Meta: New Look and Christmas Break

I'm visiting family for the Christmas holiday now and have decided that "But it's Christmas!" is an excuse for me to shirk all responsibilities, not just work and healthy eating. As such I won't be keeping to my twice-weekly schedule until the New Year. The first GURPSday pull of 2017 will be on 5th January, so I intend to have two posts for it and then back on the schedule afterwards.

I've also finally overhauled the look of the blog. A few weeks ago I realised I'd been on a totally unmodified default layout and colour scheme the entire time – having just picked one when I started up to satisfy the requirement and forgetting about it – and I've now got around to changing it to something more unique. I'm well aware the colours on the mobile version are a bit janky but overall I think it looks better. If you have any issues or critique, let me know.

Playbook: Armour Damage Threshold

Long before I started this blog or joined the GURPS Discord, me and Jose of Blogging At Default, Taking Extra Time have regularly bounced ideas back and forth, discussed things and come up with some new rules to handle situations. One of the things we had both run into is that, especially at high TLs, weapons can't keep up with armour, especially not military-grade examples. Someone in a combat hardsuit is all but invincible to any handheld weapons of the same TL. This presents an annoying combat balance problem if other players aren't wearing the same armour, as anything that might seriously threaten the hardsuited character will simply turn the rest of the party into red mist.

So the solution we came up with was a system to gradually degrade the DR of armours, based on the attacks that are hitting it.

Dramatis Personae: Arilith, Demon-Touched Sellsword

This post contains a small amount of content that might be disturbing. If implied sexual assault disturbs you, skip the first paragraph.

To say Arilith went to the school of hard knocks would be the understatement to end all understatements. Her mother, violated by a demon nine months earlier, abandoned her mere minutes after birth, naked and crying on the cobblestones of an alleyway in a pool of uterine fluid.

Looking back on it, Arilith figured it wasn't too bad a start in life. From there, the only way to go was up.

A good samaritan followed the sound of crying and picked the newborn baby up. Arilith was left at a temple in the city, where the monks and nuns raised her, always with barely-concealed distaste at her demonic heritage. Other orphans lived in the temple, too, but Arilith was always treated more harshly than them – with her fiendish taint so visible, the monks considered it their duty to straighten her out and make sure she didn't follow her blood, doling out tougher punishments and harsher penalties for rule-breaking and misbehaviour. Of no great surprise to experience parents, it didn't work, and Arilith ran away from the temple at thirteen.

Her life from there on out was a litany of pain and struggle. Forced to beat, lie, cheat and steal for her bread, she become harsh and hard as iron. Eventually she found employment as a thug and strongman for local criminals, years later legitimising into a caravan guard. With combat experience under her belt, she joined a mercenary company for a few years, taking part in two separate campaigns when her host was hired by the sitting duke. After interpersonal conflicts made life with the company impossible, she struck out on her own, renting her services as a guard, mercenary and sellsword.

Utility Closet: Spaceship Character Sheet

The last campaign I ran was space opera, set in the Endless Space universe. Being space opera, the players had a starship of their very own. It was more than a means of transportation – it was where they hung their hats and charged their power cells, where they slept and kept their stuff, and where they brought their prisoners (my players were quite sensible about not fighting to the death). The main problem of starships is that they have all sorts of statistics and resources to keep track of; power, fuel, reaction mass, rations, weapons, ammunition, etc. It got confusing for me to keep track of these on separate papers or files, so after the campaign ended I drew up plans for a record sheet to use if I ran another space opera game.

I posted it a while ago on the official GURPS forums, with minimal interest shown, though the one person who replied had some very useful input. Now that I have a blog that people seem to read, I thought I'd share it to a wider audience. This is only the second iteration, so I'm mostly looking for feedback, critique and improvements at this point; what more would you want in a spaceships' character sheet? Tables for quick references? More empty boxes for keeping track of miscellaneous things? Have I left out something huge? Obviously there's lots of empty space; my hope is to be able to fill it while keeping the sheet both attractive, simple and clean, and useful. Please let me know in the comments!

Meta: Dude, Where's My Shield (Design System)?

So one of the things I mentioned in a previous post is the shield design system I've been working on. I've also talked a bit about it in the GURPS Discord if you've been lurking there at the right times. It's something I'm very proud of because of it's elegance – it encapsulates what could be a very complex problem in a simple and direct way. But the reason it's not shown up on this blog yet is because last weekend I sent a query letter to Steve Jackson Games for writing it as a GURPS Pyramid article.

