Name David Pulver | Role Writer | |
Books GURPS Robots, The Complete Druid's H, GURPS Psionics, GURPS Traveller Alien Rac, Gurps Vehicles Lite | ||
David L. Pulver (born 2 November 1965 in Kingston, Ontario) is a Canadian freelance writer and game designer, with a History degree from Queen's University. He is the author of more than fifty role-playing game rulebooks and supplements, including the award winning Transhuman Space.
Contents
Career
Steve Jackson and David Pulver coauthored a novella entitled Thera Awakening that was distributed with the Interplay computer game Stonekeep. This novella describes the back story and history of the Stonekeep world and characters and was completed before the game itself was finished.
David was the Guest of Honor at the 1992 U-Con gaming convention (held annually at the University of Michigan).
Pulver designed GURPS Ultra-Tech (1989), an equipment guide that could be used with many different worlds. Pulver also designed GURPS Psionics (1991) and GURPS Vehicles (1993), the latter of which featured a very mathematical vehicle construction system. Mark MacKinnon brought Pulver on to Guardians of Order in November 1998, and Pulver took the lead in extending Big Eyes, Small Mouth from its simplistic start to a more complete game system. Pulver also simultaneously worked on more licensed, standalone games, resulting in releases such as Dominion: Tank Police (1999), Demon City Shinjuku (2000), and Tenchi Muyo! (2000). Pulver and John R. Phythyon, Jr., designed the gangster Samurai Tri-stat game Ghost Dog (2000) based on the film of the same name. Pulver designed the hard science-fiction Centauri Knights (2001), the first original setting from Guardians of Order. Pulver designed Transhuman Space (2002), a new science fiction setting for GURPS. Pulver oversaw the fourth edition of GURPS beginning in September 2002.
David is the designer of GURPS Vehicles, a set of rules to design vehicles from a stone-age canoe to faster-than-light starships. GURPS Traveller (especially GURPS Traveller: Starships and GURPS Traveller: Ground Forces) and GURPS World War 2 (including GURPS WW2: Motorpool) use somewhat simplified specialized versions of it. The design rules in GURPS Robots and GURPS Mecha are fully compatible with it. GURPS Reign of Steel uses the rules from GURPS Robots.
In 2007, he completed the first vehicle design rules for the 4th edition of GURPS, titled GURPS Spaceships.
Pulver has stated in an interview that although he has been doing work for Steve Jackson Games "ever since I became a freelance writer," he has also done work for Guardians of Order (particularly in creating the second edition of the anime RPG Big Eyes Small Mouth aka "BESM"), White Wolf Publishing, Game Designer's Workshop, West End Games, Iron Crown Enterprises, and TSR. He is a fan of anime and manga.