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The GURPS All-Star Jam 2004

Now this is a bizarre idea for a product. They took 10 of the most popular GURPS authors and paid them to write up... anything they wanted. Two of the authors collaborated on one, and the rest each wrote up their own entry.

So really, this is like 9 miniature GURPS supplements. The topics are, well, quite varied, although most of them are game settings. Some of them I found fascinating; others were just odd. None of them were actually bad. I have a feeling that most people who read it will have the same reaction, just with different articles as their favorites.

Airships

The ones that I really liked? Well, first of all, there was Brian Underhill's article on the historical role of balloons and zeppelins. This sounds dull, but I found it really informative and interesting. He not only covers the history of lighter-than-air travel and famous craft, he even goes through the various technical problems and how later models coped with them.

Call me zeppelin-ignorant, but I didn't know that the crew quarters were generally inside the zeppelin itself with the balloons surrounding them, or that fuel was often carried in a gaseous form so that it didn't increase the weight of the vessel. The GURPS specific info is very minimal here; it's more of a detailed discussion on lighter-than-air travel that would be very valuable to any game set in a period where zeppelins were still in use.

Meridian

David Pulver's Meridian is a far-future science fiction setting that extrapolates the use of trains for interplanetary travel. Yes, trains. It's actually a logical development. They have invented gate technology that lets them open up a portal between two places... but you have to create them in pairs and then ship each end to the location you want it to be. So in order to open a portal from Earth to Alpha Centauri, you have to create a pair of gates on Earth, then ship one of them to Alpha Centauri at slower-than-light speeds. Once it's finally in place, then you can start shipping stuff through it... provided that it's all small enough to fit through the gate.

So, let's say that you were on the planet Tsikada (the headquarters of the Galactic Railway company). You might board a maglev train and travel at 300mph to their "beanstalk" space elevator. Then your train would go up along the elevator into low orbit to reach the actual railway station. There, they would route you into the right gate and send your train through it... you'd emerge instantly on the other side of the paired gate, perhaps at the railway station in orbit above Tau Ceti 3. Then it's just a slow descent back down the elevator to ground level, where you'd probably disembark and travel to your final destination.

So interplanetary travel has become, not a long, uncomfortable journey in a spaceship, but a leisurely train-ride. A network of interconnected gates has made the transfer of goods and information along the route quite painless, and the society of Meridian is always looking to expand their network of gates.

Add in a few more clever setting elements and some moral ambiguity (for example, there's a group of A.I. terrorists who fight the expansion of Meridian because Meridian has wiped out entire alien species in the past when they were in the way) and you have an intriguing sci-fi realm in which to place a Transhuman Space or other far-future game.

The Last Spartan

Gene Seabolt's The Last Spartan is a historical campaign setting which starts with the final defeat of the Spartans in 222 B.C.. The basic premise is that the PCs are all surviving Spartan warriors... men raised from birth as members of the most highly trained military on earth at the time. A young Spartan warrior clocks in as a 200 point package in GURPS terms.

Unfortunately, while individually the Spartans were arguably the finest warriors in all of Greece, the enormous cost of training and supporting these soldiers (who generally did no work besides constant training for battle) meant that their nation couldn't afford as large of an army as some of the other countries and they were eventually defeated and subjugated. The communal barracks, where boys were raised from birth as members of the Spartan military, were torn down and abandoned forever.

But Seabolt's interest is in the period immediately after the defeat of their army, when the few survivors were left to their own devices. In The Last Spartan, these highly trained killers are now roaming the land like ancient Greek ronin. The article concentrates mostly on describing the various nations and their capabilities. There are lots of job opportunities for a deadly killer without a kingdom, so the PCs will not lack for adventure.

A bit that I found particularly amusing is his writeup of magic for the period... which makes magic non-existent and yet omnipresent at the same time. There isn't any true sword & sorcery fireball-tossing magic around... but superstition is rampant. Someone who has been cursed and knows it suffers a lot of penalties until the curse has done its work, simply because everyone knows that curses work. To keep skeptics from just ignoring the effects of magic entirely, it takes a Will roll to keep from succumbing to the negative effects of an evil spell.

