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 .

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GURPS Steampunk 3: Soldiers and Scientists

http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-steampunk-3-soldiers-and-scientists

Which completes the starting set of GURPS 4th edition steampunk PDFs (along with 1 and 2 and Conveyances); to put it another way, put those four books together and you'd have approximately the book I'd have written if SJ Games had been willing to do a new-edition GURPS Steampunk.

This one is the characters book, which means a lot of templates, but I tried to add more interest with variant skills and disadvantages and martial arts styles and so on.

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GURPS Steampunk 2: Steam and Shellfire:

http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-steampunk-2-steam-and-shellfire

The latest in the little line of steampunk supplements I’m doing for SJGames, and oh so very much the highly necessary gear book.

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Occasionally, my work leads to something getting published...

GURPS Vehicles: Steampunk Conveyances is now available from Warehouse 23. It's technically the first book in the GURPS Fourth Edition "Vehicles" line, but it's also, of course, the second book in the 4e "Steampunk" line, supporting my past discursions on settings and style with notes and game mechanics for some very steampunk hardware... A remarkable amount of it historical.

(Of course, just because it really existed doesn't make it automatically a good idea. Pre-dreadnought battleships and giant balloons had their little problems, and that "torpedo ram" that gets the one big heroic moment in The War of the Worlds? Only a geek like Wells could think it was a cool idea.)

But there's also some fantastical stuff, some of it courtesy Jules Verne, though I also raided third edition GURPS books along with dubious dime novels. So there y'go; thirty-plus vehicles, covering land, sea, air, and space.

EDITED TO ADD: Roger Bell_West has reviewed the book on his blog.

More on GURPS Steampunk

Just a note; Roger Bell_West and Mike Cule discuss steampunk, taking discussion of my book as their starting-point, in the latest episode of their podcast, Improvised Radio Theatre - With Dice.

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And so it came to pass, after a fair amount of waiting to launch... My latest GURPS creation is now available for purchase online, in PDF form.

GURPS Steampunk 1: Settings and Style is planned to be, as the title should imply, the first of a new series, bringing GURPS 4th edition rules standards to contemporary steampunk sensibilities. Or vice-versa, perhaps. It imports and revises some material from earlier (3rd edition) books while adding new stuff, so you can now be driven to fits of the vapours, stat up quick and dirty steam-tech, and argue the definition of Raygun Gothic, all from one book...

Oh, and I've been updating and revising a couple of other manuscripts lately, about which I may not yet speak in detail. Related to this, though? You might ask that...