GURPS Rogues
It Takes A Thief...
GURPS Rogues is the latest in a series of Template-based
character supplements for GURPS. It's the first of them that I've
seen so I can't compare it to GURPS Warriors or GURPS
Wizards but I believe that it's very similar in design.
The basic idea is that GURPS
Rogues gives you a ton of character templates and example
characters for different sorts of rogues, thieves and ne'er-do-wells.
A "template" is just a list of suggestions for making a
specific character type. For example, the entry on the plain-old
"Goon" discusses what sort of stats a typical thug would
have, recommending a ST and HT of 12 each and a DX of 11. They
further suggest leaving IQ at 10 and using various mental
disadvantages to represent a goon's poor brainpower, rather than just
making them stupid. This is followed up by a writeup that describes a
65 point Goon template. Basically, they give you the suggested stats
and their costs, then let you take 30 points worth of advantages from
a list of likely candidates (each one with its own point cost listed)
and -30 points of disadvantages from a similar list of choices. Then
they tell you to spend 8 points on combat skills, making sure that at
least one is at the 12+ level. Finally, it suggests 7 points worth of
secondary skills from a list of appropriate ones.
So if you follow all of their
guidelines, when you're done you'll have spent 65 character points
and have a fairly stereotypical goon of some sort. That leaves the
typical 100 point character a lot of room for further
customizations... or your GM could just use this to crank out a ton
of generic thugs at 65 points each. Naturally, it's easy to tweak the
template. Nothing is based on other choices elsewhere; they tell you
how many points to divide up between what skills, but they don't try
to predict what the final values of those skills will be, because
that would depend on you sticking to their suggested stats exactly.
To then demonstrate the use of the
goon template, they give four example characters from four different
game settings. In this case, we get Greg Crowe (a zombie
slave), Hideo (an artifact spirit from GURPS Japan),
Vitus (a gigantic slave from GURPS Imperial Rome) and
my favorite, Wolf. Wolf is a K-10A Postcanine for GURPS
Transhuman Space. A genetically uplifted intelligent guard dog,
Wolf makes for a nasty thug but at heart he's still a dog. You'd be
more likely to successfully bribe him with a scratch behind the ears
and a doggie treat than a wad of cash. As an aid to creating similar
characters, they also provide a short writeup of the K10-A Postcanine
package, which consists of a huge number of advantages and
disadvantages and ends up at a total of just -1 points. Of course,
you'd probably need Transhuman Space to look up what all of
the advantages and disadvantages do. I mean, I can make a good
guess at the game effects of "Horizontal (-10)" and "Chummy
(-5)", but I'd rather have the rules handy to see for sure.
The templates take up the vast
majority of the book. There are only about 10 pages of additional
material not directly related to specific templates, and 7 of them
are on how the templates were constructed and various ways to use
them. There are a lot of ways. They even suggest stuff like "Lenses"
and "Filters", mini-templates that can be combined to
produce specific character types (e.g.- create a "Nobleman"
lens that can be applied to any character to give them the
appropriate Status advantages and etiquette skills), but you'll have
to make these yourself, probably by just taking sections out of
existing templates. Still, it's nice to see the various options
discussed.
We get 29 fully developed templates, covering a diverse gallery of
rogues such as Con Artist, the Evil Mastermind, Pickpocket,
Saboteur... and even some less obvious ones like Prostitute and
Street Doctor. The example characters are probably the most
interesting part of the book. Some of them were clearly chosen to
show how broad the template could be. For example, one of the
Assassins is a military sniper, more of a war hero than a hired
killer. One of the Cat Burglars actually has a racial template that's
worth -76 points because he's not human... he's a trained parrot.
It's these sort of creative uses that show the versatility of the
template system.
The art is decent. It's a huge
mix of styles, but that's kind of appropriate considering all of the
myriad settings that this book is aimed at. None of the pieces were
particularly striking or especially bad. I think it's about typical
for GURPS books, which generally have better ideas than art.
While it's generic, it's very
system specific. So, unlike a lot of GURPS products, I
wouldn't recommend this one to people who don't play GURPS.
There are some nice ideas, sure, but they're going to be buried in a
morass of system-specific information. Which brings me to an aside:
what the heck does the "Starglazing" skill do? It's some
sort of thief/rogue skill, but I couldn't find it in any of my old
GURPS books. Since GURPS
Rogues doesn't define
any of the abilities it mentions, but just refers to them by name,
you really do need to have the other books handy to use this product.
For people who do play
GURPS, this is a nice set of templates and doubtless an
excellent companion to the first two template books. I like the fact
that they often discuss why something
is recommended instead of just listing it. Oh, and it does have a 1
page index. I give it a 3 for Style and a 4 for Substance. For
non-GURPS players, though, the Substance would probably be 2
at best. Stick with their more generic supplements in that case.
|
