24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not perfect, but pretty good, June 26, 2006
This review is from: GURPS Space Fourth Edition (GURPS: Generic Universal Role Playing System) (Hardcover)
This is the fourth iteration of GURPS Space. It's got a lot that's new, quite a bit that's appeared elsewhere in more primitive forms, and a few relics that have been recycled from GURPS Space 1, 2 & 3.
Bad bits first:
The book recycles a small amount of faily bland and pointless text about interstellar societies and "generic" organisations in chapter 1 and expands on most of this information in chapter 7. Thus, some of this text is a bit redundant. It also includes the irritating joke organisation "Special Justice Group" (SJG, like the publisher, Steve Jackson Games).
There are no game statistics for equipment in the book at all, and no ship design system.
Steve Jackson Games uses the avoirdupois system in preference to metric. So do most Americans, of course, but it just seems unscientific for a scientific game book.
Good Bits
The vast majority of the book is devoted to hard science concerns; possibile and miraculous technologies, world and starsystem generation, and alien life. These are excellent. The technology section contains no examples, but is nevertheless thought-provoking and useful. The worlds section is as accurate and up to date as the authors could make it, and is a vast improvement on all the prior GURPS spaces and, for that matter on any star generation system by anyone else. The same goes for the alien life chapter, which is more detailed than any other that I've seen.
The remainder of the book has solid advice on how to create, fine tune and run a space campaign, and sample templates for character creation. It's all good stuff.
Finally, should you buy this book? If all you want to know is "how does a 3rd Ed. TL8 gauss needler translate into a 4th Ed. weapon?" then no, because the book doesn't tell you that. But if you want to design and run a scientifically plausible, richly detailed space game for any games system, then yes, this book is definitely worth the money.
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
What do you expect?, July 31, 2006
This review is from: GURPS Space Fourth Edition (GURPS: Generic Universal Role Playing System) (Hardcover)
What you will get out of GURPS Space depends on what you are looking for. It does not have any stats for weapons or technology, no rules for spaceship construction and no rules for space combat. For that, Interstellar Wars is a better book, but neither are up to 3rd Edition standards (space combat is fairly boring as defined in IW).
Space is good for designing star systems and worlds, and has some decent material on alien life. If you want to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations, then this book is good.
If you want to build the spaceship that will take you there and be able to defend yourself when you meet hostile aliens, this is not the book.
That is about it. 3rd Edition Space is a better book.
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great!, January 10, 2007
This review is from: GURPS Space Fourth Edition (GURPS: Generic Universal Role Playing System) (Hardcover)
This book is great! It covers all about space campaigns, at any detail level you want. Worlds, Star maps, Races and etc.
The book is beautiful, too!
It just don`t go deeper into building starships, but I think I know why. That is much more about engeneering and I bet SJG will soon release the Vehicle Builder in its 4th edition to help in this matter.
Great book!
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