Designer's Notes: GURPS Traveller: Bounty Hunters

The following originally appeared in the January 8, 2002, JTAS Magazine article. It is Copyright © 2002 by Steve Jackson Games and is used by permission.

When Phil Reed asked me to write Bounty Hunters, I jumped at the chance. I'd been a Traveller fan for years, and the dangerous, exciting world of bounty hunting seemed ideally suited to that universe. Writing such a book would be both enjoyable and easy! Wrong. Writing a book about bounty hunters was easy; designing a credible and economically feasible profession for the Traveller universe was not.

First, bounty hunting, in its most familiar form, is a largely American profession that had its heyday in the Old West. Other countries may have some form of bounties and bounty hunters, but many do not. Even with a bounty system in place elsewhere, my research continued to turn up stories, legends, and histories of American bounty hunters. Needless to say, translating this largely American profession into an interstellar one, while avoiding the Americanization of an interstellar civilization (i.e., "Yanks in Space"), proved very difficult.

Second, travel across the universe is expensive, which means that tracking a fugitive across the universe is expensive as well. Bounty hunters who spend thousands of credits traveling from one system to another had best be tracking a very valuable prey, or they'll quickly end up broke. The bounties in the initial draft of the manuscript had to be increased, and provision made for covering travel expenses, in order to make the job economically feasible. Why would anyone spend Cr10,000 in travel expenses just to capture a lowly criminal with a Cr5,000 bounty on his head?

Solving this problem by increasing the bounties was easy, but justifying the extreme cost of such bounties was not. In the end, the book's focus shifted from mundane criminals (bail skips, common thieves, etc.) to the more dangerous ones. Since most players would rather chase a psychotic killer to the frontier than nab a purse-snatcher before he leaves town, this solution worked out nicely.

Finally, cramming the entire profession into 18,000 words was more of a challenge than I'd anticipated; the initial first draft came in at nearly 30,000 words. Cutting NPCs, sections on the mundane aspects of bounty hunting (desk jockeys, collusion, insurance fraud, corporate law), and numerous colorful narrative sidebars brought the final word count under control. On a positive note, it also left me with a lot of material that might end up making its way to Pyramid or JTAS some day.

Was the final product worth the effort? I think so. After one last read of the manuscript before I sent it off, I felt driven to create a steely-eyed gunslinger ready to track down the scum of the Imperium. Unfortunately, another GURPS project awaits, and if I don't make the first draft deadline someone at Steve Jackson Games will put a bounty on my head.

Entire Contents Copyright 2002 Brian J. Underhill. All Rights Reserved. Last Updated: October 22, 2002