OSSR: GURPS Fantasy II

[angelfromanotherpin]

Nowadays, GURPS Fantasy looks like this:



And it does exactly what you'd expect a GURPS Fantasy to do. It gives a detailed treatment of various fantasy tropes and how to use them in a GURPS game. It does have a sample setting, but its a single chapter tucked away in the back of the book.

An edition before, however, and GURPS Fantasy looked like this:



That tagline, 'The Magical World of Yrth,' is the giveaway. Instead of telling you how to do fantasy in general, they did fantasy in specific, by publishing a treatment of somebody's campaign world. (That campaign world would be revisited in GURPS 4e with the GURPS Banestorm supplement.) It was just one in a line of fantasy worldbooks, but it was the first one that wasn't a licensed property like GURPS Conan or GURPS Horseclans or GURPS Witch World or something; and it seemed to exist solely so they had a worldbook with comfortable elf and dwarf tropes in it. So in the GURPS 3e audience, there was some hope that another book would come out which did what 4e GURPS Fantasy eventually did do. But GURPS Fantasy II was not that book.

It was this book:



A Conan knock-off fighting two flayed horrors in the snow? Fuck yes! The tagline this time is 'Adventures in the Mad Lands,' so you know already that this is just someone else's campaign world. Well, as it happens, that someone else is Robin Laws, or more specifically, Robin Laws after taking the brown acid.

So saddle up, kids. We are going for a ride.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Pre-Introduction

Credits Page
'By Robin D. Laws' and 'Edited by Steve Jackson.' Then the cover and interior artists are credited, along with technical folks like the typographer. Looks like they really did just get Laws to drop a manuscript on them.

It has a playtester's list, and below that, there's a note of thanks to 'the players of the "Icfrom" campaign from which The Mad Lands grew,' so this very clearly was a home campaign before it was a gamebook.

Contents
Nicely detailed, probably as useful as the index. Main headings are: Introduction, The Land, Madlander Culture, Daily Life, Characters, The Gods, Monsters and Beasts, The Soulless, Shamanism and Sorcery, Campaigns, and The Village of Kawa Tok. Except for that bit about 'soulless,' it looks a lot like a fairly normal sort of layout, except that the magic chapter is oddly late.


Introduction

The Introduction is all of one page, and a third of that is the sidebar which covers 'About GURPS' and 'About the Author.' It starts with a description of the landscape, and I can only assume that's an attempt to make the players skip reading this section. It continues with a brief portrait of tribal life, and that will probably bore most of the survivors of the first paragraph. It's not until the third paragraph that the game mentions that the whole experience of life in the Mad Lands is shaped by living under the shadow of insane and monstrous gods who can strip the humanity from their victims.

And when the hypothetical reader gets to this: 'But despite it all, the Madlanders keep their nobility, courage, and a fatalistic sense of humor. This is a land where simple survival takes heroism.' Well, then they know what the beast is: a semi-Lovecraftian survival horror fantasy.

But even that doesn't prepare them for what's to come.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Land

The acid kicks in slow. This chapter begins with some fairly dry description of physical terrain, seasonal weather, and local plantlife. The gods get a mention here and there: one digs tunnels that often collapse into ravines or riverbeds, and another likes to eat a certain kind of tree, which has evolved to grow fast and drop seeds early due to the extra pressure.

Somewhat questionably, this book describes the neighboring cultures and their opinions of the Mad Lands' before getting to the Mad Landers themselves. The first of those neighbors is a sort-of standard feudal agrarian society that used to be fractious mountain clans until their god flattened the mountains into plains and changed the climate to better support growing things. That's ancient history by the time the game starts, so their pre-farming past isn't super relevant, except to establish that their god is mighty and occasionally helpful. The last of those neighbors is a region of extremely weird city-states which are the result of two fuck-off post-deity-powerful sorcerers who 'decided to annihilate their physical selves and use the resultant energy in a competition to see which of them could create the most unlikely societies.' So the first wave of hallucination seems to have been well on its way by then, and the result is a wider universe of absurdist phantasmagoria.

