GURPS Action 9: The City

[Kromm]

"Welcome to Darkville
Population Twelve Thousand"
Soon to be one less

— Kicker Steele, Steel Justice IV: Dark Vengeance

Most action stories happen in cities – or at least in towns. You need casinos and fancy restaurants where you can size up the opposition, doors to kick down later on, streets for the high-speed chase to the showdown, and a half-finished skyscraper or a grim industrial district for the thrilling conclusion. And you need enough people to explain the army of goons that somehow nobody noticed before . . . or will miss once you're done with them!

Like the rest of the Action series, GURPS Action 9: The City delivers like a brick through a plate-glass window. It shows how to transform the useful-but-sedate information in GURPS City Stats into challenges and opportunities for dynamic exploits. And because speed and simplicity are essential, it also gives you six ready-to-use communities that both illustrate the ideas and provide seeds (and stats!) for adventure: isolated Camp 23, high-tech Tomorrow, war-torn Mozli, charming Ves, corrupt Urbopolis, and sprawling Tazhicheng.

Whether you work for the city or are just passing through, try not to burn the place down.

—

Store Link: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG37-0377

[whswhs]

How could I resist/A sequel to my own book/From the hand of Kromm?

Got it!

[Rasputin]

This book has a lot of goodies for any kind of urban adventuring. Might we see more such books in the future on the topic of urban adventures?

[Phantasm]

Damn you, Kromm, for making me spend money on Black Friday!

You know I can't resist an Action product! XD

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Damn you, Kromm, for making me spend money on Black Friday!

You know I can't resist an Action product! XD

I'm thinking of a Cops-based game. You know - "This is the city..."

[Farmer]

Grabbed this as soon as it was announced and very happy. I mean, for $6-? Seriously, worth more.

Particularly useful for a game I'm playing in - our GM has some upcoming sci-fi city scenarios that he's sure will benefit from this.

[whswhs]

I definitely want to look at it in relation to Fronteira, the campaign I'm about to start up, set in the city of Pavonis Portal on Mars a couple of centuries from now.

[Michael Thayne]

Hoorah! Been waiting for this for a long time. One question: I'm confused what exactly a city in 2021 being TL6-7 is supposed to represent since the book seems to acknowledge the ubiquity of cell phones in the developing world. A lot of places might be TL7 with respect to weaponry and other stuff subject to export controls, but even then I'd say it's an oversimplification to say they have "TL7 militaries", since they will still use lots of TL8 stuff from categories not subject to export controls. But I don't know what TL6 would mean—while an irregular force's grab-bag of assorted weapons might include some pre-1945 stuff, I've never heard of a recent case of it being anything like a majority of the weapons.

[Kromm]

Plenty of towns are controlled by non-national forces, and in large parts of the world, these forces use WWII weapons. A good example would be many towns in Syria. My mother works with Syrian refugees . . . a lot of places there might be fairly called "TL5 with TL6 weaponry, plus TL8 cellphones."

Beyond warfare, look at pp. 6-7 of High-Tech. Tech level 6 is a fair assessment of any place where goods are made largely of wood, rubber, and steel instead of plastics and composites; that lacks reliable access to chemical fertilizer; that doesn't have widespread computers; that relies on prop planes rather than jets; and that doesn't see appreciable use of solar or wind power, or have much instance of organ transplants. A few cell phones and TVs aren't really enough to change that.

As the rules say, communities in the developing world might include more TL6 tech in the mix because poverty means that tech has to be kept running . . . but treating a town as TL6 doesn't mean TL7-8 gear doesn't bleed in! It means there's no local production or up-to-the-minute infrastructure for TL7-8 stuff. That's why people from truly TL8 places have penalties to find parts and support for their tech, and bonuses to work around the outdated, poorly maintained local electronics.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Sounds like this is a good chance for people to remember that TL is a convenient label and not how real life actually works. (And sometimes not how fiction works, depending on how hard its science is.)