November 30 was another full house, with Bonnie ("Xiang Wen," a.k.a. "Wu Xie Zhi"), Marc ("Anabel Windsor," a.k.a. "Abigail Wilson"), Martin ("Zhu Zhang," a.k.a. "Harold Lee"), Mike ("Vincenzo Calliente," of many aliases), Stéphane ("Hamid Fassal"), and Torsten ("Qoqa Ramazanov," a.k.a. "Zoya Petrovna Sidorov").

December is upon us! Run for the hills! Braaains!

Oh, wrong audience. Here's the GURPS stuff:

• We released GURPS WWII: Red Tide, by Gene Seabolt. This is a GURPS Third Edition supplement – but it's useful to anyone running a campaign that has any to do with the Soviets in WWII. Note that unlike most e23 releases, this is a full-length, 128-page setting guide.

• I just updated the web blurb for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables, by Matt Riggsby (wombattery). That makes its release before the holidays a near-certainty. It somehow seems appropriate for the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas greedfest . . .

• We reviewed the rough PDF of Pyramid #3/14: Martial Arts. As one of the authors of GURPS Martial Arts, I heartily endorse this product!

• I am now past the 31% mark on my edit of GURPS Low-Tech Companion 1-3. GURPS Low-Tech Companion 1 is, in fact, edited. Onward to GURPS Low-Tech Companion 2 and all its weapons and armor . . .

• The revised first draft of GURPS Spaceships 8: Transhuman Spacecraft, by David Pulver, is in. I'm not sure what kind of playtest we have planned, but that will be happening soon.

That'd be "snow," which is falling and sticking around for the first time since last April. It started last night, but the occasional flake is coming down today. It isn't accumulating in great huge heaps – just a little white here and there – but it isn't simply vanishing on its way down, either. This marks the beginning of winter 2009-2010, whatever the silly solar calendar might say about when that starts.

At our November 23 session, we had everyone . . . EVERYONE! Bonnie ("Xiang Wen," a.k.a. "Wu Xie Zhi"), Marc ("Anabel Windsor," a.k.a. "Abigail Wilson"), Martin ("Zhu Zhang," a.k.a. "Harold Lee"), Mike ("Vincenzo Calliente," of many aliases), Stéphane ("Hamid Fassal"), and Torsten ("Qoqa Ramazanov," a.k.a. "Zoya Petrovna Sidorov").

While SJ Games' American arm is on holiday for Thanksgiving, we (wee?) Canadian gnomes are at work on GURPS. Or something like that. Here's what's new:

• We released GURPS Thaumatology: Urban Magics, by Bill Stoddard (whswhs). That's 55 pages of goodness for magic-using campaigns set against an urban backdrop – or for any campaign where cities and magic inspire and influence one another, really.

• We finished our review of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables, by Matt Riggsby (wombattery). That was a long review! This is a big item! But it represents another book of stuff that will nicely complement all the character-creation supplements released so far for Dungeon Fantasy.

• My edit of GURPS Low-Tech Companion 1-3 (the set, so I'm talking about all three) is at the 20.2% mark by page count. The items above and below somewhat cut into my editing time, but progress was made on such diverse topics as pyramids, didgeridoos, pascalines, orreries, and phlogiston.

• I reviewed the rules and stats ("crunch") in the first draft of the latest staff-written item from Reverend Pee Kitty (peekitty). I cannot give out details – this one is unannounced, and I have specific orders to stay quiet – so you'll just have to read my mind.

• Hans-Christian Vortisch submitted the first draft of GURPS Tactical Shooting, which does for hard-core, high-realism firearms combat what GURPS Gun Fu does for, um, gun fu. We have no ETA on playtesting, much less a release date, but since this item's existence is an open secret, I figured I'd let you all know that it has reached an important milestone.

At our November 19 session, we had Bonnie ("Xiang Wen," a.k.a. "Wu Xie Zhi"), Marc ("Anabel Windsor," a.k.a. "Abigail Wilson"), Martin ("Zhu Zhang," a.k.a. "Harold Lee"), Mike ("Vincenzo Calliente," of many aliases), and Torsten ("Qoqa Ramazanov," a.k.a. "Zoya Petrovna Sidorov"). Stéphane ("Hamid Fassal") had to deal with the hoop-jumping of changing jobs, and couldn't show up.

Ah, Friday! (As opposed to "Argh! Friday?!") Time to update the world on the secret life of GURPS. As has often been the case lately, there was much progress on releases that are too far in the future for me to leak news of them, as well as boring administrative headway on things in past reports, so I'm just going to present a short list of the genuinely interesting stuff:

• We released Pyramid #3/13: Thaumatology. If you like any of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Power-Ups 1: Imbuements, or (to state the obvious) GURPS Thaumatology, then you'll probably want this issue. If you're into two or all three of those, then you'll love this issue!

• We started our review of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables, by Matt Riggsby (wombattery). Yes, "started." At 70+ pages, it's a big one that will take two afternoons to review. Matt wasn't exaggerating when he estimated trillions of possible combinations . . .

• I'm editing GURPS Low-Tech Companion 1-3 as a lump because that makes ensuring internal consistency much easier. So far, I'm at around the 11% mark by total page count. The first part of the first volume – the book subtitled Philosophers and Kings – treats politics, economics, etc. as de facto technologies, which I think is quite cool. Reminds me of the Civilization games!

