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GURPS Taverns is an add-on book to Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal RolePlaying System, or GURPS.  Part of the Dungeon Fantasy series of E-Book supplements, GURPS Taverns explores that most common of Fantasy RPG settings: the Tavern…where every adventure seems to start!

I got really excited when I saw this book as I’m always looking for better maps and detailed settings for our TL3 Fantasy game. When it comes to settings, Taverns provides a lot of interesting ideas for Tavern specific characters and special rules for bar fights, tavern based adventures, and more.

Taverns also includes a few pre made taverns… but not many.  Most of them are also pretty bizarre – I found it difficult to integrate any of them into our game.  The maps are only for these strange taverns and are certainly not to scale – I would estimate they’ve been shrunk 75% from what you’d want if you’re using miniatures. If you were hoping for removable pages that you could move figures around on… better hope your copier has a nice zoom setting!

Unfortunately Taverns left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. I was hoping for some good maps and settings and ended up with a fairly limited selection. The character details, as usual, are quite excellent. The settings themselves, while not being what I wanted, might be useful to you in your game.

I don’t feel cheated, as the price is only $7.99 from E23. If you’re looking for some pre-made settings and

GURPS Stands for Generic Universal Roleplaying System.  I personally believe that GURPS is the best roleplaying system available today – it’s flexible, fun, and as detailed or simple as you choose.  Some people are turned off by how detailed things can get in GURPS, but flexibility is the key: it’s only as complicated as you want it to be.

On the Steve Jackson Forums first time players are often asking for hints or tips for starting a GURPS game.  Often the post is by a Game Master (GM) to-be that isn’t sure where to go.  I thought I’d do my part and give back to the GURPS community by compiling a list of useful links to help get your game going.

Getting Started

To start, you should have one copy of the GURPS Basic Set, which consists of GURPS Basic Characters and GURPS Basic Campaigns.  You can usually find them in Game Shops, occasionally book stores, online through Amazon and from Steve Jackson Games who offer print versions as well as download-able PDFs.

You only really need to have Characters, but if you start playing GURPS seriously, you’ll want both.  I would also suggest getting a copy of GURPS Lite, a free download-able PDF that distils the most basic GURPS rules (good for handing out to your players.)

Resources

The Big List of RPG Plots

S. John Ross has compiled a list of the most frequently used RPG plot elements with summaries and suggestions for merging elements or twisting them.  If you’re not sure where to go in your campaign, have a look at The Big List of RPG Plots and see if you can’t find a good place to take your game!

Robin’s Laws of Good GameMastering

A Steve Jackson book, Robin’s Laws is full of helpful tips and guidelines for the would be Game Master.  Written by Robin Laws (seriously) this short book is an essential read for a GM, detailing what makes good games good, the psychology of running a campaign, and more.  Robin’s Laws is currently out of print, however you can still buy it from Amazon and from Steve Jackson Games as a download-able PDF.

GURPS Campaign Planning Form

Steve Jackson Games is pretty good about providing free resources for gamers.  The Campaign planning form is a nice one, that lets a GM peice out exactly what they want their game to be like. Very useful when starting a new game, and for giving to players to let them know exactly what to expect (is there magic? Are there Super Powers? Etc.)  You can download it directly here.

GURPS Game Master Control Sheet

Another excellent free resource from Steve Jackson’s Resources page.  You can use a Control Sheet to help keep track of which player can do what – useful when your plot  hinges on something like wall stopping the players, and you forgot that one of your players can walk through walls!  You can download it directly here.

GURPS Character Sheet

SAB previously posted a detailed article on GURPS Character Sheet.  GCS is the best free GURPS Character Sheet program available.  The program includes a detailed, indexed library of advantages, disadvantages, skills, spells, equipment, and just about everything else you would ever need.   Even better, it works on any computer platform, not just windows like some other Character Sheet programs.

For more screenshots you can click here.  You can get it from Richard A. Wilkes’s site, Trollworks.

GURPS Lite

While I’ve already mentioned GURPS Lite once, the fact that it’s both free and extremely useful means it deserves to be mentioned twice!  A great primer to the GURPS gaming system, I’ve used GURPS Lite to lure unsuspecting gamers over to GURPS.  You can download GURPS Lite for free from Steve Jackson Games.

