GURPS settings appreciation thread

[Swanosaurus]

Since a lot of GURPS settings habe been mentioned in the thread about Revised 4rth edition, I thought I'd start a thread were people can gush about GURPS settings old and new.

I'll make a start with Banestorm: I never played it and read the new version only cursory a few years ago because I wasn't expecting to play it anytime soon (if ever), but I love it's core concept of having imported earth cultures (along with religions) that have already gained a strong foothold in a fantasy world. It gets around all the awkwardness of obvious non-XY-cultures, while at the same time, it provides ample space for pseudo-historical gaming without actual history getting into your hair. Plus, the elves being the ones who f***ed it all up is kind of a nice bonus twist. I just realized that the fantasy folk series for GURPS includes info on most of the fantasy folks within the Banestorm setting, so there even seems to be a lot more setting material than I expected.
(BTW, I never checked out Banestorm when it was still GURPS Fantasy, because I thought it was mainly a portal fantasy setting where people from our time travel to Yrth, bringing along their machine guns ... I wasn't into this and realized only much later that while that theoretically is a possibility in the setting, it's not at all what the whole banestorm thing is about!)

I think I finally should give it a proper read. While the next rules system I want to try is Daggerheart, Yrth could be a good setting for it.

 

[Staffan]

I'll copy over my post from the other thread.

GURPS Technomancer is a nice bit of genius IMO. It's just too bad it's extremely strongly tied to the GURPS system.

The idea is that the first nuclear test explosion created some kind of rift that increases the ambient mana in the world, turning the world from the "normal" low-mana real world into normal mana, with high mana within some distance of the explosion (I want to say about 100 miles but I can't be bothered to check – anyway, a fair bit into Mexico as well). Now it's 50 years later and magic has become an industry, very much based on how GURPS magic works assisted by rules from a supplement (Grimoire?) that had stuff about using mundane power to enhance magic. So you have assembly-line mages working to create magic items, which include things like kevlar magic carpets used by special forces for surreptious intrusion. If a high-value worker calls in sick, they teleport in a healer who casts cure disease on them. And rocketry never developed much beyond the V2 – because of the effects of that first nuke (and a second one the Soviet Union used in Antarctica, which caused a MUCH larger effect which in turn discouraged further testing) nuclear weapons were pretty much abandoned. The space program is alive and kicking though, but uses teleportation instead.

Addendum: a really cool detail is that since there's little focus on outer space in culture (since there was never a space race), the modern-day mythology of alien abductions has been turned into fey abductions instead. Mostly the same thing except that instead of being taken to a spaceship, you're taken into a fey mound.

Oh, and one of the effects of the nuke the Soviets set off in Antarctica was that a whole bunch of penguins became intelligent and have created a commmunist magic-based society.