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GURPS Casey & Andy is a role-playing adaptation of Andy Weir's madcap webcomic Casey & Andy. For those not familiar with the comic, it's a tale of two guys who've been friends since high school and happen to be mad scientists. Casey uses mad science to attempt world conquest as his alter-ego, Dr. X, and Andy uses it for pure research and demon summoning -- which is why he's currently dating Satan. (Yes, that Satan. She's quite the cutey.) The comic is usually "gag a day" style, occasionally delving into story arcs that often involve dimensional travel and lots of fun cliched "alternate versions" of the main cast. It's actually rather hilarious in a completely bizarre way.

I was rather surprised to hear that it was being turned into an RPG. This is a world where you erase someone's memory by building a "Memory Erase-o-Mat" and usually end up blowing yourself up in the process. (It's okay, Satan's cool about letting you back out of Hell once you get to know her.) So Toon seemed like a fit, but GURPS? It's an intriguing idea, but can David & Andy pull it off?

What You Get

e23 is the new PDF division of Steve Jackson Games and their Warehouse 23 catalog. It's freed them up to release niche products like this. GURPS Casey & Andy is a 34-page PDF download. I paid $7.95 via credit card and had no difficulty immediately downloading it. Two of the pages are the cover and "back cover" (really an e23 ad), so you're looking at 32 pages of content.

The first four pages are dedicated to a unique C&A comic strip involving Andy going back in time to the 19th century to woo Frances Cleveland (wife of President Grover Cleveland) with his "19th Century White House Teleport-o-Mat". The president invents his own time machine and takes command of the United States of today! Frances has her own plans, and Satan isn't about to stand for this adultery (she may be pro-adultery, but she's also a proud hypocrite) -- what happens next? "Play it out," the comic exhorts.

Yes, this is a typical C&A plot, and it's nice to have a fun romp of an adventure presented in comic strip form. It helps get one into the mood of the game. The remaining 28 pages are setting, rules, and adventure ideas.

What's Inside What You Get

Chapter 1 - The World of Casey & Andy takes us through the setting. It first delves into locations, from Casey & Andy's house to the Fremont Police Station. Not a wealth of info on these places -- some barely get a paragraph -- but it's sort of understandable, since some have only appeared in a single C&A comic.

Dr. X's Lair and Lord Milligan's Lair get significantly more attention (3-4 paragraphs), with the "Dr. X's Lair Blueprints" (from the comic) at the top of the page. The corresponding text mostly apes the blueprint, but there are also a few ideas for the GM to use (like what type of "doomsday device with digital countdown" Casey might be using) to stave off disappointment.

You then get about a page worth of Hell -- the plane itself and key locations therein -- with a sidebox on Heaven. I liked this section as it actually stretched what we've seen in the comic into more detail.

Next, the book goes into Interdimensional Travel. We don't get a lot of mechanics, but that's sort of a given -- in C&A, you build a Dimensional Portal-o-Mat, a glowing gate opens up, and you step through. It's that simple. Instead, it focuses on alternate personas and then describes the dimensions that C&A have visited in the past.

The Time Travel rules are the real jewel, here. Two and a half pages (including a chart) are devoted to explaining the complex (but very gameable) rules of time travel as established in the story arc "Jenn". The gist of things is that every time you change history, you create a new timeline and lock yourself out of the old one, but you can keep going back and messing with the timeline to bend it back into shape, at which point you get access to your original timeline(s) again. (There's a lot more to it than that, though, and the rules on Paradoxes are just neat.) The result is less scientifically sound, but very well-honed for gaming, with characters always having a chance to save things -- it just gets harder and harder each "time around".

Finally, a small section on Mad Science, which boils down pretty much to, "Give 'em the Cinematic Gadgeteer advantage and let them make whatever the hell they want with it." To properly pull off C&A mad science, though, it's obvious that the GM and players will have to either be science geeks or comfortable with faking technobabble and coming up with "logical" effects of the inventions. In other words, if you don't read quantum physics books for fun (and I know many of us here do), you'll probably have more fun playing something besides a mad scientist. This section also touches on the ease with which characters come back from the dead (summed up as "Just make it part of the setting, or give 'em all Unkillable 3.")

