates, and lenses to use as tools to create the specific templates for a campaign, and I'd call that a "toolkit."

I was thinking that too, it really would not take much tweaking to use for an Age of Sail crew.

[ericthered]

I'm actually looking hard at the multi-role lenses for use with Action 4, which would really make them part of a toolkit. They're 50 points, not 25, but that's a clean multiple. Also, I think all of them have 20 points in attributes, so that takes things down to 30 a piece.

[Evil Roy Slade]

I dug up the password and have since filled the survey out (several hours ago) but no sign of any response from BackerKit or SJG or of a link for my PDFs. Is this standard?

[Celjabba]

I submitted my survey early on Thursday and got the 12 PDFs about 20h later on Friday. I would guess they run the deliveries in batch, so it should come soon for you :)
That said, you should have received a Survey Confirmation email from Backerkit. That one was near instant.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

I dug up the password and have since filled the survey out (several hours ago) but no sign of any response from BackerKit or SJG or of a link for my PDFs. Is this standard?

Please email help@sjgames.com for support.

[Michael Thayne]

I was apparently part of the smoke test, and have been looking over the PDFs for the last few days. Highlights (IMHO):

• The Starship Crew book is amazing. It's less like the previous two Template Toolkits books, and more similar to DF1/MH1/AtE1, but that's a good thing—a sci-fi equivalent of those books has been sorely lacking for awhile. It also has what is AFAICT a new trait to help with the issue of multi-tasking crew members. Note that while it's designed for superscience settings, with minor tweaks the templates could be used for a hard sci-fi game (possibly you could just replace Navigation/FTL with Navigation/Air).
• The Ritual Path Magic book fills some significant gaps in previous RPM books. For example, RPM was originally designed for Monster Hunters, which assumes demons are easy to summon but hard to control. The new book provides support for GMs who want to let players reliably summon loyal minions a la D&D or similar.
• Also, I love the BATTLE system from the Mercenaries book, definitely applicable to lots of genres.