November 15, 2010: More Low-Tech! More Space Gamer!

This week, the e23 releases couldn't be more different. But variety is the spice of life, so let's take a look.

GURPS Low-Tech Companion 1: Philosophers and Kings is a sourcebook on the technology that often goes forgotten in traditional RPGs -- politics and medicine, instruction and music, laws and monuments. It's tightly focused, diverting only the bare minimum of pages away for the necessities (like the credits, table of contents, and index), as you'd expect from a companion tome to the recently released (in PDF; the print version is arriving very soon!) GURPS Low-Tech.

(Two more Companions --  Weapons and Warriors, covering optional rules for weapons and armor, and Daily Life and Economics, covering the things that the common man took for granted -- are on the schedule. Watch this space for announcements of their release!)

Why is this information -- and the other technologies in the upcoming Companions -- segregated into their own PDFs, and not bundled into GURPS Low-Tech? In the words of Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch, GURPS Line Editor and rumored Canadian, "[The Companions] contain elaborations and details that not all gamers will want, but that are still sufficiently broad that they cross numerous cultures from TL0 to TL4."

Space Gamer #47 contains an article on beginning roleplaying and that most traditional of RPG materials, a fantasy adventure titled "Kimberani's Tomb." Space Gamer spreads its net wide, with articles on doctors in Traveller, traps in Killer, and errata in Barbarian Prince, as well as the usual collection of reviews and news from 1982.

-- Paul Chapman