So while magic is limited to psychosomatic effects like boosting the confidence of the "blessed" or undermining the performance of the "cursed", it can still be quite potent when applied by a persuasive practitioner.

And 7 Others...

But that's less than a third of the entries. We've got Kenneth Hite's Ghost-Breaking, which converts the humorous scientists-vs-ghosts setting of Ghostbusters into GURPS terms. There are a lot of nifty details here, including the existence of "elemental" spirits which embody only a small aspect of a living personality, rather than being the ghost of a specific person. "Slimer" from Ghostbusters, for example, is described as an elemental spirit of Gluttony.

Phil Masters wrote up Alchemical Baroque, an early 18th century version of Earth where magic works. We get example stats of all sorts of fae folk, including flower faeries and talking cats. Ogres, for example, are fairies who burnt out their shapeshifting powers by assuming too large and powerful of a form, permanently damaging their own minds in the process.

Elizabeth McCoy and Walter Milliken teamed up to produce the most amusing setting idea... Mythic Babysitting. This humorous campaign posits the PCs as ordinary teens recruited as babysitters in the GURPS IOU world. Babysitters Unlimited may seem like an ordinary babysitting agency when you first sign up, but they cater to a very elite clientelle with "troublesome" kids. Perhaps Thor and Sif need someone to watch little Modi while they're out on the town (don't let him fight with the Frost Giant kids next door)... or a Lich who needs his little undead Homonculous fed human blood twice a night (at exactly 9pm and Midnight, or bad things will happen)... or a superhero couple who need someone to keep their levitating twins from flying away or burning down the neighbor's house with their heat vision (did you remember to bring the asbestos diapers? Gee, that's too bad)... well, that's when folks call Babysitters Unlimited.

William H. Stoddard produced another factual mini-supplement with his writeup of Underground. This isn't a setting as such. Rather, it's a detailed discussion of adventures in caves and underground areas and the various real-world problems and effects. Of course, he's also happy to discuss various unrealistic options, like giant, flesh-eating worms that can swim through stone like it was water, or even the possibility of having enormous underground catacombs inhabited by strange creatures or the remnants of ancient civilizations.

Johnathan Woodward's Precursors discusses the common sci-fi trope of finding artifacts left behind by a superior but now vanished species. He talks about all sorts of possible reasons for the disappearance of the Precursors, the various types of gizmos that they could leave, and gives some example species.

Finally, Jon F. Zeigler's The Chariot Age is a campaign setting during the period when chariots ruled the field of warfare, around 1348 B.C.. A skilled archer and lance-fighter carried by a fast chariot was the most effective fighting machine in the world at that point, able to cut regular infantry to ribbons and far more mobile than normal archers. He describes the current rulers of the Middle East, particularly Egypt, and shows us the various conflicts currently underway between the various nations.

Summary

Overall, the GURPS All-Star Jam 2004 is an interesting product with something for everyone. It's a standard 128-page softcover with black & white interior illustrations. The editing is great, with hardly any typos. Most entries have multiple references to other pages, and I didn't find a single one with the wrong page number listed. It even has a small index in the back.

The art is more so-so... like most GURPS products, you'd buy this for the content, not the presentation. The art is acceptable and generally closely reflects the material in question, but it's not going to bowl anyone over.

It has a ton of references to various GURPS rulebooks, so you might see Infravision listed as a suggested advantage, but the rules for it won't be reproduced here. That's pretty standard for GURPS books, of course and the vast majority of the references are for the core books.

I had looked at the All-Star Jam in my local gameshop before and was never impressed enough to pick it up. But having actually read through it now, I'm a lot more impressed. I give it a 4 for content and a 4 for style (that's GURPS style, mind you; if you're looking for fancy art or color plates, look elsewhere).

If there's any real problem with this product, it's the simple fact that you'll probably end up being mainly interested in just a couple of the articles and the rest of the book will be filler. That's why I'm only giving it a 4 for content. There's just no focus here. But it's a novel idea and well executed, so if you are interested in any of the sections, or if you're a big fan of any of the authors, you ought to give GURPS All-Star Jam 2004 a closer look.