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Old 10-12-2013, 05:22 PM   #1
schmeelke
 
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Default Real-World GURPS Resources

I'd like to see a GURPS reference (probably on a wiki) showing what the (present-day) real world is like.

For example, The Solar System on p. 124 of GURPS Space or San Francisco, 2010 on p. 18 of GURPS City Stats.

I'd like to see a canonical list of cultures. So far, I think we only have East Asian, Muslim, and Western, which covers a lot of ground (and may overlap — Indonesia is both East Asian and Muslim). (Remember, for Cultural Adaptability to be worth its 10 points, you need significantly more than 10 cultures.)

If GURPS still used language skills with defaults, I'd ask for a list of languages with associated defaults. Since a list of Earth languages can be easily looked up online, I'm not sure it needs to be specifically referenced.

I'd like to see at least a rough estimate of what percentage of people are in each Wealth group.

I'd like to see a GURPS Infinite Worlds data box. Obviously, some entries (Divergence Point, Quantum, Infinity Class, and Centrum Zone) don't apply (unless you want to count present-day Earth as Earth-Beta), but I'd like to see a list of Major Civilizations and Great Powers (countries with government types and CRs).

Thoughts?
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Old 10-12-2013, 06:32 PM   #2
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

Quote:
Originally Posted by schmeelke View Post

I'd like to see a canonical list of cultures.
We have never published such a list, but behind the scenes, we use this one:
  1. Latin American (Mexico and parts south)
  2. Anglo (the U.K. and its English-speaking former colonies, including the U.S.A.)
  3. Western European ( "the Continent")
  4. Eastern European (the former Soviet Bloc)
  5. North African (from the Mediterranean coast south to the Sahel)
  6. Sub-Saharan (specifically as contrasted with North African)
  7. West Asian (from the Mediterranean east to Iran)
  8. Central Asian (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and so on)
  9. South Asian (dominated by India)
  10. East Asian (China, Japan, Korea, etc.)
Of those, I'd say you could afford to break up Latin American and South Asian further, and Sub-Saharan a lot further, if the campaign requires it. But if you want an even 10 to hit Cultural Adaptability on the head, this list works well enough.

Quote:
Originally Posted by schmeelke View Post

If GURPS still used language skills with defaults, I'd ask for a list of languages with associated defaults. Since a list of Earth languages can be easily looked up online, I'm not sure it needs to be specifically referenced.
You would almost certainly find "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (Pyramid #3/44: Alternate GURPS II) and "Speaking in Tongues" (Pyramid #3/54: Social Engineering) to be of value, then.
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Old 10-13-2013, 04:29 AM   #3
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
We have never published such a list, but behind the scenes, we use this one:
  1. Latin American (Mexico and parts south)
  2. Anglo (the U.K. and its English-speaking former colonies, including the U.S.A.)
  3. Western European ( "the Continent")
  4. Eastern European (the former Soviet Bloc)
  5. North African (from the Mediterranean coast south to the Sahel)
  6. Sub-Saharan (specifically as contrasted with North African)
  7. West Asian (from the Mediterranean east to Iran)
  8. Central Asian (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and so on)
  9. South Asian (dominated by India)
  10. East Asian (China, Japan, Korea, etc.)
Of those, I'd say you could afford to break up Latin American and South Asian further, and Sub-Saharan a lot further, if the campaign requires it. But if you want an even 10 to hit Cultural Adaptability on the head, this list works well enough.

You would almost certainly find "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (Pyramid #3/44: Alternate GURPS II) and "Speaking in Tongues" (Pyramid #3/54: Social Engineering) to be of value, then.
Thanks for the list! Though I do notice that it seems to mismatch several canonical mentions of a single 'CF:Western'.
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Old 10-13-2013, 09:02 AM   #4
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

When we were discussing a 1920's horror campaign we came up with a list fo 25-30 cultures (I think). I can dig up the list but it's not canonical, of course.
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Old 10-13-2013, 03:37 PM   #5
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

I'm working on a 1930s game so a 1920s list would be useful. I would expect that there might be more in that era then now, less mass media and slower, costlier travel.
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Old 10-13-2013, 06:34 PM   #6
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
We have never published such a list, but behind the scenes, we use this one:
  1. Latin American (Mexico and parts south)
  2. Anglo (the U.K. and its English-speaking former colonies, including the U.S.A.)
  3. Western European ( "the Continent")
  4. Eastern European (the former Soviet Bloc)
  5. North African (from the Mediterranean coast south to the Sahel)
  6. Sub-Saharan (specifically as contrasted with North African)
  7. West Asian (from the Mediterranean east to Iran)
  8. Central Asian (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and so on)
  9. South Asian (dominated by India)
  10. East Asian (China, Japan, Korea, etc.)
Of those, I'd say you could afford to break up Latin American and South Asian further, and Sub-Saharan a lot further, if the campaign requires it. But if you want an even 10 to hit Cultural Adaptability on the head, this list works well enough.

