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Before I start this review, I'd like to clearly set out some goals. I think any review should be based on a variety of factors. Primary among these factors is how well a product fulfills it's purpose. If the product is called pirates v. ninjas, there damn well better be some pirates, ninjas, and adversarial relationships between the two. So my main intent in this review is to establish how well the product (GURPS Gun Fu) provides information on Gun Fu.
However, in addition to this, I will be making value judgments that are necessarily personal. Layout, art, readability, mechanics, usability outside the system it was written for, etc. Some may disagree with these judgments, and that is their prerogative, but hopefully I can provide my reasoning for these personal judgments so that readers may decide for themselves whether they agree with my underlying assumptions and accompanying judgments.
Overview:
GURPS Gun Fu is a PDF release available at Steve Jackson Games' online store, e23 (e23.sjgames.com). It is 50 pages, will set you back 9.99 USD, and may be re-downloaded as many times as you wish so long as SJGames stays in business (as is their policy with everything they sell there, as I understand it). Only the Basic Set (Characters and Campaigns, the core books for GURPS) is required to utilize Gun Fu, but High Tech, the Victorian age to modern day gear catalog, is probably a good idea if you want lots of gun stats and Martial Arts goes into greater detail on the hand-to-hand side of things if you're looking for greater detail on that side of things.
The PDF is divided into five chapters and one appendix. The PDF is entirely grayscale, with a white background and black text, and has quotes from various inspirational sources (The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, The Boondock Saints, Wanted, Dirty Harry, The Fifth Element, etc.) scattered throughout. The text is separated into two columns, with callout boxes throughout.
As the name implies, the subject of the PDF is cinematic gunplay, be it western, modern action, hong kong-style shooter, or sci-fi. If it involves regular gunfights as a central theme of the game, Gun Fu aims to give you some relevant information and tools.
Lights, Camera, and Action!:
The first chapter is only three pages, defines the term gun fu, and covers the two century history of gun fu as a literary and film genre, from traveling shooting shows to modern day John Woo films and beyond. It gives multiple examples of influences from each time period and genre, as well as innovations in the types of stories, from the growth of fast-draw duels in westerns to bullet-time ballets in modern action movies.
This is the most broadly useful chapter to non-GURPS games, as it's mostly history. It gives you a good sense of the roots of the genre, and helps the reader to think about what in particular they want to emulate in their game, be it western quick-draw duels or John Woo-style bullet ballets.
Shooting with Style:
The second chapter is six pages, and deals with rules tweaks that allow you to model various gun fu genres in GURPS. Acrobatic movement while firing, quick draws, simplified range bands, shooting from a mount or vehicle, readying a weapon by kicking it up from the floor or flipping it off a table, high speed shooting, trick shots, sniping, or mid-combat assistance to allies. It all has streamlined, detailed rules with simple modifiers for trying to do all the tricks you've seen in The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Transporter, or The Matrix.
Most are special situations of existing GURPS actions, with a paragraph or two detailing how the gun fu version is different or easier than the generic version. About a quarter of these rules have been seen before in other GURPS supplements (mostly High Tech or Martial Arts) but are covered in full in Gun Fu so that you only need the one PDF to play your Matrix game.
This is less useful to non-GURPS heads, but it does showcase the actions you typically see in the genre and what key action elements make up gun fu.
Style Components:
This is the GURPS mechanics chapter. In 17 pages, it covers how to use the existing mechanics from the core set to model the abilities of gun fu shootists, from bullet time to managing to dive out of the way of slo-mo explosions. There are no new advantages or disadvantages, one new skill, and a bevy of perks and techniques that let you mimic special tricks seen in gun fu sources, like safely carrying a gun in your waistband, flying backwards due to the barrage of bullets you're unleashing on some hapless mooks, accurately firing a crew served weapon from the hip or while driving, or disassembling an opponents weapon in his hand before he can fire.
This chapter is very GURPS heavy, and while it picks out specific tricks that gun fu shootists tend to be able to do (from never having to reload to having a thin table stop automatic weapons fire) it will probably cause the uninitiated to glaze over a little.
