GURPS Time Travel Adventures

GURPS Time Travel Adventures was published in 1993 – I have an adventure in it called Titanic! set, yes, aboard the Titanic, the doomed transatlantic liner.

It’s been out of print for years, but in 2020, Steven Marsh at SJ Games tracked me down. It seemed they’d lost the contract and wanted to know if I had a copy as they wanted to publish GURPS Time Travel Adventures as a pdf through Warehouse 23.

Unsurprisingly, I also couldn’t put my hands on the contract, but I clearly remember it being a work-for-hire (ie, they hold all the rights), and told him.

The quitclaim

However, SJG needed me to sign a “quitclaim,” (which basically says they have the rights to it). I was happy to renounce everything (after all, I’d been paid back in 1993) but, because it was another contract, we needed an actual physical consideration of $1. So, at some point in 2022 or 2023, I received a dollar bill from Steve Jackson Games.

(I tried to get them to give it to charity. But no, that wasn’t an option.)

I have no idea what I did with the dollar bill. I guess it’s around somewhere, but it’s effectively worthless as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, I mention all this for two reasons.

First, at the end of December 2024, I received my complimentary pdf of GURPS Time Travel Adventures. So it’s now available on Warehouse 23.

And second, glancing through Titanic! again, I remember how much I hated creating the NPC stats. 

NPCs, why did it have to be NPCs…

The idea behind the adventure is that the PCs are time agents sent back to the Titanic to ensure that some people (passengers and crew) are saved, while others are not. This is to secure their future. Meanwhile, a rival set of time agents want to save a different bunch of people to secure their future.

So what with the passengers and crew and enemy time agents, Titanic! features 30+ NPCs, most of which are fully statted out. Dear god, what was I thinking?

(There is absolutely no need for most of the NPCs to be statted out. But that was the house style, and so that’s what I did.)

Moving on

It was also, if I remember right, the end of my interest in GURPS. The early 90s was when I started playing and writing freeform larps, and my gaming was heading in a very different direction…

(Trivia note: Lynne Hardy, now Chaosium’s Associate Editor for Call of Cthulhu, helped proofread Titanic!)

Slugblaster: A first impressions review

Thanks to Quinn’s Quest review on YouTube, I bought the Slugblaster pdf. 

It isn’t something I’d normally be interested in, but I’ll get to that.

According to the rules, Slugblaster is “a tabletop roleplaying game about teenagehood, giant bugs, circuit-bent rayguns, hoverboard tricks, and trying to be cool.”

Forged in the Dark

Slugblaster is a Forged in the Dark (Fitd) game set sort of in the modern day, but with a wacky cartoon veneer as their home town has a crazy science lab in it that is warping reality. The PCs are bored teenage skateboarders, taking their boards into alternate universes for a “run”. That’s a “slugblast” (and the game’s core activity) - doing unnecessary things that are unnecessarily risky.

(I guess you could think of it as a four-colour, gonzo version of Tales from the Loop. )

So the players go on runs, then return home for downtime to deal with their dysfunctional families.

The rolls are as FitD, there are playbooks and gear (lots of crazy gear) and monsters and more. It’s all extremely charming, nicely laid out and fairly concisely written. (It’s a masterpiece of conciseness compared to the weighty tome that is Urban Shadows' second edition.)

I have a chequered history when it comes to running FitD games (see here and here). I don’t think the rules quite work for me. I’m not sure why – I think I’m missing something fundamental. I probably need to play more to see how it’s supposed to work.

Slugblaster's cycle of play

Anyway, Quinns made Slugblaster sound like a lot of fun, and I think I’d rather play it than run it. Although I’d quite like to run it. (And it needs more than my usual preference for a one-shot.)

And that’s because of beats.

What are beats?

Basiscally, beats are dramatic character development arcs. Slugblaster has loads – several common beats plus a unique beat for each playbook. Some examples:

The family arc:

1. Trouble at Home (2 trouble). Your family disapproves. How? Why? Do you care? +1 slam (distracted, worried, etc.) and pick a teammate who notices.
2. Final Warning (3 trouble). An argument, punishment, or ultimatum. What do they want? What do you? What don’t they understand? What don’t you? +1 doom.
3. Last Straw (4 trouble). Nuclear war, scorched-earth, and words you both regret. +1 slam (grounded, lost device, etc.) and +1 doom. What’s the crew think?
4. Redemption (4 style). Who makes the first move toward forgiveness? What’s changed? How will you treat each other differently now? −2 doom, +1 legacy or trait.

The angst arc:

1. Angst (2 trouble). You’ve got issues. Do we know why? How do they show? +1 slam (angry, jealous, depressed, etc.) and pick a teammate who notices.
2. Struggling (3 trouble). Your issues get worse. You act out, project, or try to solve the problem the wrong way. +1 doom.
3. Darkness (4 trouble). You are not okay. Your issues hurt your own crew. How? What did you say? What did you do? What did you not do? +1 fracture.
4. Catharsis (4 style). Who helps you? What do you understand now that you didn’t before? What will you change? −1 doom, −1 fracture, +1 legacy or trait.

During downtime, you can use beats to clear the trouble you have accrued during runs (when you are messing about in other dimensions). And you don’t want trouble to get too high…

Let’s say you start on the angst arc. It’s your turn, so you clear two trouble and start a scene where you describe your issues and how they are manifesting. You can bring in a teammate, and it’s up to you whether you roleplay this in full or just describe it. And when you’re done, you get +1 slam (“…lingering problems that directly affect your body, mind, spirit, or gear. Things like bruised, exhausted, freaking out, humiliated, glitching device…”).

