You Can Pick Your Friends, And You Can Pick Your Lock . . .

I'm a huge fan of flavor details in my tabletop RPGs: If possible, I love it when I don't have to say, "The surveillance drone is cutting edge," but can add something colorful like, "The drone seems to be the cutting-edge Skyskreamer 7000 . . . Here's a picture."

To that end, I humbly offer a YouTube video from the channel Works By Design: "Making the most pickproof lock yet." The video does what it says, coming up with an interesting, innovative lock design that detaches part of the key, rotating it inside the lock to engage with the pins. This ensures there are no accessible components that can be picked or tampered with.

The project even discusses possible attack vectors, so that if your GURPS Action heroes encounter the "pickproof lock," they also have a couple of options that can be mentioned as flavor details for when they roll at a skill penalty. (And if that fails, well, they're action heroes; they may have other boomier tricks up their sleeves . . .)

-- Steven Marsh