When I started this blog it was always one of my intentions to hold myself to a professional standard, as well as to use a similar voice and tone to Pyramid articles. Writing for Pyramid is something that I've thought about for at least the last year. I had the ideas, for sure, but the writing itself was the issue. But beginning this blog and setting my two-per-week goal has really helped me refine my writing, both in terms of quality and speed. After some unexpected but glowing feedback on the Discord, I decided to pitch the shield design article to SJG. I got quite a positive response, so if all goes well and it's accepted, it won't be appearing here. But, as Bob Ross says, it'll put a happy buck in my pocket. But if it's not accepted, I'll post it here!

EDIT: To clarify, nothing has been decided yet; the query I sent got a good response but there's no guarantee of publication implied in that. I did point them at this blog but I have no idea whether reading what I've posted here was part of the decision or not. I'll talk more about it when there's something to talk about.

Equipment Locker: New Beams for Blaster and Laser Design

I think I've talked about and teased my expansion to David Pulver's Blaster and Laser Design system for too long. So rather than keep you waiting even as far as the "Read More" button, here are the important numbers!

These were made from reverse-engineering energy weapons in GURPS Ultra-Tech. Pulver's system doesn't gel perfectly with them; some have non-exact focusing arrays or have slightly varying costs or shots. A lot of this can be put down to rounding errors; when you build a weapon that costs $4,956 you round up to $5,000, and when your power cell gives you 45.8 shots you drop the fraction and get 45. That makes working backwards a little trickier but not impossible. The bigger issue was holdout weapons, which almost uniformly had too many shots, too long range, and too little weight for their damage. This is the main caveat emptor for my expansions to the system: weapons smaller than a pistol won't work the same as the ones in Ultra-Tech.

There are some more specific things you'll need to know in addition to the numbers above. Those are continued after the jump.

Dramatis Personae: Ilia Elektrostal, Ex-Corporate Freemerchant Captain

Born on one of the harsher Russian colony worlds, Ilia had a typical colonial upbringing, lacking in excitement or stimulation. Perhaps that was why she had always ascribed a poetic wonder to space travel, and why she eventually decided that it was what she wanted to do for a living. She signed on with Dmitry-Akata, a medium-sized interstellar haulage corporation, who paid her a pittance for her job as a cargo engineer. But it didn't matter to her – she was getting to travel the great empty black.

She worked with them for eight years, rising to quartermaster, then first officer, then captain of her own ship, the CSV Jubilant Snowflake. By the time she was 29, space had lost some of its wonder, replaced by the day-to-day grind of tight deadlines, low overheads and demanding journeys. Perhaps part of her fatigue was from taking so much shit from Dmitry-Akata – pay rises lagging behind inflation, cuts to health insurance, overtime encroaching on paid leave and a million more little insults. All while the unions utterly failed to exert any pressure to improve their working conditions.

Finally, eventually, the camel's back broke. During a night of drinking with her crew planetside, they started all expressing the same sentiment: fuck Dmitry-Akata. Drunken, joking plans to liberate their ship from corporate hands were made, half-assed and filled with in-jokes. When the hangovers cleared the next morning, they all seemed to have decided that the old adage of "drunken words are sober thoughts" had a grain of truth to it.

They were going to steal their own ship.

Equipment Locker: Sonic Disruptors

I've been a fan of The Generic Universal Roleplaying Blog ever since I first encountered it. A recent post on it that was part of this week's GURPSday haul was Ultra-Tech Quickie: More Options for the Blaster and Laser Design System. TheRyujinLP nicely encapsulated the chemical power packs for TL9 lasers, which I intended to do at one point, though they did so much more elegantly and simply than I probably would have. Another large part of the post was weight modifiers based on TL – prototype weapons that are heavy, mature weapons that are light. I've been considering including sonic screamers in my space opera setting but wasn't really happy about the lag in TL, since the setting is TL10^. But with Ryujin's little expansion, I can now extrapolate sonic screamers to TL10!

In the process, you get a sneak peak at my own expansion to the Blaster and Laser Design System: sonic screamers and stunners, plasma flamers and guns, electrolasers, and neural disruptors.

