Get With the Times, Grandad

GURPS fourth edition was released in August of 2004. It’s over two decades old and soon to have a revised edition published. Me being the early adopter I am, I decided to get with the times and give it a go.

In all honesty, I had previously tried to switch from third to fourth about a decade ago, but kept bouncing off the dense, three-columned layout. I’m pleased to report that I’ve had more success this time, although that layout still made for hard going. I hear the revised edition will go back to two columns, something I will be eternally grateful for.

Once I’d slogged through my issues with the text formatting and came out the other side, I found I liked fourth edition. I really liked it. Yeah, it has a dryness that previous editions weren’t burdened with, and some of the rule tweaks changed things I liked, but overall, I thought it was solid. Many of the default mechanical assumptions were things from the old third edition compendiums that I already used anyway, so I didn’t have much to acclimatise to.

As with the previous edition, the first thing I did was make a combat cheat sheet. All colour coded and fancy, like. Although, at six pages long I probably need to abandon the idea it’s a cheat “sheet” and think of it more like a “rules reference” printout.

Now I needed some characters.

Whilst I was mulling over the possibilities, I realised I also needed a general idea of what world I would be adventuring in. I was thinking about carrying on with stitching together something from all the half-finished projects I had chucked in a folder and consigned to a dusty old hard drive, but then I remembered I had recently started going through some of my ancient RPG storage boxes. Returning to the darkest corner of my cobweb infested garage and having a good old rummage, I eventually found a folder of notes from a homebrew world I used to run in the 90s. Oh! The memories of fun times long past! Rheumy-eyed bliss!

I had to run it.

But once I had carefully caged my rampaging nostalgia and set it to one side, I realised some of the setting was quite childish. The scribblings of a group of teenagers intent on raucous fun and fighting. It wasn’t bad, just a bit nonsensical.

So, I took two weeks. Redrew maps and rewrote notes so they made sense. Tidied things up. Connected some dots. Filed down the rough edges and gave it a bit of a buff. Then, I made the characters. Solo gaming being what it is, I started them at 275 points so they wouldn’t keel over dead within half an hour. I kitted them out, came up with a starting idea, and plunged them into the world.