The Mad Landers view of all foreigners is that they are insane and dangerous, and not fully human. They have a profound cultural xenophobia which is kind of justified by their circumstances, but means that in-character the distinction between the different varieties of foreigner is kind of moot.

[mean_liar]

I like where this is going.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Madlander Culture

The first rush of visions subsides long enough for Robin to present a really good take on a culture that's pretty strange to a modern audience: a communal hunter/fisher/gardener society, lightly flavored with mystic paranoia. He develops gender roles, an amusing hunter/fisher rivalry, standards of beauty, etc.etc. One thing I really like is the big pile of proverbs he drops, which succinctly and flavorfully demonstrate a number of Mad Lander attitudes. There's also a fairly long joke, and a cautionary story starring the culture's fictional fool: Zo Do Wabda.

The paranoia shows up in a wide variety of ways. The elderly are respected for having survived so long. The society has as few rituals as possible and tries to avoid even accidental ritual behavior, because rituals draw the attention of the gods. Children are examined at birth to make sure they are human (more on this later). Mourning the dead is discouraged because it can call up ghosts.

The aesthetic of the Mad Landers is very reminiscent of Amerindian Northeast Forest Culture. One big distinction is that they have ironworking, but they don't seem to use it for armor at all. The book has a pretty fair amount of internal art, and no Mad Lander is ever depicted wearing anything heavier than buckskins.


Daily Life

This is mostly a continuation of the last chapter. Details of the procedures and perils of a hunting trip or fishing expedition. Boatbuilding. The details of a village's tuber harvest. Also recreation: music, games, and sports.

One thing that's clear is that the Mad Landers have an extremely static society. Now, given the supposedly dreadful and random god events that these people are exposed to, one might expect that their culture would be wildly divergent as different villages tried different (futile) things to manage the problem. But because ritual activity attracts the gods, and because there's a strong streak of fatalism running through the proverbs and jokes, it actually seems pretty plausible that they've gone the other way, into the extreme conservatism of people whose traditions have kept them alive so far, even if the quality of life is pretty low.

This far, the gods have been pretty coy. Sure, they get a mention here and there, like how there are a couple who will show up and eat an entire year's root harvest, throwing the village onto the horns of starvation; or how all the 'Lands lakes are suspiciously round, because they are divine impact craters. But it's all been teaser so far. And it's going to stay that way for one more chapter.


Characters

Basically the first thing that gets mentioned in this chapter is the necessity of distinguishing your characters more by personality than capability, basically because all men are some variety of food-spearer, and all women are some variety of gardener-craftsperson.

A few mechanical things of note. A lot of social advantages and disadvantages are kind of meaningless in a propertyless tribal society. The Luck advantage is half cost because there's no truly good luck in the Mad Lands, and every lucky break comes with some troublesome downside. Dwarfism gives more points than usual because it makes you look like a kind of monster called a 'heightless.' Perhaps most notably, Magery is a disadvantage instead of an advantage because you can't start with any spells, and it means you get targeted first by gods and monsters, and also give normal people creepy feelings like this was Ars Magica.


Next up, the real trip: Gods, Monsters, and Soulless.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Gods


Good morning!

The Mad Lands have a specific pantheon of ten gods, and I'm not going to jerk you around: they are a grimderp interpretation of the cast of Winnie-the-Pooh.

That is how good Robin Laws' drugs are.


Eeyore Bax Powu Kag

Bax Powu Kag is an odd sort of moose, with stubby legs, gray fur, and (usually) no antlers. His face is long,his saucer-sized, staring eyes deep and mournful. He's fatter than a normal moose, lacks its characteristic goatee and doesn't seem to like swamps very much.

Bax Powu Kag is very sad, and that sadness seeps out of him and permeates his surroundings and infects anyone who gets too close, becoming pessimistic, depressive, even suicidal. He's not particularly active or hostile, but people who stumble across him can be in serious trouble.

Bett Agwo

Unlike his fellows, Bett Agwo never appears as a giant; he always manifests as a normal-sized hare. His fur may be white, yellow, or brown; he always appears with a small dark brown patch at his throat.

