Review: GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves

Review: GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves

I have never written a book review in my blogging "career," but it's as good time as any to try. A new GURPS book came out today - GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves, and it was an instant buy for me, as I was looking forward for this.

GUPRS Fantasy Folk: Elves is the first supplement in the Fantasy Folk series for the 4th edition, and that means a lot. It will be used as an example for the upcoming books (two are already in progress, as far as I know), and perhaps even as a template on the GURPS Wishlist. Fantasy Folk takes a race from Fantasy Folk 3e and gives it a much more detailed treatment, sort of like what GURPS Aliens series (well, more like a single supplement) for 4e does in regards to GURPS Aliens 3e. It is also the first GURPS book written by Alden Loveshade. So, I 

The book is 27-pages long, which is longer than the usual "small" books that are around 12-14 pages. The first chapter gives a quick overview of the previously published elves, both in GURPS books and folklore. Before the book came out, I was thinking about what kind of elves this book is going to be about - Banestorm elves, Dungeon Fantasy elves, Fantasy elves? Apparently, it's about all of them, and that's great. I like this multi-directional approach, it is very GURPSy.

The second chapter describes the elven culture in detail, while trying to keep things generic. You can always insert such an elven society into your game world as is, or use this as a base for your own take on elves. Or even use this described society for a non-elven culture, if you feel like it. While the level of detail is not as high as, for example, Races of the Wild for D&D 3.5, it is enough to make the elves feel distinct.

The third chapter is just a single page that describes racial relations between the elves and other races. I feel like this should have either been longer (we only got humans, dwarves, and orcs), or should have been incorporated into the second chapter. Again, things are kept generic here, but that's GURPS after all. Also, I feel like there is a lot of potential in inter-subrace relations of elves, since there's so many of them. But word count limit is a thing.

The fourth chapter is devoted to the racial templates. If you are one of those people who hate variety, skip this chapter. I enjoy variety, and when I was building my fantasy setting, I realized that a multitude of elven (and dwarven, etc.) subraces existing in the same world makes total sense, just like how there's so many different human ethnicities. But I digress. This chapter collects all previously published elven racial templates and adds some new ones. It also discusses the impact of the Unaging advantage on the game, something that I've seen many people discuss online, but was never addressed in the books before. (This is the perfect opportunity to plug my Ageing Abilities post.)

The fifth chapter is all about racial abilities. It reprints some advantages, disadvantages, and perks relevant to the elven race, introduces three new perks, a new Terrain Adaptation specialization, and a new advantage - Tree Walking. Cool! It also has two new techniques - Wildspeak (for Mimicry), and Underwater Archery. The latter is very confusing to me, as it seems to eliminate a -4 penalty to use bows underwater, while the underwater combat rules (both the shortened ones in this book and the much more detailed ones in Pyramid #3-26) do not mention such a penalty. There is a -4 penalty to attack from air into water and vice versa, but not a penalty to simply use the bow underwater. There's also two new spells - Singing Trees and Waterproof. The latter seems to be just a variant of Soilproof for the Water college. Also, both spells do not have their colleges listed, but I assume that Singing Trees is a Plant/Protection & Warning spell, and Waterproof is a Water/Protection & Warning spell. Such things are important when limited talents and Magery come into play.

The sixth chapter has the Forest Warden occupational template and a sample character. I cannot really say much about these.

The seventh chapter is about gear. Just like the rest of the book, it contains many references to other supplements, which is nice. The seabow for sea elven archers only deals thr imp damage, which seems a bit underwhelming. If I were to make an underwater bow, I would use one with a much higher damage bonus, since bows used underwater have their damage halved. Thr imp seems very ineffective. We alse get a couple of statblocks for typical elven mounts.

And the book ends with an index, because it is long enough to justify having one.

Conclusion: Overall, it's a good book that might be useful to you regardless of the type of game you are playing. It can be used both by the GMs as a worldbuilding resource and by the players as a character-building resource. There are some shortcomings that I have mentioned, but they are not critical. I will rate this as 4.5/5 or "no buyer's remorse"/5.