OSSR: GURPS Goblins

[angelfromanotherpin]

Fighting and Drinking



Despite being two great tastes etc., this chapter's themes are not particularly unified. The first is genre-specific combat modifications, and the second is rules for drunkenness, and there's no particular cross-over. They could easily have been two very short chapters to no loss.

Fighting

The first modification to combat is initiative. In normal GURPS this is done in order of Speed, but Goblins initiative goes to whoever first declares "I'll whack him," and to everyone on their side. I'm not usually fond of this sort of thing, if for no other reason than it could be a sizable drawback to a player with a stammer, but in play I've noticed that it has a few upsides – mostly in keeping players engaged with high tension in possibly violent situations. I have had players start fights simply because the players couldn't stand the suspense. That sort of thing is complemented by the goblins plainly not being heroic individuals; nobody in my experience has ever claimed that their low-grade criminal is too badass or too cool to be put on edge by imminent stabbing, even players who are otherwise prone to that sort of thing.

I've already mentioned Courage, which is part of the method of making fights to the collapse or flee rather than to the death. It seems likely that in the original Goblins game the characters had only Courage and not hit points or similar, and keeping track of both is a bit of a pain. I like the results of having both physical and morale hit points, but the process could stand some streamlining. One thing which is kind of bullshit is that a particularly bad morale failure means shitting yourself in an especially humiliating way and just cold taking an additional -15 in social disads assigned by the MC; that's harsh and bad for the game, although it is an excellent motivation to start running before that result is even possible (you have to be significantly in the red on Courage before that happens), and I guess it's comparable to getting fucked up physically which can easily land you -15 points in physical disads.

You may have noticed in the chargen example that Wall Stabbington ended up with a couple of points of Menace. Well, some people and weapons are especially frightening and knock points off the opposition's Courage just by being visible when a fight starts, and Menace is the number that tells you how much they knock off. A bottle gets two points scarier if you break it to create a jagged end, so you are motivated to do that before any whacking is declared (or declare whacking before the enemy breaks theirs).

There's a small treatment on socially-appropriate weapons, with the lower classes using whatever gruesome implements are handy, the gentlefolk using actual pistols and swords, and the aristos using hired goons. Guns get their own new rule, where instead of being handled with the ordinary attack/defense procedure, a gunshot is a quick contest between the shooter's Gun skill and the target's Theology skill, which is funny as a concept but has some strange implications, like why the understanding of religion is so twisted if so many people are motivated to learn actual theology.


Drinking



The expanded GURPS drunkenness rules were originally laid out in GURPS Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, which oh man, I'm not even. They are essentially the same here, and the granularity is high, with 14 levels of intoxication and associated bonuses and penalties, but it's mostly manageable. The attention paid is probably appropriate considering that (as you may have noticed from the chargen example) Goblins are racially alcoholic. The only real connections between fighting and drinking are: 1) a Goblin's Courage is increased by their intoxication level, and 2) a Goblin who loses a fight doesn't get their Courage back until they've had a drink (victorious Goblins get all their Courage back immediately).

Rules for how bad your hangover is finish up the chapter.

Next up: DISEASE.

[Eikre]

Has some strange implications, like why the understanding of religion is so twisted if so many people are motivated to learn actual theology.

Sounds right to me!

[Count Arioch the 28th]

General question, do I need the GURPs core book to play this or is it self-contained and has everything one would need if they're not familiar with the system. Because I need to play this game like yesterday...

[angelfromanotherpin]

No, it's not self-contained, although you might be able to get by with the free GURPS Lite.

[Prak]

Count- please run a pbp game of Goblins. I would totally play.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Disease



Goblins must check occasionally to see if they have contracted a disease, or less occasionally if they engage in hazardous behavior like having sex or being a barber. The most common trigger is just every month on the day of your birthday. It doesn't say that you can cut your risk almost in half by choosing to be born on the 31st of a month, but one of my players tried it and I let them get away with it.

There are two disease tables, one for minor ailments and one for compound ailments, and between them they contain a more-than-sufficient variety of dreadful afflictions, although some (such as Pregnancy or Blasted by Lightning) are not strictly diseases. I do like that Goblins are just generally assumed to be at risk for everything, from scurvy to leprosy, because their environment/diet/lifestyle is simply that awful.



Treatment for diseases is questionable. You can try some of the listed superstitions, like hanging a dying beetle around your neck, but the only method with rules is bleeding. Any disease is holed up in a random part of the body, and by letting blood from that body part, a barber can grant a chance to throw off the disease (or by amputating, remove it for certain). The difficulty is that bleeding costs HT, and if the barber misjudges which body part the disease is in, that's pain for no gain.



It's one of those things which probably isn't great in most games, but in Goblins winds up doing a great job of implying the general filth, as well as expressing the arbitrary and unfair misfortunes which assail Goblins. Nobody wants their heroic power fantasy to catch the clap or whatever, but most people are okay with their low comedy character getting ill. And everyone will remember the time someone caught typhoid, couldn't beat it, told the barber to take the limb, and wound up losing two limbs because they guessed wrong the first time. Or the time they gave an enemy a disease and then bribed the barber to deliberately misdiagnose him and fruitlessly bleed him white for the lulz.

Next up: DIRECTING THE GAME. Solid. Fucking. Gold.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Count- please run a pbp game of Goblins. I would totally play.

