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Early 20th century firearms are complicated. Without NATO and Warsaw Pact standardization of calibres, and a century of experiment with the effects of different design choices, a bewildering variety of weapons and ammunition were in use. Most readers will be repeatedly surprised. For example, detachable shoulder stocks were a popular option for pistols during the pulp era, in part because they could be sold where rifles and submachine guns could not. And the famous 9mm Parabellum round had a number of competitors during the pulp era with slightly longer or shorter cases and more or less propellant.
Guns! Lots of Guns The main body of the book is a listing of 63 handguns, 20 shotguns, and nine submachine guns (plus at least a hundred variations and copies). As in GURPS High Tech, each weapon gets a written description with information about its manufacture, features, accessories, and users, plus an entry in the weapons tables. Many written descriptions include up to a dozen variants, with a concise listing of how their stats differ from the base version, and it is here that one’s eyes begin to water. Trying to grasp what these variants look like in game terms requires keeping in one’s head the base weapon’s stats from the table, how those stats compare to other weapons, and the adjustments for a specific model. This is a formidable demand on the reader. The writeups inspire scenes in a pulp game, whether a search for a shady gunsmith to convert a Colt Government to fully automatic fire, or a crashed aviator encountering an angry farmer with a H&R Model 8 Standard shotgun.
Weapons seem to have been selected to cover the common, the inspirational, and the bizarre. The former include fowling shotguns, Browning automatics and Smith and Wesson revolvers (and their many imitators). The second category includes the famous Thompson submachine gun and a special shotgun for Egyptian antiquities guards. And the later include such things as a 20 shot revolver and a special semiautomatic pistol designed to be operated with one hand. Sidebars cover combination weapons, such as combined tear-gas-projector and billy club, and options such as the Cutts Compensator or cutting down a revolver into an ideal pocket gun. The attention to common modifications to weapons is very helpful, since sawed off shotguns and illegal machine pistols tend to be a favourite of criminals and gamers, but are hard to find in references. Some listings describe the holsters, spare magazines, and spare ammunition that were issued with a given weapon.
Other Contents The content is rounded out by sections on period restrictions on firearms ownership in the US, UK, and Germany (one page); a list of pulp guns slang (half a page); a description of some famous gun shops (one page); and listings of explosives (half a page) and loadbearing equipment (half a page). The later includes a range of purpose-built and improvised containers, and fills out the sparse listing in High Tech very nicely. Images of gangsters with a golf-bag full of shotguns, or a FBI office with its case of Thompson magazines and tear-gas shells, also inspire scenes in pulp games.
So Should I Buy It? In short, this book should be of interest to any gamer interested in pulp era firearms. Noir dective, Lovecraftian horror, and plain old pulp action campaigns will have many uses for these weapons, and many remain in use today by poor or sentimental shooters. Gamers who prefer less detail could use the book for inspiration and flavour, and gamers of other systems than GURPS might be able to convert the stats to their own system. With a fair bit of work, the long lists of weapons could be boiled down into a short list of generic firearms for a pulp setting. No region of the world appears to be neglected.
Unfortunately, this book is not as usable as it could be. While it is possible to use it to build a generic weapons list of a dozen guns for a particular campaign, this requires a lot of work by the GM. Most of the necessary information is available, but it takes time to sort through it, and to confirm that a particular weapon is typical of a class. Also, the decision to include up to a dozen variants of a weapon in the text, but not in the tables, makes it hard to find weapons meeting certain requirements. The weapons table is incomplete, but the abbreviated stats for variant weapons in the body text are impossible to compare to the base version, or to other weapons, without a lot of flipping back and forth or memorizing the appropriate table. A reader looking for relatively powerful semiautomatics, for example, needs to first check the weapons table, then check the descriptions of individual weapons for ones available in different calibres than the version in the weapons table. A complete weapons chart, or a copy of the weapons stats in the text for each weapon, would have been much more helpful. Alternatively, these problems could have been solved together, by combining similar rows of the weapons chart together (one “.32 Pocket Pistol” entry not ten different entries that differ only in cost, weight, and Shots) with specific examples either getting their own line or referring to a generic weapon of the same class and calibre (“Colt Pocket Pistol: As .32 Pocket Pistol, but Weight 1.6/0.2, Shots 8+1, Cost $450/26”). The content of this book is worth the trouble to unpack it, but some readers may not bother.
Vital Statistics GURPS High Tech: Pulp Guns, Volume 1 is available in PDF only, from Steve Jackson Games’ online store e23. It is 35 colour pages long including the title page and two pages of index. The illustrations are a mix of unlabelled paintings of guns (apparently corresponding to weapons on the same page) and reproductions of period photographs. Unlike most GURPS products, there is no bibliography or filmography, although the listings of movies under individual weapons partially rectify this. Unlike most Steve Jackson Games products, there are a few typos and editing mistakes.