Bett Agwo is a Dicko the Genie variant. He likes to grant wishes, and they always go all Monkey's Paw, not because Bett Agwo is malevolent (he's genuinely friendly and helpful), but because he's just not very bright or good at using his powers. He is the entire reason that Mad Lander society doesn't recognize good intentions as a mitigating factor for misdeeds.

Bubzavuv

Like many Madlander gods, Bubzavuv often appears in gigantic form. Sometimes he gets as small as an adult male grizzly. His fur is a very light brown, almost yellow, which distinguishes him from a normal grizzly at this size.

Bubszavuv is basically an ordinary bear with godly powers. Part of that is his frequently forgetting his powers and getting in troubles he could easily get out of if only he remembered he could e.g. change size. He juxtaposes a basically friendly and polite nature with matter-of-factly eating people and most anything else.

Dopod Abwep

Dopod Abwep is the sole humanoid in a pantheon of animal gods. Although he's never less than twelve feet tall, his body is proportioned like that of a seven- or eight-year-old boy. He moves in the gawky, loose-limbed way of a young boy who's just had his first big growth spurt. The Child literally leaks divine power, his entire body glowing and giving off a constant halo of light.

Dopod Abwep is usually found killing time in childish ways. Where Bax Powu Kag is sad, Dopod Abwep is very lonely. He seems to want to make friends, but contact with him is invariably destructive - actually touching him melts human flesh, but just being in his presence damages human social and language skills. He also has a childish temper and throws disastrous tantrums when he doesn't get his way.

Gakox Pezep

He's renowned for his unpredictable dual nature; when on the hunt, he's a mindless snarling beast, capable of nothing but destruction. At other times he appears as a normal-sized cougar who walks upright like a man.

The Cougar jumps miles at a time, and if he's chosen to be particularly big, he causes impact craters when he lands. He's completely unpredictable, switching between his vicious predator and friendlier cuddly form for any reason or no reason, but especially if he smells blood or fear. In particular, his predator aspect is

Kikavo Vo and Kikavo Dat

Descriptions of them in village lore are precise: they have the heads of deer (without antlers) mounted on long thick necks. Their chests and torsos are like those of big potbellied grizzly bears. Their postures are upright, like a man's. Mounted on their shoulders are tiny arms like those of a small child. On the end of each arm are the sharp claws of a wolverine. Their powerful legs are designed like a toad's, but their huge feet resemble those of no known beat, long and flat like planks from a ship deck. With these fearsome appendages they bound across the landscape, leaping miles at a time, smashing anything they touch down on. They anchor these leaps with a thick tail, resembling a shortened squid's tentacle, protruding from their hindquarters. Their freakish bodies are covered from head to tow in thick brown hair like a moose's.

Kikavo Vo is K-Dat's mother and generally bad-tempered, but only gets truly hostile when she feels that her child is in danger, which happens a lot considering that he's divine and invulnerable; when not enraged, she radiates a bliss aura. Kikavo Dat has the mind of a hyperactive child, and plays with humans like human children play with flies and ants. His hyperactivity is infectious.

Vuvuti
A huge horned owl, Vuvuti is the only god who doesn't talk, he just shows disturbing visions in the reflections of his gigantic eyes and seems to enjoy showing people things that make a mockery of their values and beliefs.

Zewa Zab
Zewa Zab is an enormous gopher who single-mindedly makes tunnels and only harms people incidentally to that. But the tunnels themselves are dangerous, because inside them time and space are... different. Even collapsed, the tunnels don't renormalize; a river that has a collapsed tunnel for a bed may run uphill. Any ravine in the Mad Lands is suspect.

Zuutak

Though he most often appears as a giant hog the size of a [longhouse], his physical size can vary radically. Sometimes he's merely the size of a grizzly bear; other times he's so huge that the tread of his hoof can crumble a hill into the sea. On the other hand, he sometimes appears as a normal-sized or even tiny pig; in this form he may seem harmless, but all of his destructive power remains intact. Usually his hide is a bright pink, a coloration not found in the boars of the Mad Lands.

Like Bubzavuv, Zuutak is motivated chiefly by hunger. He devours mostly plants, but is untroubled if a person is scooped up as well. Once or twice a year, he despoils a village's crops and is so feared for this act that his name contains a double-vowel sound unique in Mad Lander language – it represents a kind of screaming pronunciation.


