For those of you who love space mercenaries, there’s more to game with, if not necessarily more to love. Genevieve Cogman’s wryly loving GURPS Vorkosigan Saga (238-page full-color hardback, $35; $30 as PDF) covers the ructions of Lois McMaster Bujold’s size-challenged and galaxy-challenging aristocrat, Miles Vorkosigan, in fine form. About 100 pages are pure source material: canon NPCs, races, planets, tech, and so forth. Another 44 pages are a retuned version of GURPS Lite — like Miles himself, short but startlingly effective — making the game complete in one book. Add 48 more pages of spaceships (with plenty of worked examples) and a dedicated space combat system, and you’re left with only about 30 pages to answer the killer question all RPGs, especially licensed RPGs, face: “What do I do with this?” If you already know the answer — if you’re a fanatical wanna-Bujoldian with stories aching to be told — this book will backstop you admirably. If not, there’s not much in the way of hand-holding to get you there. One can argue that between Bujold’s epic novel series on one hand, and GURPS‘ epic pile of sourcebooks and campaign frames on the other, you shouldn’t have any shortage of raw material. But I’d say you might still want some guidance refining it.
A similar criticism could obtain in Gareth Hanrahan’s straight-shooting Traveller adaptation of David Drake’s mercenary-fic Hammer’s Slammers (206-page full-color hardback, $40; $28 PDF) from Mongoose. It, too, devotes 150-odd pages to its source material, with Trav stats for AFVs, planets, and NPC mercenaries from Drake’s books. (And it has its own setting-specific combat sub-system, this one for tank battles.) And again, this is pretty much de rigeur, and indeed downright essential, in a licensed property, and doubly so in an F/SF property where the basic assumptions have to be literally spelled out in game-mechanical terms. Like Cogman, Hanrahan knows his material cold, but presents it piping hot. But Hanrahan is able to use Traveller’s old-school “random encounter table” feel to get much closer to “what do I do now?” in a packed 15-page “Conflict” chapter. You get, essentially, the Not-Quite-Random War Table – which is, Drake would doubtless say, true to life. Unlike life, and like a good RPG, Hanrahan provides plenty of explanatory support with these tables: the consequences of “no orbital support” are spelled out both in rules and table modifiers, and in suitably grim prose. Add in an excellent “grunt’s eye view” diary-style treatment of a campaign (RPG or mercenary?), a sample war, and an introductory scenario, and you’re on your way to slamming with and for tools of all descriptions.
The “I already know what I want” GM will perhaps find this all too much of a muchness, but I have come around to thinking that the original Dungeon Master’s Guide knew what it was doing with all those random tables and lists. “You can tell mercenary stories of duty and honor in conflict” is all well and good, but Col. Hammer might add that to his list of pieties that’s trumped by laser-firing tanks, and by tables telling you how many of them are just over the ridge. Hanrahan doesn’t quite get that far: his admirably complete mission breakdown is a checklist, not a table (random or otherwise) — and it’s only a page long. (Followed by four pages of examples.) Something like it would have greatly stiffened the spine of GURPS Vorkosigan, while allowing the novelistic impulses of freer-form GMs plenty of room.
Tags: gareth hanrahan, genevieve cogman, gurps, gurps vorkosigan, hammer's slammers, licensed rpg, mongoose, sf, sourcebook, steve jackson games, traveller
Buuuuuut the art of the Random Table has come a long, long way since goddamn ‘expensive doxy/haughty courtesan/rich panderer’ – as e.g. Day After Ragnarok demonstrates. Compulsively tabulating trivia is one thing, writing evocative improvisatory play aids is another; any praise of Gygax’s fetish for random encounters probably ought to be leavened with the admission that he was only accidentally designing a story-game, and RPG designers employing randomness have had to swerve around his idiosyncrasies as much as they’ve jumped off from them.
Well, and there’s your overwrought random-table-related defensiveness for the evening, thank you much.
Oh, and, the gurps link goes nowhere.
Wax: I agree that there have been better versions of some of the tables and lists in the DMG since then, but the random table as a technology has been less-utilized (and perhaps thus less-improved) than other elements of game design. Indeed, its very value is still questioned. All of which reminds me I need to write a review of Vince Baker’s intriguing In A Wicked Age.
Chaosclockwork: Fixed! That’s Miles for you, though — you think he’s one place, and then he’s gone.