Review: GURPS Social Engineering: Keeping in Contact, Kelly Pedersen

[Roger Bell_West's autoposter]

This GURPS supplement deals with contacts: how to use them, how to
customise them, and a wide variety of examples.

Disclaimer: I was lead playtester for this book and
therefore did not pay for it.

The first thing done here, and one of the most important, is to
confirm the slight rules change that many people already made: a
Contact's effective skill level is not a single specific thing they
can do, but an abstraction which represents the contact's resources
and ability to help with whatever problem you bring to them. (This
works well for me anyway; my mental model of contacts rests heavily on
_Dark Conspiracy_, where someone was defined as an academic, or a
government, or a criminal contact, not a specialist in Research or
Administration.)

There's more discussion of whether to classify a helpful NPC as an
Ally (full stats, comes with you on adventures), Patron (more powerful
than you, gives you major assistance) or Contact (gives you some
information and favours but you can quickly wear down their goodwill).

There are cinematic variations, like Contact! (one contact who works
as well as a group) and Friend of the Week (a modular ability that
lets you swap in new contacts when the plot demands).

The meat starts with special enhancements and limitations, to tweak
the core mechanics of appearance, reliability, and speed of getting
bored running around to a PC's whims. The chapter concludes with a
consideration of other traits that interact with Contacts: Advantages
that can interact with them, but more significantly Disadvantages that
shape relationships.

The second chapter goes into more detail about the process of getting
information out of a contact, and indeed the sort of thing you can
look for: secret information that you can't readily get without being
an insider, convenient information that you just want to get more
quickly, synthesis of information that you've already gathered from
other places, and organised knowledge from a group (e.g. a single
American cop might get you someone's name and address from their
licence plate, but your cop contact group can also tell you their
criminal records, known associates, and so on).

Next are favours, i.e. asking the contact to go and to something
rather than just answer questions. These are classified as Quick vs
Taxing, Nonhazardous vs Dangerous, and Inexpensive vs Costly; the more
they move into the latter categories the more work it'll be to
persuade your contact to do them for you. Specific types of favours
are laid out, particularly including the use of social privilege to
get introductions, jobs, and so on.

Having established what the contact can be asked to roll for, the
chapter continues with the roll itself: how can that skill be modified
(with bribery and extra time), and even with complementary skill
rolls.

Slightly out of order, Frequency of Appearance and Reliability are
covered next, also introducing levels of convenience: how much work is
it for you to find the contact, and what else can you do at the same
time? Reliability is expanded to cover incompetence as well as
treachery (e.g. when the contact fails their skill roll they go
hunting for the information and get into trouble). The chapter
concludes with hints to the GM on how to keep contacts useful and
interesting: mostly this means treating them as people, not just as a
set of numbers, on both sides of the table.

The final chapter deals with categories of contact – and lays them out
at the same sort of resolution as those old _Dark Conspiracy_ contacts
in categories (partly borrowed from _Boardroom and Curia_) like
Advocacy, Criminal/Street, Martial Arts, etc.; each class has lists of
typical skills, some examples, the sort of information they can
provide, and the sort of favours they can do. There are some notes on
running contacts with particular skills, such as design skills for new
inventions, teaching, and so on.

Overall there's a great deal of excellent material here, and this book
is very likely to be important in every game I run that's set in any
kind of functional society.

Social Engineering: Keeping in Contact is available from [Warehouse 23](http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-social-engineering-keeping-in-contact).

https://blog.firedrake.org/archive/2019/09/GURPS_Social_Engineering__Keeping_in_Contact__Kelly_Pedersen.html