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.

GURPS: Boot Hill

This will be a brief article.

Done.

Joking aside, the GURPS Old West book is a far more comprehensive resource for Old West gaming than can ever be imagined. Even if all you are doing is a casual, generic, Wild West gunfight simulation, GURPS has you covered. There is far more information, history, factions, technology, and functional adventure information in the GURPS book than Boot Hill could ever hope to deliver.

I like the GURPS Old West book a lot, and this is very well written. It is helpful for more pulp, TV shows, and serial cowboy action films as it is for a more gritty and realistic treatment of the genre. It is excellent reading and one of my favorite GURPS guides. You gain an appreciation for the hardships of life, the plight of the Native Americans, and the sweeping scope of change that moved across the country.

The period was part of the nation's formation, encompassing both its positive and negative aspects, as well as the transition from one way of life to the one we know in the modern centuries that followed. The story of every settlement, town, city, and place out West was one forged in fire and blood, a mass movement of people and settlers seeking a better life, some finding it, and many not.

The time was both the end of the strife of the Civil War, during which a nation forged the meaning of the word "freedom," and the beginning of a very hungry Industrial Age, where those freedoms were eventually realized after long struggles and hardships. The entry of the world into the Industrial Age led to displacement, a hyper-aggressive rush for resources, food, and land. The pressures of a shrinking world doomed those in its ravenous path.

Progress was the enemy.

If I were to play this, I would maintain that perspective. I would not gloss over the bad parts. Ignoring the struggle is a disservice to the entire fight, erasing the hardships that have brought us to our current state. We can't forget this and pretend it never happened. If the struggle is there, I want to acknowledge it and remember those who made sacrifices.

This may be why the safe opiates of fantasy are more popular.

https://www.amazon.com/Famous-Gunfights-American-West-Southworth/dp/1890778176

Boot Hill does have scenarios, but you could always find real-world accounts in history books to pull from. I would go by the history books for the classic gunfights, and don't worry about getting every weapon perfect. Stick to the most common types of guns, such as six-guns, shotguns, rifles, thrown knives, and lever-action guns, and things will work out fine.

I do feel the Western has held up as a genre stronger than Gangster movies, as we see the influence of the Western even today in modern films and TV shows, where that "gunslinger influence" and "Code of the Old West" can be seen in TV shows like the early Mandalorian seasons, and even TV shows like Fallout. If the traditional fantasy genre is "European D&D," then the Old West is "American D&D," at least in mythology, the role of the hero, and lore.

Plus, gunfights are tense, epic, and cool. In GURPS, they mean something, and you are not using a short rest to heal off a shotgun blast to the face. I swear, modern 5E has a reality disconnect that drives me up a wall, and while they may present realistic art (and even games that pretend this is gritty and real), none of it is true. D&D 5E lies to you in that you can get seriously hurt, die, and it doesn't matter.

You respawn in 5E like a video game.

In GURPS, injury and death are real and matter. The stakes are raised. The battles are tense.

Gunfight mechanics and weapons matter. Track shots and reloads! Part of the calculus of Western gunfights is not "spamming bullets" like in an FPS game, but being careful about shots and making each bullet count. Knowing the combat system and how to get and stack bonuses helps, even if that means taking a few seconds to brace and aim.

These are not high-capacity firearms, and even bullet belts should be limited in how much ammunition they can hold (typically 50). Reloading a revolver with the fastest gun to operate takes a full nine seconds! Make each shot count.

There is a gritty realism to gunfights where you must perform "mental math" to determine if a shot is worth it or not, and take actions to aim and slow your rate of fire. You do not have many rounds before you have to duck under cover and reload. Making shots matter, while avoiding getting hit and not being too careful, is the gunfight calculus you need to master.

You will use every point of those firearm skills.

You will remember those ranged combat rules.

Even the fighters can be mostly done with bang skills, or quickly designed characters from GURPS Ultra Lite, which I am a massive fan of. These will work with the full GURPS game just fine, and this gives you a bit of customization to personalize your gunfighter. The most armor anyone will ever have is a DR 1 leather jacket or overcoat, and most fights can be done without any armor at all.

It is what it is.

Now, this assumes that you think "Westerns are all about gunfights." This is like thinking "fantasy is about combat," which is the legacy we live with, given D&D is turning more into a wargame these days than a roleplaying game. While classic Old West gunfights are amazing and fun, they are not something an entire campaign can live on.

