Rediscovering GURPS

Che Webster’s recent love letter to older game designs resonated quite strongly with me, so much so that it’s reignited a passion for GURPS.

I often gaze lovingly at the treasures stacked upon my GURPS shelf. They are some of the few RPG books that survived the Dark Era which saw much of my collection lost to the cruel tides of time and mental health. Some of them I’ve lugged around for nearly four decades but haven’t opened, let alone played, since the turn of the century. I even have a selection of fourth edition books, all new but never used. I tried to read them many times during the last twenty years but kept bouncing off the dense, three-column layout. It felt like wading through treacle.

But that blog post had me reaching for the Third Edition Basic Set and Compendiums. I read them over the course of a couple of weeks (when I should’ve been preparing a 3.5 Eberron game for my regular group) and am determined to use them.

The Basic Set held no surprises. I used it extensively in the 90s and it felt like riding a bike. I even remembered a couple of house rules my old group used. The combat escalation timer that switched active defences to contested rolls after a variable amount of time, and the 1d + Basic Speed roll for sequencing.

Compendium 1 felt vaguely familiar and has a lot I can use. More advantages, disadvantages, and skills are welcome. Some of the other options I’ll adopt, like ST for hit points and HT for fatigue, skill manoeuvres, and templates.

I know the secret to GURPS is not to use everything or the game will grind to a halt. Which brings me to Compendium 2. I don’t remember it at all, but it’s very useful, if a little dense in places. I think I will end up using the expanded hit locations and some of the ritual combat rules but ignore the rest.

I did think about reading through GURPS Fantasy and starting a solo game to explore Yrth, but I just want to get stuck in at this point. I have quite a few folders chock full of worldbuilding notes for campaigns I absently doodled, but never fully built. I’ll keep plucking bits and pieces from those to construct a milieu as I play.

Next step: build a character.