The G&G Splatbook

I've considered going through 2004's Hackmaster Goods & Gear, the Ultimate Adventurer's Guide, on several occasions over the years ... but somehow I always end out forgetting about it, losing track of the online copy.  Inevitably I stumble across it again, as I did a few days ago.  As splatbooks go, it isn't useless.  It's a great deal better than most, but commits a lot of the same sins.  The equipment lists include weights for everything, so that makes it a good resource for my own pricing table.  Hopefully, I can plug a few numbers into that table before I lose track of the book again.

Encouraged by how popular my deconstruction of the 5th Edition Players Handbook has been (which I'll come back to soon enough), I'll dig into this book a little.  The link above provides a full copy; it doesn't hurt to read through these things, even if you do feel some guilt getting something for free that the company obviously needed you to buy.

Getting past the introductions and the writers explaining how books work, we have to wade through a lot of fairly useless information defining important game concepts such as bartering, imaginary coins that are a complete rip-off of any numismatics text-book (which goes on for five pages), the notion that there's such a thing as good craftsmanship as opposed to bad, inflation, taxation, an overview of where trade happens and why, frauds, scams and swindles in the market place and merchant guilds.  All this reads like a "friendly" textbook for grade-sixers, saving the reader the trouble of reading sourcebooks for this material.  Of course, it also pads the 272 page book brilliantly while looking to 12-year-olds that the publishers "know what they're talking about."

On the whole, however, it is pretty hard to put most of this content in practice.  Readers will no doubt declare that it provides "inspiration," which I suppose reminding me that merchant guilds are "very active in politics and matters of state" will do.  But unless I'm old enough to understand politics and matters of state, and HOW merchant guilds do that, which a typical 12 y.o. won't know, it's not actually helpful.  We can dismiss everything thus far as having the same limitation.

It is impossible to make a splat book without repeating the same useless content about weapons and the G&G book does not disappoint.  Now we wade through a long list of hafted weapons, types of hilts, axes and picks, bows and blowguns, ammunition, clubs, daggers and knives, flails and whips, hammers and maces, miscellaneous weapons, polearms and poleaxes, spears and lances, swords ~ and even siege weapons.  All this takes 58 pages, a fifth of the book, to plough through; it's populated by images of weapons groups and long tables detailing the statistics of each weapon.

In 40 years, I have seen this list in books so often I can't begin to remember all the examples.  It was old and tiresome by the time it was added to the Unearthed Arcana back in 1983.  Every game version of D&D feels it needs to do this, pouring long, long lists of weapons onto the pages as though we could hear a truck dumping the weapons out in a bouncing, scattered pile which must be then separated and organized.  The numbers attached to the weapons lacks any real sense; if we were to switch the damage done by this over that, it would be just as meaningful.  Multiple weapons on every table have the same statistics: they all do the same damage, they all have the same weight, they're the same "type" ... but they look different and they have a different price.  I guess that means something.

The weapons list is followed by passages about materials that weapons can be made out of (and to their credit, modifiers for changing the materials that I could actually adapt), then weapon accessories, then a few more odd kinds of weapons, some "giant" weapons, giant ammo ... and then giant missile weapon ranges.  Can't have a splatbook without random rules having a vague, obscure connection to the book's agenda.

This is then followed by 11 pages of repeating all the weapon lists once again, only in a single compiled list this time.  And that accounts for 85 pages of the book - almost a third gone.

Followed by ~ sigh ~ armor.

Armor proceeds for 26 pages and I just don't care.  I just don't.  It's all parts and bits and fifteen ways to make a shield and fuck, it is so derivative I'd have to bang my head on the desk repeatedly just to get through it.  That's not good for an old man like me.

Page 113 starts with Clothing.  We're told what clothes are and why people wear them (this is important stuff), followed by an effort to get players to buy more expensive clothes by creating a rule called "style points."  These give a charisma modifier; every piece of clothing thereafter is assigned a style point, so that the player can add them together to get the maximum bonus, +2.  And while I might steal three or four items from the table on 114, have a careful look at it:

This is not photoshopped.  These are the tables as they appear in the book, side by side.  It must be one of the best examples of splatbook padding I've seen.  The Kenzer Hackmaster book felt compelled to provide a D&D version of their own equipment table, though with the style points and the Hackmaster "Regions" included ... and then the same SP points and weights are copied exactly on both tables.

I appreciate the urge to include "availability," but this metric doesn't work this simply.  If I'm in a part of the world that wears clogs, can you imagine that I would ever have trouble finding them?  Go to a store much only to discover there are no slippers?  Or that "climbing boots" have the same chance of being available everywhere, in a prairie town as likely as a mountain village?  Including numbers like these just means we'll have to ignore them later.

This is enough for now.  The chief benefit of the book is that it is sooooo fastidious about inclusiveness.  It isn't really the "ultimate" book, but it is certainly comprehensive.  And redundant.  Very redundant.