GURPS: Space Opera, Part II

There is a problem with generic science fiction. Why bother?

Space Opera goes a long way towards solving this problem, especially if you grab the Star Sector Atlases and use the structure in the core rulebook to establish factions and organizations. All of a sudden, we have a complete universe out here to explore, on the size of a complete setting like Traveller and its Imperium, and due to this game being so rare and niche, practically nobody knows what this universe is about.

Galactic Starship Dune Star Federation Troopers Battlestar Trek Wars: Gordon Rogers is my best explanation of this universe. Every pre-1980 primary science-fiction setting put into a blender, just like D&D did with fantasy.

Drop players in here, and let them figure it all out.

Trust me, after their initial revulsion and complaining that this is not Star Wars or Star Trek, they will begin to like it here. Because this is really Star Wars and Star Trek, with the licensed IP removed, and the whole thing feels like a classic science fiction novel from the 1960s and '70s.

This is solid, playable, generic science fiction!

If you want one of the factions to walk around and act like the Galactic Empire, do it! Just don't play the music, and have their troopers be just as brutal and be better shots. If you want Starforce to be like the United Planetary Federation, just do it! The ships are a little different, more heavy metal, but that does not mean you can't riff on classic Trek.

Oh, and spoiler alert, when you are in battle, everyone will be in a spacesuit and strapped in tight, so take that, stupid TV shows and movies. Decompression is real, and having an armored spacesuit protects you against internal explosions and fragmentation. If you start the game in the middle of a starship battle, start all the players in spacesuits in a depressurized ship. Set the tone from the start.

Seriously, that is such a cool thing to imagine the bridge filled with a crew in armored spacesuits, armed in case they need to abandon ship, and the entire bridge depressurized to a vacuum to avoid explosive decompression. Escape pods will be close to all crew stations. Seats may also be armored to give an extra level of protection. There is a hard-science fiction element to this universe, but it remains at the highest levels of theoretical technology.

Space Opera is a mix of World War II naval battles, hardcore engineering, speculative science, and instant death at any moment. This is not hard science fiction, science fantasy, or any other genre we know. This is the OG version of science fiction found in Starship Troopers and Federation. Yes, you may be dealing with a hyper-intelligent species of alien pod-creatures on some undiscovered world. Still, you are backed up with a battlecruiser armed with one-meter megabolt battleship guns in a triple turret, sitting in orbit. If these aliens give your away team heat, an option always exists to pull out and start orbital bombardment.

Space Opera is Battleship Gray Science Fiction (BGSF).

This genre stands on its own, smelling like a fresh coat of paint and the metallic tinge of air recyclers. The genre is pure STEM, with a heavy metal injection of military power. Science is essential when the captain wonders what they are dealing with, and engineering builds the solution. Navigation and math-plot courses are getting the ship to its destination before a vessel faster than the one the players are in, just because the navigator knows how to use gravity wells to fling the cruiser quicker and on a better course, without wasting time or acceleration.

Right now, they are wondering how we got here before them, despite their faster ship. Communications officer, open a hailing frequency. Navigator, you may raise your middle digit on my command.

This genre is strong enough to carry the entire game, just as good as Star Wars, Star Trek, or Licensed IP. Seriously, I ran BGSF for decades in the Star Frontiers Universe using the Space Opera game, and it was a great time. We ran generals and admirals who planned planetary invasions and got involved in conflicts and adventures. The genre stands on its own without corporate IP. Just look at Helldivers. Star Wars and Star Trek like to pretend they are in the same genre, but they are not, and they have gone too soft, into science fantasy.

Parts of this universe are wonderfully backwards and silly. Other parts of this universe will remind you that you are dealing with anti-matter-powered systems, and things can go horribly wrong. You will laugh, but never cry, since by that time your atoms will be scattered all across deep space.

The ship design and combat system work as-is if you convert GURPS skills to Space Opera (GURPS Skill Level - 10, max 10; so an 18-minus in GURPS is a skill level of 8 in SPO). So there is zero work needed to design starships and have combats with GURPS characters inside them, using converted skill levels. You do not need to mess with GURPS ship combat and design; the system in Space Opera is a bit of WW2 wargamy goodness, but it is functional and works well.

And we have starships! Seriously, there are some amazing ship designs in here, and it is worth learning the starship combat system to see these heavy-metal behemoths slug it out with massive nova-gun battery fire and the follies of dozens of nuclear torpedoes. If the players sit in their starship and whine that they don't care about the universe, have the Space Soviets of the Galactic People's Republic show up in a fleet cruiser and obliterate them all. You will learn to care, comrade!

Those Soviets never really do go away, do they? All of a sudden, we are stuck with the Cold War forever. Yes, this is silly, but hey, we are talking 1970s science fiction here, with spandex jumpsuits and early 80s hair. There are hives of billions of bug aliens here, too, and there are times the only way to stop them is to blow up the planet. Sorry, we need to blow up a world to save the rest of them. Next time, please check the cargo pods with customs before they infest the world.

The players will be back next time to this insane place, a little wiser and wanting to explore more. Play it serious, torture them with the crazy things, turn the factions up to eleven, and make the universe come alive.

I would keep this universe hard, brutal, and deadly. Don't let people laugh it off or take it unseriously. Have the GPR or Blarads show up, beat the entire party up, leave them for dead on a planet with no gear, and laugh as they fly away in their shuttlecraft. The evil factions here are not to be messed with, and they will enjoy taking out their punishment on anyone who crosses their path.

Otherwise, what? I am bored and playing Traveller. Not to slight that game and its universe, but we have had many times where the universe felt too cosmopolitan, safe, and advanced, and it all fell flat for us. While there were small fights here and there, wars did not reach across subsectors. Where Traveller can feel too much like 2025, Space Opera is firmly set in a universe that resembles the Cold War, with a couple of Vietnam Wars going on around the galaxy. Starfleets can and do get into scraps here, especially in border space.

These space armies still use flame weapons, disruptors, gauss weapons, and tactical nukes. Go figure. Star Wars is soft romance fantasy compared to this. Ewok, meet flamethrower. If that fails, we gas the whole forest with chemical weapons and send the warbots in, firing cannister rounds out of gauss cannons.

