I picked GURPS Grimoire (1998) in part because if you buy the current GURPS Magic, it combines the original GURPS Magic and this book. I also thought that my take away from GURPS Magic, of it providing a framework that could be applied to new magical practices would bear interesting fruit with the Tech and Gate magic listed on the cover.

Alas, not so much. It’s a fine book, but there isn’t much in the way of Jackson’s how-to for new neat stuff. Rather, the book is just a lengthy collection of new spells. My disappointment is tempered though by the fact that they are arranged by College and Sub-College, but also that there is a brief discussion of how colleges can be reshuffled for different game flavors (the example given is arranging them by color for Andre Norton’s Witchworld). It’s a passing comment, but a through-provoking one. The back of the book is stacked with flowcharts of the various spells and their prerequisites, which is cool and probably useful (and a little videogamey in a way I appreciate).

The Tech college is interesting! I like how it has to re-configure the notion of arcane power in order to kind of co-exist, and work with, technology. It implies a lot about a world, and I found myself wondering what Cyberpunk would be like with magic, and how different that might be from Shadowrun.

Pete Scanlan on the cover. Can’t go wrong with demons and books. I like his weird bat nose. Interiors by Guy Burwell and Ruth Thompson. I like both artists, but there is something weird about how their work is presented here. Too dark? Too much ink? Too big? Not big enough? I can’t quite parse out the problem, but flipping through this book is a bit claustrophobic.