You would almost certainly find "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (Pyramid #3/44: Alternate GURPS II) and "Speaking in Tongues" (Pyramid #3/54: Social Engineering) to be of value, then.
Huh. I've been grouping 'Anglo' and 'Western European' together as 'Western', since those are the areas that people mostly seem to refer to when speaking of 'the Western World' or 'Western civilization'. How generally important is that?
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Old 10-13-2013, 07:25 PM   #7
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

Quote:
Originally Posted by dcarson View Post
I'm working on a 1930s game so a 1920s list would be useful. I would expect that there might be more in that era then now, less mass media and slower, costlier travel.
Quote:
Africa:
Bantu
Bushmen
Ethiopian
Nilotic-Saharan
West African

Amerindians:
Arctic North America
Central America
North America
South Amerindians (East)
South Amerindians (West)

Arctic:
Inuit
Samit
Siberian Indigenous

Asia:
Buddhist (much of Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, Tibet)
Central Asian
Chinese (mostly China)
Hindu (mainly India and nearby areas, Bali)
Japanese
Korean
Mongolian

European-derived:
Germanic (most of the USA, the usual Germanic-speaking peoples, German minorities in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states depending on who you're talking to, Finland, Estonia)
Latin (the Latin language speaking people in Europe and Québec, LatinAmerica)
Balto-Slavic (mainly Eastern Europe, Russia and the Baltic states)

Islamic World:
Near East (Egypt, Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, Persia)
Saharan Nomads
Central Asian Muslim
Indian Muslim (East and West Pakistan)
South-East Asia Muslim (Indonesia, Malaysia and environs)

Oceania:
Australian Aborigines
West Pacific (Micronesia, Melanesia)
East Pacific (Polynesians)
And countless of minor CFs. It began as a project to include all human cultures, but the workload soon overwhelmed me. It's really impossible to include all human cultures - the variability is too large. If I ever play in medieval Europe, I might use the list in Crusader Kings II.
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Old 10-13-2013, 10:17 PM   #8
Peter Knutsen
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

Quote:
Originally Posted by schmeelke View Post
I'd like to see a canonical list of cultures. So far, I think we only have East Asian, Muslim, and Western, which covers a lot of ground (and may overlap — Indonesia is both East Asian and Muslim). (Remember, for Cultural Adaptability to be worth its 10 points, you need significantly more than 10 cultures.)

If GURPS still used language skills with defaults, I'd ask for a list of languages with associated defaults. Since a list of Earth languages can be easily looked up online, I'm not sure it needs to be specifically referenced.
A list of Cultures, divvying modern day Earth up into 16-15 CFs, would be very nice indeed. When I looked into the subject for one of my old RPG design projects, Modern Action RPG, my conclusion was that I'd have to divide Cultures up into Major Cultures, covering large amounts of world real estate and costing a fairly amount each to know, and Minor Cultures, covering much smaller amounts of world real estate, and being much cheaper to know, but each one also being fairly obscure. Of course, I didn't have a "target" number, because that system didn't have anything analogous to GURPS' Cultural Adaptability.

To do something like that in GURPS, you'd have a Major CF cost 2 CP, and a Minor CF cost 0.5 CP (so you get 2 for 1 CP), and then define various subsets of Africa and so forth, and the Inuits, as Minor Cultures. Done that way, it's probably quite doable to match the 10 CP "target", without having to do silly things like split The West into Anglo vs Continent.

As for modern Languages, the PK guy has a list over on his MyGURPS website that looks fairly good. At least he knows enough about Languages to group the Scandinavian ones as a single Langauge, something I do too. Just google the site name, if you don't stumble over the link in his forum signature.

I once wrote up a list of Languages for my 10th century Ärth historical fantasy setting, but it's rather old, so I'd prefer not to share it until I've updated it.

If you want to get an idea of how closely different Languages are related to each other, e.g. whether they should "default" to each other at 1 or 2 levels lower, you can take a look at the Hero System RPG, either the 5th Edition Revised (or maybe unRevised), or for an even more massive example The Ultimate Skill for 5th Edition. Although the same material is probably present in 6th Edition and it's version of TUS. Hero System uses a more fine-grained system of Language Ability, though, so you'll have to convert to adapt the materail for use with GURPS.
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Old 10-13-2013, 10:19 PM   #9
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Originally Posted by Asta Kask View Post
And countless of minor CFs. It began as a project to include all human cultures, but the workload soon overwhelmed me. It's really impossible to include all human cultures - the variability is too large. If I ever play in medieval Europe, I might use the list in Crusader Kings II.
Yeah, it's probably a bit foolish to strive to write a complete list of what I'd classify as Minor Cultures. But trying to cover "most of them" might be doable.

As for the list in Crusader Kings, it's obviously not suitable for my Ärth setting, since it doesn't have Geats and Svea as separate cultures.
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Old 10-14-2013, 12:43 AM   #10
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Default Re: Real-World GURPS Resources

I tried the "lots of Cultural Familiarities" option in an older fantasy campaign. The players were not impressed. It simply isn't fun when Combat Guy's fighting abilities, Sneaky Woman's thieving skills, and Magical Thing's spells all work at 100% effectiveness in Faroffia, but Face Lady is constantly being hosed for -3. Players will respond by giving all face characters Cultural Adaptability, making the GM's work on cultures kind of irrelevant . . . and non-face characters won't bother putting a point into a couple of social skills for color, because at -3, it won't be worth it. You'll end up with Face and the Silent Trio, and it'll be hard to argue against Face just covering for the Trio, because she paid points to be their spokeswoman – that's what "face" means.

Which isn't to say that "lots of Cultural Familiarities" is a bad thing! This is just a caution that then you also want travel to be special, and fish-out-of-water roleplay to be a major focus, so the -3 isn't just a penalty but also a challenge, even an adventure. You can also make it work if social interaction is just about irrelevant, so that the -3 almost never comes up. However, if you're running a high-powered, globe-trotting game where travel – especially fast, long-distance travel as by jet or teleportation portal – is routine, and where larger-than-life social interaction is a vital niche on a par with heroic combat, impossible heists, etc., then you're better off having just a handful, because the -3 will mostly be an obstruction to the Rule of Awesome.
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