...or perhaps it would be more alliterative to say that it 'GURPS my guts?' In any case, this post is heavy on the geekery, so if you don't know what I mean when I mention a d6, a character point-buy system, or Bode's Law, maybe you'd better just move on and read the sports page or something.

Anyway, I'm working on the first adventure in our brand-spanking new campaign, GURPS Firefly, which Michael, Dan, and I will be GMing round-robin style on AIM Chat. Since we all decided that we want to run the game as well as play it - a situation which has proven quite successful for relatively long-running campaigns in the past - I thought I'd best use a system we all own. Thus, it's back to our Old Workhorse, GURPS 3rd Edition. Most of the time I enjoy GURPS well enough; it handles a number of genres fairly well. "Firefly", as a dramatic but still gritty space adventure TV series, translates quite well to GURPS.

However, I'm rediscovering why I was originally planning to use a simpler system: I'm trying to build the spaceship that our characters will be flying around the 'Verse as they get into one sticky situation after another. GURPS Space has what the authors describe as "a streamlined version of the system used in GURPS Vehicles," for ease of use. If you're not familiar with GURPS, they had to come out with a booklet called GURPS Vehicles Lite because the regular book was just too much work, and Lite's still too crunchy for me to find of much use. Folks, I've just spent the last two hours trying to build a ship, only to realize near the end of the process that it's probably too large for the ship we've been describing in our preliminary concepts and character backgrounds. I've only got a little bit of hard data on the size of a Firefly-class mediumweight freighter, from someone's tentative GURPS 4th Edition (I think) stats from another website on the same ship, which describes it as a 200-ton vessel. I think I'm up to 1, 066 tons on my ship design thus far; a ship that's supposed to be smaller and faster than Serenity.

I have about three to five science fiction RPG rules sets, and twice that many generic RPG systems, and I'm certain that, of all of them, GURPS has by far the most complex rules regarding spaceships. Once you get running a game, GURPS is just dandy, but all this techie-stuff bogs down a non-gearhead like me. I have to look through my rulebooks to see if there's anything about streamlining this process even more. I'd be perfectly happy to just do some hand-waving and make the ship entirely conceptual, with a few basic stats to represent all the tech...but since I'm not the only one who'll be running this game, I don't feel easy about doing that. I'm sure that all of this data will be useful down the line, when we encounter other ships or need repairs or something like that in the campaign, but right now it's just a pain.

"You have a ship. Another ship flies up and shoots at you. Roll on your Piloting skill for a Contest of Skills against the other pilot. Too bad, you failed. You hear a thunderous clamor throughout the ship as it trembles under the shelling. Outside, you can see pieces of your hull splaying off into the black." Ta-daa! Not a single bit of tonnage calculation was needed. Ugh.

Moving on from game rules, here's the thing that's bugging me about "Firefly,"* now that I'm mucking about in its innards. Apparently, they don't have FTL - faster-than-light - stardrives for their ships; this is what I'm told by the Firefly Wiki and other sources. Everything that happens in the show takes place in the same star system, I presume. But they clearly state that there's something like 70 to 100 Earthlike worlds that have been terraformed and settled. Right. So, if you ignore Bode's Law and assume that the planetary orbits around the sun are closer together than in the Sol system, and say that many of these Earths are moons of gas giants, and assume that the system they're in is a trinary star system, pretend that the gravity all works out and everything doesn't start smashing into each other...well, it's hard to reasonably fit 70 to 100 planets inside the entire system, much less the same size (in order to have Earthlike gravity) and inside the same biozone (Too far from the sun, and it's too cold to inhabit; too close, and it's too hot). If I allow that there are 4 or 5 gas giants with, say, 10 Earth-sized terrestrial moons each, orbiting each star in this system, that still leaves me at least 20 Earths to cram into these systems. Let me remind you that the Sol system has, like, 4 or so.

Now, another possible solution is that there are numerous star systems, but they're really close together, in some kind of cluster or perhaps closer to the center of the galaxy. Radiation issues aside, that's still a freakishly long way between stars to cover with ships that can't go anywhere close to the speed of light.

The truth of the matter is this: I'd probably chuck all this and just say that it's actually just a bunch of different star systems, and slow FTL drives do exist - and I may still decide to do this before we play - but I found a calculator online that someone designed which allows you to calculate how long a trip will take from any world in the 'Verse to another, and how much fuel and food will be consumed. This is hugely helpful for running a campaign, and it's something all three of us can use, so I'm loathe to let go of it. I may simply have to swallow my disbelief and remember, "It's just a show, I should really just relax." As has also been pointed out to me, Joss Whedon has said that science questions make him cry. Scientific inaccuracy is hardly new to television sci-fi. Did I rant about "Earth 2" back when we were watching those? Same deal.

I have only myself to blame. When we first started talking about this, Michael had simply suggested we create a setting like "Firefly," not necessarily the "Firefly" setting itself. But I had already printed out a bunch of setting information I found online back when I first watched the series, and I thought it would just be more satisfying...and easier...to just use the original. I think it'll still be worth it. Actually playing should be a hoot, but I have to get there first.

*Okay, the other thing. The first thing that bugged me was that, for a setting in which everyone speaks Mandarin, I don't recall ever seeing any Asians in the series; the only one I'm aware of is in the graphic novel, and he's just a minor thug. Even when forced to appropriate another culture wholesale, the future is safe for Whitey.