What we have here is an unflinching social satire of Regency London, circa 1830. Except, instead of English humans, everyone is a goblin. Except, they aren’t really goblins in the D&D sense. They’re…if you’re familiar with political cartoons of that era, or even in the Victorian period, the twisted figures whose physical traits so often visually depict their inner failings and moral decay? They’re that. Sort of like the ugliest of people crossed with Joe Dante’s gremlins. A city of millions of sentient deadly sins walking around, being the worst they can possibly be (and brought to a semblance of life through Guy Burwell’s grotesque illustrations).

Players, of course, take the role of goblins from the lowest class strata, the poor, the desperate, the criminal. The point of the game is to get a leg up. The introduction says, “The aim of every goblin should be to gain security and power with improved social level, faster than he degenerates through disease, age and the aforementioned maiming.” I should mention that the text is scathing, unflinching, strident and regularly very funny. I find it hard to find the correct words to convey my awe at this game, that in addition to pillorying Regency society of nearly two centuries ago, also somehow sees into the dark heart of 21st century life.

To wit: “The ruins and dungeons are far from uncharted — the only creature who never explores them is the landlord who rents them out.” I mean, damn. That’s some Ambrose Bierce shit right there.

Honestly, the goblins are kind of a red herring — remove their desperate parodying and you basically have an incredibly detailed source book for London in the 1830s, rife with poverty, disease, exploitation, crime and inequity. The goblinoid veneer makes it into something playable (though I would be surprised if something with this tenor found much of an audience in 1996) and brings the laughs, though I suspect they’d be the uncomfortable sort that issue when a gag hits too close to home.

A forgotten classic.

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Anyway, the RPG material is very instructional. Unlike most GURPS campaign or world sourcebooks that go all in on a specific framing, this one goes all in on the specific theme — robbing from the rich and giving to the poor — and applies it to a bunch of different frameworks. The basic, classic Robin Hood campaign can be run with just this book, or enhanced with GURPS Fantasy. But then there is robust support for GURPS Old West (in which Robin is a Quaker living with a band of Lakota Sioux under the name Splits Arrow; not sure how this one holds up, honestly), Supers, Cyberpunk and Space. Oh, and a curious framing with highwaymen in the Scottish Highlands that I guess pairs with GURPS Swashbucklers.

None of these pairs are overly surprising and most are probably rote. However, the old saw is that you can do any sort of campaign with the right combination of GURPS sourcebooks. It is nice to see that laid out in front of you, though, especially with so well-known a yarn as Robin Hood.

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The basic premise is pretty familiar. The year is 204X, and everything is fucked. The hows of that are honestly a little less important than the how-nots. For instance, as I mentioned already, the world is not magically fucked, as in Shadowrun. It isn’t even fucked up to the degree of Cyberpunk. It’s funny, because Mike Pondsmith has always said his world was inspired by lots of stuff, but not William Gibson’s work, but Gibson is so enmeshed in the indicators of cyberpunk that when I’m reading Pondsmith’s stuff it seems like a sort of dubious claim. But then I read this and all of a sudden, I can see how much more out-there Cyberpunk is, with its telepathic tanks and whatnot. Cyberworld is a little bit more fucked than Gibson’s Sprawl and maybe a little less fucked up than Underground. The corporations and the government and the cartels all feel like gangs, there’s plenty of plausible tech and violence, but everything feels grounded. You can see our contemporary world underneath the chrome, still. It’s cool.

Cool cover by Keith Parkinson, with maybe the earliest anticipation of 21st century alt-models I’ve seen in genre art. Dan Smith handles the interiors entirely and gives the proceedings a nicely unified look. 

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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.

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As you might imagine, there’s a lot going on this book. There is, of course, a beefy spell list, magic-related monsters, character builds (including for shape-shifters!), rules for making and using magic items and some notes on the various ways magic can fit into a society. Alchemy gets a treatment, too. Those sections are all, give or take, what a player should probably expect from RPG magic systems. Interesting, usable, but no surprises. And maybe even less surprises than you’d expect, given the precision in which Jackson writes his effect descriptions: not a lot of room for lawyerly interpretation here!

Now let’s look at some of the unusual stuff. First, a system for improvisational magic using verb/noun combinations. Not unlike Ars Magica? But, like, GURPSy, so you need to roll skills connected to both the verb and the noun, pay manna and then hope the GM accepts your proposed effect. It’s interesting and perhaps clearer than Ars, but also a bit crunchier? It’s hard to say, really. I probably would opt out of them. I think the brief discussion of magical aspects (basically, giving magic a variety of thematic polarities) and magical knacks (inherent, rather than learned magic) have broader application and are easier to swallow.

