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GameLords’ short-lived classic Traveller line has a good reputation, helped by the fact that much of it was written the prolific Keith brothers. To me, the most interesting part were the ‘Environment’ books, which outlined additional rules for various environment types. I recently got one in PDF, and read through it.

The book is nicely centered around explaining how deserts work, and different types. Rules are done up front, but world-designing and GMing are the real center of the book. Equipment is comparatively an afterthought buried near the back.

The discussion of terrain is about a dozen pages, starts with how deserts happen, gives guidelines as to how much of a surface is likely to be desert depending on water surface and atmosphere (this does end up handwaving a bit more than I’d like, but is good advice). It then discusses temperature ranges, and some thoughts on placing them in the world. Then there is a welcome discussion of various desert terrain types from the stereotypical ergs (sandy wastes, where dunes form; there is a good summary of dune types), to hammada (which get listed twice) and reg, canyons and mesas.

All of this is the type of thing that fairly basic research or college classes on climates will teach, but it is already gathered here, and talked about in a world-building context. Similarly, the “Survival in the Desert” chapter has a discussion of fairly practical ways of finding water, leaving details of how much of this a character should know up to the GM. Short sections cover food and shelter, followed by two pages on navigation, including a reasonably useful table for spotting what may be a tiny target (oasis) in a large desert (more useful would have been also including a table for trying to stay on course while navigating to a small fixed point). Most of the rest is even more general, though decent guidelines on what animals can carry and their water needs (sadly, William Keith did not think to provide any statistics on camels, as a specialized desert-dwelling creature, for figuring out alien analogs).

“Danger in the Desert” covers purely physical effects such as sunburn, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke with some good general rules for checking for them. The chapter also starts with the idea of Intelligence penalties from extreme thirst and heat, and this ties into the other sections. These penalties are considered actual (though hopefully temporary) loss of value, with the character becoming completely irrational when Intelligence reaches zero. (Treating this as a separate ‘sanity’ statistic is a bit tempting, but it would have to impose real penalties on most Intelligence-based activities.)

This leads us back to the start of the book, which is much more system-based. It introduces a new skill, based off of Survival from Book 4 Mercenary: Desert Survival is given as a specialization (or ‘cascade’ in Traveller terminology) of it. It’s a sensible idea, even AD&D picked up much the same skill in Wilderness Survival Guide, and extensive skill systems (like GURPS) will probably have a specialized survival skill as a matter of course. Keith suggests that characters that are specified as being from a desert planet can have this skill, and of course get it through the Mercenary character gen. Then there’s notes on other skills in the desert, and a good table of movement rates. Finally, there is a system for “endurance loss”. There’s a nearly full-page table of conditions that lead to endurance loss points. Every time these accumulate to the level of the character’s current Endurance, he loses a point of Endurance (which turns this into a ‘death spiral’ of sorts), with unconsciousness, and a need for real treatment occurring when Endurance is reduced to 0. The details of this system (including recovery) take another four pages.

The later chapter then specifies that loss of Endurance also causes loss of Intelligence, leading to the conditions outlined above. Sun blindness, sandstorms, breakdowns and other events are also covered in the dangers chapter. It finishes off with example event and animal encounter tables for use in hammada. The equipment chapter is three pages, and covers normal staples (goggles, water purification, etc) to an obvious translation of Dune‘s stillsuits, ground vehicles, and even a navigation satellite (handy if you’re going to need to travel overland after setting down).

This is a fairly dense 56 pages, with a good amount of advice, and some solid ideas for a detailed simulationist look at desert travel in RPGs. Traveller‘s uncommon 2d6 basis make a straight translation of system numbers a little iffy for a more common 3d6/d20 system, but you could still use it straight; you’d want to think a lot more about it going to a percentile system. Endurance can translate to constitution or health, or whatever else the target system uses for physical resilience. I think the system needs some streamlining, and of course, should only be broken out when it’s important, but is a good look at the breakdown of the body under high environmental stress.

While there’s a lot of products and publishers I’ve never seen, I don’t know of any other supplements that try to do all the things this one tries, and it retains some value just for a basic look at desert terrain types and worldbuilding info. System-wise, any GM who wants to drive home the problems of the extreme environment of a desert may want to adapt the mechanics here. William H. Keith’s Duneraiders was designed to use these rules, and the Keith brothers’ earlier Uragyad’n of the Seven Pillars could certainly use it. Similarly, any desert-based adventure might get a bit more verisimilitude by being more aware of what deserts are like, though this book doesn’t really reach to capturing mood and the like. Personally, I’d have liked a little more on the world-building end. Originally published in 1984, it is available in PDF on DriveThruRPG or on the Traveller Apocrypha-1 CD from Far Future Enterprises (along with the rest of the GameLords line).