Cross-Post: Generic Universal Roleplaying Blog

It was only a month or two ago that I got back into reading the content published around the GURPS-o-sphere (collated over at Gaming Ballistic) and one of the blogs that had escaped my attention before was The Generic Universal Roleplaying Blog. Me and TheRyujinLP seem to have a lot in common – we both like GURPS Ultra-Tech and science fiction, as well as having a penchant for ripping apart existing GURPS systems to see how they work and build our own. Unlike me, however, Ryujin has been much more regular in their posting and has deconstructed a lot of the equipment from GURPS Ultra-Tech to produce systems for designing your own gear. So far my favourite posts of theirs, in no particular order, have been Plasma Guns, Re-Energised; Power Armour, Powered Up; and Totally Not Lightsabres. If you enjoy my posts on ultra-tech equipment, definitely check this blog out.

Ad Astra: Singularity Rider

Horrible cosmic deathtrap or delicious
starship power supply?

It's a new column! And it's not the one I mentioned before! Surprise!

Just about the only promising way for humans to travel the vast distances between stars within a lifetime is the black hole starship. The basic operating principle is simple and also totally nuts. You collapse matter to make a black hole massing in at around 606 kilotons. Given it's so small, it releases intense Hawking radiation – this can be deflected out the back to provide thrust directly or used to heat reaction mass. Estimates of power output place black hole drives as being able to accelerate to 10% of lightspeed in about 20 days. Assuming a uniform acceleration rate (which is wrong due to relativity but a decent approximation), you could get to near-lightspeed in just under seven months.

Once you can get going that fast that quickly, the galaxy opens up a lot. Travel times are still measured in decades but at such a high fraction of lightspeed, time on-board the starship goes slower, so you could feasibly travel anywhere within a few hundred lightyears in only a few years (from your perspective).

So let's build one in GURPS Spaceships!

Equipment Locker: Lightning Guns

When going through GURPS Ultra-Tech for the five-billionth time, something occurred to me. Blasters can have an omniblaster setting, which gives them a nonlethal stun mode. It turns dice of damage into a penalty on a HT roll and drops the armour divisor one step. I turned back a few pages, to the electrolasers. They have penalties to HT rolls and an armour divisor... Can you do the same backwards?

I mean, obviously you can because a) I'm writing this post and b) this is GURPS. So here are write-ups for two different varieties or flavours of lethal "electric guns".

Meta: In the Pipeline

I'm currently writing from the CERN accommodation in Geneva, Switzerland, because as a particle physicist it was only a matter of time until I ended up here for a week or so. This also means that I won't be making my goal of two posts every GURPSday pull this week. Damn! This would have been a full month of keeping to that goal, too. But nevermind.

This isn't for lack of content, mind you. There's quite a few things I've got knocking around, all nearly-ready for deployment:

• A shield design system, based on Pulver's armour design system
• Superscience lightning guns!
• Plasma weapons that use the vortex ring system so that they're only limited-superscience, rather than total superscience
• A system for designing electromagnetic guns from the ground up
• The first instalment of a new column, Dramatis Personae, where I create characters for use as PCs or NPCs

I just need some time...

Equipment Locker: Boser Weapons

I've been reading Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space recently and highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction (and not just because Reynolds is a fellow Welshman). Reynolds' setting is best described as relativistic space opera; spacecraft called lighthuggers travel between star systems at a hair's breadth below the speed of light, their Ultranaut crews genetically and cybernetically modified to endure years-long voyages and repeated hibernation. Inhabited planets and star systems have an array of different technological levels, with the splinter group of humanity called the Conjoiners responsible for ridiculously advanced technology that exhibits Clarke's Third Law. The thing that piqued my attention enough to write a blog post was a type of weapon several characters use in the book, called a boser.

"Boser" obviously has a hint of "laser" about it, following in the tradition of masers, grasers and spasers by making a portmanteau of laser and something else. But what they actually were baffled me for a while. A hint comes during an altercation about halfway through the book on the planet Resurgam, where the beam of a boser is described as "coherent matter". This made me curious enough to look it up and as soon as I saw the words "Bose-Einstein condensate", I immediately understood. For those without the background in particle physics I have, I'll explain below, and give some highly speculative statistics.

Utility Closet: Armour Design Spreadsheet

David Pulver's armour design system is one of my favourite things in GURPS Pyramid, since I'm a perennial tweaker. One of the things that annoys me about it is the fact that it's spread across three publications, requiring flipping between several if you want to make something that uses materials or rules from more than one. To ease the issue, I've collated all the information on body surface areas, constructions and materials into one Google spreadsheet. Enjoy!

