Harping on Steampunk

Every now and again, I actually get a writing gig for a company other than Steve Jackson Games. However, this being the roleplaying games writing business, I may then have to wait a little while for my work to be published... Something I should mention here because people may have heard me talking about this one for a little while now. But that's by the by.

The important thing is that HARP Steampunk, my supplement adapting Iron Crown Enterprises's "HARP" ruleset to the steampunk genre, is now available through DriveThruRPG (in PDF form; I believe that a print option will follow in due course).

I'm quite fond of this one, as it's a long while since I wrote for any kind of class-and-level ruleset. In this case, that meant coming up with Professions (i.e. classes) such as Detective, Pilot, and Engineer, cultural Backgrounds based on the Victorian class system, and creature stats for black dogs, dinosaurs, and theosophical root races. Not to mention steam-powered power armour and ornithopters. I got to flex a few odd creative muscles with this one; I hope that people enjoy it.

And by the way, I've put up the wherewithal for a demo scenario on my Web site, and I'll try to get a second up in the near future.

Trading on Trad

 

I seem to get a GURPS supplement out approximately once a year these days, and 2025's has just come around. GURPS Magical Styles: Traditional Styles is 22 pages of "how to use the standard GURPS spell-based magic system to represent traditional conceptions of magic". Well, five such more-or-less traditional conceptions that I found interesting, anyway. (Bodily, Dream, Spoken Word, Theurgic, and Mystical Assassin magic, specifically.) Available now from Warehouse 23, for a mere $7.

Boundary Movement

Just for the interest - my Trail of Cthulhu 18th century supplement, Boundary of the Darkness, is finally moving towards publication - and is being launched as part of the ToC 2nd edition project, which is getting a Backerkit (i.e. quasi-Kickstarter) launch.

Go to https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/pelgrane-press/trail-of-cthulhu-2nd-edition if you're interested. Note that a couple of the support levels are cheaper if you act in the first 48 hours (I think that's what qualifies you as an "Early Bird").

Weighed in the Scales

Another new PDF of mine is out: GURPS Fantasy Folk: The Reptilian Races. Available now from Warehouse 23. 

Me on Video!

Hey, I've been interviewed by Really Dicey, so now you can see me on YouTube!

Catching Up on Publications

 Oops, it's been a little while since I posted here - which wouldn't matter much if I hadn't had experienced an outburst of productivity.

To begin with, Steve Jackson Games published my second "Fantasy Folk" creation - the short and sweet (well, not too unsavoury) GURPS Fantasy Folk: Kobolds. Yes, the mild annoying little guys. Except that GURPS Banestorm kobolds aren't that small, when you look at them, and I'm also covering more folkloric kobolds, which came in at 245 GURPS points. Then there's the question of the myth's possible roots in Greek myth... the project was slightly more fun than I might have expected.

And then, just a little later, I released a couple more books that collect characters who I originally created for volume 2 of Pyramid magazine (i.e. the Web-based version). Pyramid Characters: Fantasy Foes and Friends has characters for a variety of fantasy settings, while Pyramid Characters: Crosstimers and Other Oddities mostly features characters for the GURPS Infinite Worlds milieu, plus a couple of others who sort-of fit with that concept.

 

(Both of those latter two are currently only available from DriveThruRPG, as Warehouse23 seems to be having some technical issues with third party sales at the moment.)

Goblin Mode

 After a bit of a lag (for, as I understand it, administrative reasons), my latest effort is now out (in PDF form) from Steve Jackson games: GURPS Fantasy Folk: Goblins and Hobgoblins. It's a generalised sort of guide to playing and GM'ing the creatures known by those names in RPGs - and not just genre fantasy games. (I'm rather pleased with the goblin template for Monster Hunters.) It walks the line between "very generic RPG fantasy" and "what words actually originally meant", and I hope avoids falling off.

Transhuman Space: What is Old is New Again

 Oh yes, this blog still exists.

Well. I have a new (small) roleplaying book out - self-published, even. (Though some people would doubtless quibble with "new", because some people are born to quibble.) Transhuman Space: The Pyramid Personnel brings back half-a-dozen NPCs for the Transhuman Space setting which I originally wrote up as short articles in Pyramid magazine volume 2 (the Web page version), but which haven't been available to new readers since that went offline. So I negotiated a deal with Steve Jackson Games, put together a 30-page compilation, and am now selling this. It's available as a PDF from Warehouse 23, and as the same PDF or in print on demand form from DriveThruRPG:

The Pyramid Personnel on Warehouse 23.

The Pyramid Personnel on DriveThruRPG.

(One note; some people seem to be under the impression that DriveThru do all their print-on-demand printing in the USA, with ensuing exorbitant shipping costs to Europe. This is out of date; they now have printing options on this side of the Atlantic.)

