GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Even a god-king
Must humbly wait a decade
For Chinese take-out

— Segerseni, Obscure Egyptian Pharoah

Our world has always been inescapably interconnected. A moth flaps its wings in China, so the saying goes, and a day later a storm forms in Europe. Except that the true global change happened back before the moth even emerged from its cocoon, when it spun strands of thread to be woven into silk for trading halfway across the world.

GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road explores the Seidenstraße, a collection of trade routes through Central Asia which connected the world to a degree that remained unsurpassed for millennia. Whether used in historical games or as inspiration for more fantastical ones, the Silk Road is brimming with exotic sights and potential adventures! Ancient underground temples lie within the sands of the Taklamakan Desert, awaiting exploration. Rogue bands of steppe archers threaten to prey upon Sogdian merchants, who enlist trained mercenaries for protection. Abbasid spies stalk Imperial couriers, attempting to ferret out where Chinese defenses are weak. And all the while, countless cultures and religions meet, intermingle, and clash.

Tour the geography of the Seidenstraße, with over six pages of detailed maps and a full gazetteer detailing everything from nations to small-but-important towns and shrines. Immerse yourself in the wide range of cultures, learning about everything from key religions and careers to local food and music. Organize a campaign, with details for everything from trading and economics to military tactics and GURPS Mass Combat. And optionally mix this all with anything from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy to GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier. The included adventure seeds and ready-to-use character traits make it easy, and everything else makes it fun.

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Store Link: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG37-0662
Preview PDF: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0662_preview.pdf

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

This is great for what I am interested in. I am using a mix of Ars Magica, GURPS Arabian Nights and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy with a dose of Cthulhu Dark Ages so this will be very useful to me for adventuring outside of the Islamic world. I hope it will be up soon.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Awesome! That's definitely going to be BUY NOW for me!

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Warehouse 23 is back up and running.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

A Matt Riggsby supplement? Insta-purchase. :)

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

:steeplefingers: Eeeexcellent!

Buying now!

Edit: This reminds me of an old thread I posted, about trade between Europe and China in medieval ages (albeit with a dash of fantasy).

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I love Matt Riggsby's stuff. It's always interesting, useful and high quality.
I picked it up last night.
I'm going to find a way to put it into my group's DF campaign set on Yirth (Banestorm).

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

This is the supplement I've been waiting for for at least a decade. I have skimmed some of it and I am utterly enthralled. I've had a fantasy version of the Silk Road in my fantasy game for at least that long. Now I can file the serial numbers off and basically import this wholesale into my game. (I've used it for both DF and garden variety heroic fantasy.)

I'd like to recommend Harold Lamb's work for inspiration. Although set in the 15th & 16th centuries, his Cossack Tales - most famously the Khlit the Cossack stories - are a gold mine of ideas. They were written for the pulps back in the 20s, but they're very well written and mostly historically accurate. There are some (including myself) who see his influence on Robert E. Howard's writing, in particular Conan. Enjoy!

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I've got a long trade route through a mix of cultures and terrain types. With name changes and some other shifts, this'll fit right in.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I didn't know I wanted this, but as soon as I heard the title, I realized I did.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Purchased!

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay is another Silk Road novel, although the main character is travelling towards not-China instead of away from it.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I've got some...not designer's notes as such, but some thoughts on the book posted.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Thanks. I always appreciate a view into how things get made. :)

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I am hoping for a follow up book with templates for clerics of the religions found along the Silk Road along with various wizards, fighters, martial artists and thieves. I also hope for a beastiary of monsters too and also treasures with some historical feel including magic items. Of course if a book like this ever happens then it would be great if there was a very strange coincidence where it is somehow comparable with the Dungeon Fantasy line.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Just wanted to say that even though I don't have any settings set during the age of the Silk Road, I loved this particular book. Well-written and well-researched.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Put a review on my blog

The long and short of it: A must-buy if you like history, inter-cultural exchange and/or crossovers. Might be a good buy even if you don't care much for history, but are looking for something new.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

excellent

Cheers

TD

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

A clear, fair, and in-depth review, as always. Thanks!

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Matt's Designer's Notes for Silk Road are available now in this month's issue of Pyramid and it isn't marketing hype when I say that they're a must-read if you enjoyed the book. You also get a poster-sized map of Central Asia, in full color, which is the kind of funky "bonus content" that we like to throw into Pyramid. I talk more about both in the Pyramid announcement thread.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

What kinds of undead would be found on the Silk Road? Would each culture have their own different types?