I wish all of you were back in the 1980s playing Space Opera with us. Very few know the unhinged side of this universe and how slap-in-the-face brutal it can be. It makes Warhammer 40K look like My Little Pony.

Oh, and one of the ship damage results is the solid waste sewage system backing up into hydroponics again. Or a box of bandages in the med-bay malfunctioning and losing their stickiness when the ship is hit by enemy fire. Or all the interior sliding doors need to be cranked open manually. Or the ship's humidifiers breaking and turning the vessel into a sauna, increasing the breakdown rate of every piece of electronics on board. Fire detection systems can go out, and you will never know that the lower decks are currently engulfed in a hellish inferno until smoke starts blowing from the vents and killing people in those compartments. If the anti-matter converter fails with a high enough shutdown level, there is a flat 25% chance the ship turns into a small sun. 

Some of these ship breakdown effects are hilarious in a way only the classic Paranoia game can inflict on players, and your players will be begging the engineer for relief. Or survival. Or it may be too late by then. And no other classic science fiction game makes ship breakdowns this deadly, so you will take maintenance and repair seriously.

Here is a secret. All the ships resemble World War 2 vessels; they explode in gigantic atomic explosions, mount weapons far too powerful for anyone's own good, and hate everyone inside them. Even the smallest starfighters pack a punch that can do severe damage to a city skyline.

Seriously, though, these ships feel like real starships, not just fake CGI or oversimplified parts of the game the designers don't want to think too hard about. Every one of these ship breakdowns needs attention, and continuing to fly with them is a considerable risk that ups the ante and heightens the tension. They can also ground the ship until they are repaired.

And the computers are wonderfully a 1970s vision of computing, with a TL 7 mini-computer (hand computer) having 1 DPU of CPU and 2 DPU of storage, with a DPU being about a megabyte of storage. When you scale up from computers to mainframes, the TL 6-7 multi-computer weighs 500kg and has 100 MB of memory and 500 MB of storage. These are so primitive that they are endearing in a way.

This is not really a society that has the Internet, and computers are more utilitarian and functional. Computers do not control society here; you walk up with a clear plastic "holo card" and put it into a wall slot, and a holographic movie plays.

You can actually talk to the higher-level computers with sentience! Otherwise, the conversation goes like this: "Computer, how many moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five?" And the mainframe answers you like someone talking out of a can, repeating the question with the answer, "The answer is, seven moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five." Think of any computer out of Star Trek: The Original Series or 1970s science-fiction movies, and you have what it is like in Space Opera. As a referee, drive your players up the wall with canned, vague, and too literal answers from these computers.

And you have to pay double and allocate 5 MB of memory (instead of 3) for a galley program to get served chicken cordon bleu. Seriously, the computers in this game are as bad as the starships, and they secretly all hate you, too.

Modern game designers assume that every piece of computer technology has to be "just like today," and they put themselves in a box. I still miss the original Shadowrun universe, where nothing was wireless, and you had to physically "jack in" to access points in dangerous locations. Wi-fi and VPNs ruined the entire setting.

If you port in the classic weapons, you can use GURPS Ultra Tech for the base stats. Still, there are some good parts to take into consideration with the classic Space Opera weapons, like the fact that almost all the energy weapons are capable of fully automatic fire. Even the blaster pistol. So Han Solo will be sitting across from Greedo, and instead of just shooting him one, he will be drilling a burst of ten blaster shots into the poor green latex sap. Tell Jabba to suck on my blaster Mauser with a switch. It is insane, unhinged, but incredible. Make sure to carry around a personal force screen.

Otherwise, stick with GURPS personal weapons and gear if you want to keep your life simple.

Plots? Steal them from other science fiction. If you have a Starforce ship, make a remote outpost lose contact, and send them to investigate. Since we have no transporters, we need to take a shuttle down with a contingent of marines, and then we get to do science in the abandoned outpost. Make the sentient computer get paranoid, and you need your social scientist to talk the computer out of it to find out the truth. Have the Space Marines go on foot to investigate a series of strange signals around the outpost. Let the engineer discover a secret sublevel beneath the outpost, full of labs conducting strange experiments. Let one of the PCs have a possible psionic awakening and hear voices telling them to run.

Come on.

Science fiction is not hard. It is full of secrets and mysteries, and nothing is as it seems.

Also, we are rocking the new Wacom MovinkPad 11 today for my doodle art. If you are into drawing and sketching, this pad is excellent. I did not go all out and get the most expensive one; I just got the smaller one, since all I wanted was a quick tablet to practice on with a Wacom-quality matte screen and a paper-like feel. Just something to practice a little each day, and knock out silly, fun doodle art is all I wanted. If you are looking to get into art, this is the ideal pick-up-and-draw Android practice device that lets you get some pen time in, save your work, and tear off a new sheet of digital paper for another silly idea.

Highly recommended and a great Christmas gift for a budding artist. Don't use AI! Have the satisfaction of drawing it yourself! Practice each day! Learn fundamental skills and grow as a person. Years down the line, you will thank me, and no one else will be able to draw a straight line without using ChatGPT.

But GURPS: Space Opera is a fun universe with a complete set of star sector maps, starships, fun gear, and compatible space combat systems that work efficiently with GURPS. Most of the books are "stuff to play with" either in organizations, equipment, weapons, starships, star maps, or other information. Outside of Traveller, this is one of the most complete science fiction universes in gaming we have, and one that has been forgotten.

Where Other Games Fall Short...

GURPS just does everything well.

I run a few other gaming blogs because I have been in the hobby so long, and my leading SBRPG site is still going strong 15 years in. My sites have probably been scanned by so many AI agents that my wisdom is now part of the global consciousness from role-playing games, from now to eternity.

I was trying to discover the best version of D&D on one of my other sites, and settled on the idea that AD&D Second Edition (and the retroclone For Gold & Glory) are the best D&D you can get. Yes, this is a heavily censored edition of the game, with half-orcs, demons, devils, and assassins removed, but the rules make a few significant fixes. Also, all the cut content was restored later in the Outer Planes Appendix and the Complete guides, so it is there if you look. Also, other free games like OSRIC have all of those, and First and Second Edition are the same game, so everything ports in without needing any changes.

