Gurps Steam-Tech is a book of gadgets, inventions and equipment for use in a Steampunk setting. For those not in the know, steampunk is basically 19th century adventuring in alternate time lines where technology, mostly steam powered, is far ahead of what was true in our own real past. The basis for the genre are the great sci-fi novelist of that period, Wells and specially Jules Verne. The genre has had a renaissance of sorts with novels like Gibson’s The Difference Engine and (a favourite of mine) Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The book is 128 page soft cover similar to all recent Gurps “tech” releases. I will not do a run down of each and every item in the book, suffice to say that it’s full of ideas. The devices are all named in appropriate genre style (like the Phrenological Character Evaluator or the Tempest Prognosticator), the description follows and is usually well written, at the end are the stats which include the weight and price in 19th century US dollars. One annoying thing is that each item is preceded by a period “catalogue blurb” boasting the item’s qualities, while some are amusing and it does add flavour to an otherwise dry book, I would still have liked that space to have been allocated to more items. The style of items is very varied ranging from mundane to high steam-tech. Some have a very industrial feel and other are...well...very organic. Most items have some form of use for gentlemen adventurers.
The sections in the book include : Personal Weapons, Clothing and Armor, Equipment, Apparatus, Analytical engines and Automata, Vehicles, Heavy weapons, Drugs and Chemicals, Living Creatures. Throughout the book there are a small number of information boxes, like interplanetary fares, and adventure seeds. I will say that I think many of the “items” are adventures seeds by themselves. I can think of a lot of ideas coming from “Enhanced Chickens” or the “Holmes-1 Detection Automaton”.
So this is very much an essential book for anybody running a Steampunk campaign be it Gurps or not. Now for the bad points, well this is a tech book that is not tied in to any world, so it’s up to the GM to figure how the existence of each item would influence a campaign setting and it’s up to the GM to determine what can be bought at the corner store and what belongs in the vault of a mad genius. Finally I would have liked the inclusion of more “epic” one-of-a-kind items. Still, I think this is another good book for the Gurps Line and those of us who prefer adventuring in more “civilized times”, tea anyone ?
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