Please note that I deliberately didn't include explanations of the numbers or the actual rules themselves, as that would probably count as republishing GURPS content, which is in violation of Steve Jackson Games' online policy.

Meta: New Goals

So anyone who's been following this blog for longer than the last two or three months (so two people?) may have noticed that there was a big gap in the middle of the year. There were a number of reasons for it but to be honest the biggest was a lack of initiative – all the content I had made that was easy to dress up and present had been done, so getting the rest out there involved more work that I wasn't bothered to put in. I've recently come back to this blog properly and I'm trying to get a better flow of content. I have a lot of content half-finished – there's about the same number of draft posts as there are published posts. 

So from now on, I've made a goal for myself to make at least two posts every week. More specifically, to get two posts in every GURPSday pull, since it's currently my biggest source of traffic and views. Tomorrow's pull will mark the second week of keeping this goal. Most of the posts will be coming from my large amount of unfinished drafts, many of which are basically done but for my perfectionist streak. After that backlog is cleaned out... well hopefully I'll have built up more half-finished ideas to finish by then.

Equipment Locker: Pressor Weapons

While Halo's gravity hammer is probably currently the best-known example of this kind of weapon, 'gravity hammers', 'impact hammers', 'pressor weapons', or whatever you like to call them have been seen in science fiction for a while. GURPS Ultra-Tech comes close to giving us them with the rocket striker (p. 163) but stops just short of giving us anything more sci-fi than rocket-assisted melee weapons, at least for those of us who prefer blunt instruments to fancy knives. Thankfully, the tools we need to build these weapons are all in the book and only need a creative application of the Combination Gadgets rules (p. 16), to tease them out.

GURPSGen: ArmourGen and BeamGen released!

I've posted before about my Github repositories for releasing my little generators (random and otherwise) but in the past few weeks I've been slowly grooming them for a proper release as real, honest-to-god software. I now have a page on this blog that introduces them, describes the current release and points towards the Github pages, newly-revamped as actual programs for release rather than a dumping ground for code.

To lower your expectations somewhat, the programs both run in a terminal and need Python3 installed. If you're not familiar with interacting with programs in the terminal, it'll probably be too complicated to open and run for you. My top priority with development now is to implement a graphical interface so more people can use it. To that end, I'm in contact with the developer of the GURPS Star System Generator to see about using the same web-based GUI. In an ideal world, I'll be able to host it on a webpage rather than force you to download it, making it 1000% more accessible. The only issue I foresee with this is with importing generated items to GURPS Character Sheet but I'm more than willing to sacrifice that for a drastic increase in usability.

I'll make posts for further updates as and when they come.

Worlds-R-Us: The Rift at Ayyadieh

I'm not a fan of the "rightous Christians,
sinful Muslims" vibe of this image but it's
the only depiction of it that I could find.

WARNING: This content has been "inspired by" (i.e. shamelessly ripped off from, then expanded on) the game Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader from Reflexive Entertainment and Black Isle Studios. 

In the Year of Our Lord 1189, Pope Gregory VIII calls the Third Crusade against the Ayyubid Sultanate, lead by Saladin, who had conquered the holy city of Jerusalem and looked poised to wrestle the entirety of the Holy Land from Christendom. Kings marched to the Holy Land; the situation so dire that even the kings of England and France called a truce in their war to march together to retake the lands from the Saracens.

In 1191, the long and brutal Siege of Acre is broken – the garrison surrenders. King Phillip II of France and King Richard the Lionheart triumphantly march into the city, taking the Muslim garrison into captivity. King Phillip leaves shortly afterwards, having to attend to a succession crisis within France caused by the death of an important duke while on campaign in the crusade. King Richard stays, intending to ransom several thousand prisoners in exchange for money to continue the crusade, important Christian captives held by Saladin, and a piece of the True Cross. Saladin stalls for time; he sends the first instalment of the ransom but draws out further negotiations, likely intending to raise an army to storm Acre and retake the city from the exhausted Christians. His hand forced, King Richard takes his advisers' counsel and ascends to the hill of Ayyadieh, in full sight of nearby Saracen encampments, and slaughters over three thousand Muslim captives.

In our world, the crusade continued on, resulting in a costly campaign for the Christians that ended with a treaty providing unarmed Christian pilgrims with the right to enter Jerusalem free from hassle or toll. This didn't succeed in ending the contention over the Holy Land, and the disastrous Fourth Crusade begun merely ten years later, resulting in the infamous Sack of Constantinople.