And For Gold & Glory is easily one of the most generous games in the OSR, and one I will happily support. The art is all public-domain works by the great masters, so this game features some of the best art in gaming today, and every piece is stunning and authentic to the period. Compared to the AD&D Second Edition POD reprints, this book beats them all. It makes me want to play a historical fantasy game based on the book's pictures. Also, while AD&D 2E is a dead game that can't be expanded or have adventures written for, FG&G is a community game that allows for all of that. The FG&G PDF is free and can be freely redistributed without profit. Only OSRIC comes as close to this game, and is another favorite of mine (even as a GURPS resource).

In the Second Edition, we get Story XP, which is more like GURPS's XP system for achievements and difficulty, which shows D&D was chasing GURPS (3rd Edition) in the 1990s, and they were. Everyone I knew quit AD&D First Edition for GURPS, so they needed to compete with the market leader. Level limits for non-human characters were raised to around 12th level, and while level limits are silly, this made them all but ignorable since few games even got to that level, and if you ever did, you ignored them anyway.

We also got the original core bard class and not the freakish hybrid of First Edition. This was a cool bard, very difficult to play since it was a half-arcane caster, and the bard's abilities were particular and of limited use. Even the combat song required 3 rounds of singing, without attacking, to get going. You had to be a great player to make a bard work; otherwise, you were just a mediocre archer with a few arcane spells. I would rather have a new player play a thief or a mage. You had no bardic inspiration nor healing spells! This was a challenging class, but great if you knew how to make it work.

We played AD&D 2E back in the 1990s, and this game got us back into AD&D, mainly because of the GURPS-like XP system and the increased XP values of monsters, easily ten times the old BX D&D game. Also, there was zero XP for gold, so the greed motivation in the game was gone, and this was more of a heroic storytelling game where Story XP doubled your monster XP if they were defeated on a quest. We read the original Forgotten Realms novels and loved those stories, and the game did a good job of being "the game of the novels."

GURPS was still the better overall game.

In GURPS, if you held a crossbow to someone's head, that was a tense moment. In AD&D 1E or 2E, if you were high enough level, you laughed it off unless DM Fiat kicked in and they called for a save or die roll, which was rare, and if you were high enough level, you made it anyways. The same was still deadly (by the rules) and required resurrection saves, but GURPS did that tense moment far better than games with bags of hit points. Resurrection in GURPS is exceedingly difficult or impossible, with the spell costing 300 FP and one try (GURPS Magic, p. 94), and it can be ruled impossible in some settings.

To bring someone back to life in GURPS, you all but need ceremonial magic and a circle of casters (GURPS Magic, p. 12). To get that 300 FP, you need a lot of casters with the skill over 15-, ten times the casting time (20 hours), there are baked-in failure rates, and you get one try. This is not a spell you can "pay the temple 500 gold to cast" and be on your way, like this was a video game and an extra life.

In 2E, resurrection requires a system shock roll, ages the caster 3 years, and has a maximum number of times equal to a character's CON score. Still, this is beginning to feel like a video game, assuming you will die multiple times, and NPC healers are there to suffer aging effects. In 5E? The cost is laughable: 1,000 gold, and you need a long rest before you can cast spells again. The subject also requires a long rest and gets a -4 on all rolls (um, we do have a disadvantage and fatigue system here in 5E) until they do.

GURPS does a better job of creating a profound, realistic, and dramatic game. Death still means something here. Part of me feels like the fantasy genre has been ruined by the D&D-isms and assumptions baked into it, and that going back to GURPS is the only way to clean my palette of the video-game-inspired mechanics in today's fantasy games.

If we don't push back against these D&D tropes, the entire hobby will become a mobile game where we will be expected to buy currency, boosts, characters, items, and stamina for real money.

All that great art in For Gold & Glory that I have been posting in this article? That is more GURPS than AD&D. I love the game and its art, but to me, this feels like GURPS art because of the weight and realism of these pieces. They come from an era before the concept of "role-playing" gaming existed, and they are all-time historical greats. For Gold & Glory is worth checking out (for free), just for the art and inspiration it brings to fantasy.

It comes down to a question of why you play the fantasy genre.

For me, I like the grim reality that GURPS brings to the table, and everything becomes a serious, weighty decision. Healing isn't free, and death is all but final. GURPS is like a hardcore game where you get one life, and you live with your decisions, good or bad. If your character gets a bad rep, that sticks with them, and they will feel the repercussions of that for the entire campaign.

In D&D, especially 1E and 2E, I can still ignore much of the danger and its consequences. In 5E, it ignores all the threats, and there are no consequences. The new "rule zero" in D&D 2024 is "everybody wins," and I immediately check out, that is not why I play role-playing games.

Would I rather play a thief in AD&D or GURPS? This one is easy, and GURPS is a clear win. While thieves in AD&D are simply a weak martial class with a collection of skills plus backstab, thieves in GURPS are real people. In GURPS, I am dealing with disadvantages and reputation, and the campaign world matters all of a sudden. In AD&D, thieves "just are" some sort of "class choice" on the "choose your class" screen in a video game, and they sort of exist in the nether. If my GURPS thief blows a kleptomaniac roll and goes for that shiny necklace, fails, and the town guards show up - that is a real problem.

Death is real, so I need to have the skills to escape, since fighting and killing guards will lead to worse consequences, or I can surrender and deal with some time in a cell, maybe some manual labor for a few months, or being sent out on a dangrous mission that is all but certain death (but finding a way to succeed and pay my debt to society in the process with a smile and smirk on my face). Hey, GURPS referees can have fun with the whole "prison time" thing as well, and give thieves some creative ways to pay off that debt by taking on dangerous missions for the constables.

A highly skilled thief is also an asset when a town has monster troubles, and this is a resource that innovative mayors can make secret use of. Even if the mayor is embroiled in inter-faction politics, those missions could get very interesting as the thief is sent after political enemies to gather (or plant) dirt, steal from, or otherwise weaken the mayor's political foes. All of this is done under the table, of course, and the thief can walk free for a few favors.

Or, I could have the skills to talk my way out of the whole mess. None of the above ever happens.

But back in AD&D, I will just hide in the shadows or climb a wall to escape the guards. I never needed to make a self-control roll or suffer a bad reputation, so there is no societal cost for choosing to be a thief. Death is no big deal, especially in 5E. Thieves just sort of "are there" in D&D, with few interesting things driving them or painting how others see them.

