Customer Reviews

GURPS Mars

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I've fallen out of my RPG-playing days, but I still buy books like this now and then, simply because the make such great resource/reference books.

GURPS Mars is no exception - the first section describes (in pretty good detail) the actual Mars - everything from atmospheric composition, resources, and the calendar to geographical features. The next section gives a brief but intriguing look at many myths and legends associated with the Red Planet over the centuries.

But it is the following four sections that really make this book shine. Each deals with a different take on Mars:

--Domed Mars (what the first days of human colonization of Mars might look like; this is a rigorous 'hard scifi' take).

--Terraformed Mars (describing the actual processes needed to terraform Mars, and then how society might develop afterwards).

--Superscience Mars (this is Mars as it appears in classic scifi B-movies).

--Dying Mars (my personal favorite, this section describes a Mars straight out of Burroughs' Barsoom novels).

Each of these sections contains a wealth of information, more than enough to get your creative juices flowing, whether you're a gamer looking for new settings and adventures, or a writer looking for inspiration.

GURPS Mars is definitely one of SJG's best products.

If you're unfamiliar with the series, Steve Jackson Games produces GURPS--Generic Universal Role-Playing System--allegedly adaptable for a wide variety of types of RPG campaigns. This supplement was intended to help a dungeonmaster or equivalent set a GURPS campaign on Mars. It contains the physical facts about the red planet, has "Mars in Fact and Fiction" and a series of settings for different versions of Mars--Domed Mars (Heinlein and Clarke), Terraformed Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson), Superscience Mars ("Mars Attacks?") and Dying Mars (Burroughs and Brackett.)
It's not a bad idea, but the author--James L Cambias--spread himself way too thin. The book is 128 pages, and a good 24 are pretty well completely irrelevant--histories of our understanding of Mars, poetry, or half columns on "Silly Mars" or "Cabal Mars"--ideas without information. That wasted space could have added depth to the scenarios, which could use it. For that matter, "Superscience Mars" is really an earth-based campaign. A brief rundown of common facts--size, distance from earth, length of year and day and so forth, followed by fuller pictures of Mars as it might be in the early stages of colonization, a partly terraformed Mars and Mars as the pre-modern SF writers saw it would have given would-be dungeon masters a lot more to work with.
As it is, I'd say buy the book if you're specifically intending to run a "hard SF" RPG set on Mars. If you want to return to the dying Mars of Brackett or Burroughs, go back to the source material--there are maps of both which Cambias does NOT use--and work it out for yourself. Easier to adapt Brackett to GURPS than to adapt GURPS to Brackett.