Building a Cowboy Bebop Campaign in GURPS 4th Ed.
posted on Mon, 06/15/2009 - 13:41 by
theshadow
GURPS 4th Ed. is the latest release of the GURPS system claiming to provide a more streamlined rule set for combat and expansion material integration. In the past I've only played one GURPS game and unfortunately it didn't last to long. Recently though I decided to pick up one of my old plans to create a campaign in the Cowboy Bebop setting. My original plan was to build it and play test it and then try to host a game at this years NDK. To accomplish this I decided that I would start with GURPS 4th Core and build from there. The following is my heroin tale as I built my campaign.
As any good GM knows creating an engaging and good campaign comes down to two crucial points. First is details, details, details. Any GM worth their salt will spend hours and days pouring over material piecing together the world for the players. From the overall 30,000 ft view down to the most innocuous NPC character types. Of course, as a GM, we all know that up to 80% of this material will never be seen or used. The point of it is so that at any given moment the GM can more easily bullshit something or put together another adventure.
Secondly is making sure that you tailor your adventures to the characters and players of your campaign. Because if you don't they will quickly loose interest and then you have a game without any players and thats just lame.
Now, as any seasoned GURPS GM may be aware of is that through GURPS you can create a world as complex or simple as you choose. When I embarked on my goal I went out and watched the entire Cowboy Bebop series (including the movie) again just so I could refresh my memory and because I couldn't find a "definitive source" to reference.
After finishing this initial research I discovered that although the story was quite entertaining and engaging the world around the characters was filled with many plot holes and missing bits of information. Which means I would have to spend hours filling in these gaps and with nine planets over 13 moons and various eluded to locations this was going to take some time. To top it all off there were missing NPC organizations and several other bits of information that would have to be made up.
After this initial scouting I decided to dig into the GURPS Basic books so that I could figure out what was provided and what would need to be elaborated upon. A week later and feeling rather tired of reading tech manuals (because reading any gaming systems core books is going to feel like this;) I decided that GURPS would indeed fill my needs.
The chapters were broken up into a mostly logical order from character creation to campaign building. I only had one major gripe which was that they moved away from the old system of listing the Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills grouped into their usefulness. For example in GURPS 3rd you could find First-Aid under the "Medical" section. Which made character creation really quick and easy. In 4th ed. they instead decided to go with an alphabetical listing. Which makes sense since you spend so little time creating characters and more time using the book as a reference. But they could have at least providing the listing as an appendix or even a PDF that could be readily downloaded.
After finishing the two Basic books I realized that though they were clear and would indeed meet my general needs there was quite a lot of things missing that I just didn't have the time to fill in. This being all the weaponry and technology that existed in the Cowboy Bebop universe. To resolve this I resigned myself to purchasing some of the expansion/companion books which are well known from previous editions. This included Bio-Tech, High-Tech, and Spaceships. Ultra-Tech is also on my list but isn't available in print as of the date of this posting.
In Cowboy Bebop they had what felt like a hodgepodge of futuristic and 21st century technology. Most of the technology from the 21st century was covered in the High-Tech book which included ballistics based weaponry and general computer technology. Overall the book was useful and I think will play more of an important role during gun battles than anything else.
Next because Cowboy Bebop displayed an advanced level of Medical technology, specifically in the realm of cryostasis, microbiology scanning equipment and diagnostics software I picked up Bio-Tech. Which helped to fill in a couple of the gaps. Overall I think Bio-Tech was more useful for plot ideas than actual technology. Though I understand that cybernetics are more technology based it would have been nice for them to cover them in part for prosthetics. From my understanding Ultra-Tech is going to cover this in great detail but its just kind of annoying that I have to wait and purchase yet another book to get my hands on this information.
Lastly because a lot of Cowboy Bebop revolves around space travel and possible interstellar battles I picked up Spaceships. Though GURPS 4th Ed. does have its own iteration of Space after reading reviews and getting some feed back I didn't feel that it would have the information I would need for this campaign. I may pick it up at a later time though for one of my other ideas. Spaceships became one of the more useful additions to the GURPS collection I felt. By giving me simple and clear rules that allowed me to build nearly any type of ship I would need in the campaign as well as a fairly intuitive integration of ship to ship combat. Though I'm not sure how much interstellar battles will play out in my campaign I can imagine them as really amazing and in depth scenic displays of projectile and beam weapons explosions.
Since I haven't played out the campaign yet I can't yet provide a more in depth review of each of the books. As I play through I'll make a more definitive review of each book individual as I see how they hold up.
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