If I take the same above logic and apply it to a bard, mage, fighter, cleric, druid, or any other fantasy role, then you can begin to see why GURPS just does fantasy better. My characters are part of the world, required by the rules to interact with it, and for the world to interact with me. With great, creative refereeing, even these "failure states" that would kill characters or imprison them in D&D-style games are easily turned into new plots and adventures in GURPS. Yes, blowing my self-control roll put me here, but it does not mean instant death or rolling up a new character unless my choices are horrible.

Where other games fall short, GURPS delivers.

Linux is Really Good Right Now

I am shocked at how great Linux is. I have been on and off with the OS for years. This year, I dedicated a whole machine to it and have been maintaining it, learning about security, installing software, using the command line for updates, and just getting my feet wet with a distro.

Go with Linux Mint, or if you just want a starter OS that everybody uses, Ubuntu. I know how bad Ubuntu is and all the terrible choices they made with Amazon, packaging, and other things. If they use Ubuntu at your place of work, trust me, install it on an old machine and learn it. I like Mint a lot, but there are things about Ubuntu where I see them pushing the OS forward, especially with their (controversial) Rust rewrites of the core libraries. Debian recently announced Rust rewrites, too, so the writing is on the wall.

I know people dislike Ubuntu!

But hey, Ubuntu is one thousand times better than Windows, and if it starts you off as a "first distro" before you move to Mint or Arch, then you took that first step on a long road of learning and discovery.

You will learn, and it is good to learn in a distro that holds your hand. Plus, if they use Ubuntu at work, do it to increase your job skills and justify it that way.

But install something and start learning!

Rewriting the entire OS in Rust is one of the most forward-looking ways Linux can cement its position in the enterprise market and finally replace Windows. Decades of C and C++ code in Windows versus an OS entirely written in a secure development language that allows zero exploits and buffer overflow attacks? This is your future cloud OS, and Steam is 100% onboard.

If you have old hardware that can't run Windows 11, why not try this?

Oh, and Steam runs on Linux too, along with thousands of games. If I want to be distracted, there are excellent ways to do so here, too, but that's my choice.

The fact that the GURPS Character sheet comes with a Linux version is just tremendous joy for me, and it frees up my creativity from the constant annoyance of Windows. Windows is becoming highly trashy; it annoys me with notifications every five minutes and constantly puts news, entertainment, and information from sites I do not care about in my face.

Windows is making the world's "second screen attention disorder" worse.

With Linux, I have a choice. The default state of the operating system is quiet. There are very few notifications outside of system updates, and even then, those are very infrequent. I love the peace and quiet. I can focus on something creative, rather than being pinged, bugged, alerted, flashed ads in front of, spied on, and constantly reminded that I am not using my computer the way Microsoft wants me to.

The computer sits quietly and runs.

What I do with it is my choice. I typed 3,000 words of a novel in one day with that peace and quiet. I got into my zone. I felt the creative flow return to me again.

With Windows, forget it—it is like trying to study in a noisy dormitory with music blasting through the wall, people running in the halls, the door won't lock, and people barging in at random. I am always expecting a notification or an ad to pop up in Windows, so I can never get into a peaceful, productive, pure, higher-level of thinking, creative flow.

With Linux, I can.

I know nothing is going to bug me, pop up, or annoy me. My guard isn't constantly up. My mind is at ease. I have nothing to distract me or take me out of that higher level of cognitive thought.

Linux is the "quiet mode" that Windows is missing.

And this helps me think and play GURPS. Since GURPS takes a little more effort and brain power to enjoy, if I can eliminate the constant ping-ping-ping of Windows and its annoying nature, I can get into "deep GURPS thought mode" and really enjoy the game. Nothing will pull me out of my "GURPS zone," and I can really dig deep on characters, adventures, combats, and reading the PDFs.

Linux makes my GURPS experience better.

Conversions especially. A game conversion, like GURPS: Star Frontiers, requires a deeper level of thought and concentration, where I can pick little things apart, identify the most essential elements to port over, and really drill down into translating one setting into GURPS. In Windows, forget it —I am constantly on guard, distracted, and doing something else while a screen full of icons fills my desktop.

Windows is the desk full of dust, crumbs, junk, papers, and clutter where you can get nothing done.

You can build the same thing in Linux, but it isn't the same. You have to actively wreck Linux to get it to annoy you. With Windows, this is the default way it comes out of the box, and it can never really be removed easily.

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

You do those things on a terminal, and your software is up to date. It is wonderful. You will have minor hang-ups here and there, but buy a book, go online and search, and even use AI search to look for answers. It is easier than ever to learn Linux.

And with my GURPS PDFs on there, the entire computer becomes a "GURPS station" for creating on. I can theme one workspace for GURPS, and zone out in one of my favorite games of all time.

With no distractions.

The Hobby is Hurting All Over

We are in a bust phase of role-playing tabletop games, with D&D seriously faltering on that side of the hobby, and many people just turning indifferent to new releases from Wizards and third-party D&D creators. One notable creator who made most of their money from 5E now says their own game is making more, and sales across the board for 2024 D&D have cratered.

People are sticking with what they have and not "upgrading" or "seeking 2024 material" unless they are forced to, and it isn't that many.

Blog hits are way down, too, and I am moving back into programming and software development and taking courses. The hobby is dead, with the air let out of D&D 2024, and people are mostly giving up or filtering into niche games. If D&D 5E survives, it will be through Shadowdark.

People say Shadowdark is far less of a headache to set up and run than a session zero of D&D, with everyone running to D&D Beyond and designing freakish niche classes and characters. We get this in GURPS, too, without some tight control on character design.

I hope the GURPS revision doesn't divide the community, and a part of me wishes the game would be left as-is. I know YouTube will go clickbait on any changes to the core GURPS books; click hunters gotta make rage-bait content to keep their channels afloat. Even if they never covered the game or don't cover it at all, you know it will be a barrage of "GURPS gone woke" one video after another, even with sensible and reasonable changes to update the book for a wider audience range.