All the info in this chapter is explicitly common knowledge for PCs, which is nice. Laws shows his genre savvy by never giving the gods any stats - thus, they are not killable. The fact that so many are described with goofy schticks and sharp mental limitations signals that they are not proper MC penis-extensions. Instead they are forces of nature to be survived, or mighty forces to be daringly manipulated. There's a lot of humor to be had with the gods, but the danger they present seasons that humor with fear, and the combination is an unusual one, at least in my RPG experiences.

Also, I feel kind of bad for the lonely kid. He just wants to hug someone who won't dissolve.

[name_here]

Well, you built up the gods as being weird and crazy, and you did not disappoint.

[Prak]

These gods are amazing, but nearly as amazing is the screaming pronunciation thing.

More elder thing names need to be written with a screaming pronunciation. I can just imagine players and gms having to suddenly shriek in the middle of a god-name to properly pronounce it.

Also, I now kind of want to play a barbarian-sort of character who's goal is to become resilient enough to give Lonely Kid the hug he so dearly wants.

[Username17]

Basically the first thing that gets mentioned in this chapter is the necessity of distinguishing your characters more by personality than capability, basically because all men are some variety of food-spearer, and all women are some variety of gardener-craftsperson.

Why would someone think that it was a good idea to do such a campaign in GURPS rather than a system where the mechanical capabilities of your character take less time to calculate? For fuck's sake, that's almost every other system!

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Monsters and Beasts

Well, they told him not to take the brown acid, and here's where the bad trip starts. The gods have a certain amount of horror appeal – mostly because they're vast power attached to poor impulse control. The Monsters, on the other hand are almost entirely horror appeal. And one of the chief sources of that is their origin: all monsters are former humans, and that brings with it all the usual baggage for that trope, like the sympathy for someone forced to live a monstrous existence, and the anxiety that the same thing could happen to anyone, even you or your loved ones. They all have a 'psychological damage' section, noting the kind of symptoms that exposure to them will bring on in people they traumatize.

Most monster conversions are brought about by contact with the gods, although there are other ways – unrepentant murderers can spontaneously become Heightless, self-centered complainers can wake up as Skinless, and so on; naturally all the monster-generating behaviors are forbidden by Mad Lander society. All monsters are defined by their lack of something, defining them as less than human even though they may have great powers. All have a list of examples of how they could be generated: someone stamped flat by one of the Kikavos may become a Boneless, someone dismembered by a swipe of Gakox Pezep's paw may become a Soundless, and so on. A lot of monsters potentially have Shamanic powers (more on those later) which allows them to be a more customizable threat.

Bloodless
A lot like Daybreakers vampires: if they consume enough human blood, they're basically ageless humans. If they start to go hungry, they go emaciated and get a big boost to their physical stats (and some nice damage immunities). If they continue to go hungry, they're in agony and start to permanently lose their minds. Bloodless never really die; even chopped into chunks, their consciousness remains intact and starving forever after.

Boneless
A flying skin-blanket with eyes, something like a really disturbing airborne manta ray. They have animal intelligence and kill by smothering with their embrace while exuding digestive juices through their underside.

Faceless
Normal-looking except for their Question-like visage, the faceless are stalkers and jinxes. They imprint on people who come too close and follow them relentlessly, trying to cling to them in a pathetic embrace. All the while, dreadful bad luck affects anyone near the thing, the closer to the Faceless, the worse the luck. Fighting them is difficult because of the misfortune aura, and even dismembered they will continue to follow their target, severed fingers crawling like inchworms, eyeballs rolling through the dirt, intestines slithering like snakes.

Fleshless
No skin, no muscle; skeletons with organs. Very physically powerful, they are mentally torn between a violent hate for all human life and a consuming desire to be accepted in human society. The basic story is that one of these horrible things shows up, doing its best to pretend it's ordinary folks, and as soon as anyone shows signs of not buying their (astoundingly unconvincing) ruse, it's murder time. If there are multiple Fleshless, they'll pretend to be a family, or even a community.

