I’m back! (This is my first blog post in six months. I spent the winter stay-at-home-dadding and finishing my master’s thesis, and I just didn’t feel like writing something for fun with that big writing task always looming at the keyboard. But it’s finished now, and I’ll see if I won’t get back into the groove […]
I’ve written a bunch of posts about the game mechanics of character creation for vampire PCs. In this one, I’ll step outside that rules-oriented view a bit and gather my thoughts regarding other aspects of what vampires are like in Sleepless Nights. What are they like, then? Any answer I give here is necessarily tentative and provisional, […]
Pretty much every social gathering must address the question of sustenance: sooner or later, everyone’s got to eat. Do we do it beforehand, each on our own? Do we go our separate ways or split into small groups and get something afterwards? Or do we make eating together part of whatever we’ve made the effort and […]
I’ve dabbled in a couple of martial arts, but there’s only one I’m proficient in. I figured it’s high time someone statted it up for Gurps. Kid Wrangling (4 points) Possibly the most ancient of all martial arts, this is the body of knowledge used by men and women from time immemorial to manage their […]
I enjoyed writing my first Fight Analysis post so much I decided to follow up with another one. Same genre, broadly speaking, but this one’s a real fight scene instead of a comedy skit – in fact, the climactic duel of the movie. Fellowship of the Ring came out 15 years ago, but still feels fresh. I […]
Inspired by Hans-Christian Vortisch‘s wonderful Gurps breakdowns of shootouts from movies and TV shows (here‘s a recent one), and Mailanka‘s equally meticulous turn-by-turn analyses of Star Wars lightsaber fights (like this one), I decided to try my hand at the same. Now, it’s a point of pride and principle that my favorite film is Conan […]
So, while Sleepless Nights starts in earnest sometime next spring after I come back from a five-month stint abroad, we managed to play a sort of prologue session last week. I wrote this primarily as an official record of the events of the adventure, but I tried my best to elucidate the decisions and blunders […]
In yesterday’s post, I looked at how spells and the Ritual Magic skill work in Sleepless Nights. Today, I’m expanding on that, checking out two other major supporting skills, Symbol Drawing and Thaumatology, and a couple of more minor ones. 3 Spell-Supporting Skills (Continued) 3.1 Symbol Drawing Drawing magical symbols aids in casting a […]
So, Gurps has a lot of magic systems of varying degrees of independence from one another. For Sleepless Nights, though, I wanted to try something I never have in 20 years playing Gurps: the standard magic system. I’ve used Powers-based magic, the 3e Spirits system, 3e Psionics rebranded as magic, and a scratch-built homebrew system – but […]
I doubt I’ll actually make use of the style rules from Martial Arts in Sleepless Nights, but just as a small exercise, I decided to try and design an effective style with the single purpose of taking out vampires. Secret Order Vampire Killing 6 points This style was founded as the hand-to-hand training regimen of the […]
dice and lives 