Phil Masters

It sounds like a great idea to have nine of your best authors fill an anthology with whatever they want to write about. Unfortunately, maybe there's a reason there's more editorial control over what gets published then was used in this anthology. On the other hand, some of my complaint was material that felt like rote GURPS filler.

Ghost-Breaking felt like a mundane chapter from GURPS Undead or something, not at all what I was hoping for from Hite. Alchemical Baroque, by Phil Masters, is an interesting little fantasy campaign setting that combines a number of traditional details with original material that's clearly not Middle Earth or Greyhawk or any other fantasy world. (I didn't fall passionately in love with the setting, but it deserves a full 4E book a lot more then Yrth did.) Mythic Babysitting is fun, but it's worse then Elizabeth McCoy's other setting, GURPS IOU, in that it marries a setting that doesn't bear nitpicking points and stressing over fine details, with, well, GURPS. (It's the only thing in this book I might run.) Meridian is a science fiction setting from David Pulver. I wouldn't classify it as space opera; it has tightly contained points of impossible (but necessary) tech in it, with the rest reasonable (for fiction) extrapolation. It wasn't something that excited me, but it was interesting. The Last Spartan, by Gene Seabolt, was a mini-historical handbook centered around the time period of the end of the Spartans, and what the last few might have done in that world. Underground was a bit of rote GURPS material about the underground, complete with scientific information and templates. Airships is a piece of real world description about airships. Precursors is back to sci-fi, covering the Ancients. The large section of advantages and disadvantages and how they might show up in precursors drags this down; a lot of it feels like obvious hackwork. I haven't read Chariots yet, but it's a historical book, the Near East in 1348 BC.

What did I want this book to look like? GURPS Horror: The Madness Dossier. Not once did this make me feel like "I could never run this, but this is incredible." Maybe that's somewhat specific to Hite, but large parts of it seemed like rote material, the same stuff you'd get if you assigned a chapter in a normal GURPS sourcebook to an author: We need a chapter about airships, or ghost-breaking, for example. The historical stuff may not have been my cup of tea, but were closer to what I would expect--though I'd point out that both the Spartans and the Chariots were set in the Mediterranean in times familiar to Westerners, and I can imagine GURPS books consistent with what they did put out that could contain those works as chapters. GURPS Ancient World wouldn't have seemed that unlikely at the time. They were hardly on 16th century Tibet or China of the 1930s. The three new campaign settings were my favorite; Phil Masters' fantasy setting really is unique. I might actually play Mythic Babysitters, but definitely not in GURPS.… (mer)