GURPS: It was Twenty Years Ago Today...

...well, no, but close. Anyway, sometime in 1985 I bought Man-to-Man the combat rules for GURPS, released a few months ahead of GURPS 1st Edition while Evil Stevie tweaked the ruleset a bit. Some twenty years later:

Number of GURPS books owned: 238 [1]

Number of GURPS e23 products downloaded: 19

Number of GURPS campaigns I've game mastered: 0

Number of GURPS campaigns I've played in: 0

Sad ain't it?

Manuscript Update: Week 2 for Opening Shots at Analog, plus no word back from Steven Marsh at Pyramid either about my latest article. Typically I don't know anything until the latter is published anyway.

[1] By my reckoning, all I need is GURPS Conan and Up Harzburk! (I know, but I'm a completist), and the new Prime Directive books to complete my collection. Yes, I'm quite mad.

AU: No ungulates

So, I'm in the middle of Yet Another Terinu Fanfic, this one set on Vulpine Prime before the invasion of the Varn, focusing on a pair of brothers who are the Vulpline equivilent of the Wright Brothers. Naturally a lot of their conversation revolves around transportation, and various speeds thereof. Technology wise it's set in a neo-early 20th Century, with idealistic Victorian values. The main setting currently is on the brothers' family estate, which is the sort of Ur English farming village which mystery writers love, writ large.[1]

Anyway, there's powered lighter-than-air craft (propelled by hideously expensive, propane fueled steam engines, making them more toys of the rich rather than practical transportation), but the fastest technology out there are the local Stanley Steamers and of course the railroad. But prior to that, I'm not sure what was out there. I'm actually angling towards there being no equivilent to horses on Vulpine. For one, I'm lazy, and I don't care to go into the details of creating a whole new alien species. My default assumption is that herbivores didn't grow that big, and any predators that might be of a similar size had a temperment ill-suited for use as beasts of burden. And anyway, Vulpine have digigrade feet, making stirrups pretty problamatical.

So when the steam engine hits society, it really hits. Not having horses around to haul wagons would make expansion across their world hidiously slow, even if they did develop a fairly sophisticated civilizations along the way. Much like in South America, it's quite possible that the wheel was developed quite late. After all, there would be little use for it until someone came up with the concept of the pulley or the wheelbarrow. But once it was there, the West (or the East, or the North) would be Won in short order.

Also I figure the Vulpine developed automobile racing about 30 seconds after the first steam cart came off the assembly line...


[1] Being Vulpine (ie: Far Cooler Then Humans, cuz they're Furry and Matriarchal), they never developed the Dark Satanic Mills to mar Mr. Blake's Green and Pleasant Land. Obviously those steam locomotives were lovingly constructed in village workshops by hand. :P Though I do have the notion that they developed and refined natural gas before coal became readily availible, threreby saving them a world of troubles.

Taste Test

Item: Local grocery store was out of Diet Vanilla Cherry Dr. Pepper.

Item: They did however, have a new product "Diet Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper"

Test Result:

I now know what a soda would taste like if it was enhanced by cherry flavored cough medicine.