Footless
An eight-foot long foot with proportional shin, with a mouth and a single giant eye on the shin. Completely insane, they mutter all time and seem to have access to all knowledge, in unorganized form, so if you can sneak up near them you can try to sift through their babble for actually useful info.

Headless
Lacking heads, they have faces on their torsos Arnim Zola-style. Animalistic brutes, with ridiculous strength, they basically just hulk-smash any non-Headless they come across - they'll even go after gods.

Heightless
One-to-three foot tall serial-killer puzzle monsters. These guys get a big mental boost from their monsterism, but no physical augment. As long as they ritually murder at least two people per year, they can only be killed by one thing. That one thing varies between Heightless and can be basically anything: fire, drowning, a beetle walking over its left boot, etc. They like to get their kills in the style of Batman villains, giving warnings and setting up elaborate deathtraps, all to emphasize their superior intellects and their victims' helplessness.

Skinless
All gross bare muscles and monstrous strength, Skinless develop strange manias, and also live in a constant low level of pain which is only eased by killing people. Groups of them can skin humans for two purposes – either to convert them into more skinless, or to wear the skin for identity theft, but those are more-or-less mutually exclusive.

Soundless
A dismembered person, if each separate part sprouted tiny legs and venomous needle-toothed mouths. They also make no sound at all (automatically succeeding on all sound-based Stealth checks) which has obvious horror applications. Their venom is paralytic, so their victims can wake up unable to move as the silent pack begins to feed...

Weightless
Basically an exotic kind of living ghost, they've lost the ability to interact with the physical world except by being perceived. They pursue a variety of goals, from ghost-type unfinished business to tricking people into treating them as humans so they can forget their state for a little while.


Beasts
Stats for the local wildlife, most of which are North American to go with the Amerindian aesthetic. Most are basically normal, except for the seals, which are sapient, capable of speech, and seen by the Mad Landers as closer to human than foreigners. Some can perform a kind of sorcery, but they know the Mad Lander fear/hate of magic and keep it secret from them. There are also a couple of sample mutant animals, which occur when normal animals encounter divine energy: the Desire Snake is a snake which causes nearby humans to hear their own voice listing their most secret desires over and over; and the Raccoonalisk is a raccoon with flesh-melting eyebeams.

[Prak]

Can you give the behaviors that lead to becoming each kind of monster?

Also, raccoonalisk is totally going into D&D.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Apart from the ones already mentioned: being a leech on the community (mostly by not pulling your weight at your job) makes you a Bloodless, being a recluse can turn you into Soundless, and being too philosophical can make you a Weightless. The others don't have associated transformation behaviors.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Soulless

Okay, the trip's swinging back from bad to weird.

Thousands of years ago, before the mad gods arrived, the Mad Lands were dominated by a race of 'malevolent jade trapezoids.' A member of a local tribe managed to steal the secrets of trapezoid sorcery, and used it to make a bargain with an extradimensional entity to make her people immortal. No longer constrained by time, all her people mastered skills of sorcery and warfare and used their power to wipe out the trapezoids and take over.

A thousands of years later, they finished culture, reaching creative dead ends in everything. They have all been extremely bored for many milennia now. And they can't even die to escape it. (Except that they can, and I'll get to that.)



So the Soulless are distinct from the other -less beings. They aren't even missing their souls, that's just the best guess the Mad Landers have for what's wrong with them. The chief interactions between the two come when a Soulless is 'killed.' More on that in a moment.

The Soulless live in a few cities, each in a pocket dimension. The houses look like you might expect if they were made by very bored people in a post-scarcity economy, because the Soulless are all crazy sorcerers and can conjure up whatever the fuck they want. Soulless society is very strange, because they're almost all completely self-sufficient and mostly interact with each other out of force-of-habit, or in hopes that if they're just weird or outrageous enough at each other, they'll experience some new permutation of interaction. Even their fashion is desperately strange.


Ugh, a knife-dress? That is so 5589 years ago.

