Review: GURPS Grimoire

Summary

The Grimoire brings the spell tally for the GURPS system to well over 800 spells. If you're looking for a catalog of spells or a catalog of ideas, this supplement will deliver. It isn't that you couldn't create this yourself -- it's that SJG has taken the trouble to do it for you. And the sections on Radiation magic and sympathetic constructs are not to be missed.

Detail

Whew.

When I got done with this book, I felt dizzy -- thanks in part, no doubt, to the Decapitation spell, which a mage can use on himself. I considered that spell to be of dubious value, regardless of the described options for uses. However, that was only one of the over 400 NEW spells in the Grimoire, resulting in a formidable total of over 800 spells described for the system.

The book provides incidental coverage on additional spell throwing skill specializations, one new disadvantage, a short sidebar on ghosts, and a few more skills that may be relevant to your fantasy campaign, such as Tattooing. But the real meat of the book is spells.

Aside from the more mundane spell offerings, such as Mage Light, Create Gate, Shocking Touch and Shrink, the spell list now has some extremely entertaining and useful entries. Steelwraith, to avoid metal weapons; Ecstasy, to trigger pleasure centers (watch out for addiction!); Weapon Self, where you + your weapon = dancing weapon; Malefice, Simulacrum, Doppelganger, Effigy, Homonculus, and Soul Golem, which all provide imaginative ways of creating proxies that perform specific functions, such as storing souls, taking damage, or causing damage. Trust me, there's more.

Two new categories of spells are introduced: Gate magic and Technology magic. Gate magic covers time and space, and the GM is advised that it may be considered a sub-category of Movement spells, much like the weather, electricity, ice and acid spells might be considered sub-categories of the elemental spell categories.

Technology magic is exactly what it sounds like: the fusion of magic and technology. It was Arthur C. Clarke who said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In contrast to that statement, Technology magic has a direct effect on high-tech concepts, materials, and constructs, emphasizing a clear distinction between magic and technology in the GURPS universe.

Cyberpunk magic is present in the Technology magic category. Thinking Rigger and Decker from the Shadowrun game? Those spells are here. It's easy enough to become a Gremlin, with spells such as Malfunction and Glitch. But leaving all the other spell categories far behind is the section on Radiation magic.

The authors have managed to describe underlying concepts of, mechanisms for, and effects of radiation poisoning in two pages. The frightening spells themselves take up another page. In a game where inherent magic is permitted in this category, for a meager 12 points, the GM or a player can create the ultimate assassin with the spell Radiation Jet.

This is a very unusual GURPS publication on another front: only four pages have the sidebars so common to GURPS-line publications. The tabular list of spells with essential casting information and correlating page numbers takes up 5 pages, and the spell flowcharts illustrating prerequisites take up 16 pages. While the tabular information is useful, it might have been nice to have it be comprehensive across both GURPS Magic and Grimoire. Also, I noticed that duplicate spells were not page-referenced twice (for better or worse). For instance, Bless and Curse Machine are not listed in the table, but they are page-referenced to the original Magic book's Metaspell category.

I find it hard to believe that anyone with Grimoire would not own Magic. And frankly, although the flowcharted information is crystal clear, my head was swimming with the amount of information contained in them. I strongly advise anyone picking up both Magic and Grimoire to have a strong idea of what kind of character they want to design before picking out spells, or else be prepared to flounder about in a sea of possibilities.

The Verdict

The section on Radiation spells launches this supplement into the category of "indispensable" for both conventional and post-apocalyptic fantasy. Throw in the new Enchantment spells, and you've got enough to get your creative juices flowing, which is what a resource like this is all about. The rest of the book is just icing on the cake. Do keep in mind that there is a touch more redundancy than in Magic, largely due to the thematic arrangement of the spell categories.