This "roleplaying is combat" feeling with 5E turns the hobby into a tabletop video game. I am more drawn to characters, story, skills, and a deeper plot, as well as a sense of character development. In GURPS, my cleric can become an Arctic survival expert specializing in exploring ruins and ancient history. In 5E, they are a cleric. Need to survive? Find a ranger. Need exploration? Find a rogue.

In a Wild West game, my sheep herder or preacher can become an outlaw, lawman, gunfighter, treasure hunter, or go in any direction the story takes me. Yes, I started here, but in GURPS, I can go anywhere. This is why I love GURPS: you are not going down a set class progression path, and anything is possible.

While progression is essential, you need more. I will say this about fantasy, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, science fiction, gangster settings, modern games, or any other historical or speculative roleplaying. You need characters doing something compelling, a story that they will tell together, a goal, and a reason why you are playing.

You need more than a "let's create cowboys" theme for your game. While that "random adventurers" thing may work in D&D, for most GURPS games, you need a little more.

You need to know the focus of your game, and your characters need to fit that theme. The character concepts have to work together. You need a story and a current situation. The story can't be set in stone and unchanging; there needs to be enough freedom for the players to solve it with creativity, wits, and grit. There may be other answers they come up with. They may also want to do different things, and your game becomes a sandbox.

Take a favorite western movie, set up the characters, and let the players resolve the entire film the way they want to. If you get stuck, simply send them to the next scene to stumble through and have a laugh. Play the whole movie like that, having them solve each scene, wrap it up early, or go completely off the rails. Make adjustments to reflect how the characters impact the plot. Go with it. Make "High Noon" into "Your Noon."

A love of the genre and its conventions always helps a great deal. If you are not into Westerns, then this genre won't appeal to you. But most of science fiction these days is a play on the classic Western tropes, so if you like science fiction, you may find a lot in Westerns to be very familiar, except with laser swords and blasters, and lots of fantastical aliens. You could watch a Western and replace the guns and characters in your mind with lasers and aliens, and make the evil army "space troopers," and you will begin to recognize things quite quickly.

There is also a nice town map in the Boot Hill game, which can be helpful for campaign setting purposes. Other than that, the Boot Hill game itself is rather slim, more of a tactical miniatures game than a full-fledged RPG. There is a fun list of characters from Western fiction in the Boot Hill games, which is also an interesting note.

The 3rd Edition of the game is more meaty and a more complete game, but then again, why do I want to learn a dead game that isn't supported, with limited options, when I have GURPS?  I am not learning and supporting a new game that won't go anywhere, and I have all the best and most familiar rules right here in GURPS.

Also, watch some movies and TV shows for inspiration! You can do classic "Lone Ranger" games and singing cowboys, where the bad guys "fall down" when they are hit, or you can do a more realistic and gritty game. You can make your game as "Hollywood" as you want, do pulp adventure games, or as "tall tale" as you can imagine. This is not always about realism, and you can do comedy and lighthearted gaming if you want.

And, we have an entire line of GURPS Deadlands books! If you're looking for Weird West games, we have them here. So, not only do we have the best RPG with the best character options, but we also have an entire setting with supernatural elements. We want magic or Steampunk? Airships and steam-powered robots? We got it. We want to cross over to Mars and venture forth with an alien princess? We got that too. We wish to run this gritty and realistic? That is possible too. Cowboys and Cthulhu? It works here. Unlike other games that force a single way of play, GURPS lets you customize your game in any way you can imagine.

We truly have the best of all worlds with GURPS, allowing us to mix and match options and books to our heart's content. Do we want furries or fantastical races? Elves and dwarves? We have them here. All the sourcebooks from GURPS can be used, from Horror to Zombies, and many others can be mixed and matched. Even the martial arts book is handy for a Kung Fu Cowboys-style game out of the 1970s drive-in movie genre.

Generally speaking, historical gaming is easier with GURPS than with games written for the same period in other systems. With other Old West games, I feel a sense of being lost, and the energy drains from the game as the motivation wanes. The original Boot Hill was only 44 pages of tactical combat rules and very light campaign support, which served only to string together gunfights. Some of the OSR and 2d6 games in the Old West genre are nice, but they still lack the motivation and driving force of "why play this" beyond the gunfights.

I can easily create unforgettable characters and have a classic campaign using GURPS.

