GURPS Does It The Hard Way!

[ClayDowling]

I think that b-dog needed a sarcasm tag.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

That said, given the generally poor sales of those adventures which have been published, it would seem clear that people who want published adventures for GURPS are very much a minority.

Maybe, but the poor sales only strictly imply that the people who want any particular published adventure are in a minority. And I think that is the problem that is reflected in the contrast between the strong demand for adventures that we see expressed in threads like this and the feeble actual supply of adventures.

Most GMs want adventures. But

• some want contemporary adventures
  • some want Action! adventures
    • some want military adventures
    • some want cop adventures
    • some want criminal adventures
    • some want spy adventures
  • some want Mysteries adventures
    • some want thrillers
    • some want procedurals
    • some want cozies
    • some want hard-boileds
• some want historical adventures
  • some want pulp-era Cliffhangers
    • some want gangbusters
    • some want Indiana Jones stuff
    • some want Buchan-style espionage/intrigue
  • some want pike&shot-era swashbucklers
    • some want adventures for musketeers at the court of Louis XIII
    • some want adventures for sea dogs on the Spanish Main
    • some want mystical espionage adventures with Dr. Dee running an illuminated section of Walsingham's Elizabethan secret service
  • some want Westerns
  • some want Gaslight/Gustark adventures like Sherlock Holmes, The Prisoner of Zenda
  • some want Napoleonics/Regency Scarlet Pimpernel stuff
  • some want GURPS WWII adventures
    • some for Allies PCs
    • some for Axis PCs
• some want science fiction adventures
  • some want GURPS Traveller adventures
    • some want an Interstellar Wars period setting
    • some want a Third Imperium period setting
      • some want mercenary contracts
      • some want tramp spaceship adventures
      • some want Scouts adventures
  • some want Transhuman Space adventures
  • some want Tales of the Solar Patrol adventures
  • some want Infinite Worlds adventures
    • some want adventures for Infinity Patrol agents
    • some want adventures for crosstime bounty hunters
    • some want adventures for crosstime researchers and explorers
    • some want adventures for dilettantes and tourists
  • some want Alexander Athanatos adventures
  • some want adventures for the setting implied in the Ultra-Tech vignettes
• some want adventures for Supers
  • some want golden age setting assumptions
  • some want silver age tropes
  • some want iron age grittiness
• some want fantasy adventures
  • some want Dungeon Fantasy hack & slash
  • some want an Yrth setting
  • some want Roma Arcana adventures
  • some want urban fantasy adventures
  • some want Age of Gold adventures
  • some want GURPS IOU adventures
• some want Horror adventures
  • some want a Lovecraftian cosmic horror and a 20s/30s setting
  • some want intriguing adventures with classical horror in a modern setting
  • some want cthulhupunk style adventures
  • some want a Delta Green or X Files style Lovecraftian take on contemporary tropes such as alien abduction and men in black
  • some want zombie survival adventures
  • some want WoD-style personal horror
  • some want WoD-style vampires v. drug-dealers shoot-'em-ups
  • some want In Nomine adventures
    • some want them with high contrast
    • some want them with low contrast

Result: no actual adventure is going to sell to more than about 5% of the GURPS market. A majority wants adventures, but hardly anyone wants any adventure.

If your name is Ken Hite, David Pulver, Sean Punch, William Stoddard, Phil Masters, Lisa J. Steele, or Jason Levine then you can probably write an adventure that will sell three times as well as if your name is Brett Evill and your selling points are genre, setting, and SJ Games' editorial standards. But if you are one of those luminaries you could spend your time writing GURPS Horror, GURPS Spaceships 8, GURPS Action! 3, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 7, GURPS Low Tech, and other things that will sell even to people who like to make up their own settings and adventures.

The best-selling adventure on e23's Hot List is Singapore Sling, which has sold 487 copies at $4.99, doing business worth $2,430. What do you suppose David Morgan-Marr's commission was on that? $600, maybe. Not much of a pay-rate for about 18,000 words.

And most of us will sell much worse.

[ClayDowling]

Just to make it clear: I'm not some kind of super-genius that can come up with brilliant worlds on his own. I read the basic set books and found the materials for my campaign sitting right there. It's like Sean Punch and David Pulver and Steve Jackson were thinking of exactly the game I wanted to play when they wrote out the sample templtes in the basic set.

The latest installment from my campaign is A Walk on the Night Side.

There's no great genius involved. We took the wizard and man at arms templates from basic set to make characters. I made the villain of the piece out of the vampire racial template. The adventure was simply me riffing on what would make good scenes in a vampire story with my teenage daughter.

So you don't have to be some kind of genius, or have any particular talent. Just be willing to do a little bit of the work, and let your imagination run loose for a bit.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Brett

Suppose I wrote a dozen terrific adventures set in Tales of the Solar Patrol

AAAAAAAH! DO IT! DO IT! I'LL BUY 'EM!

Ahem. Excuse me. One of my favorite GURPS settings there.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by ClayDowling

So you don't have to be some kind of genius, or have any particular talent. Just be willing to do a little bit of the work, and let your imagination run loose for a bit.

Some of the TSR originals have said that they were surprised when early fans started writing in, asking for more rules and adventures. "Why don't they want to make this stuff up themselves?" they would ask. "That's the fun of it: using your imagination."

I like GURPS because SJG and the rules treat me like an intelligent peer capable of exercising my imagination. Not all games are like that. And frankly, I have no interest in the arguments over "canon" that plague the various D&D settings.

So just go and make stuff up. You won't run out of material. And in making everything up, you, the GM who is supposedly too busy to make your own setting, will eventually have made your own setting.

[Cybren]

http://e23.sjgames.com/wish_list.html#gurps

Unless they haven't updated it, they do seem interested in getting adventure submissions.

[whswhs]

For me, at least, the difficulty with writing conventional adventures is that I don't think of my scenarios as "adventures." I don't have a standard plot with a standard resolution; that depends on what the players have the PCs do. And I don't even try to come up with one-size-fits-all adventures or situations. Rather, I come up with adventures tailored to the individual PCs and their situations.

Oh, at the start of a campaign, I often have a list of situations to present. But they're short items, two or three lines long; they don't get filled out till I'm ready to run them, and the details get adjusted.

In much the same way, I haven't a great inclination to run a "campaign" out of a single book, or out of a series of published scenarios. I've used Griffin Mountain, which I have a lot of respect for; but it's notable for not having a plot—it has a bunch of settings, situations, and people, with many different interconnections among them. And that would be a much, much bigger project than an "adventure," and one I don't know if I could do, not having tried it.

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

AAAAAAAH! DO IT! DO IT! I'LL BUY 'EM!

580 copies of each adventure?

[AmesJainchill]

Scenarios?
One of the attractive things about GURPS for me is I can use other systems adventures and scenarios. OTOH, GURPS Space Atlas 1 was very useful in my Star Wars campaign, and likewise GURPS Super Scum in my Supers game.

[nik1979]

I guess it depends on the attitude and approach. The Basic Set is pretty huge, but it does the All-in-One better than any other RPG. You can have entire campaigns in multiple genres and settings with JUST the Basic Set and an Infinite more if you look at the material online.

The hard way can be interpreted as the path least taken. With such great forum support, wonder why would the OP be frustrated? Really?