I love GURPS, but I know how people are, and the desperation of many of these channels and who they will dump on for clicks. It is a sad state of affairs that we can't have positive, constructive, and game-focused content. YouTube and its "engagement" are a blight on tabletop gaming. It gets so bad that I unsubscribe and tune them out. Even the 5E hype channels are becoming sad, "please watch me," channels that beg for views and comments.

There are times I need to escape it all.

But I am learning Rust and enjoying the language. We finally have a language that puts some thought into data, buffer overflows, variables, and tight memory control. There is a learning curve, but it is not as hard as GURPS once you grasp a few core concepts. Everything is migrating to this language—from AWS to Linux—and it is the future of systems and application development.

While gaming is in a slump, I am working on other skills.

Even games will move over to Rust once the tooling and knowledge expand, since testing is built in, refactoring is easier, and the applications will not compile if they have memory leaks or serious pointer flaws. The cost to maintain a game and the development costs will go down once the engine spreads from system development into the application space.

C and C++ are dying. It is a shocking thing to see. But the demise was foretold long ago by the language's failure to change and its being far too permissive with security and trust. We simply do not live in an age where we can't trust the software that controls the planes we fly in, the banks we put our savings into, the medical devices we rely on, and the cars we drive.

Coding, like gaming, has gotten far too permissive and out of control. Character power, combinations that break the game, and builds that do nothing but exploit one fringe rule are commonplace. Rust shows you can put tight controls on a system and still achieve expressiveness while maintaining control over the development experience. GURPS suffers from this outdated game design paradigm, too, and it feels like C++ in an era where application development requires a tighter rein on memory access and variable scope and lifetimes.

D&D 2024 is 100% loosey-goosey characters who can over-spec into passive perception and be like automatic trap radars in a dungeon, or over-spec into social and walk around saying they own everything in the kingdom, and make themselves the rulers. The era of this sort of massively careless and sloppy design paradigm is on its way out, and the far-too-permissive games of the 2020s will be seen as relics of overdesigned characters, designers who did not care, zero-challenge adventures that are more themed time-wasters, and executives who just needed to sell more books with OP subclass options.

One side of Wizards is shipping cozy game starter sets, while the other is kneeling at the altar of Dragonlance and proclaiming that the old-school is back, and I see a confused hydra with heads that don't know what the other ones are doing. Meanwhile, players are walking away in droves or simply stopping to care.

We are heading into an era of tighter, more secure, tested, less permissive, and proven designs.

Working well, proving the math, and being supportable will soon be seen as highly desirable features in gaming, as this "do anything" culture fades along with many of the systems that cling to the old ways.

GURPS 4th Edition Revised

From the GURPS Discord and the SJ Games forum here:

https://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=205432

We are getting a 4th Edition Revised GURPS rulebook. This is a good change, and they are preserving page references while making a few adjustments to keep the book more of a rules reference than a new edition. We have two posts from Kromm on the GURPS Discord that are worthy and of note:

Originally Posted by Kromm on the Unofficial GURPS Discord

Since the GURPS Fourth Edition Revised monkey is out of the sack:

Zero. It won't be years. Most of the work is already done.

1. By far the biggest differences are major changes to physical layout and design. I'm not sure what SJ leaked at Gamehole Con, so I'm not going to go into detail here beyond saying, "The thing will be easier to use and read." It will not look the same, despite #3 below.

2. It is definitively not GURPS Fifth Edition, or even a GURPS Third Edition to GURPS Fourth Edition-level change! It is a GURPS Third Edition to GURPS Third Edition Revised-level change. It will not make edition-level changes to point costs, modifiers, prices, weights, etc. All rules changes will be additions, in clearly marked addenda "chapters," so that people can easily decide what to retcon into Fourth Edition campaigns.

3. Top priority is to preserve page references so that whether you use the Basic Set, Fourth Edition or Basic Set Fourth Edition Revised, an internal "p. 00" or external "p. B00" points you to the same rule. This brooks little to no rewriting outside of the addenda mentioned in #2.

4. Inasmuch as there is some rewriting, as in #3, it will be to remedy some particularly offensive or unclear passages. Not to change rules!

5+. And other minor stuff while we're at it. The above will inevitably change the size, shape, and location of art and quote boxes, so expect art and quotes to change, too. We'll update the credits to reflect additional material in the addenda, and the creatives who created the revised book. I'm sure there are 100 things like that.

#3 is the single most important element in living up to the promise of compatibility. There are literally millions of page references in 21 years of supplements and articles, not to mention community discussions. Invalidating them would mean a huge slap in the face. But #1 is the main reason to do the thing. So, it isn't a conflict . . . it's a visual upgrade that doesn't insult customers, while still providing both enhanced readability AND some extra "best of" addenda.

I can say without shilling or exaggerating that it is far, far more than a new printing. It just isn't a full edition. There are things between the two. A revision is one of those things. If all a reader cares about is the rules . . . well, there will be lots of addenda, but no, not a full revision. However, lots of readers care about readability, sensitivity, design aesthetics, being aware that it's 21 years later, etc. even if not a single rule changes.

Well, that's it for my needless leaks to follow SJ's leaks, but the takeaways:

• Better, more readable layout with different art and quotes.

• Mostly less controversial words, excepting indefinite pronouns (for economic reasons).

• More than 25 pages of "best of" rules skimmed from 21 years of system growth.

• Incidental glitch cleanup (e.g., mistaken "damage" for "injury," or "than" for "that").

• Promise of NO rules or page-reference changes to maintain total compatibility.

And this:

Originally Posted by Kromm on the Unofficial GURPS Discord

Just dropping in to reiterate that, no, we're not going to be changing important rules. Or even unimportant ones. 😉 When it comes to rules:

* We'll be adding 27 pages of rules. Those will get edited from their sometimes-obscure, often two-decades-old originals to speak modern ***GURPS.***

* We'll be fixing rules errata that people have reported. Not "Wah, this isn't how it *should* work!" but actual 1+1=3 and using-HT-to-mean-HP errata. Plus some errata I noticed at a glance as I was looking for sensitivity issues. Very, very minor stuff here.

* We'll be clarifying a few rules to set FAQs to rest, but only where there is space to do so. No new rules. Just adding belts to a few suspenders (or suspenders to a few belts, if you prefer).

