Another week in the life of GURPS

[dr_kromm]

Time for the first update of November 2009. Wow, November. GURPS goings-on this week included:

• We released a freebie that I hinted at ages ago: GURPS Infinite Worlds: I.S.T, by Steve Kenson and Kenneth Hite (princeofcairo). Are you a fan of Bob Schroeck's GURPS International Super Teams? Would you like to use it with Ken Hite's GURPS Infinite Worlds campaign frame? This item should help you out!

• Actually, we released two freebies. The second was GURPS Range Ruler, by T Bone. This is a cool little tool for gamers who use tactical combat. It's just about all you need to go mapless with your figures, if that's your thing.

• We reviewed the rough PDF of Pyramid #3/13: Thaumatology. I think that the title, which hints at GURPS Thaumatology, explains itself. That should be out later this month.

• And . . . my GURPS Low-Tech edit is at the 92% mark by page count. This week, I mainly tackled vehicles: carts, dugout canoes, reed rafts, sleds, wagons, even surfboards. If you need a small vehicle for your adventuring party, chances are good that it's here. (Big ships will be in the GURPS Low-Tech Companion volumes.)

Comments

Big Ships

[unachimba.livejournal.com]

Which companion are the big ships going to be in?

Re: Big Ships

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Depends which big ships you're looking at. Big merchant ships will be in Companion 3; big warships in Companion 2.

Bill Stoddard

Re: Big Ships

[unachimba.livejournal.com]

So I will need two extra e23 books to get stats for a Pirate Campaign?

Well hopefully there will be other things that I like in each of them.

[seanmoon.livejournal.com]

Excellent news in this post, since my own game is TL4 and relies heavily on Thaumatology... Oh, and I'm extremely happy that big ships are coming somewhere, since the campaign is eventually going to be all about pirates...

[dr-kromm.livejournal.com]

As several earlier announcements explained in more detail, we can no longer afford the expense of publishing 240- to 256-page full-color RPG hardbacks. High printing and shipping costs combined with the weakness of the RPG market for everyone (not just SJ Games!) make that a money-losing proposition. The content needed for GURPS Low-Tech to be complete is too extensive to fit into the 144-page hardback that we can justify printing, so we're releasing it as a 144-page GURPS Low-Tech hardback plus three 32- to 40-page GURPS Low-Tech Companion PDFs. Total expense to the buyer will be comparable to the cost of a 256-page hardback in 2010, were we to try to publish one, but breaking it up into four bits lets us accommodate customers on tighter budgets and/or who don't want the whole cow.

Which is a longwinded way of saying that however much we love games and are gamers ourselves, SJ Games is still a business. We would ignore printing costs, market shrinkage, and customer budgets at our extreme peril.