It’s been only a six weeks since the last GURPS offering from Sean Punch and while I would still like to see a more tightly packed release schedule, I am more than content to wait if everything we get is the same quality as GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting – Caverntown and GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells, both of which plug some big holes in heroic fantasy line-up of GURPS.
Facts
Author: Sean Punch (a.k.a. Dr. Kromm)
Date of Publication: 17/05/2018
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 31 (1 title page, 1 content page, 1 index page, 1 page ad)
Price: $8.00 (PDF), $ 0.30 per page of content; Score of 4/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0154_preview.pdf
Review
As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.
The GURPS Magic – XYZ Spells series are mini-grimoires. They always contain a large list of spells (50 in this case) and an introduction that helps the reader to put them into perspective. Unlike Plant Spells (a favourite of mine since I helped playtest it), Artillery Spells doesn’t focus on a single college, but on a type of spell – namely those that allow a mage to damage and kill multiple low- to mid-threat foes. It is the counterpart to Death Spells which have a good chance of killing one worthy opponent in one fell swoop.
The spells cover most of the colleges with only Food and Knowledge being left-out, which is probably a good thing. Every college having a death spell was a bit weird already and I don’t think we needed more of that. GMs do get a lot of information about building their own artillery spells, so readers don’t need to worry that they’ll never see their favourite food fight spells.
The chapter on spell-building is five pages long and discusses both the types of spells that can be used as artillery and how to balance their stats. It’s deliberately not
The spells themselves form the majority of the volume (21 pages) and are unevenly distributed over the colleges with the elemental colleges usually getting more and the ones less commonly associated with damage-dealing less. A couple of helpful boxes on larger topics are distributed throughout this chapter.
Meat
There’s a lot of meaty rules goodness in this book, beginning with dramatically expanded ways for dealing damage to multiple opponents. Cones, emanations, bombardment, ricocheting shots, swarms, contagious damage, portals, damage that moves the targets around – it’s all in there. Indeed, the book goes a long way towards making damage-dealing spells less generic. There are some common themes like cones and repeating area damage, but many spells have unique and mostly entertaining mechanics.
The spells range from merely efficient, workmanlike spells like Improved Explosive Fireballs and Cloud of Doom to fast but unpredictable damage-dealers like Twisting Terror and Mana Storm to atmospheric spells like Vengeful Staff (think Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad-dûm), Doom Wish and Spirit Incursion.
There are mass mind-control spells that induce everybody to stab each other, psychic screams, magically-animated weapons that attack everybody in an area, huge fists that pummel targets from the sky, sun-light lasers, mine-fields, the whole shebang. A couple of spells are slightly edited versions of older spells that had been introduced after GURPS Magic, but most are completely new. As there are far more ways to deal damage over an area, the spells feel much more unique than the ones in Death Spells. The spread also feels appropriate and there are a no obvious gaps.
A few of the spells are a little complicated (Collision, Sun’s Arc, Ironweed), but most of them are not much more complicated than what we’re used from former publications. Magery requirements are handled flexibly as is availability. The spells are almost all very hard (except for Self-Destruct) and Legality Class 1 or 0.
Especially interesting are the spell-building guidelines (the good doctor deliberately didn’t call them a system), which give the GM good ideas for balancing their own spells and making sure the spells in the grimoire don’t upset their campaign. GMs also get hint on fitting damage effects by college. There are also boxes on defence and the ever-popular topic of spell maintenance. Kromm takes especial care to show the reader how to differentiate artillery spells from boss killers. You don’t want your goblin horde eradicator to take out the dark lord or the archmage by accident.
All in all, there’s not much missing here. Even the page-count is half a dozen pages higher than the previous volumes in the series, despite Death Spells having a similar number of spells.
Meat score: 8.5
Cheese
As this is a spell catalogue there’s not that much in the way of world-building information present. There are, however, boxes on how to introduce artillery spells to existing campaigns and how to fit them into a fantasy legal framework, how to frame a heroic self-sacrifice by dangerous spells and how to fit the new spells into divinely-granted spell-casting tied to Power Investiture. There are hints as to which spells fit which genres best, but the vast majorities are slanted towards generic fantasy with a good dash of dungeon-delving.
For a generic spell collection there is not much more you could ask for.
Cheese score: 6.5
Sauce
The writing here is less tongue-in-cheek than most of Kromm’s Dungeon Fantasy titles, but there are the odd joke or two. It’s mostly enjoyable, though it does get a bit technical in some of the spell descriptions.
The art is, while not great, at least appropriate to the spells mentioned, sometimes more than I would have thought possible with reused generic art from Dan Smith & Co. We get a whopping five black and white illustrations and the cover isn’t actually doing them justice. Still, it’s a far cry from what other companies or even enterprising freelancers like Douglas Cole and his Lost Hall of Tyr.
Still, it’s a good effort for our favourite system.
Sauce score: 6
Generic Nutritional Substance
There are probably few campaigns outside of traditional fantasy and Technomancer that will use all the spells presented here. There are, however, a fair number of spells that work in secret magic, illuminati and horror games. Whether a dozen spells are worth the price of admission, everybody must decide for themselves.
Generic Nutritional Substance score: 6
Summary
GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells plugs a hole in the GURPS Magic system by presenting interesting damage-dealing spells that don’t all work in the same way and merely exchange damage types. Together with Death Spells it goes a long way of remedying one of the criticisms that are frequently levelled against the system, namely that its spells are boring and generic. It’s a good buy for everyone who likes the versatility of the system, but wants a little more flavour.
Total score: 7.7 (very good)
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (50%), Cheese (15%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a cheese-oriented book. A “cheesy” story- or world-building-oriented book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.
Value score: 5.85 (above average)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.
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