* We'll correct a few obviously outdated things, like thinking it's 2004 when it'll be 2026. This may influence a few rules-related examples, but not the rules per se. Closer to being a minor erratum or light edit, really.

But people who want new core magic systems, TL definitions, armor stats, and so on will not find them here. Sometimes there are things like that in supplements, but we're taking those as alternatives to an established core, not the new core. I've made an effort to point out supplements where quote boxes allow me to do so. Where they don't . . . well, at least I updated the *Ludography.*

Combat Lite will not be in the book, so it will only be found in GURPS Lite. Iconic characters are being kept alongside Infinite Worlds. Some words, like 'slave,' are being changed, and the 'slave mentality' disadvantage is being renamed and clarified. This is still useful for hive-mind bugs and similar creatures, but it is not really great for intelligent beings.

Please don't get rid of the Bulletproof Nudity rule (B417)! Just change the no-top rule to 'any gender,' since I use it for both my Conan and He-Man games, as well as Rambo and Schwarzenegger Commando-type movie games. Another option is to put the +1 on a STR 14+ to focus the rule on showing off a perfect physique, regardless of gender (keeping the +1 but making the toplessness optional). I need those big oiled pecs in my shoot-em-up adventures, and that silly +1 bonus still in the game as a 1980s action-movie nod. You have my permission to rename the rule to a more genre and reader-friendly: "No Armor? No Problem."

Overall, I am liking this new direction: an update of the language and art, elimination of dated references, and a new edition of the game that focuses on ease of use.

Dungeon Fantasy Magic vs. 5E Magic

On my SBRPG blog, I went at length to prove that the magic in the B/X and AD&D versions of D&D was far more potent than either D&D 4E or 5E. Relative character power (as you level) is also far better preserved in the original editions of the game.

The problem with "Wizards D&D" is that they scale hit points on a curve as you level, and they have to artificially boost character damage as well, but it never keeps up. This has been true since D&D 3.0. Where in AD&D a single fireball spell can wipe out a room full of ogres, in D&D 5E, it barely touches them. In AD&D or B/X, the fireball is mighty. Is it anything 3 HD or less? That is vaporized with a 6d6 fireball spell when you get it at 6th level, and it scales up as you level.

In general, you are doing half the damage in D&D 5E than you are in AD&D or B/X, and it gets worse as you level up. You need to optimize everything to "keep up," or you will fall behind, and if you focus on roleplaying feats and other non-combat abilities, you will be useless in high-end play. Have fun, and you will be punished for it.

So, the question is, where do Dungeon Fantasy wizards fall in comparison to a B/X magic user or a 5E wizard? As a player who wants to play a spellcaster, what game gives me the most power? Which game preserves my power versus higher-level foes? Which game gives me the most flexibility when casting spells, the types of spells I can cast, and how many times I can cast them? What game gives me the best wizard I can play?

First, we need our baselines for comparison, so let's use the classic 3rd-level spell, fireball, as it is iconic. For B/X, let us use the excellent Old School Essentials.

• Fireball (B/X)
• 3rd Level Spell
• 240' range, 20' sphere
• Gained at level 5
• 1d6 damage per level, save for half, no damage cap
• 5d6 damage total
• 18 points of damage average

For 5E, let's use the SRD:

• Fireball (5E)
• 3rd Level Spell
• 150' range, 20' sphere
• Gained at level 5
• 8d6 damage total, save for half
• 28 points of damage average

For GURPS, let's use Explosive Fireball (DFS29) as our spell.

• Explosive Fireball
• Many spell prerequisites, Magery 1 minimum
• 1/2D 25, Max 50
• Two rolls to cast:
• Spellcasting Skill Roll
• Innate Attack (Projectile)
• Costs:
• Any amount of energy up to twice your spellcasting talent per second
• Up to three seconds
• 1d explosive burning damage per 2 points of energy

So, what does that mean? Looking at some of the starting spellcasting characters in the game, we see they have about 12 mana to use, so if we have magery 2, we could dump 4 points of mana per second into that fireball, for three seconds, and cast it at 12 energy, for 6d6 total explosive fire damage (21 average). This needs a little breakdown, so let's open the Exploits book (DFE46):

• 6d6 damage in the target hex
• Everyone out to 6 x 2 = 12 yards takes damage
• Divide damage by 3 x hexes to the center
• 1 hex = 2d6
• 2 hexes = 1d6
• ...and so on.

Add to this the chance to be set on fire (either one location or all, see DFE68), and there can be some nasty consequences for fire spells in GURPS in general, along with ongoing damage. The GURPS fireball is far more of a "simulation spell" than it is one that just does damage in an area equally.

Additionally, as GURPS, the referee is free to rule on the effect of fragmentation based on the environment. Let's say my wizard casts an explosive fireball into a dining room full of goblins. I am throwing a [2d] fragmentation effect on there (B414).

Yes, this is a sim. As a GURPS referee, you need to "sim when you need to sim."

It is also worth noting that the GURPS fireball scales, and a character with Magery 6 and enough mana can dump 36 energy into the explosive fireball in a 3-second casting, for 36d6 damage. If you have the skill and the mana, the GURPS spell will scale to an insane level of damage, and that is like the blast of a 120mm modern-day mortar.

What does any of this mean? Let's pull a few sample monsters from each game and go up the level chart with them. Let's do B/X first:

• Goblin = 3 hp
• Orc = 4 hp 
• Gnoll = 9 hp
• Bugbear = 14 hp
• Ogre = 19 hp
• Mummy = 23 hp
• Green Dragon = 36 hp

Let's do 5E, from the SRD:

• Goblin = 7 hp
• Orc = 15 hp
• Gnoll = 22 hp
• Bugbear = 27 hp
• Ogre = 59 hp
• Mummy = 58 hp
• Green Dragon (adult) = 207 hp

Let's do GURPS:

• Goblin = HP 12
• Orc = HP 14
• Hobgoblin = HP 16
• Ogre = HP 20
• Troll = HP 20
• Vampire = HP 20
• Green Dragon = HP 50

GURPS hit points tend to be between 10 and 20, and armor and resistances make a huge difference. When you get above 20 HP, you are talking big creatures. The B/X fireball is the most powerful of the group, since monster hit points are constrained and do not scale on a curve. The range is impressive, too. The 5E fireball is the weakest, with most of the monsters alive on a save, and the dragon laughing off the damage.