Steve Jackson Forums

The Steve Jackson forums are excellent.  You can use the site to research any question you might have about GURPS, or ask the friendly community there anything that might be on your mind.  There is a section specificially for GURPS (where I often lurk as my persona of Dantar) as well as other sections available.  Why don’t you visit it today?

D6 Probability Chart

GURPS uses 3 six sided dice for just about every roll.  This makes the mechanics of the game simple, and easy to catch on to.  SAB previously made a helpful post detailing D6 Probabilities. I keep one next to my desk when I’m making character sheets to easily see what my chances are.

GURPS Combat Cards

There are a lot of options in combat in GURPS and sometimes it can be confusing GURPS Combat Cards from Steve Jacskon is a free downloadable PDF that you can print off, cut out, and hand out to your players in game.  We’ve found they make combat a breeze (especially for new players.)

That’s it for now.  I hope some of these resources help you and your players out in your games!

Are you a GURPS roleplayer? Are you still using pencils and paper for your character sheets? If so you need to seriously consider GURPS Character Sheet. GCS is free, works on pretty much every computer and is maintained and frequently updated, and is approved by Steve Jackson Games. The creators appear to work diligently to keep the program in sync with official GURPS changes. Did I mention it was 100% Free?

This program will change the way you roleplay! Generate new characters in a heartbeat, browse through a library of advantages and disadvantages that even has the source page listed! If you use GURPS you need to download this and check it out.  Featured at right is Arick Vordan, Master Wizard.  Other screenshots are available here.

It has a few faults, specifically it lacks a few features of GURPS Supers. Eventually I’m sure the developers will fix this as they all seem to be active roleplayers themselves. Steve Jackson Games had a previous program called GURPS Character Builder,  and have a current program called GURPS Character Assistant.  Character Assitant receives updates when new books are released, something Gurps Character Sheet does not have, however GCS is regularly updated.  The official Character Builder from Steve Jackson Games costs money, and to my knowledge only run on Windows.  GURPS Character Sheet runs on any platform and is regularly updated and it’s free… so decide for yourself!

UPDATE  3/27/09  GURPS Character Sheet Errors

Some people get an error saying that a file called MSVCR71.DLL is missing when they try running GURPS Character Sheet.  If you need it, you can download it here.  Just plop the file in your Windows directory (or in the folder where you installed GCS) and it should work just fine.  It’s a .7z file, so you’ll need 7Zip which you should get anyway, it’s the best way to open .zip and other compressed files.

“What do you collect?”
“Well, everything—what do you want?”
“Can we have it all?”  “Sure.”
Dmitri Williams summarizing the conversation with Sony.

MSNBC and Ars Technica recently reported that 60TB of user data over the last 4 years of EverQuest II play will be released and studied by scientists. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and, ominously, the Army Research Institute.

Among other things (read: all things) the information will include who players talked to, when they talked to them, and the geographic locations of those players, as well as their Body Mass Index (BMI), psychological and other factors like depression, and their sexual orientation.

Once the data and the study are released, some interesting trends may become available. Already we’re told that MMO players in the study are more fit than the United States as a whole, and interestingly that players on Roleplaying Servers are more prone to have higher levels of depression.  Players also tend to play with individuals that they know personally and who are geographically close to them.  Numbers on the percentage of gay players has yet to be released, I’m curious if the MMO population is higher than the general population.

In my personal experience of playing MMOs it certainly seems like there are more gay people around, however I suspect this may be because more people are “out” in MMOs, due to the consequence free environment these games provide.

The data in the study has been made anonomous, with no user names (real or otherwise) apparently involved.

A niche movie if ever there was one, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising follows both the real life and roleplaying fantasy life of a group of, you guessed it, Gamers.  Roleplayers to be specific.   The film shifts, akwardly, between poorly acted scenes around a gaming table, and slightly better acted scenes (not by much though) set in the fantasy world in which the gamers are roleplaying.