But what if the massacre unleashed something otherwordly?

Eidetic Memory: Ultra-Tech Armour Design... Review

I had recently begun a post here where I updated David Pulver's articles Eidetic Memory: Low-Tech Armour Design and Eidetic Memory: Cutting Edge Armour Design from Pyramid #3/52 and #3/85 to work for TL10 and up, having reverse-engineered armouring materials from the items in GURPS Ultra-Tech.

If you've seen the latest Pyramid (#3/96 - Tech and Toys IV) you'll know that unfortunately for me, Pulver has beaten me to the punch! I was working on something a little more extensive than his materials, trying to generalise his more-detailed approach to TL9 armours up to TL12. That post isn't quite ready yet, since I still have some fiddling and noodling to do with some values of them, so instead I thought I'd do a quick test/review of Ultra-Tech Armour Design by building a few armours with it.

Equipment Locker: Gyroladar Launch Pistol

A friend and I regularly pick each others' brains for GURPS concepts, ideas and advice and one of our recent discussions was a kind of "enchanted weapon" for a boss to wield in a semi-hard TL10 space opera game where humanity fell then rose again (somewhat like Traveller). The idea of "boss loot" is tricky to do in science fiction, since the vast majority of objects are mass-produced (or 3D printed) but fall-and-rise-again space opera gives you a certain amount of wiggling room if the previous civilisation was more advanced than the current one. The other constraint was that it can't rely on special ammo, since the specialness of the weapon degrades a bit if you can just stuff it's ancient 10mm rounds into your modern gun.

The idea I came up with was a gyroc pistol with an active targeting sensor on it, that uses it to auto-adjust itself. I didn't get time to build it in detail at the time (since anyone who regularly reads this blog should know I'm fond of using the combination gadgets rule to make new items) but I took some time to do it properly, so here's the entire process, as well as the result.

Rogues Gallery: Junker Exo

Something like this but with more taped-on scrap metal

Boss fights are a staple of traditional fantasy RPGs. As you may have noticed, I heavily lean towards science fiction rather than fantasy but the concept of a boss fight sometimes has difficulties making that transition. Especially in games like GURPS where the fragility of individual humans is relatively constant, boss fights will often tend towards one of two extremes. Either the fight is an anticlimax, with the Big Bad going down from a few well-placed shots like most people do; or the Big Bad seems perfectly fine after taking a full power cell's worth of laser shots to the chest, ruining the players' suspension of disbelief that they are in fact a regular human and not some kind of thinly-disguised killbot. Although a thinly-disguised killbot would actually make a pretty good boss fight...

But there's an idea that I've had brewing in my head for a while that allows a little bit of both and it involves Ultra-Tech's exoskeletons, relying on them to provide the two things that make many traditional boss fights: an enemy that's both big and tough.

Playbook: Focus Enchantment

While I'm not posting a lot, I'm still keeping my ear to the ground within the GURPS blog-o-sphere, especially the GURPS Day summaries over at Gaming Ballistic. One post that caught my eye was the Southern-Style GURPS post on some tweaks to the GURPS Magic enchantment system. It reminded me that, during a fit of worldbuilding for a fantasy setting a while ago, I too made an alternative enchantment system. Handily, I also wrote up a summary intended for players, so I've already spent a while polishing the description to make it look and read well. So I thought I'd share it!

Meta: He's Not Dead, He's Pining for the Fjords

All's been quiet here for nearly a month now, and the reason is work. Doing a PhD and being a researcher means I have a highly non-uniform workload. Sometimes I have very little to do. Sometimes I have way too much to do. In this case, I've had a lot for the past month and a bit. I had a week of work in Germany, followed by the Easter holiday, two weeks of illness due to tonsillitis followed by a week of of catching up from missing two weeks, then a week of crunch work in Germany again before we deployed some hardware for testing in a beam, then a week of testing everything in the beam. All while teaching a lab module and taking two modules myself. I currently have a week more work on our testbeam and if the experience so far is representative, I'll have very little free time for working on anything for this blog for the next week or so.

Another reason is that I've already posted a lot of the content I had already worked on before starting the blog. Most of my backlog of content is already posted. In addition, a lot of the stuff I'm working on right now is bigger and meatier. It's taking longer because there's more of it.

So there'll be more posts. Eventually.

