The power is in the colons.
In 1993, GURPS designer Jeff Koke took a go at adapting Vampire: the Masquerade and Mage: the Ascension as GURPS sourcebooks. GURPS was on its 3rd edition, Vampire on its 2nd. It was a real odd couple.FrankTrollman wrote:But I would go beyond even what AncientHistory said about book quality. It isn't that the books are individually "not bad", they are individually great. Steve Jackson brought in consultants, experts, and focus groups for these books. 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". 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. GURPS Asparagus is probably one of, if not the best Asparagus sourcebooks for Dungeons and Dragons. Or any other Asparagus related campaign you intended to run with any system.
-Username17
Now, which one is stupid?
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 is known for lovingly-crafted, well-researched sourcebooks with mechanics that look simple, but tend to get fairly complicated. 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, as some people have said, the kind of RPG where first you design the game. Before 4th edition, setting and metaplot were nearly nonexistent, consisting mostly of suggestions and pointers between books.
So this could be a match made in your celestial afterlife of choice, or this could be a trainwreck.
Let's talk about the good stuff first. 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 while there is a bit of GURPS-ish filler art in here, most of this stuff is Tim Bradstreet and contemporaries. 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.
Jeff Koke, as far as I know, has never written anything for White Wolf. This is a good thing. He's an outsider. He could see possibilities that Mark-dot-Hagen and crew would never realize, and he would approach this book with stoic GURPS determinatorism.
The first thing you see when you open the book is a card cut-out for subscribing to Pyramid magazine.
There's an OSSR that needs to happen.
The TOC is two pages, going into a level of detail that White Wolf wouldn't go into until autogenerated TOCs became ricockulously easy with desktop publishing some twenty years later. It's a 192 page softcover that covers...well, the main rulebook for V:tM is 270 pages, and this covers more ground than that. So it's typical GURPS terseness.
But then we get to the Prologue, which is atypical for GURPS, and it's 16 pages. And this prologue consists entirely of in-universe found documents - a 1993 letter from a history professor on stationary from a Romanian hotel, a 3-page letter from an Inquisitor from 1481, a 6-page letter from a vampire to their childe from 1904, and - I love this - a printer paper (with the little feeder strips down the side!) of a Kindred BBS c.1993.
The lulz, they overwhelm me.
And the prologue is basically an in-character explanation of what vampires are, and the basics of being a vampire, from different perspectives. The GURPS guys are trying, bless their little pumpers, and the laugh of it is that that collection of simple, rather straightforward documents...is better than anything Vampire ever did. It's better than anything they've ever tried to do along that line. Seriously, when Frank and I did Ghouls: Fatal Addiction they tried it, and when we did Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom they were still trying to do it, but it was always terrible. White Wolf has never mastered the interior-document thing. But GURPS, on their first try, does a good job. A better job than White Wolf ever did. A better job than they did on Vampire Revised!
The Introduction is one page. There's a quote from William Blake on the top of the page, and a "About GURPS" sidebar pointing to other GURPS books.
The intro is mostly Jeff Koke's mini-essay on vampires, and why they deserve this book. It's unpretentious and sincere, but it's also written as if Vampire: the Masquerade didn't exist. Seriously, White Wolf isn't mentioned once. Jeff Koke did not sit down to write this book to be a licensed product like Hellboy, where you're playing in somebody else's world using GURPS as an RPG engine. No, Jeff Koke wrote this as Vampire: the Masquerade if a GURPS guy wrote it. It's staggering in its simplicity.Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. - William Blake
Vampires are the symbols of this struggle. These darkly beautiful beasts attract us like a murder scene. They feed our morbid curiosity and trick us into thinking that we are observing something alien, when we are truly watching ourselves. Vampires mirror the state of humanity. They are at once beautiful and hideous, vibrant and unliving, powerful and dependent. They are cursed to stare their own evil in the face every single day, despising their thirst for blood, begging for the freedom of death, until the sheer weight of their immortality forces them to rise above their darkness and reach a state of humanity that is more than we can possibly hope to achieve. This is why we both love and fear vampires.
Basically, vampires are cool.
There's a brief note on the author. I will quote this in full:
About the Author
Jeff Koke is a graduate of Southwest Texas State University in English and philosophy. He works and writes for Steve Jackson Games, and his previous writing credits include "Jupiter Blues," from GURPS Supers Adventures, and "A Nile Elation," from GURPS Time Travel Adventures. He had edited too many books to count.
Besides being a frequent player and a long-time fan of GURPS, Jeff likes to write short stories and poetry; he also plays guitar for a lock rock 'n' roll band called Love Blender[/i. He lives in Austin with his wife Angela and his dark-souled cat Sheba.
This book was dedicated to Angela. I can only presume Sheba planned and carried out some meticulous revenge.
Next up: Chapter 1: A World of Darkness