The B/X and GURPS HP ranges being so close means the games are more closely compatible than you think. If you use B/X "rolled hit points" in GURPS, you will get some very weak "mook" creatures at the low end, but some pretty nice fights when you go above 5 HD, and challenging for parties. Ogres and mummys become "boss creatures" that require a party to take down.

With GURPS, that 6d6 fireball at 12 energy tends to be in the B/X level of power, but once you start dumping 20 or even 40 energy into the attack, you begin vaporizing the toughest monsters with a direct hit. While B/X is the most powerful, GURPS can scale to even more powerful, just because the hit points have a tighter constraint.

Damage in GURPS will drop faster to targets farther away from the center of the explosion, so the overall power of a single blast will still be less than B/X. If you averaged damages, the GURPS fireball feels about equal to the 5E counterpart. Still, if you are going to hurl a 36d6 blast, that will be 12d6 to targets in one hex, and 6d6 to two hexes, and so on - out to 72 hexes.

It gets to a point where, uh, if you cast explosive fireball at a particular power level, you are also taking damage since the range is short. At that point, just begin to use GURPS Powers and design them like a superpower, since Dungeon Fantasy is closer in spirit to The Fantasy Trip and meant for fun "hex crawl" dungeon battles. 12d6 is the practical limit for the Dungeon Fantasy fireball because of range.

That is another wonderful thing about GURPS: if you wanted to ignore Dungeon Fantasy entirely and just design "magic superpowers" as your game's spells, you could. Your fantasy world's magic may work a different way. Collect character points, create the spell, buy it, and put a roleplay cost on learning it. In GURPS, you can do that. In B/X and 5E, you are stuck with whatever TSR or Wizards gave you.

Dungeon Fantasy is just one way of doing it. And it is not always the right way. In fact, Dungeon Fantasy may be how just one world in a multiverse of worlds works. The rest may work completely differently, with different rules and laws of magic.

You are free to say "mages can design powers given this framework of limitations" and just let the players go wild, with the referee approving the designs to fit the world's theme. Very few games give you that amount of creativity.

GURPS: Old West, Adventure Ideas

Yee-haw! Today, we are rustlin' up adventures and adventure ideas from a few different Western-themed RPGs and converting them all over to GURPS. There is a severe shortage of stock, no high-falutin' magic, none of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo, rough and tumble Western adventures, but there is gold in them thar hills if you know where to look.

So we are looking for Wild West adventures with no magic, and they don't have to be for GURPS. They just need a plot, characters, situations, and an adventure progression. A great campaign starting location is also a massive plus for our adventure cattle drive. We will do all the converting to GURPS ourselves; getting our hands dirty down here on the wagon train isn't anything new to us 3d6 cowboys.

The fact that I started this roundup with the classic Boot Hill meant something. Well, there are five solid adventures for that system, y'all can throw a lasso around and round up for your Old West adventure collections. These also have the advantage of being free from all that hocus-pocus magic and weird west tomfoolery, and they are a straight-shootin, rootin-tootin good time.

Now, Mad Mesa here is a solo adventure! This means you can create yourself a GURPS 4th Edition cowpoke, saddle hand, saloon gal, vagrant, cattle rustler, bank robber, or some other man with no name and run him or her through this adventure all by your lonesome! You can read the entries, make your choices, and perform minimal conversions to make all this work according to GURPS rules.

Heck, rustle up a free copy of GURPS Ultra Lite (GUL) if you wanna create bad guys for your six-gun to blast at! This is right fine for creating NPCs as well, and even vamints like wolves and rattlesnakes can be quickly thrown together using this little book of guidelines. This works seamlessly with the full GURPS rules, and will get you quick stats for any character in this here solo adventure, or any of these other adventures you rustle up.

I hear you saying, Prove it! Alrighty, here's my GUL rattlesnake for ya, using three levels as my base:

• ST: Weak (8 HP, d6/2 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Rattlesnake Skill: 2 levels (+8)
• Rattler Poison: 1 level (+4)

Wut? Reading GUL, that rattler will attack at a -6 for a skill that needs training, so that blasted snake in the grass's base attack will be DX + skill - 6, or doing the math we get: 12 + 8 - 6, or a 14- to-hit. Pretty dangerous! It doesn't do much damage (d6/2 + 2), but the poison is where it gets you.

I used a skill level to give that varmint a special ability for rattler poison, which I am sure you could find in one of the GURPS bestiaries, but I treated it like a skill here for a quick-and-dirty pick. If a creature has a special attack or ability, treat it like a skill and throw a level or two at it. Note: Use a contested roll with the skill level for poison creature HT + skill - 6 versus character HT, which is 14 + 4 - 6 = 12- on a contested roll.

Yes, skills can utilize any ability, and even multiple ones, such as a giant spider with a web attack that has a to-hit based on DX and an entanglement level based on ST. And skill levels can be used to buy creature special abilities, attacks, and defenses. Damage? Use the STR table for the ability, plus levels of skill.

Of course, that snake is dumb as a box of rocks, so you could distract it by tossing a river stone past it and watching it snap at it, and that may give you a chance to bean that scaley viper with a camp shovel. Just remember to skin the thing for meat and its hide; the town trading post may give you a few buffalo nickels for that.

That rattler works with the full GURPS rules, too! And your players will be none the wiser, you are building these with the quick ruleset and not flipping through books to find this critter. This will mean faster play, a still true-to-GURPS experience, and using a supported and official system to guesstimate NPC and creature statistics. Guesstimate is one of those words that those folks from Philly use, and it means to spit in the wind and get a hankerin'.

If yer' not using GURPS Ultra Lite fer' your games, you are doin' a whole lotta work you don't need to be doin. Most NPCs and critters don't need to be designed using a fancy character sheet program, and these rules we got in this one-page game work just fine for 95% of anything you need.

Want more proof? Here's my GUL grizzly bear, and I will use five levels since these are supposed to be very dangerous predators of the wilds:

• ST: Very Strong (18 HP, 3d6 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Grizzly Skill: 2 levels (+8)

Woo doggy! That grizzly attacks on a 12 + 8 - 6 = 14- but does a whalloping 3d6+2 damage per hit.  This is a massive, legendary bear; for normal ones, I could do one less level of ST for 2d6+2 damage and 14 HP, and up the DX by a level.

