The first thing you see when you open the book is a card cut-out for subscribing to Pyramid magazine. He could see possibilities that Mark-dot-Hagen and crew would never realize, and he would approach this book with stoic GURPS determinatorism. Jeff Koke, as far as I know, has never written anything for White Wolf. GURPS actually playtests their stuff, so the list of playtesters is longer than the list of playtesters for every book in the first edition of Vampire combined. So while there is a bit of GURPS-ish filler art in here, most of this stuff is Tim Bradstreet and contemporaries.
Gurps 3rd edition books with battlesuit stats free#
Vampire had already been published for two years, put out a bunch of splatbooks - and the GURPS guys were free to go through all of them and pick out the very best art. So this could be a match made in your celestial afterlife of choice, or this could be a trainwreck. Before 4th edition, setting and metaplot were nearly nonexistent, consisting mostly of suggestions and pointers between books. GURPS is, as some people have said, the kind of RPG where first you design the game. Any given GURPS sourcebook is a microcosm of greatness, and only gets truly insane when you consider it in the greater context of all other GURPS books. GURPS is known for lovingly-crafted, well-researched sourcebooks with mechanics that look simple, but tend to get fairly complicated. Vampire is known for its moody, atmospheric storytelling and worldbuilding, and its occasionally innovative but normally confused and egregiously bad mechanics, and for the tendency of writers and fans alike to sometimes get lost in the twisting pathways in the forbidden depths of their own well-traveled asses. GURPS was on its 3rd edition, Vampire on its 2nd. In 1993, GURPS designer Jeff Koke took a go at adapting Vampire: the Masquerade and Mage: the Ascension as GURPS sourcebooks. Or any other Asparagus related campaign you intended to run with any system.
GURPS Asparagus is probably one of, if not the best Asparagus sourcebooks for Dungeons and Dragons. The irony of course, is that these people often don't know GURPS from a hole in the ground, so the presented GURPS mechanics are generally much clunkier and less lovingly crafted than the setting information. If there was a GURPS Asparagus, it would be written by someone who knew Asparagus backwards and forwards and not only liked Asparagus, but really cared about Asparagus and "doing it right". Steve Jackson brought in consultants, experts, and focus groups for these books. It isn't that the books are individually "not bad", they are individually great.
FrankTrollman wrote:But I would go beyond even what AncientHistory said about book quality.