Leaving LiveJournal

Just for the record, in case anyone is interested; I'm dropping my LiveJournal account (because reasons), and will probably delete it entirely in a few days. It was always echoed here, anyway, and this will remain as much of a blog as I've got.

Back in Print (on Demand)

The Discworld Roleplaying Game went out of print a while back, but the thing about modern technology is that "Out of Print" no longer means quite what it used to — at least sometimes. The book is now available through Amazon's Print on Demand service — just follow that link.

(I've not seen a copy of this version; it's paperback, of course, and I'll be interested to see what the quality is like.)

First Thoughts on Dune part 1

 Hmm.

Spoilers follow, of course.

I walked out of the cinema moderately impressed, but then I often do. I’m a sucker for cinematic techniques, and anyway I’d seen it on IMAX and had just spent two hours being physically assaulted by Hans Zimmer’s score (which is definitely great). But the refrigerator logic hit before I’d even reached the refrigerator.

It looked impressive. The sets and scenery were epically vast. It reminded me of that historical theory about the end-state of all civilisations being stasis and architectural giganticism; every building and spaceship was ten times bigger than it needed to be. But then, equally, the movie itself could be taken as an art film which had succumbed to giganticism.

And dear god, I wish that Villeneuve could find a lighting cameraman or set designer with the guts to to tell him that murky fog isn’t big and isn’t clever. The murk was appropriate in Arrival, but neither Blade Runner nor this needed so much of it.

And then I was reminded of my personal response to some of the Harry Potter films. I should explain that I’ve never read the Harry Potter books, so I came out of the later movies especially thinking “well, there was clearly a story in there, but blowed if I know what it was” — but the people who went in knowing the story generally enjoyed it. Call me literal-minded, but I feel that an adaptation of a book should be more than a set of illustrations of scenes from that book.

And there was certainly a lot squeezed out from the book. Sometimes that’s necessary, but the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment when Thufir Hawat’s eyeballs turn white as he does some mental arithmetic suggest that mentats were supposed to be in there, but had ended up on the cutting room floor. Couldn’t they just have cut half an hour or so of Timothy Chalamet looking slightly angsty? Losing the idea of mentats just turned Hawat into an all-purpose bureaucrat, and also made Yueh’s attempted revenge and Leto’s death scene less interesting and plot-useful — because by killing the Harkonnen mentat, you set up Hawat’s move into his position for the second half of the plot (and grant Yueh some posthumous revenge).

(Losing the stuff about Yueh’s psychological conditioning also deprived the Harkonnens of some Evil Schemer points, and makes the Atreides look a bit incompetent in having defences that can be brought down by one undetected traitor. But then, “unbreakable conditioning” that could be broken by the baddies pulling the age old “we have your wife, bwah-hah-hah” tactic never made sense to me, so whatever.)

A lot of what felt off to me may be patched in part two. We’ll see. But that would make part two a very different film to part one, so I suspect we’ll mostly get murky fog and Timothy Chalamet looking vaguely angsty. Or maybe there’ll be a five hour director’s cut with all the Herbertian politics back in.

Unleashing Osiris (for just $3)

The latest Steve Jackson Games GURPS Kickstarter project again offers the possibility of acquiring a PDF of my creation -- in this case, GURPS Infinite Worlds: The Osiris Worlds, a brief collection of alternate history settings centered on alternate versions of Ancient Egypt. Actually, it offers the definite possibility of getting twelve GURPS mini-supplements for just $3, if you act in the next few days.

Twelve Towers and Turrets

 

Just for the interest, I recently made a small addition to my very small collection of personal works on DriveThrough RPG; specifically, A Dozen Castle Images is mostly what it says - twelve full-colour pictures of castles (processed photographs, to be precise), large enough to show to players (especially perhaps on-screen while playing by video) and each with a brief note including some ideas for game events and plots.

So that's a bunch of generic, illustrated game ideas for just one dollar...

Kicked to Start

I find myself on Kickstarter for the first time. Sort of.

Steve Jackson Games are currently running a Kickstarter promotion in which a bunch of short PDFs are made available to anyone who backs it -- exactly how many depends on how much the Kickstarter raises, but it's currently nine, and will probably rise to twelve by the time things are done. And one of the nine is my "Broken Clockwork World" steampunk setting.

And the good news is that one can get this material for just $3. (There are also larger backer levels which add other GURPS material in PDF form, making this a good deal for anyone who wants to buy a bunch of such stuff.) So if anyone is interested in any of this, the cost really is quite negligible.

The URL for this is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/warehouse23/steve-jackson-games-gurps-2020-pdf-challenge .