At our November 2 session, we had Bonnie ("Xiang Wen," a.k.a. "Wu Xie Zhi"), Marc ("Anabel Windsor," a.k.a. "Abigail Wilson"), Martin ("Zhu Zhang," a.k.a. "Harold Lee"), Mike ("Vincenzo Calliente," of many aliases), Stéphane ("Hamid Fassal"), and Torsten ("Qoqa Ramazanov," a.k.a. "Zoya Petrovna Sidorov"). Full house!

I got Left 4 Dead late last year – let's say I've had it for about a year. During that time, I think I had one crash, and that was my fault; I left the wrong thing running in the background. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I downloaded the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. When I started it for the first time, it recommended that I update my GeForce drivers. Okay, "new game, new drivers"; that's how 3D games have always done things. This was fine until the middle of last week.

Sometime last week, Left 4 Dead crashed abruptly – we're not talking "stutter" here, or even a BSOD. The game just stopped hard and left me with a black screen; in fact, my monitor displayed its "looking for video signal/no signal" message, which it normally only shows when my PC is off or the monitor isn't plugged in. With this, I got looping sound; a sample of the last sound I heard in-game before the crash, over and over again. To resolve this crash, I had to use the power button.

When the PC came back up again, all was fine. No corruption, no problems . . . I ran diagnostics on the hardware, checked the integrity of Vista, even scanned for viruses. Nada. My system scored high on the "no issues at all" scale. Well, that's good. Maybe it was a fluke.

No such luck. Since then, both Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo have crashed repeatedly. Sometimes, it's once in a night; other times, it's five times in an hour. It's always the same crash: instant blackness and a sound loop, forcing me to cycle power. Afterward, Windows recovers as if nothing had happened.

It's fairly clear that this is linked in part to the GeForce drivers. They're the main delineator here: I crashed once – only to desktop, I should add – with the 181.xx through 186.xx drivers I had used for most of my fun times with Left 4 Dead. I've crashed lots of times, rather badly at that, with the 191.07 driver.

The obvious thing would be a driver rollback, right? Oh, if only it were so simple. I did that. It didn't solve the problem.

So I checked the Event Viewer for other possible causes. The only errors it had were all WMI errors, code 10. But when I ran diagnostics on WMI, it was fine – the repository was in good shape and all the WMI components were present and healthy. In fact, this computer has loads of code 10 errors logged, and I rather doubt that's the cause. I think it logs a code 10 whenever the system halts unexpectedly for any reason at all.

My conclusion is that some other recent change in the environment is somehow conflicting with the GeForce drivers. Windows does like its updates, and there have been a dozen or more of those between when I downloaded 191.07 and when the crashes got bad. There have also been updates for my AV software (McAfee), Java, and probably six or eight other things. This complicates the sleuthing.

Anyway, I'm ranting on the off chance that somebody who knows me has a bright idea. The relevant bits of my system are as follows:

Motherboard: ASUS P5Q-E
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad 9300
Memory: 4GB OCZ DDR2-1066 Reaper
Hard Drive: Seagate ST3500320NS
Video Card: ASUS EN9800GT Hybrid Power
Display: Samsung 2253BW
OS: MS Windows Vista Home Premium x64, SP2

My sound and ethernet are on the motherboard; I don't have separate devices for those. All drivers are up to date, according to pcpitstop.com. (Of course, this might be the problem.) As for Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo, I run them at maximum detail with multicore rendering turned on, in my monitor's native resolution (1680×1050).

Any constructive input would be appreciated. By "constructive," I mean, "Please avoid, 'Check for viruses and malware,' 'Scan for Windows integrity,' 'Verify hardware function,' and, 'Try a driver rollback.'" I've done all that twice, and no joy. It's clearly something a little more subtle, like a specific security update for Vista SP2 and the 191.07 driver fighting over some bit of paged pool memory.

And please, no "Get a Mac!" or "Use Linux!" Vista is working like a champ for everything else. I lay this one squarely at the feet of nVidia.

I'm sorry I've been so quiet in here! Bonnie is away, so I've had her portion of the household tasks to attend to as well as my own share . . . and owing to her departure and arrival dates, we've had to pause gaming for a couple of weeks, which is why I haven't posted any campaign recaps recently. To this, add a multitude of little troubles – family, health, computer, etc. Today certainly feels like Friday the 13th.

But enough about me. What about GURPS stuff? I'm going to keep this update short because I'm feeling harried (see the little mood icon up there?), but I think that the three items I have for you are cool enough to make up for my brevity:

• We released GURPS Spaceships 6: Mining and Industrial Spacecraft, by David Pulver. You couldn't do Alien without a mining ship or H2G2 without a constructor ship. Well, now you can do both!

• Nikki finished the rough PDF of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables, by Matt Riggsby (wombattery). This means you should be rolling up random treasures by this time next month, if all goes well.

• I finished my interior content edit of GURPS Low-Tech. Oh, there will be tweaks as I edit GURPS Low-Tech Companion 1-3 in coming months, and of course there are 101 little administrative editing tasks left, but the stats and words are essentially finalized. Yay! To give you some sense of time, I started that in early September and finished today, and it's about 120,000 words. The Companion items tally just under 100,000 words.