Chapter Two - Characters goes into the design of a PC in GURPS Casy & Andy. Mad Scientists, Villians, Authorities, Aliens, Minions, and Ordinary Citizens are all touched on. A few Traits are especially appropriate (or work differently) in a GURPS Casey & Andy game (Gadgeteer and Weird Science, notably), and there's a fun new Perk, "Easel".

The C&A fanboys will love the next part: Stats for the main cast! Just because I know you're curious, I'll leak point totals: Andy [267], Casey [267], Jenn [200], Lord Milligan [408] (hey, he happens to be a demon as well as dictator of Japan), Mary [275], Quantium Cop [375], Quantium Crook [375], and Satan [1,855]. Other characters don't get full writeups, but are given a paragraph each, such as The Bug Fairy, Don Cindy, J.J., the Nazi Whales, and Wellhung the Hunkinite. You get about as much info reading the descriptions as you would from reading the comic, so it's nice to have a condensed reference version.

Chapter Three - Campaigns and Adventures first delves into campaign styles. Suggested themes are Mad Science (focus on the gadgets and technophilia), TV Action-Adventure (focus on villians and their plots to be foiled), Romance (huh? uh... no. I've read this one seven times and it just does not work), Soap Opera (over the top romance -- okay, I could buy that), and Straight (mad science is scary and you can't order plutonium over the internet). There's also a box on Humor which is full of helpful advice for GMs and players, regardless of the style chosen.

There's a nod to crossovers, which might help one work a C&A game into an existing game-world, but also are evocative of alternate dimensions for characters to visit (e.g., "Fantasy", where C&A summon demons and test experimental spells, or "Reign of Steel", where they're junkrats cobbling together weapons to overthrow the zonemind -- and rule in its place!). And finally, eight adventure seeds, all of which seem rather easy to run and in the spirit of the game.

What's the Use of What's Inside What You Get

The target markets for GURPS Casey & Andy are (obviously) fans of the comic and gamers.

Fans of the comic will find this book useful and fun. It's a good reference for the characters and locations from the strip. It doesn't expound on most of it, instead being content to just summarize what we already know, so don't expect any inside information here. Still, for the low price, this is basically The Compleat Guide to Casey & Andy with a bonus C&A comic. Get it.

Gamers who aren't really big on C&A will, obviously, not get a lot out of this book. However, anyone who likes running crazy, funny games will find much useful advice within -- this book should be required reading for anyone running a GURPS Illuminati University game. Also, the Time Travel rules alone may be worth the price if you're looking for a good, narrative-based system that (almost) always leaves an "out".

If you fall into both categories (as do I), I'd have to recommend this book with few reservations. I don't think it will convince you to run a game in the C&A universe... but if you already think that'd be a neat idea, it's full of the advice and reference that you need to do so well. No new ground is broken here, for gaming or for C&A, but it wraps up the comic in a nice, gaming-friendly package and helps you map strip to stats.

Final Ratings:

Style: 4

One of the few PDFs really worth printing in color (not that I can afford to, mind you), the cover is perfect and the comic is classic. The writing style can be rather flat at times, however, reading like a textbook in some sections. Fortunately, a small part of the book is like that, so it gets a 4.

Substance: 4

GURPS Casey & Andy collates everything we know about the C&A universe into one book, and does so in a well-organized, easy to use manner. The stuff on Time Travel is a bonus, and some sections (like Hell) go the extra mile. If it had kept that up throughout, it would earn top ratings, but since much of the information feels cut-and-pasted from the comic, I give it a (still respectable) 4.

Feel free to visit the GURPS Casey & Andy product page and check it out yourself. Steve Jackson Games has a few pages from the game up as a free download. Bear in mind that the pages offered are some of the driest text in the book, though -- it does get better further in.