Reviewer gives GURPS Space substance 3 out of 5

[Pmandrekar]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

... but I'll pretty much buy anything that has William H. Stoddard's name on it.

Having interacted with William H. Stoddard on at least one playtest, and as a fan of GURPS Fantasy I would certainly have to agree!!

On the actual question of Substance 3/5 (for the purposes of disclosing my potential biases to the project, I was a playtester on GURPS Space...) I would have this to say:

There is a lot of Substance to this product. Depending upon what you want to do with the material, there is ample material for designing the things that you are likely to find *in* space, like alien races and new worlds...

While there are some discussions of government types and campaign types and even a large set of templates of character types that show up in SF campaigns, there are not a lot of materials that provide in depth discussions of what a GM would do *downstream* of a set of technological assumptions. This is on purpose and was part of the design of this product...

Specifically, there are discussions in general of how communications and travel technologies differ. Depending upon the combination of any one 'setting' for communications and any other 'setting' for travel work you could potentially have a huge set of resulting society types...

High speed communication + low speed FTL travel, for example would make piracy among the stars much more difficult. On the other hand, if FTL Travel is the limit for communication--Poof! Traveller!

There are so many combinations of assumptions that one could make that conceptually, it made a lot of sense to discuss in concept what impact technology has, and then go into a lot of detail on any one axis of technological development in downstream books.

Ultra Tech, for example, will have a lot of indepth discussion of what each technology *means* and along the genetic engineering/medical axis, Bio-Tech will have a great deal of discussion as well. (I was a playtester on GURPS Biotech too, incidentally)

The point that I'm making is that there is so much material out there for writing and running Space adventures, that complaining that everything isn't in one book (as this review appears to do) simply isn't fair to the scope of the project.

I don't know if it is permissible or appropriate for a playtester to also write a review, but I just might...

In any case, this reviewer appears to have penalized the work for not placing the substance that he would envision, but it's really unfair to say that there *isn't* substance in the work, to my mind.

There is a lot of discussion about star systems and world types... The material that 3e crammed into First In is much more appropriate (being that it's not just a subset of Traveller assumptions) in a book entitled "Space"

-Paraj Mandrekar