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

If you have not already, you'll want to get your hands on Pyramid #3/103. The designer's notes article contains some monster stats not suitable for the book, including the Tibetan ro-langs, a sort of zombie. Alas, I couldn't find anything like enough Sogdian or Uighur material on the subject.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

The Uighurs are originally a Turkic people, I think, and so anything from Turkic mythology would be appropriate for the region. The Epic of Koroghlu as well as the Dede Korkut are sort of key epics for this culture, you can find them in any online library.
Depending on the campaign, I'd likely throw in vanilla skeletons and zombies and put some local garb on them, and many some advantage appropriate to the terrain and campaign.
Also I think the phoenix myth is big in that region (I'm no expert! far from it), so maybe an undead Phoenix (if that's not completely impossible). Would a Phoenix be undead between the time it died and rose from it's ashes?
Rolling vs. my philosophy skill...

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Ghosts of stragglers who fell behind their caravan and got left in the desert. They are still looking for someone to latch on to.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Mostly I was curious about how undead would form in that kind of setting. I assume there are many different types of undead in each of the different cultures around the Silk Road. So I was wondering if Chinese people would turn into Chinese undead, Tibetan people turn into Tibetan undead and so on based on ancestry or would it be more of a location based thing where the location determines the type of undead. Or maybe a mixture of these.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I'd assume a 'naturally' or spontaneously forming Undead would be based on the culture of the person it formed from, regardless of their geographic location, but if they can spawn or pass on an infection like vampires do in some stories, then the infected victims would follow the infection pattern even if it's not something that would be typical of their culture.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Chinese are ancestor venerators and so their undead-if that is the word-are more likely to be dead of the clan gone on ahead that are paying a visit to check up on their kids back in the world of the living. I would picture them as more like giving advise and occasionally meting out discipline then doing "hauntings" like your normal undead. In fact they sound rather charming fellows. Of course if they were given a miserly funeral it might be different. Someone else more up on Chinese lore might have a better picture. But it seems rather like ancestor venerators would just come up with a nicer picture.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Well, there's a scenario: "Help me -- I've turned into the wrong sort of undead! The shame! The horror!"

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Nope. Chinese mythology has all kinds of ghosts who either can't get into Heaven, or won't, along with ghoulish monsters and green- or white-furred vampires (the Chinese 'Hopping' Vampire is particularly notorious).

Romans were big on Ancestor worship, as were the Etruscans before them - specifically because if you didn't do it right, they would get angry. I understand many other cultures have the same belief.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Yeah. Most cultures develop ancestor veneration as one their first religions. It really is ubiquitous.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

My great-grandmother ruled her son's household wielding a large wooden spoon as her preferred weapon [1]. It's only a small step to continuing to live in awe/terror of her after she died.

[1] From the family's description, a Small Round Mace. I suspect it was more of a Baton in reality. :)

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Here is an interesting article relating to the Silk Road.

https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/budd...cated-history/

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

While we're on the Silk Road, a couple days ago I read from the book, "Shiraz in the age of Hafiz". It is a fascinating book about a city that though constantly bullied by warlords around maintained a great civilization of scholars and poets.

The section I read was about the power nexus which was fairly typical including the nearest autocrat, the local governor and the judge, the nobility(descendants of Mohammad in this case), the guildmasters and neighborhood heads, and the various family heads.

All of that can make for a good game of intrigue and espionage. It is also a good place for a stop by normal caravaners or adventurers going on a quest. No doubt the caravansaries and bazaars will have plenty of inns to meet at.

For the matter of that you might even meet Hafiz himself and maybe the local ruler will challenge you to beat him in a contest of poetry.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

A new history of the Safidim dynasty just got downpriced to affordable range on Amazon.

For a more modern idea there is the memoirs of a boy who grew up in an underground Yeshiva in Samarkand.

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

I was always curious about how Buddhism was phased out in India, I guess without state support the Buddhist monestaries just went out of business. It is cool that it got adsorbed back into Hinduism because that was the religion of the common people and they did not need state support to keep their religion alive.

I am curious about how a Confucian would be played in a high fantasy game, maybe something like a Scholar in DF?

Re: GURPS Hot Spots: The Silk Road
 

Irene Franck had something to say about that in her book "the Silk Road".