Playbook: Alternative Reluctant Killer

Pacifism (Reluctant Killer) is, basically speaking, totally broken. It forces your character into the same depressive stupor as Cannot Kill [-15] after actually killing anyone, while severely impeding your ability to do anything in combat, for a mere -5 points. Put bluntly, its underpriced, doesn't produce interesting roleplaying and is totally pointless. So I tried to fix it. Your mileage may vary.

GURPSGen

Since about November last year, I've been coding a series of tools for GURPS in Python which I've been uncreatively calling GURPSGen. Chief among them are two programs that do all the calculations and busy work for the two systems featured in Pyramid for designing armour and beam weapons. I've recently uploaded my work over the last few months to a Github page, since the beam weapon generator is getting close to being finished. So I thought I'd share it with other members of the GURPS community. Here it is.

More information is available in the readme for the repository but to summarise: the beam weapon generator can do everything the original Pyramid article can, except cannon. At this point I'm mostly adding features on top to make it more complete and versatile. Two highlights are that I've added some beam types from Ultra-Tech that weren't in the original article (though some were clearly left out for a reason) and a limited facility for exporting weapons to XML files that GURPS Character Sheet can read. The downside is that I have no knowledge of GUI programming, so the entire thing has to be run from either your shell or a Python interpreter, and you have to input everything via text. I'm intending to start tangling with Tkinter any day now and hopefully set up a decent GUI to make it easier to use.

I'd appreciate any feedback, which includes breaking the hell out of it and telling me how you did it. The nice thing about programming is that you make it better by breaking it.

Equipment Locker: Battlesuit Point Defence

One of the most annoying holes in GURPS Ultra-Tech is the comparison between armour-piercing or shaped charge warheads with both heavy battlesuits and tanks. The DR values given for either of these are woefully inadequate at stopping even the lightest shaped charge or HEMP round. I was reading through the entries for tanks, trying to find some justification for why the main battle tank doesn't have enough DR to stop being ripped to shreds by a shoulder-mounted HEMP round. Then I found it: the tank has a strike laser on the turret for point defence. This makes sense! If you can stop missiles and anti-tank weapons from even hitting you in the first place, you don't need to lug around armour heavy enough to stop the damage. Well, that's all well and good for tanks, but how does that help battlesuits?

As per usual, GURPS Ultra-Tech provides us with the tools to make what we want, it just doesn't put them together for us.

Utility Closet: Balance Calculations for Damage, Armour and Penetration

Balancing damage and armour in GURPS is complicated. GURPS Pyramid 3/77 gave us the Combat Effectiveness Rating, or CER, to help mitigate this with a system that mimics the way CR works in Dungeons & Dragons. It's imperfect, obviously, since a single number can't accurately encapsulate how much of a threat a monster or bad guy is, but it's a welcome addition for rule-of-thumb balance in a system where one of the common worries for new GMs was combat balance. While reading through GURPS Ultra-Tech over the few years I've been playing the system, I've put together a few easy formulae to help understand the interactions between damage, armour divisors, penetrating damage and injury that can help a gamemaster understand what kind of threats they're placing in their players' path, so I'm sharing them with you down below.

Warning! This blog is finally living up to its namesake. Under the break you'll find mathematics as complicated as a square root! This is because we need to calculate a standard deviation, although I've done all the hard work and these calculations require absolutely no understanding of statistics beyond knowing what a mean or average is. All of these can be done with the basic calculator on your phone or computer. Bear in mind also that I have dyscalculia – if I can do it, so can you!

Playbook: Zero-G Dodge

GURPS rarely reduces a character's active defences due to environmental factors. My guess is that this is more of a game balance choice than a realism one, since Dodge is typically already low for non-superpowered characters and dropping it down even a single point represents a huge decrease in survivability, especially against ranged weapons where Dodge is the only available defence. I've recently been planning for a sci-fi campaign in a setting with no artificial gravity and decided I wanted a set of rules for dodging attacks in free fall, to help drive home the feeling of a different environment. So I came up with three different mechanics, which you can pick at your leisure.

Ars Mundi: The Serpens Codex

Arecibo saw it first, by pure chance. In the ever-present radio noise of the universe, a small blip, 24 times as strong as the background. Two blips. Three blips. Then five, seven, eleven, thirteen and seventeen blips. Then it repeated. Seven prime numbers. The signal repeated over and over again and as the Earth turned, every radio observatory around the world trained their receivers on the constellation of Serpens. The pattern repeated for forty-seven days, during which time scientists hotly debated what it meant. But the initial consensus was immediate:

We were not alone.

