Steampunk in GURPS-ish Style

 

Quite a few years ago, I printed a PDF of GURPS Steampunk, as I had some idea about running a late Victorian 1890s campaign involving an alien invasion, weird scientification, and the rescue of Queen Victoria. I did run that campaign, but I used the Hero System, not GURPS.

Until now, that printout has just been sitting in a rather bulky plastic sheet display book, and since I have the capability, I thought I might as well turn it into a proper book.

The bookcloth is some stuff that I made a few days ago; some printed cotton impregnated with a paste/acrylic medium mix. It works pretty well.

I used Affinity Photo to cobble together a vaguely Steampunky illustration for the front cover, using bits and pieces snarfed off the internet. I laminated the result and glued it in place, along with a spine title cartouche.

I used a retro poster on heavyish matte paper for the endpapers. The illustrations have nothing whatever to do with the book's subject matter, but they're bold and colourful, which is mainly what I wanted.

The pages were edge-glued in a double-fan, but I also drilled and cross-stitched the spine for extra strength. That means the book will never lay completely flat, but since I'll probably never be using it as a reference book at the games table, I don't care too much about that.

It doesn't show in this photo, but the original printout was single-sided, so each printed spread is followed by a blank one. That means that the book is twice as thick as it really needs to be. I suppose I could have reprinted it double-sided, but I really couldn't be bothered.

The cover boards have an issue: the piece of 2mm grey board that I cut them from had its grain running the wrong way. That means that with all the moisture from the gluing, they bow horizontally instead of vertically, making the book look distinctly tubby.

The condition has been somewhat ameliorated as it dries properly, and with ruthless pressing, but it will never be permanently 100% flat — it's likely to show itself again with changes in ambient humidity. However, since it's unlikely to spend very much time out of the bookshelf, I doubt that it's going to be a major problem.

GURPS 4e in physical form

NOTE: This review concerns only the physical manifestation of the rules; I make no judgement whatsoever here about the usefulness of the GURPS rules and system for roleplaying games.

The first half of my GURPS 4e order arrived today. 

I ordered the Characters volume from the Book Depository (it hasn't arrived yet) under the impression that I was getting the set of two books. Then I realised that I'd ordered only the one, so I ordered the Campaigns volume from Amazon, and it arrived on my doorstep this morning.

I think this edition is GURPS's first foray into signature-bound hardback publishing. I don't really care one way or another about hardcover/softcover books for roleplaying manuals. As long as the glue used for softcover perfect-binding is adequate to the task so that pages don't start falling out, that's fine by me, though signature binding is always going to be harder wearing if it's done even half-way competently. This appears at first sight to be well bound, but that's not something that is easy to determine until the book has been in use for a while.

As an aside, I recently bought a copy of WotC's 5e Tasha's Cauldron of Everything book, which is the worst of both worlds. It's really just a badly perfect-bound book stuck into hard covers, and the binding is really shit. Anyway. Back to GURPS 4e.

Let me say at the offset that I hate the paper. It's a very bright white, glossy stock. That's no doubt excellent for making the colour illustration pop, but it's hard on the eyes when reading dense blocks of text (of which there is a lot) and it feels kind of nasty to the fingers.

The illustration style is competent enough, though not particularly inspiring. It's in colour throughout, which is another new thing for GURPS. Again, it's not something that I require in a RPG manual; black & white illustration is fine by me as long as it is informative or evocative (or preferably both).

What is useful about the transition to all-colour publishing is that each chapter has its own full-bleed coloured page borders, which (once you get to know which colour refers to what) makes navigating the book much easier. The colours are easily visible even when the book is closed, so you can go straight to the relevant section with an absolute minimum of page-flipping.

I'm not enthralled with the serif typeface choices, but I have to admit that I've seen worse. The impression I get is one of "good enough" conservatism in layout design.

The glossary and index at the back of volume 2 Campaigns covers both volumes, and appears at first glance to be pretty comprehensive. Of course, only extended use will show that for sure.

In the end, what matters is whether or not this hardback full-colour glossy format is a genuine improvement over GURPS's old softcover black & white books. I'm not convinced that the advantages are significant, but I am aware that I am of an older gaming generation and that The Youth these days won't look twice at anything that isn't ALL THE COLOURS, so I guess from a commercial point of view, it's a necessary change.