Gamers has a number of laughable scenes, like the unprovoked murder of several innocent peasants throughout the movie, killed out of boredom with the GM.  Sadly there aren’t enough of these diamonds in the rough, and many scenes go on far longer than they should.

If you’re a roleplayer and you’re watching this movie with someone who isn’t, you might find the whole thing embarrassing…  not just for how bad the film itself is but for how bad actual roleplayers act in-game, and at how dorky a hobby roleplaying really can be.

The thing that really pulls the movie down is the acting.  It is as though my gaming friends and I decided to get together and film a movie with whatever we had lying around…. which looks to be the story with Gamers. At times I almost got the feeling the movie was trying to be a cult classic (an aspiration it never rises to.)

The spirit of the film endures though:  a mostly good natured look at roleplaying games, pointing out the absurdities of several conventions, and for actual roleplayers probably bringing back some fond memories of wacky games of their own.  Near the end it even tries to draw a line between muchkin players (out to win at all costs) and those who play for the story telling element, for what roleplaying should “really” be.

Is this movie for you?  If you roleplay and have some time to kill (and don’t mind some poorly acted scenes) you might like it.  For almost everyone else, probably not.

2   Dice Out Of   5  (Nice Try)

Last year SAB posted some Hex Map Tavern Interiors.  Recently there was a post requesting Hex Map Tavern Interiors over at Steve Jackson Forums and Daniel Smith posted some interesting Tavern Maps designed by him.   Smith’s taverns are highly detailed, with each room’s purpose indexed.  Everything also looks to be period correct for a TL3-4 tavern.  Go check it out!

Thaumatology is an add-on book to Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal RolePlaying System, or GURPS.  Thaumatology’s purpose is to expand upon ideas and systems first covered in GURPS Magic.  I first heard about Thaumatology when I started researching ways to change how my gaming group handles magic in our games and discovered Unlimited Mana on the Steve Jackson Forums.

The system was quite different than what we had been using, and I thought it had some real potential.  After a lot of experimenting with Unlimited Mana we decided to stick with the base Magic system, but I read that GURPS would canonize Unlimited Mana in their upcoming book, calling it Threshold Limited  Magic.

I was somewhat dissapointed in the coverage Threshold Limited Magic gets in Thaumatology.  The topic gets a scant 7 pages, but it is covered thoroughly.  While Thaumatology did dissapoint me with Unlimited Mana, I was quite impressed with the breadth and completeness of its coverage of many other Magic modifications (both major and minor), rules variants, and campaign ideas.

The actual book itself is as impressive as all Fourth Edition books have been: bright colors, great artwork, and easy to understand layout.  Like many GURPS books I find myself just browsing Thaumatology casually, rather than reading it front to back, finding new and interesting ideas for our campaigns.

The price is a bit high for my tastes, 40 dollars for a physical copy and 30 dolalrs for a PDF.  You can find the physical copy for less on Amazon and occasionally Ebay though, and I generally prefer a physical copy of my books.  If you use Magic in your game, Thaumatology is a good addition to your gaming library.

I love to roleplay. A lot! It occurred to me today that my fellow roleplayers and I have created a large number of tools, utilities, and charts that have made our lives infinitely easier… and I’d like to share those with everyone. I frequent the forums over at Steve Jackson Games, so I thought I’d start posting some of the various tricks of the trade we use.

This is one I have posted next to my desk and use whenever I make a new character… it’s a a D6 probability chart (or more accurately, a chart that shows the probabilities of various rolls of 3 six sided dice.)

As a general warning, I’m not anything close to a mathematician. I have no idea what the origins of this chart are, except that we found them on a forum…. somewhere! If this is your work let me know and I’ll attribute you properly!

Printer Friendly Version

If you’d like to print this out, you might have better luck with this
Printer Friendly Version (click to enlarge.)

In roleplaying games character interactions often require “”reaction rolls.”" In GURPS, the system we use, the higher your roll of 3 six sided dice, the better your reaction from the non-playing-character ( NPC). If you have an advantage such as “”attractive”" or anything similar the reaction is modified by what gender the NPC is attracted to. I’m sure the majority of roleplayers assume that most people are straight, and ignore the possibility of gay NPCs… we’ve come up with a novel solution to this: The Gay Dice.

