GURPS Monsters

GURPS Monsters (ISBN 1-55634-518-6) is a 128-page soft-bound book compiled by J. Hunter Johnson and published in 2002 by Steve Jackson Games as a supplement for the GURPS role-playing game system. It contains biographies and gaming statistics for forty-eight monsters for various campaign settings.

Contents

A Mythological Menagerie

• Amenhotep the Mummy, an undead pharaoh
• Asterius the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull
• Curupira, a Tupi protector of the forest
• The Golem, the Jewish legend of a clay man
• The Great Leech of Tlanusi'yi, a 350-foot worm
• Lilith, Adam's first wife
• La Llorona, the Weeping Woman of the Rio Grande
• Medusa, a woman with a petrifying gaze
• Scylla, a six-headed dog-woman
• Tiamat, the Sumerian dragon-goddess
• Yama Uba, a Japanese witch

The Cryptozoo

• The Beast of Le Gévaudan, a giant wolf
• Bigfoot, a shy simian biped
• El Chupacabra, the Puerto Rican goat-sucker
• The Great Sphinx, the guardian of Egypt
• The Honey Island Swamp Monster, the Louisiana Wookiee
• Hughes De Camp-D'Avesnes, French 11th-century nobleman and werewolf
• The Jersey Devil, a hoofed, winged near-man
• The Mothman, the prophetic insectoid creature
• Specimen Alpha-39, an intelligent sewer alligator
• Spring-Heeled Jack, a red-eyed, leaping trickster

Legends of Literature

• The Big Bad Wolf, a cautionary tale about carnality
• The Doppelgänger, an identity-stealing manipulator
• Dracula, the world's most celebrated vampire
• Frankenstein's Monster, Mary Shelley's famous creation
• Geryon, a demon from Dante's Inferno
• Grendel, arch-enemy of Beowulf
• Headless Horseman, the pumpkin-headed Hessian mercenary
• The Phantom of the Opera, a deformed but cultured man
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, a cold-hearted faerie
• Shub-Internet, a Lovecraftian transdimensional entity suffusing the internet

Original Monsters

• Barclay Thormon, the disembodied brain of a cruel businessman
• Benny the Fox, a sadistic cartoon come to life
• Elrond Carver, a radioactive gangster for GURPS Technomancer
• Gill Man, an homage to the Creature from the Black Lagoon
• Hachi-Otoko, a man-shaped swarm of bees
• Harvester, a gigantic, hungry mass of writhing tentacles
• Ixis, a shapeshifting imposter for a fantasy campaign
• Leatherjacket, a dismembered killer held together by his harness
• Leviathan, a conglomeration of many human victims
• Lord K'Han the Giant Ape, inspired by King Kong
• The Maylum Spirit, a vicious ghost trapped in an insane asylum
• Pusan Chen, an undead dragon
• Special Agent Thomas Johnson, a Man in Black like Agent Smith
• Stitches the Patchwork Clown, a murderous doll
• Sylvia Sternenkind, a beautiful bioroid serial-killer for GURPS Transhuman Space
• Tamok the Conqueror, a telepathic leader of an alien space fleet
• The Woodbury Blob, inspired by The Blob

Publication history

GURPS Monsters is a 128-page soft-bound book compiled by J. Hunter Johnson and published in 2002 by Steve Jackson Games as a supplement for the GURPS role-playing game system.

Writer/compiler

Hunter Johnson is a freelance game designer, author, and translator. He has translated many game rules and websites from German for Mayfair Games. He authored or co-authored six books for Steve Jackson Games, including GURPS Monsters, GURPS WWII: Frozen Hell, and the second edition of GURPS Japan. Johnson served for five years as the first coordinator of GURPS errata for Steve Jackson Games. He has also designed a few computer games, including gToons for Cartoon Network. (published by White Wolf Publishing) and Quizgle.com.

Reception

GURPS Monsters won a rating of A in a review published in Games Unplugged. John G. Snyder of gamingreport.com rated the book at 4 1/2 stars, saying, "You will be pleasantly surprised and not a little disturbed." Freelance writer Craig Oxbrow says in a 2001 review of the book for rpg.net, "GURPS Monsters is a wealth of ideas and inspiration for monsters as characters," and that it "will see use beyond the GURPS system."

See also

• List of GURPS books

References

External links

• RPGNet review
• Short bio and credentials of one of the contributing authors