![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
patrick_morris_millerGURPS Darkover by Walter Breen and Leslie Fish (role playing game supplement)
Withdrawn from publication schedule
Time period: notes given for both the Ages of Chaos and the post-recontact eras
Roleplaying under the Bloody Sun
I was recently visiting an old friend who had herself had friends on the periphery of the Austin gaming scene. Hours into our first night of catching up, she asked me, "You're into Darkover?"
"Well..."
"Then get a load of this."
What she showed me was a three ring binder containing a galley for a GURPS splatbook I had never seen before. The first page began:
GURPS DARKOVER
by
WALTER BREEN and LESLIE FISH
I felt like I was holding a dead rattlesnake tattooed with the original line 62 of Beowulf.
One of the least well known entries in both the GURPS and the Darkover worlds, GURPS Darkover was well on its way to press in 1990 when co-author Walter Breen took a plea bargain on child molestation charges. The book was immediately dropped from development by its publisher, who likely would prefer not being named here. Of the few outside the company who had heard of its existence, most probably assumed that every working copy had been degaussed, then burned, then buried under the West Texas desert.
The document I saw was clearly somewhat early in the production process; no index or table of contents, blank spaces for art to be added later. There was no cover or cover art; the second hand description of the intended cover my friend gave me, from old memory, was a good match for the Michael Whelan cover for Stormqueen!. Not a bad choice, if you ask me.
Content-wise, GD is fairly typical for a GURPS worldbook:
- background information on the world (including some content on the Terran Empire), with very little game mechanics involved
- a deeper description of, and GURPS rules for, laran, mostly based on the psionics from other GURPS books but supplemented to cover matrix crystals and the Comyn Gifts
- advantages, disadvantages, and skills particular or completely new for Darkover, along with suggestions for character creation, Darkovan, Terran, and chieri
- description and mechanics for other world elements, such as weapons, animals, and vehicles, the latter mostly relevant for the Ages of Chaos
- brief appendices of metainformation, such as a Darkover bibliography, a plug for the Friends of Darkover, and a call for submissions to the DAW short story anthologies (which would be rescinded two years later amidst great drama)
As is usual for GURPS, the world information is a good quick introduction to the setting and very approachable even to those who don't care about TTRPGs at all.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book such as this must include maps - but the Darkover corpus is well-known to be unmappable, and Bradley herself was hostile to efforts to map the world. Someone created maps for GURPS Darkover, including a bucky map of the entire planet, and they are... blank spots on pages, just like the placeholders for art.
What I found the most interesting about the laran section was the chapter on matrices: starstones are built as characters, contributing advantages, disadvantages, and skills to circles using them, and having character point totals in accord to their power. A sidebar gives narrative details and a 'character' sheet for the Sharra matrix, and it is nasty...
Thankfully - considering the authors - the only place I found the concept of virginity was in a sidebar basically counseling GMs to tread carefully around the subject. I suspect that is a precis of the section on the subject from GURPS Witch World, which I have not seen a copy of in quite a while.
The rules support adventuring through any era of Darkover's history but suggest either the Ages of Chaos, with player characters built on 200 CP, or the Recontact epoch, with player characters built on 100 CP. These guidelines mirror the novels' theme of powers and knowledge lost over time (and blaming the Compact of Varzil in a sidebar), as well as the continued effects of inbreeding on the Comyn; they also recommend chieri characters be required to take an Unusual Background advantage, costing more CP the later in history a campaign is set. Playing a chieri at the time of The World Wreckers would be quite challenging - appropriate, perhaps, but also frustrating.
While I detected no trace of one of the authors'... personalities (thank Evanda and Avarra), one of the sample characters is quite clearly the protagonist of "The Horse-Tamer's Daughter". As you may expect, that quite amused me.
The world turns. GURPS Darkover was strangled in the crib by the heinous crimes of one of its authors. Today, popular interest in Darkover is at an extreme low and I do not expect it to rise again. Had this book seen print, it is likely that it could now be acquired on the used market at a reasonable price. In the unlikely event that a table of interested players could be assembled, I think a decent GM could run a successful campaign with it. As it stands, there are probably less than a hundred people alive who have seen GURPS Darkover and now I have joined their numbers.
(In whose hands does that binder now reside? I shall never tell.)
I have been lax in writing. I pledge to you that I shall continue this series with The Forbidden Tower in the very near future. Adelandeyo!