We have a D10 that has the 0 colored in, and we use it as a quasi Kinsey Scale for the character, where 0 means exclusively homosexual, and anything higher is heterosexual. (we’ve generally agreed that 1 means bisexual, or “open to experimentation” at the least.) While this is not exactly a “Kinsey Dice” it does guarantee a 1 in 10 chance of interacting with a gay NPC, which is what some studies have estimated the gay population to be (other studies have estimated 1 in 20 or higher, the lower the probability the study predicts the more likely it is that a conservative had their fingers in the funding.)

As a final note, I know we should be calling it the “Gay Die.” I’ve always hated the singular form of Dice, and I don’t think many people use it anyway (even though they should.) Gay Die also sounds like some kind of hate group, so the “Gay Dice” it is!

A few years ago I saw a documentary about Star Trek’s fans and Star Trek conventions called “Trekkies.” It took an unabashed look at Star Trek’s fans and focused on several who most would believe have taken it too far.  As a Star Trek fan myself I found the entire experience to be  interesting and in some ways unsettling.

I’ve been to Star Trek conventions (where at least once I wore a uniform), I may own a few shirts that have a logo or two on them, and I have an unnaturally encyclopedic knowledge of all manner of Star Trek minutia.  This said, many (not all) of the people chosen in “Trekkies” appeared to be the most highly distilled form of Star Trek fans, giving homage to the origin of the word fan: fanatic. The documentary wouldn’t have been as interesting otherwise of course. Monster Camp is a similar experience, especially if you roleplay like my friends and me.

In a way I’ve always thought of roleplaying as a blend of “playing” like when you were a child, and telling a story collectively.  Most roleplayers, myself included, usually play in their living room or around a kitchen table with game books and other tomes piled up and character sheets scattered in front of the players. There is one director of the story, a Game Master (GM) and a game session usually lasts a couple hours.  Monster Camp takes it more than a few steps further.

The documentary follows a group of Live-action Roleplayers, or  LARPers , who are members of the New England Roleplaying Orginization (NERO)   The players of NERO like to roleplay, only in full costume (usually), outside, and in large numbers.  They are pretty dedicated, at times in the movie the temperature drops below 0, yet they remain in costume throughout.

During the course of the documentary it looks like most people are having a lot of fun, but you get a sinking sense throughout that things aren’t quite right with many of the players.  The leader of their chapter constantly complains about one thing or the other, from not enough directors (kind of like game-masters) to drama between many of the players.

Speaking of drama, this movie’s players have a lot of it (and not the thespian kind.)  From petty jealousy about a rival’s  girlfriend to a couple that had met and broken up during their LARPing, it’s sometimes surreal.  It serves as an interesting reminder that many of these players are real people and that occasionally their real life problems enter their game.

It’s also pretty clear that some players are severe escapists.  Some notable examples are Carter, who lives with Brandon. Brandon graduated from High School, works at a grocery store, and seems to be putting off going to college.  Carter lives with Brandon, apparently for free, doesn’t have a job and plays World of Warcraft when Brandon is gone, and video games when he’s there.  Dave, one of the directors plays WOW constantly to the point that his daughter told him he needs to spend more time with her, and less on WOW.  His solution? Make a new computer and install WOW on it so they can play together.  I’m not sure this is exactly what his daughter had in mind.  In the end he makes the poor decision to buy the local chapter of NERO, which I’m sure will only divide him from his family responsibilities further.

It’s not all bad news though. Interestingly a number of parents seem to play NERO with their kids.  Kelly (or Evad the Cook) brings his teenage daughter with him.  They appear to have a pretty healthy relationship and it looks like they’re both really into it.  Kelly even says he’s doing it because he wants his daughter to remember him as “cool.”  Pretty awesome.

OVERALL

Through a mirror darkly indeed.  Just like Trekkies, I saw reflections of myself in this movie… usually disturbingly so. I think my friends and I will be sticking to the kitchen table.  The film is very well made and fun, the people are complicated and interesting, and the subject matter is bizarre enough to keep your attention.

5 Dice Out Of 5   (Super Awesome)