So yes, to start with, all you get for clearing those two trouble is something bad (a slam). And the next two beats are worse – until, finally, you triumph and you are redeemed or overcome your troubles. The final beat gives you lots of nice bonuses, but frankly, I imagine the real bonus is all that angsty roleplaying.

Yes, you do have to accept the narrative leap that allows you to use the angst arc to clear the trouble you received from fleeing a salvage crab. As Quinns points out, Slugblaster is a resource management game – and trouble is just one resource. (And if you have players who struggle with that, then this probably isn’t the game for them.)

I imagine that when beats are working well, they will only encourage the players to take more crazy risks (to rack up the trouble), thus making the runs even more fun. That makes it a virtuous circle and is probably the main reason I want to play Slugblaster. With the right group.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything like beats in another game.

And the rest

The rest of Slugblaster is all the stuff we’ve seen before. Playbooks. Gear (lots of gear, much of it gonzo). Hillview, the PC’s home town, is described (along with some alternatives). There are crazy worlds (and a world-generator) for the PCs to go slugblasting in, and a bunch of crazy monsters (and a monster-generator) for them to meet. There are maps and NPCs and and factions and so on. I’ll be honest, I didn’t read this. I didn’t pick up Slugblaster for the background. If I decide to run it, I’ll read it then.

Slugblaster also contains rules for solo play, a chapter on changing the game, and examples of play. At the end, there are two boxes which explain the game in broad terms to D&D players and Blades in the Dark players.

So am I going to play Slugblaster?

I don’t know. I hope so, it looks like fun. But I’m not sure I want to run it.

You can pick up Slugblaster here.

Flashbacks and overlapping investigations

In The Dead Undead, I created a flashback. The investigation starts with a dead vampire, at which point I tell the PCs that this is very similar to an unsolved case a few weeks ago.

At which point we skip backwards in time and pick up that investigation. 

This worked really well – except the players forgot that this was an unsolved case. That was my fault – we played the flashback over a couple of sessions, and because the flashback was effectively no different to how we normally play, the players forgot that this was an unsolved case, and I had to remind them.

(Perhaps we should have played in black and white, or something.)

I’m thinking about this because the next case, The Orphan Room, also has a flashback. Or at least, it could have a flashback, and I’m thinking about how I want to run it.

(I suspect both investigations have flashbacks is because I started The Orphan Room ages ago, and while I was mulling it over, The Dead Undead dropped into place and I pinched the flashback idea from The Orphan Room.)

It takes me time to craft an Other London investigation, and so my regular group plays Other London only rather intermittently – between games of Kingdom, Good Society and more. So we do one investigation, then the next. And so on.

Overlapping investigations – probably a bad idea

Real life is rarely so ordered, and part of me would like to run an Other London game where the investigations overlap.

So the flashback from The Dead Undead occurs before (say), Murder of a Templar. And then the second murder in The Dead Undead occurs as Murder of a Templar is wrapping up. (And the flashback in The Orphan Room might even happen before all of that…)

But.

The problem with the flashback in The Dead Undead was that the players found the lack of leads frustrating. (Obviously, it didn’t help that they had forgotten we were playing a flashback. I should have reminded them.)

I suspect it would be equally frustrating if I started overlapping investigations.

We’re not good at leaving things unresolved, so there’s an inherent danger in trying this.

While unsolved cases are a feature of everyday policing, I can’t think of any examples in fiction. I’m sure there’s a reason for that.

So, I think for now, this remains an idea for the shelf.

I’d still like to do it, but it will need the right group of players. And I’ll explain what I’m doing – and hope they trust me enough to go through with it!

A treasure hunt in four mistakes

We had a few friends over for New Year’s Eve this/last year. We ate, drank and played a few games.

I also created a short treasure hunt, which was well received but suffered from four mistakes. Oops.

The first mistake

First, I planned for five players. That was my Mrs and Miss H, along with three friends who were joining us for NYE.  So I built a treasure hunt that had five parts.

The idea was that each part would lead to a letter, which could then be formed into a word that would lead to the hiding place for the treasure.

That final word was Volvo (the treasure was in the boot of my car).

To make it a little harder, I gave the letters as shapes, like this:

And then Mrs H reminded me that one friend wouldn’t be joining us until about 11 pm, after she had finished her shift at The Crown. Oops.

The second mistake

To make the final puzzle a little easier, I put the letters in age order. So the oldest player would get a V, the next oldest would get a O, and so on.

That meant that the clues for each letter were player-dependent.

Rather than write the name of the player on each clue, I created a code for them to crack. So, taking A=1, B=2 (and so on), I took the letters of each name and added them up.

So Steve would be 19+20+5+22+5 = 71.

(You can probably see where this is going.)

Unfortunately, it was only after I handed the players the clues that they told me that two of the numbers were the same! I genuinely hadn’t spotted my error before that.

(Luckily, it was easily fixed – once they solved the clues and worked out which set of clues was whose, I made sure they went to the right place.)

The third and fourth mistakes

For the next part of the hunt (the main part), the players had to answer questions that would lead them all over the house. The answer to each question was a letter – either an actual letter (“Eighth letter of Dunstanburgh Castle artist (in the kitchen)”) or a number that would give them a letter (“How many coat hooks are there by the front door?” – there are five, which gives E using the code as above).

Answering those clues led the players to where they would find the final clue (the shapes described above).

Only, as ever, there were two mistakes in this part of the treasure hunt… Again, they were easy to fix – but they were a little annoying.

No playtesting

It’s not the first time I’ve let (very avoidable )errors slip into my treasure hunts. In fact, I can’t think of a hunt that hasn’t had an error in it.

But that’s because I don’t test them. Inevitably I leave them to the last minute, so I don’t check them thoroughly.

And as my treasure hunts are one-and-done events for my family, anyone who could test them is inevitably playing them.

So I suspect the errors are here to stay.