I think they qualify as a reasonably interesting set of potential antagonists, if the MC can avoid the temptation to just use them for trolling, and actually delve into them a bit. But here's the thing: Soulless immortality as written totally doesn't support the setup as presented. Because when their bodies are killed, their spirit reincarnates in a Mad Lander foetus, and specifically forgets its previous life altogether. Now, if the baby passes the at-birth check for being human, a group of Soulless might raid the village to recover them, but otherwise in their teen years they invariably run away from home and stumble through a portal into one of the pocket dimensions, where they are manipulated in their naive state until eventually someone casts a spell to restore their memories. Why they just don't do that last part is never addressed.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Shamanism and Sorcery

The acid is ebbing. This chapter is only pretty weird.

Shamanism and sorcery are two very different kinds of magic. Shamanism comes from being touched by the gods, and mostly mimics the gods' signature effects, or at least themes (one of Eeyore's granted powers is the amazing Thistle Control). Sorcery is just a learnable thing, has poorly-defined limits, and there are four varieties practiced by the Soulless.

Shamans come in three kinds. The first are monsters created by godly action, which often have a power or two or three. The second are people who survive contact with a god without being monsterized, and pick up some sort of ability. The third are people who for whatever reason have rejected society, actively sought out a god for power, and managed to live through the experience.

The rules for Shamanism are pretty vague, unlike most GURPS abilities. You get an ability with an associated skill level, and it costs Fatigue to use. But there are no details. The Fatigue cost is specifically 'whatever the GM finds appropriate, and this may vary from moment to moment!' And to use a simple example, the Bounce ability granted by Tigger doesn't even say how high or far you can expect to jump with it. I get the impression that the whole thing is supposed to be unpredictable and dramatic, but the text doesn't talk about implementing e.g. a guy who mostly jumps twenty feet high, and then one day for no reason jumps a mile high and desperately hopes he doesn't splat when he lands. The result is just sloppy.

The four kinds of Sorcery are: Epic sorcery, granted by study of the mystical poem-story that's the centre of Soulless literature. Gem Injection sorcery, where you mix powdered gemstones with juice, shoot up the concoction, and instead of dying as tiny rocks shred your insides, convert it into magic energy. Sacrificial sorcery, where you have to kill something appropriate to the effect you're trying to generate. And Singing sorcery, which is the original magic of the trapezoids and functions as a verb/noun system flavored as a key/melody system. As with Shamanism, these are all very vaguely defined in terms of costs and possible effects.

[Shrapnel]

Thousands of years ago, before the mad gods arrived, the Mad Lands were dominated by a race of 'malevolent jade trapezoids.'

Whatever shit Laws is on, I want some.

[Prak]

Why is Shamanism always such shit in games?

[Ancient History]

The Soulless are sort of a shout-out to Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time.

[Red_Rob]

The Soulless are sort of a shout-out to Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time.

I got that vibe too. Although it is kind of odd having post-scarcity wizards living next to iron age tribes. Can't any of them do anything about the Gods, or teach the secrets of civilization to the tribesmen?

Is there any story as to why Robin Laws apparently made a whole-cloth fantasy setting based on fever dreams of Winnie the Pooh for a random GURPS book? Were they desperate for a setting and none were available, or had they already paid Robin for a book and he was fresh off the mescaline?

[Ancient History]

Actually, Laws was probably basing it off the earlier, sillier incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons, where you could seriously have Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass adventures and crashed space ships in fucking Greyhawk. People tend to forget that fantasy was a fairly broad genre and D&D didn't gel into high fantasy/swords & sorcery until somewhere in 2nd edition (and even then, there was room for rampant silliness).

Yrth in general is an effort at an old-school D&D setting for GURPS - but being GURPS, there's usually some more thought behind the decisions than you'd think. The reason there's a pseudo-medieval society in a fantasy world is that a transdimensional banestorm picked up a bunch of medieval people and dumped them in a fantasy world, along with elves and orcs and dragons and shit; the refugees were stuck and decided to make the best of it. It looks weird to us today largely because it was based on the days when D&D shit was truly weird, and your Mister Cavern might be getting ideas from episodes of Star Trek as much as the Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Although it is kind of odd having post-scarcity wizards living next to iron age tribes. Can't any of them do anything about the Gods, or teach the secrets of civilization to the tribesmen?