Styles:
This five page chapter uses the same mechanics as GURPS Marital Arts to create shooting “schools.” Double Trouble is the classic dual-wielding style of protagonists of John Woo films, Future Kill is a scientific futuristic style with impossible speed and accuracy, like the clerics from Equilibrium, One Man Army is the style of most Schwarzenegger films, focusing on heavy weapons and explosives, Sniper is exactly what it sounds like, although it emphasizes the movie version that is also able to make accurate close range snap-shots, Ultimate Shootist is the style of elite agents like Jason Bourne or Mr. Bond, focusing on ruthless efficiency, and The Way of the West is the style of almost every fast-drawing cowboy on the silver screen.
These styles each use the mechanics presented in the Style Components chapter to create a coherent picture of a certain type of shootist. While certain elements are universal among any practitioner of a style, there's a large amount of variation possible within the style, and this helps to guide what a player may want to invest their character points in as a game progresses to go from a cowpoke with a fast draw to cold-eyed death on a horse.
While this utilizes a lot of the terms from the last chapter, each style has several paragraphs dedicated to describing what the styles look like, how they operate, and what their signature moves are. This could be very helpful for sparking ideas in players (and GMs) who were stuck for ideas.
Equipment:
This 8 page chapter includes some stats of common guns that appear in gun fu genres, from western to futuristic, although if you want a truly comprehensive list you'd need to pick up High Tech. However, the real meat of the chapter deals with modifications of existing guns, including winging stats for those who don't care what the exact stats are for a Baretta 92FS, and care much more about how cool it looks when you have two fully automatic versions blazing away.
Using the rules for gunsmith modifications any gun can be customized to a ridiculous degree, including a lot of mods that make it into the movies mostly because they look cool. There are firearm accessories including holsters and reloading aids, and there is even a section covering common beliefs and how to make them reality in your game (for the vocally pro-.45 or AK crowd.)
While this chapter is great for allowing players and GMs to build exactly the gun they want (or saw in the latest blockbuster) most games don't model firearms quite as thoroughly as GURPS. This chapter would give a good idea of what certain mods might do to the performance of a gun, however abstract the system being used to model it is.
Inspirational Fiction:
Every GURPS book has a section listing influences, with a list of literary, film, and electronic sources. Gun Fu shines especially bright here, however. Five pages are dedicated to various westerns, action, pulp, or sci-fi movies, anime, and books, and each source has a breakdown of memorable characters most easily recognized moves in GURPS terms. Rick O'Connell from The Mummy is described as a Double Trouble stylist, with the advantages, perks and techniques that best model him in the movie, along with where to find the stats for his twin Chamelot-Delvigne Mle 1874 revolvers. The same is done for Neo from The Matrix, Pathfinder Poe from The Last of the Mohicans, the Gunslinger from Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and Han Solo from Star Wars.
This lets you easily visualize the mechanics in a cinematic way, and provides a enormous amount of visual flair to accompany the statistics in the PDF. It is an ingenious way to allow players who aren't very mechanics minded to pick out traits they want to emulate from the source material. If this is at all possible in future supplements, it should be repeated as often as possible.
This section is still a good resource for non-GURPS groups, as it provides plenty of influences that a group can go watch to get in the mood for a particular type of game. The main attraction is still the fantastic breakdown of main characters by GURPS stats, however.
Style:
This is a typical example of GURPS' high quality layout and excellent readability, including extensive references and a wonderful index. However, as is usual for these GURPS PDF releases Gun Fu is entirely in black and white and the art is minimal and merely functional rather than inspiring.
Because of the art and lack of color this PDF gets a four for style. High quality, but not as good as it could be. I understand the economic realities that dictate these design decisions, but it still detracts from the overall style of the PDF.
Substance:
This is a fantastic resource for any GURPS group that wants to spice up their game with a little more dual-wielding pistoleros or chaingun wielding super-soldiers. It adds a lot of depth to modifying equipment and guiding player development to model specific tropes from movies. The content is simply outstanding. Five for substance to any GURPS group that has firearms in it's games.
That said, I'd only give this a three for substance to a non-GURPS group. While a lot of GURPS books provide excellent non-game information for any game, this PDF is almost entirely about modeling a specific genre by streamlining rules. It's the point of the PDF. And most groups are familiar enough with the tropes of gun fu that they can figure out the generic information by themselves. That said, it is always nice to have someone else do the work for you. If your system of choice doesn't have a relevant resource and you're stuck on what you're supposed to be doing in your gun fu game, this PDF provides a thorough guide to get you on track.
