Just a quick disclaimer: I'm about to make a very controversial statement. My purpose is not to inflame or incite, merely to provoke thought. I do not want to be flamed for stating what I believe and I will not fight anyone over this. I know GURPS was written in cooperation with the wonderful folks at Bungie and I'm sure a lot of people have gotten a lot of good out of it. It is surely a wonderful product for the players of role-playing games. My concern here is merely the effect it has on story discussions in this forum.
Okay.
So there was Myth: The Fallen Lords, and it was amazing, but unbelievably vague. Too many mysteries, not enough evidence to explain what actually happened. Bungie planned it that way: the game is supposed to be elusive, evocative, mythological.
There were too many questions. Too few facts. They made Myth 2: Soulblighter, and it provided a wealth of new information, fleshed out the Mythworld, increased its scope and its grandeur. And it was good. Weary from their labors, the Myth team announced they were done.
The questions, however, refused to die. Still, there was that tantalizing lack of hard facts. The myth community was still in the dark on so many points, so many plot areas. Desperate for new evidence, they looked about them and what did they find? GURPS Myth.
At first this appeared to be a sacred tome, the long-dreamt of Total Codex that would speak to all the mysteries. Then people started noticing something. There were things in GURPS that didn't look... quite... right. The Deceiver, it said, was alive and well. Sure, we are all eyewitnesses to the fact that he got blown to smithereens--surely there must be some rational explanation for this. Nope. He's just alive and well. Were Shiver and Ravanna the same person? The Deceiver seems to think so. The Myth 2 flavor text states so quite explicitly. The M:TFL pregame promotional information says something quite different. Inquiring mythers wanted to know. The answer GURPS gives: yes, they were. Except when they weren't. The rest was left as an exercize for the student.
How did the myth community respond to this, and all the other strange things? By developing endless theories to connect up the known facts. A lot of fun but immensely frustrating since often the known facts now contradicted each other. Each myther had his own area he or she cared about deeply and probably every one of us found some problem with GURPS (for me it's the supposed magical properties of the Jman's coat) but because GURPS was the Facts it was difficult to ignore.
A very good college friend of mine, Fred, is an old hand at running GURPS campaigns. He's even written several guidebooks for "Call of Cthulhu". He was faced with an even thornier problem when writing the voodoo sections of the New Orleans guidebook: how do you create a workable gaming system out of something that is in such heated dispute amongst its practitioners? I saw all the research he did, all the long nights staring into his computer screen, wondering how many skill points Baron Samedi should have and who was the toughest of the Loa. He was in constant contact with numerous primary sources and still the system he came up with, while elegant and playable to a fault is completely unlike the voodoo I read about in my own research. CoC guidebooks, and GURPS books by association, are not meant to be the final truth on anything, merely a "best fit" for the available facts, filtered very heavily for use in role-playing games.
This is already very long, so I'll cut it short here with my modest proposal. I think that GURPS is an invaluable resource for story discussions but that it can't be taken as received text. I propose this: anyone playing a role-playing game set in the Myth universe should use GURPS as their bible and ignore where the computer game seems to get things differently. Anyone playing the computer game should take GURPS with a grain of salt and, wherever it seems to contradict things you've seen on your monitor first hand, should be ignored. I'm assuming most of us fall into the latter category (with the exception of those playing the eRPG).
Final disclaimer: the above is merely my humble opinion, which I advance purely as an attempt to help reconcile what I see as a major problem. If you disagree (as many, I'm sure, do) please don't attack me for stating how I feel.