Possibly? We know from the neighboring kingdoms writeup that it's possible for magic-users to power up to where gods are an annoyance, but the Soulless don't seem to be there yet; the actual quote is that the gods 'can obliterate an entire platoon of [Soulless] by sneezing.' As for helping out the tribesmen, they see the Mad Landers as animals and don't have anything like an uplift sensibility. And the Mad Landers are so rabidly xenophobic that they would only cooperate under mind control any way. There is mention that if a Mad Lander managed to learn Soulless sorcery, it would cause an upheaval, since he would count as a person and that would change how they look at the rest of the Mad Landers. But that's serious campaign last-act territory.

Is there any story as to why Robin Laws apparently made a whole-cloth fantasy setting based on fever dreams of Winnie the Pooh for a random GURPS book? Were they desperate for a setting and none were available, or had they already paid Robin for a book and he was fresh off the mescaline?

So, the setting (in some form) predates the book. Robin ran a game called 'Icfrom' in it (system unknown). He contributed descriptions of the game to an old fanzine called Alarums & Excursions, and he was contacted out of the blue by Steve Jackson about turning it into a GURPS book. Steve's motivations remain obscure – I could easily believe he lost a bet or something. Turns out it was about tied (with some Over the Edge material) for his first published product.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Footless
An eight-foot long foot with proportional shin, with a mouth and a single giant eye on the shin. Completely insane, they mutter all time and seem to have access to all knowledge, in unorganized form, so if you can sneak up near them you can try to sift through their babble for actually useful info.

[DrPraetor]

Why would someone think that it was a good idea to do such a campaign in GURPS rather than a system where the mechanical capabilities of your character take less time to calculate? For fuck's sake, that's almost every other system!

-Username17

Robin Laws should clean up the magic rules a bit and re-issue this as a supplement for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus:_The_Infinite_City - which is moderately rules-light, and may have involved Laws giving Jose Garcia some of the same acid?

I'm kinda interested in what's in the last two chapters, if you felt like finishing this up.

EDIT: Also, *why* do they view foreigners as sub-human? Are they at extra risk of turning into monsters because they don't know what behaviors to avoid, or...?

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Nexus: The Infinite City.

That is not a good idea, Dave.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm kinda interested in what's in the last two chapters, if you felt like finishing this up.

I'm definitely going to finish, I was interrupted by vacation and then post-vacation catch-up. Probably Tuesday.

EDIT: Also, *why* do they view foreigners as sub-human? Are they at extra risk of turning into monsters because they don't know what behaviors to avoid, or...?

On some level, it's just tribal prejudice. Monsters are defined by the not having of something, and foreigners don't have 'shares our culture and values.' Yes, they are unfamiliar with Mad Lands hazards and a danger to everyone in their vicinity, and some of them worship a god and are clearly insane, but mostly it's just the 'not-like-us' response turned up to 11 by a generalized fear of the strange.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Campaigns

As far as I can tell, by this point the drugs have worn off, and Laws was left looking at what he had wrought and wondering 'what the hell was anyone supposed to do with all this?' Because it's really not clear what the actual game is supposed to be. The PCs are all primitive screwheads in a moneyless society and strongly encouraged by both fluff and mechanics not to go near anything interesting, so the usual 'kill monster -> take treasure' activities are completely off the table, and even the Horror-style investigator activities are pretty dubious.

The answer is not well articulated. The chapter has some story seeds, and they aren't bad, but they all rely on some sort of unstated framework, which seems to involve the PCs mostly doing regular villager stuff until one of the many magical hazards gets in the way, and then troubleshooting it. Which means you would have to get the players to actually emotionally invest in their fictional village, and goals like 'impress the pretty storyteller,' or 'hunt the biggest deer.' There's no attempt to tell you how to do that, and without it, player motivation at all is hard to come by. Because if you aren't protecting a family or village or something, there basically isn't anything else to do in the Mad Lands except wander around until something gets you.


The Village of Kawa Tok

...is a sample village. It has a simple map and a long list of fully-statted and well-described NPCs. But again, what's missing is any reason for the players to give a single shit about any of them. If the writeups each came with a little paragraph about how to present them in an engaging way, whether endearing or provoking, they would be worthwhile. As it is, the chapter is very close to a waste of space.


A one-page glossary finishes up the book.

Final thoughts to come...