No promises, as I am aware I am not particularly reliable. Tomorrow I'm going on a trip to visit some old friends and family for a week, when I get back I'll look into getting some GURPS books and learn the system.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Directing the Game

I maintain that this chapter is solid gold, but that gold may be only 23 karat because of some baffling editing choices. Like, it begins with a very solid discussion about building a social network of NPCs, then derails that with three pages of urban bestiary. Those are useful stats, but they don't really belong in the middle of that discussion.


The corn illustrations also seem out of place.

The early sidebars in the chapter are supposedly 'crossovers,' which is usually where they present batshit combinations of the current book with some other books. But of the four settings presented, only one is a proper crossover, although it is a properly bonkers crossover with GURPS Blood Types which suggests Anno Dracula as source material. The others are just transplanting the goblin experience into renaissance times, prohibition era, and a very crazy dystopian future.


Goblins/Sweeney Todd is just... Goblins.

The real meat of the chapter is how to sandbox Goblins adventures. For instance, there's specific notes on how the PCs will probably just go nuts in the early game and run wild over most NPCs (because the NPC generator is biased), and this will get them a rep as bad dudes who could be hired to do bad things by other NPCs, and also make them some recurring enemies. That the enemies can't beat the PCs in open whacking just means they have to come up with a dastardly scheme. There's also a helpful improv guide to turning any event into someone's ruined day and associated PC-involving revenge scheme.



The most important part is the section on building a social web, a network of various goblin relationships between individuals and groups that the PCs' actions will send shockwaves through, provoking various responses. It's a relatively simple technique that's very useful in many games.

The chapter ends with the NPC generator, which is name-based. That is, you come up with a name for the character, and compare it to a couple of tables to determine their stats. In particular, the first four letters of a character's name determine their core GURPS attributes (ST, DX, IQ, HT) in such a way that the players can readily get a ballpark estimate as soon as the name is heard and that's intentional. It's a pretty sweet tool because generating GURPS characters is kind of a pain, and while you can use standardized templates in most games, that wouldn't feel very gobliny. This rapidly produces simplified but highly variable weirdos with phobias and strange body traits. Not as fully detailed as PCs, but enough to work with.

Next up: ADVENTURES

[Lago PARANOIA]

That's an interesting design assumption, that PCs will spend the first few sessions bitchslapping the less competent NPCs whereupon antagonists are hastily and stealthily assembled into a proper opposition. Rather than them just rolling in and putting the PCs in their place from the outset as is usual for most TTRPGs story-telling games games media.

[angelfromanotherpin]

There are limits, alas. Whatever his personal faults, Bishop William Sodom has +6 to all of his rolls and starting PCs have -3 to all of theirs; on a 3d6 RNG, he might not be able to keep from kicking their asses.

That goes back to playtest versions of the pre-GURPS version of the game, where instead of taking jobs from richer goblins, the PCs just cold robbed whoever looked like the softest target. In response, the designer made prospective employers beefier to encourage the PCs to prey on people who were their equals or lessers in society, just as is proper.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Adventures



This chapter is divided into eight parts, one setting for each of the four broad social classes, and an associated adventure for each setting. The adventures are pretty good, and some of the settings are especially useful, like the low lodging house which is a good example of how starting Goblins are going to live, or the aristocrat's social club, which is a stealth scenario in itself because the basic activity there is gentlefolk bankrupting themselves in attempts to make high-level connections. Also, each of the adventures comes with a set of suggested hooks for further related shenanigans. One of the scenarios even includes The Devil so you can see an example of how he works.

I have a particular fondness for the theater that serves as the working-class setting, because it includes an endearing description of their incredibly ghetto stage production (where one person plays both armies in a battle), and also an entire (one-page) script for that production: The Abridged Macbeth, With Just The Witches And The Fighting. My high school buddies actually put on a production of that show, and not only is it pretty funny, but it's a good example of the sort of thing that was done to some of Shakespeare's plays in the period.

As a whole, the chapter makes it extremely clear what a Goblins adventure is supposed to be like, and how to translate the tone that's established in the text into appropriately silly/horrible hijinks.

Up next: final thoughts.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I just realized I forgot to finish this, and I think that happened because, well, I said close to everything I wanted to in the main body. It's a great book, a great setting, a very entertaining game, and while it isn't perfect, it's still loads better than most RPG books.

But what I do want to mention before bringing this review to an official close is that the book is also the best example of a conversion mod for GURPS that was ever published. We say that GURPS is more of a build-your-own game than a game in itself, but most of the setting books did a fairly tepid job of that; probably because they were written by people who bought the hype that GURPS was a game in itself. You look at something like GURPS Lensmen, whose assumptions are so far from the gritty low-fantasy GURPS baseline, and it's clear that the book needed some far more serious adjustments than were even attempted (the best part of that book is the Space Opera Combat System, which is a from-scratch minigame). Goblins just goes balls out and mods in stuff like the Mistreatment table, the Status subsystem, the Courage subsystem, and (to a lesser extent) the Disease subsystem, and really does transform how the game plays at some fundamental levels. That by itself would make the book worth looking at.

The book being hilarious throughout is just icing.

[codeGlaze]

I have a group that is... extraordinarily silly (mute bards that emulate sexy sax man, clerics that hit people to heal them, rogues that pull levers "because it was there", etc...).

This would be absolutely perfect for them.