Equipment Locker: Laser Sword

I was a little dissatisfied with the selection of melee weapons in GURPS Ultra-Tech. Vibroblades are cool but I wanted something a little lower-tech than a force sword that still had an 'energy sword' feel. There's also issues with the immense power of force swords, so you can't really just dial down the TL on them. This is where the laser sword comes in.

Equipment Locker: The Swordstaff

An entirely fictitious weapon, the swordstaff (plural swordstaves) is exactly what it sounds like – a sword stuck on the end of half of a quarterstaff, favoured by technical fighters, melee-capable mages and show-offs alike.

Ars Mundi: Redpowder

Resembling a fine, glittering dust, as if a farmer had accidentally ground ruby into meal, redpowder gives off mystery and otherworldliness like a vapour. The European powers trade for it from the East, the scintillating red stuff coming west along the Silk Road from the farthest reaches of the Earth, perhaps beyond even Cathay. The man who discovered its fantastical properties was unfortunately struck blind and burned badly by his discovery, though learned much from the experience and is still regarded today as the father of prismatic muskets.

World-R-Us: Alexandria

Alexander the Great conquers Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Parthia, all the way to the Hindu Kush. He is forced to abort his invasion of India after a revolt of his troops, so returns to Babylon to recover and draw plans to advance into Arabia as a prelude to conquering India and beyond in pursuit of the ends of the world. In our world, Alexander the Great died in Babylon, his plans incomplete. Whether the cause was illness or poison is still unknown. Alexander's death left his empire fractured and decentralised, the task of nation-building the conquered lands left unfinished as the Diadochi fought over the remnants of what might've been a great empire.

But what if Alexander hadn't died?

Playbook: High-Cyclic Controlled Bursts for Ultra-Tech Guns

GURPS High-Tech has a great little rule where some guns can fire "high-cyclic controlled bursts". For those who haven't read the book, this is when a gun fires several rounds so quickly after each other that they all leave the barrel before the has moved due to recoil, giving the entire burst Recoil 1. GURPS Ultra-Tech was written before this rule was devised, so lacks rules for them, even though it explicitly mentions that ultra-tech firearms can stack cartridges within the barrel for ultra-fast firing speeds! So I wrote some quick rules to fix this.

Reliquary: Karpov Arms LBV-M47

The Karpov Arms LBV-M47 (Lazernaya Bitva Vintovka Modela 47, or "Laser Combat Rifle, Model 47") is a military-grade light laser carbine manufactured by the now-defunct Karpov Arms corporation. Karpov Arms went out of business at least forty years ago, yet newly-made LBV-M47s still show up in the hands of guerilla armies, criminals and mercenaries across the galaxy, all either with the serial numbers filed off or with the stamp of some armoury nobody's heard of.

Introns

This is a blog about Steve Jackson Games' GURPS 4th Edition. I'll be posting mostly content that I make, remix or alter for the game, which is going to cover a wide variety of topics, genres and levels of detail, although there will be a faint predilection towards science fiction, since I have a slight preference for that to other genres. I'm planning to structure the blog in the useful skeuomorphism of 'columns', separating posts by content type. So far I have several columns planned:

Ars Mundi
Elements, ideas and seeds for worldbuilding, generally ones I haven't expanded into full-blown settings elsewhere. It will also include discussions on worldbuilding, especially on implications or knock-on effects of technology or other features.

Equipment Locker
New equipment and worked examples of equipment created using existing rules for equipment creation and modification. This may also include discussions on the utility of existing equipment. 

Forms Most Wondrous
Animals, beasts, monsters and aliens of all kinds, magical and nonmagical, realistic and cinematic. Will occasionally include player races/species.

Playbook
New optional rules, or expansions upon existing ones.

Reliquary
Artefacts, relics or mythical treasures. Any kind of item that is one-of-a-kind, unique or noteworthy.

Soapbox
Rants/diatribes about game mechanics, game design or approaches to play that don't serve any concrete purpose. Feel free to ignore.

Utility Closet
Random useful information that doesn't fit under other columns. Typically more GM-focused.

Worlds-R-Us
Seeds or fully-detailed descriptions of settings or parallel worlds. It differs from Ars Mundi in that these are fleshed-out and given specific details, rather than throwing out concepts and discussing how they might be used. Where applicable, information for integrating them into GURPS Infinite Worlds will be given.