Game Dream 18: Mock Review

Game Dream 18 asks us to:

Do a mock review of a game that doesn't exist, but you think really ought to. Readers are encouraged to let the author of the review know if this game exists in another form somewhere.

GURPS Trains

GURPS Trains is a new book for the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, covering a subject very close to my heart. It promises to be the definitive guide for games set in, around or involving trains. And it shows every sign of living up to that promise.

Chapter one gives a brief history of trains and railways, from the primitive mine tramways to the experimental maglevs. It contains a very useful timeline, giving the construction dates of famous routes across America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Chapter two railway operations and technology in gameable terms, explaining what all the jargon means, and how safety equipment works, and how things differ across eras and continents. It also notes that Hollywood takes enormous liberties with the latter, and a cinematic GM should also do so to remain in genre. To this end it uses the unintentionally hilarious "Cassandra Crossing" as an example. It also includes a section on the physics of train crashes, which allows the GM to calculate the odds of a character's survival or of escaping injury based on TL, speed, and their position in the train.

Chapter three covers characters, with GURPS templates covering everything from train drivers and conductors though transport cops, and of course hobos.

Chapter four puts it all together with advice about using trains in games, covering adventures set on board or centring around trains in genres ranging from Old West to Horror to Espionage to Special Ops. It gives recommendations for running everything from train robberies, zombie infestations, or terrorist hijackings. There's plenty of advice for running fight scenes on board moving trains, and recommends that in cinematic genres, the fight must always end up on the roof.

Chapter five describes in detail a dozen iconic trains from different eras and continents, complete with floorplans of carriages, details of significant landmarks en-route, and of the terminals and major intermediate stations, as well as some typical passengers and a couple of plot hooks for each one. It covers not just classic long-distance expresses such as the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian express and the Twentieth Century limited, but more mundane examples such as a New York Subway train, and typical north American freight train. The last two are fictitious; a massive steampunk monster running on 12' gauge tracks, and a future maglev crossing the inhospitable surface of Mars.

Next come four sample adventures, ranging from middling to good; we have a fairly straightforward Victorian horror adventure set on board the overnight London to Inverness express, a rather more involved GURPS In Nomine adventure set on board the San Fransisco-LA "Starlight Express", a very tough World War Two adventure centring on Yugoslavian partisans, and finally a terrorist plot aboard the Martian maglev.

The bibliography lists an enormous number of reference books, and a great list of classic train movies, from British comedy classics such as "Oh Mr Porter" to action movies like "Runaway Train" and "Von Ryan's Express".

All in all, a very good book, and very much not just for train anoraks. Like many of the best GURPS supplements, relatively little space is taken up with GURPS-specific rules, making GURPS Trains usable with systems other than GURPS

GURPS Trains is not actual GURPS book: GURPS is © Steve Jackson Games, and this piece of wishful thinking is not intended as a challenge to SJG's intellectual property. But if SJG ever did publish a book called GURPS Trains, I would certainly buy it! Unless I get a playtest credit for it first, that is.