Wait one second! You designed a rattler and a grizzly using the same GUL design system, and did it in less than a minute? And these work well enough with the main rules; no one knows the difference? That's faster than flipping through a 5E Monster Manual and taking 30 minutes to read a whole stat block! People who say GURPS is too complicated are full of hogwash. Making NPCs and monsters in GURPS is easier than 5E, B/X, or any other game on the market.

In fact, GUL is the key to quickly playing and converting these adventures on the fly, with a minimum of fuss and reference. Yes, if you have the GURPS Bestiary and want to run a full rattlesnake, be my guest, but this works just fine for our needs.

Pardner, I ain't doin' any more work than I have to so I can run these here Old West adventures, nor does having perfect stats matter all that much. Just look over yonder at D&D-land; they keep changing their monster stats every five years for the last fifty.

We got Mad Mesa, The Lost Conquistador Mine, Ballots and Bullets, Burned Bush Wells, and Range War for a complete campaign of adventures to play with GURPS Old West and the 4th Edition rules. You will get a decade of campaign gaming out of these five adventures alone, and they are worth checking out.

Some of these are right excellent campaign starters and home bases in their own right, with Ballots and Bullets featuring a small city as its home base of operations. While you can play through the main adventure, creating linked adventures for an epic campaign set in any one of these adventures would fill out a whole pickle barrel of adventure time for your cowpokes.

BH4 and BH5 are from the third edition Boot Hill, but they are still fine additions to your Wild West adventure library.

If I were looking for adventures and campaign starters, you couldn't get any more classic and good old-fashioned clean fun than these classic Boot Hill adventures. The old game's rules are so simple that they don't take up too much of the book, and you can just drop GURPS right in and make your own stories with one of the best generic universal role-playing games this side of the Rio Grande.

https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-TV-Western-Collection-Television/dp/B003ANP8CO/

Another downright mother lode of adventure ideas is any of these huge DVD collections featuring westerns, cowboy TV shows, and all sorts of rough-ridin' adventures. Sure, you've got to mess with those old-fashioned "movie disc" thingies, and maybe round up one of those movie disc players. If y'all can operate a remote and hook up one of those HDMI cables, you are gonna have a good time.

The quality won't be like a new-fangled 4K masterpiece, since some of these shows are as old as the hills, but all the work is gonna be done for you when you pop in a disc and turn an episode of some random TV show into a GURPS adventure idea.

Those writers from the golden age of Hollywood, creating these "moving pictures," will probably be tickled pink that you are reusing their plots and stories for your "silly dice games." And these TV shows are so old; none of your players are going to know better. Use the GURPS Ultra Lite system and create characters, no good outlaws, and critters from the stock footage included in these films, and you will have some right good gaming.

And if you can't get your hands on this, there are loads of 10 and 25 Western movie collections to get your grubby hands on, and you can score them used or dirt cheap at places like Oldies.com.

https://www.oldies.com/Western-Movies/collection.cfm

What is this? A place you can pick up Western TV shows on DVD for as cheap as $2 per disc? And the Blu-rays are $4 each? I will stop trying to sell you things now, and I won't be getting any money for it. However, deals are available, and there are some amazing collections and affordable discs to own. If you are a fan of the genre, you will love having these to enjoy. 

Additionally, physical media remains a viable option in an age of streaming services, where content can be easily taken away. People have lost entire libraries of films they thought they owned forever.

Popping in a TV show or movie you never saw in your favorite genre is a far better experience than YouTube or random scrolling to find entertainment. Plus, all these do qualify as adventure ideas, NPCs, locations, and scenarios for you to use in your games.

Other western games are hit and miss for adventures, such as the 2d6-based Rider and the Hero System Western Hero (WH). The WH game does have a 44-page section in the back with campaign information, a few scenarios, and adventure seeds, so this is still a worthwhile idea book for creating period adventures using Western tropes. This is not as useful a book as the Boot Hill adventures, which I recommend getting first, but it still has a few good bits in the campaign section, as well as maps of trains, buildings, houses, and other period locations.

Rider has a dozen pages of basic information on adventure creation, along with the familiar act structure. Most of the book is 2d6 rules and careers, so it is not as useful as adventures written for the genre. This is not as helpful for GURPS referees and is more akin to a 2d6 version of the Cepheus Engine, designed for playing Wild West games.

The book is enormous; most of it consists of 2d6 rules, but there are some nice d66 charts for encounters, patrons, and rumors. I wish there were more charts for creating solo adventures, plots, factions, and other Wild West scenario pieces. This one is not as useful, but it is still an interesting game. Western Hero is the better buy.

https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-West-Stephen-Hyslop/dp/142621555X

I know I am done selling things, but this is another book in my collection. There are times when beautiful coffee table books, like the one above, inspire me. Just looking at the illustrations, pictures, and reading the stories is worth more than a written adventure, film, TV show, or a game designed to cover the subject, but you need that extra thing to make it feel real to you.

The Old West is more than "playing generic fantasy" and spinning up cowboys to shoot things. It is a love of the genre, the tropes, being a part of a massive sweeping change, and those frontier stories of seeing the last open expanse on Earth being settled. This wasn't just "them 'mericans" doing the settling, either; this was the entire world flooding in as immigrants, the European powers, banks, and the crushing power of the world moving in on a massive land rush for what would become a nation.

But in this grand, sweeping, oil painting of moving West, one you would see on a saloon wall, there are moments for personal stories, struggles to survive, tales of souls fallen to evil, lawmen and those who bring justice, pioneers, settlers, trappers and hunters, wagon trains, cattle drives, saloon gals, railroad workers, share croppers, townsfolk so poor they lived in dirt hovels and sewed clothing out of burlap sacks, farmers, ranchers, investors, schoommarms, cowboys, marshals, bandits, and so many others living a dream in a grand experiment and moment in time that did not last forever, but left its mark on us all.

Playing an Old West game is more than simulating a cowboy movie or screaming yee-haw!

It is about a more profound love of the genre, of this being a uniquely "American fantasy" with legends, myths, stories, giants, gunfights, and a mythology all its own.