Another week in the life of GURPS

And so passes another week of GURPS line development. The highlights, for those who follow what I do for a living (and if you don't, I understand -- we can't all play RPGs in the basement):

• As mentioned earlier, I finally completed my first draft of GURPS Action 2: Exploits.

• David Pulver and I prepared GURPS Mass Combat for playtest. We'll put it through its paces for a couple of weeks starting just after Labor Day.

• I finally got to read David's GURPS Abydos. That's the citybook he originally wrote for Devir Livraria. Zombie fans are going to like this one, even if they loathe GURPS. David certainly didn't pull any punches with the whole "city of necromancy" shtick.
 
• I received a promising PDF proposal from a good friend and coauthor. At this stage, I can only say "it supports GURPS Martial Arts," but it's nice to see that electronic publications are becoming increasingly attractive to writers I like.

Of course, there were some lows:

• We discovered that a PDF series that we had staff working on wasn't going to be viable. Again, I can't share titles. We'll make lemonade, but it's annoying when a project looks good and eats staff resources, and then ends up in consolation-prize territory.

• Two items that were supposed to be stats-checked in playtest . . . weren't. Gah. I have the greatest respect for playtesters, but it's a pet peeve of mine that some people would sooner check grammar and spelling -- which the author will usually catch himself when he revises, and which the editor and proofreader will almost certainly catch otherwise -- than, you know, game mechanics. I guess it's the inevitable result of an aging RPG market: People have more responsibilities and less time to play games, so they can make a few hours of free time to read a draft and critique the writing, but have no time to sit down with friends, play the game, and discover that the rules and stats have errors.