GURPS Review: High Tech: Electricity and Electronics

Disclaimer: I was a playtester on this one and that can sometimes make you feel a part of the book, hence possibly biased.

High Tech is basically the industrial period to modern and near future in technology.
That can cover a lot of material, and much of it easy to understand and stat for a game. So High Tech gear books are mostly time savers rather than new and original ideas.
This one though is a little different.
At 52 pages its a good sized book and as is typical of the author its pretty dense and tightly written.
So lets break it down....
High-Tech: Electricity and Electronics

Rogers review

Chapter 1: Basic Science

5 pages

This covers the basic science and is really useful at giving the reader a simple grasp of electricity and an idea on how electronic devices work.

Chapter 2: Laboratories and Workshops

5 pages

There is a lot of adventure useful material here your unlikely to see elsewhere. It goes over measuring methods and devices, goes over devices including a bunch of medical stuff, and finishes up with toolkits. This is a really useful chapter and gives the reader specifics on whats in various toolkits. Also a lot of very useful tools here.

Chapter 3: Power and Machinery

9 pages

Whats electricity without a means to store and transmit it? This chapter covers batteries, generators, motors, lighting, and more. Except for the lights this material is more useful for the base than the field.

Chapter 4: Signals and Waves

9 pages

I think we spent more time on this chapter than any other.  If your players (or you) like to improvise stuff in the field this will give you stuff about signaling that is really useful.

Chapter 5: Computation

5 pages

Wait, another chapter on computers? We have this material in other books but here the author goes into more detail and especially the history and under the hood of the technology.

Chapter 6: Electronic Warfare

8 pages

What modern day adventure would not include secure facilities and ways to break into them? Thats the scope of this final chapter. But it also includes weapons, jammers, targeting, fuzes etc.

Summary

This is the kind of book GURPS was famous for in Third Edition. The author put in a lot of research time and camr up with an extensive list and stats for gear.  The playtesters included people with a lot of electronics backgrounds of various types and the author used that feedback to refine a few things and add a bit of material. Its really handy for the techy types with ideas for using various things and improvising things as needed but the equipment list is also great for most modern settings.

This is the kind of source book we haven't seen in awhile and is useful for other game systems set in the right time period.

RogerBW's Review