The most interesting part, though, is the first 15 or so pages, in which Jackson lays out the GURPS theory of magic and demonstrates the many ways its principals can be applied in play. It’s just so varied and flexible; what it doesn’t account for, you can easily see how you might make it work, and that’s neat.

Rad cover art Kirk Reinert, who liked it so much he signed it twice. A ton of interior artists with no clear credits, but this is a good-looking though consciously generic, book.

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The books are about, well, the Humanx Commonwealth, which is an intergalactic political body created through the partnership of humans the the mantis-like Thranx. It seems a rather optimistic sort of arrangement, with both species advancing farther symbiotically than the might have otherwise on their own. There are other sorts of aliens as well, including the lizardy, militaristic AAnn, whose empire is the Commonwealth’s primary antagonists. There’s high technology and ships and psionics (I believe this is the first attempt by the system to tackle mental powers, even), lots of setting information (there are apparently a large number of stories to draw on!) and a starter adventure.

I really like it! I find a lot of RPG sci-fi seems pessimistic in character, so this is pretty refreshing, more in line with Star Trek or even Iain Banks’ Culture. Yet another instance of GURPS inspiring me to track down some novels.

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Moving on. GURPS Time Travel is a masterpiece. There are far too many GURPS books for me to have any idea which is The Best, but this one should certainly be in contention. It is the definitive RPG book on time travel to date, to my knowledge, for ANY system. For real, its pretty light on GURPS-centric rules, so you can use this for reference for any game that dips into the timestream.

In fact, it is an excellent primer on time travel in general. There’s plenty of discussion of both scientific thought on the matter (outdated now, but still handy) and much chin-stroking over the various strains of fictional time travel. This mechanical pondering of time travel takes up about half the book and covers pretty much all the time travel bases I am willing to consider (I admittedly have a low tolerance for time travel stories!). This forms a bedrock upon with Jackson and science fiction author John M. Ford build a number of campaign frames, both large (Time Corps!) and small (time jumping via drugs!). A lengthy section on parallel earths and all the messes time travel can make rounds things out.

I don’t really know how to convey how wildly out there the book is. The casual discussion of paradoxes and other theoretical quirks of time travel is both boggling, deeply entertaining and omnipresent. It seems intentionally complex, like the book is trying to make you wave your arms in the air in exasperation — and there is a wily fun in that pseudo-frustration. Without a doubt, this book, sitting at the crossroads of all worlds, times and possibilities, is the true and secret heart of GURPS.

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Anywho, I am not sure what to call Orcslayer. I would not call it a combat supplement, actually — that implies to me that there are new combat rules. It introduces Yrth, a campaign setting that would later be expanded on in GURPS Fantasy, but it really isn’t a setting book — you just get some bare bones sketching of a locality and its politics and factions. Most of the book is dedicated to nine combat scenarios linked by roleplaying vignettes. These aren’t nearly robust enough to constitute a “campaign” and they don’t really feel like what I’d call an adventure, though I suppose that is the closest to what it is in form. I like the formatting, actually, with the roleplaying interludes clearly framed out before and after the equally clearly presented tactical battles. There is a lot of advice on how to run the battles effectively and most of them have interesting criteria and special rules that make them all feel different and exciting. I enjoy how linear the whole thing is, and how the writing acknowledges it but advising the GM to pretend to roll for things like NPC reactions that are preordained.

Excellent David Martin cover, too. I feel like he was really practicing his Frazetta-style butts for this one.

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That aside, this is exactly what it purports to be: the combat rules from GURPS. There are two configurations. Basic is fast and relatively easy. Advanced is much more involved, uses hexes and directionality and is, essentially, an evolutionary step from Fantasy Trip. There is not a lot of art, and what there is shows up again in the GURPS rules. I’m sad my copy doesn’t have the chits. Love the Denis Loubet cover, though!

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It is a pretty stacked box! You get some rad chits, two rulebooks, a solo adventure, a group adventure, character sheets and a reference booklet. In light of Steve Jackson’s history with boxes (Metagaming decided, somewhat foolishly, to not issue the fully realized Fantasy Trip RPG in a box), seeing all this stuff in a box feels like a sort of cosmic justice.

It also feels, perhaps obviously, like GURPS! There are lots of updates that broaden and refine the game in the third and fourth editions, but the core is all right here, often with art that was reused in the later books. It feels slightly more ‘80s in substance, thanks to some typesetting choices, but other than that, it feels just as homey as, say, a favorite flannel shirt.

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