In the game Fading Suns there is a race of bad guys called symbiots. These nasty critters mix and match all types of creatures/DNA/biology and come of with all kinds of oozing hellspawn. Heck! One of their weapons is a huge sphincter cannon that really shoots the…uhh, nevermind…gave that up for Lent. Holistic Design hasn't released any kind of sourcebook on the symbiots yet, and I picked this book up in the hopes that it would give me some wild ideas for a Fading Suns campaign. Well, for that it failed utterly…not exactly, but it didn't have the kind of wild Frankenstein mix and match DNA stuff that I wanted. Now GURPS Bio-Tech does have this stuff in it, but it seems much more English and restrained…less oozing and stuff.
What GURPS Bio-Tech does have are comprehensive rules and ideas for altering the human form and others almost beyond recognition. This book does for biological engineering what GURPS Vehicles does for vehicular engineering. It is well-written, evocatively illustrated, and unlike GURPS Vehicles it doesn't seem buried by its physics model, but liberated by all of the possibilities of biological engineering. I mean this is a game book, but some…no, a lot of this stuff seems possible, if not real!
David Pulver has done an extraordinary job here of distilling a variety of disciplines…genetic engineering, biological modifications, surgical modifications, chemical modifications, nano-symbiotes, immortality, etc., and distilling them down into a format that is both understandable to a layperson, and imminently applicable to a GURPS game. This is great stuff, and it is an essential GURPS resource! I only wish that he had been able to include a campaign background (check out Technomancer!). This book gets an "A."
Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)
