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The book has typical production values for a book in this series. Planetary maps and character portraits for some of the more important NPCs are dispersed liberally throughout the book--to help orient the reader to the setting. Other interior art is also black and white and conveys the general feeling of the setting, alien species, starships, characters and so forth.
As with other GURPS products, this GURPS book has a working table of contents, an equally useful index and an organization that’s logical and helpful for finding the bits that you want---if you’re not just reading it straight through. The text is organized into five major sections that outline, in order, the history, worlds, library data, characters and equipment and campaign opportunities for playing in this setting.
Sword Worlds also continues one of the better GURPS traditions, the sidebar. Sidebars have interesting ideas for adventures, background stories, and other useful info condensed in little gray boxes throughout the entire book. These little seemingly extraneous bits help expand the book’s usefulness and, frankly, make the whole product more interesting. Whenever reading the history chapter (for example) seems like you’re reading a HISTORY chapter, just browse over to the nearest sidebar. Even if it’s discussing peanut production rates during the eight centuries Planet X has been colonized, it’s probably entertaining.
Getting on to the main five sections, we come first to history. The History chapter discusses, er, the history of the subsector. From the mysterious Ancients (who had a penchant for moving species from world to world and seeding planets with new species for future development) to the current time in the campaign setting, readers are exposed to the various events that have molded the Sword Worlds into their current state. This information is useful if you want to know why people X hate people Y or why such and such alliance formed. It is also very useful if your group wants to play a specific part of the subsector’s history. If you want to role play a colonization period, it’s a little easier if you know what kind of challenges the original settlers faced.
The Worlds section details the various planets found in the subsector. Each planet has an encyclopedic entry that gives an overview of the planet, its culture and how it fits into the Sword Worlds Confederation, if at all. The aforementioned maps are also provided in these entries in order to help orient the reader to the geographical realities of one world when compared to another. Aspects from agriculture to political issues are briefly covered for each world described. Like history, these entries help explain what is found where and why that might be important to a campaign.
The next section might seem confusing, as it’s the Library Data section. After all the information presented in the history and worlds sections, it might seem redundant to have a library entry section, but it isn’t. This section reads even more like an encyclopedia than the worlds section (it’s even alphabetical) and covers aspects of the SW from Aesirism to Winston. Important political, social, and other aspects of importance to a person visiting the Sword Worlds are listed in this section. You get a brief blurb on what a specific event or thing is referring to and sometimes an illustration. Again, this is good information to have as a reference for GMs and for players (it would be great to have a little 2-5 page reference for some sci-fi/fantasy RPGs to help folks stay in character).
Characters and Equipment provides guidelines on how to play PCs in the Sword Worlds. Appropriate SW-related skills are introduced and/or expanded as are the roles of gender, reputation, and even suitable character names. Weapons (personal to honest to goodness field artillery), equipment, vehicles and even a starship or two are covered for folks who want to expand their campaign with setting-specific bells and whistles. Nothing earth-shattering here, but these are proper additions to the overall picture, nonetheless.
Campaigns is the last section of the book and one of my favorites. The previous sections pretty much tie the player to the Sword Worlds setting in one way or another. That’s not a bad thing but as a sci-fi RPGer, I know that a book becomes more useful if I can use it for more than one system or RPG. Campaigns presents a number of neat little adventure seeds that any halfway decent GM can work into fun RPGing. From The Hunt for the Red August (yes, that’s their name for it) to a Cannonball Run-like seed, there are a lot of familiar and some new ideas available for adventure mining. Again, there’s a lot of potential just in this section alone.
Overall, SW is a good setting book. It provides thorough, useful background material on the SW planets, a handy history to let you set adventures any time during the area’s development, and a garage sale full of new equipment, vehicles, weapons and characters to use or to use against your PCs. The only real drawback I see is the specificity of the setting. Presumably, those interested in buying this book will already be fans of the Traveller universe looking for a new place to develop in their campaigns.
The book is still useful as a generic setting reference but it is heavily Travellerized. If you are looking to develop some star systems for a campaign for your sci-fi RPG, I recommend this book. If you’re doing that expanding for a Traveller game, I can recommend it even more.
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