[gurps] Traveller to buy or not to buy?

[Onno Meyer]

Tom replied to me:
> I am looking at search and rescue, accident investigation like scenarios
> dose gurps have any these scenario in any of the books?

I've thought a bit about my GURPS Traveller collection and I found 
no very good matches. Starports talks about emergency services and 
Modular Cutter has rescue craft, but neither has enough to justify 
buying them for that reason alone. Nobles has something about all
sorts of investigations, but again the focus is elsewhere. Sword
Worlds has a couple of nice scenarios, since it covers only one 
subsector in a full-sized book. Alien Races 4 covers Schalli and 
Shriekers, who would make great subjects of investigation, and 
the Bwap, who make great accident investigators. 

If you play accident investigations, Mysteries will come in handy.
Unless both you and your players are engineers, technical 
investigations will be similar to the challenges of gaming a 
crime scene investigation with people who learned forensics on 
TV. 

Rescue operations put the characters against the wrath of nature
in different permutations. Search for a lost boat, search for a 
lost plane, search for a lost shuttle, while there is a storm or
not, etc. To build a campaign, it might help if some of the 
accidents are not quite accidental. Blue Planet puts heroes 
between two sides in a civil war. A criminal organization might 
fill the same role. Start out with ordinary accidents, let the 
players find a pattern (hijackings covered as accidents, maybe),
let them come almost in time, let them interfere in time, let 
the bad guys sink a luxury liner as a diversion for their big 
job ...