A Late #GURPSDay Post

On my mostly political Twitter feed on Friday, I saw the link for GURPSDay at Gaming Ballistic from the SJ Games feed. I thought I would send something up here on why the GURPS releases of Traveller are still useful.

The books work well. Every release has an index, and table of contents. It's something that requires a bit more editorial skill and oversight than most gaming producers manage at all. The various sidebars are bon mots or expansions. Many give good 'chrome' ideas to enhance the setting and adventure seeds. Even if you are not operating in the GT setting, there's some good bits. For non-GURPS players, there's enough material there to salvage for your own campaign, like Jump Masking, and a very comprehensive set of Library Data for the Official Traveller Universe. For non-Traveller players, it can be a good introduction to the Third Imperium Setting, or a source for visiting. A malfunctioning time machine could easily place a GURPS Weird War II group of PC's into Regina/Regina for a fish out of water experience. Anybody got Language Talent?

Also, there's a fundamentally good presentation of the material. The mostly colorful front and back grab the buyer's attention. The art is a mixture of the classic 1980's images, and new art makes very pleasant looking books. It's not the full color, glossy books that are D&D 3e and later, but it's a workable publication that I do not mind using and showing people. In a note of personal preference, I like the roughly leonine humanoids GT uses for the Aslan over Mongoose's humanoid lions.

Finally, the products were available to me at that point. My dad still has his copy of the Classic Traveller "Deluxe Traveller" boxed set, and I had generated some characters using Books 1-6, and been bitten by the bug a bit there. The problem was that it all was out of print at that point, but as the back cover of the GT core book says: "Hang in there Beowulf, help is on the way!" Here was a link to the ideas (and deck plans!) that got me interested. I got about half of my collection at various games stores in the Twin Cities, including the long gone Wizards of the Coast store at Roseville Mall, much of the rest through Warehouse 23 when I was on active duty.