As long as I have a theme and a story to go on.

It Becomes GURPS

One of the best things about converting a setting to GURPS is that it becomes GURPS. And I don't mind it "not feeling like D&D anymore," and I see that as a good thing.

The setting gets real.

I get complete control over the settings rules, and it does not have to be a circus of high-magic fantasy, like the setting is these days. With the Forgotten Realms, I am free to play this like we used to, a low-magic, gritty, realistic, character-driven fantasy world with no unkillable GM NPCS, vast areas of unsettled lands filled with monsters and evil humanoids, and even the first edition demons and devils that were later erased from the setting by the Satanic Panic.

I can ban every book past the first, original, AD&D gray box set. I can include anything in the original AD&D books, mostly just the monsters, and have those as the bad guys. But as for the characters and magic? The gritty day-to-day life and survival? The deadly melee combats where you think twice before drawing a blade? Slow healing, bleeding out, and serious injuries in melee?

That stuff is all GURPS.

An Orc swinging an axe like that on horseback is a serious threat, capable of causing serious injury, maiming, or even killing, and not just "damage we can short rest off." Even that muddy horseback battle screams "grit and realism," something the plastic and too-clean later versions of the setting seriously lost. Today, this is just a setting inspired by a video game, and we lost so much.

I miss the old Forgotten Realms, and we are never getting that back.

Well, at least I can have it with GURPS.

But I appreciate the realism I get with GURPS, and it fits my vision of the setting much better than the original game. With D&D, you get into this "D&D mindset" where the setting becomes more about the rules than the setting and story. Players begin to "chase power" instead of driving a narrative. The design of D&D forces you into this mindset.

In GURPS, I can get more skilled, but getting impossible to kill is not easy. Combat is always a serious descision, even with supposedly "low level" foes. One lucky shot from a goblin shortbow is taking my 400-point wizard down.

I have a few boxes of Pathfinder 1e standup minis, and I'm looking to revive another setting with GURPS. I hated what they did to this world at the end of 1e, and today in 2nd edition, the removal of any mention of the evils of slavery, the too-cute plushie races, the elevation of goblins to a core race, and the high-tech mess the setting has become with steampunk technology and modern ideas. They got rid of the Drow, too, which is wrong. OGL be damned, they are a part of the setting, and in the Creative Commons now as well (as a monster). Half-orcs, half-elves, and all the classics are here in the first edition books, and this is the world as I loved it.

I miss the original Golarion so much.

Pathfinder Campaign Setting, Inner Sea Races, Page 141

Plus, the first edition Golbins were way cooler than their goofy counterparts in 2E. These little monsters were dangerous, far more capable of demon-worship, slave-taking, town-raiding, and doing all sorts of vile wickedness than the cleaned-up corporate McMascots we have these days. The modern goblins are cute, but they have been defanged and turned into plushies. I miss the old ones and that vibe. Look at them, they have red glowing eyes, and they are drawn coolly.

With GURPS, I can have that feeling.

With any other set of rules, it will feel more like modern fantasy, where you can sleep off a shotgun blast, have someone throw a bandage on you to raise you from the dead, and be fine the next day.

And I love the idea of using those standups on my hex grids for GURPS combats, the gritty, dark, deadly, and pulp-fantasy, sword-swinging, almost Conan-themed art of the original books. Again, you look at these books, and the characters who look like they are carrying a million-and-one things on them, plus a kitchen sink, and these scream GURPS to me.

And yes, that is a Golarion Drow on this cover, and they are amazingly cool and wicked elves with style. They even go beyond the D&D ones and can worship a variety of evil gods and demon lords. Again, we lost them, and these were a massive part of my setting and lore.

Granted, the worst part about a GURPS-Finder campaign is the conversions or the thousands of monsters in the setting. You don't have to, but the standups I have force my hand at either conversion formulas or some other manner of translating statistics other than guesswork. I can always lean on my B/X conversion guide for many of the creatures, but I need a better answer.

Maybe Grok or ChatCPT can convert monsters over, and I won't have to worry about it. We are not there yet, but it would not surprise me if this worked reasonably well to get a baseline. There will be a day when we won't need game books or conversion formulas at all; we will just have anything we want, instantly, on demand.

But I don't mind the mood and feeling of a setting changing once GURPS drives the action. This is a bonus, and I love that feeling since it aligns with my original vision of most of these worlds.