GURPS 40th?

According to sources, GURPS was released at the Origins Game Fair on July 3-6, 1986. This was not the Man-to-Man books, but the first edition release of the game.

This would make next year, July 3, 2026, the 40th anniversary of GURPS.

This is the ruby year, marking a significant milestone for people to come together. I would love a crowdfunded special 40th Anniversary red faux-leather edition of GURPS Characters and Campaigns, featuring a striking red cover, to commemorate the occasion. Clear red d6's and other add-ons would sweeten the deal.

We need a special community day, like Goodman Games does for Dungeon Crawl Classics, where volunteers run GURPS games at hobby shops, talk about the game, and just have our community's own little anniversary day, like a GURPS Day, every year where we spread goodwill, get people interested in the game, and share positive articles and information about our favorite game.

DCC Day last weekend was fun, and I shared little reviews and commentary about the game in a flood of articles. I think I wrote eight and shared all weekend for people looking for DCC content to "be in a place" and "read together." My general roleplaying site (SBRPG) received a significant amount of traffic, approximately five times the normal amount, as people searched for DCC Day and discovered my blog. I shared the publisher link for the local hobby shop events from the company site, so people could find it and join in the fun, meet other players, and get to know people at their local hobby stores.

I love these hobby-positive events and community organizing. It not only connects players to other players, but also strengthens local hobby shops and the community ecosystems for local gaming. Gaming is a grassroots, face-to-face social activity, and anything we can do to support our community and message makes our game stronger and our community the best place to play together.

GURPS needs an annual GURPS Day.

And we need to do a bunch of fun things for GURPS 40.

Wildcard/Bang Monster Skills

When I do my quick-and-dirty B/X monster conversions from old-school games such as Basic Fantasy, I will assign them a hits value based on my conversions, give them a base damage value based on hit dice, and then for most everything else, combat skills, special attacks, defenses, and other powers - I will just assign the monster a simple wildcard "bang skill" that is a catch-all skill roll for anything the beast is likely to do.

These are explained in the GURPS Basic Set Characters book (B175), and they are meant to group together like skills for a simpler game. An example is the skill Detective! in the game, which groups together all specific skills in their area, such as the ones a detective is likely to know.

So, in this case, a goblin gets the Goblin! skill, and a giant spider gets the Giant Spider! skill. If my goblin needs to make an attack roll, be sneaky, disengage, set a trap, hide, or do sneaky and stabbing, I would use the Goblin! skill. For my giant spider, that skill covers ambushes, hiding, wall crawling, web throwing, entanglement in spider webs, spider poison, scampering away, grappling, seeing in the dark, sensing movement, and spinning webs around a grappled character.

The critical part of this second case is that the wildcard skill covers "monster superpowers" that a monster should naturally have. Want to resist the spider poison? Opposed HT roll (Contests, B375) versus the bang skill, or you take the damage or effect. Web entanglement? Opposed ST roll versus the bang skill.

You can even use the Margin of Victory (B375) as a modifier to the effect roll, such as a spider poison being death on a loss difference of 6 or greater, damage for a failure of 3-5, nausea on a failure of 1-2, and no damage for any success.

I typically set this skill to 11+ the monster's hit die rating in B/X rules, and the Basic Fantasy set is just as good as any to use for this, plus the PDFs are free. That is a good baseline, and some "zero hit die" monsters, such as goblins, will just default to an 11-minus roll for everything.

If a power needs an exceptional modifier, let's say my Giant Spider! skill is at a 12-, I could modify STR-based rolls by a +4 (to the skill level) if I want that spider to be stronger in terms of grappling and STR-based checks. These one-off modifiers are easier to track than a complete design, and they add a little extra flavor to the monsters beyond just assigning a bulk skill level for everything. I could throw in a +2 skill level to web-based rolls if this type of spider is primarily known for its web-spinning and throwing powers.

More hit dice? That is going to be a higher base skill level and a more brutal monster to fight. Please remember that parry and dodge ratings are exceptional and should be rated in the usual GURPS manner (see my B/X conversion page), or else the fights will quickly become frustrating as high-level monsters will always be able to dodge and parry any attack coming their way.

One to three special case modifiers are enough to give any monster a custom feeling that avoids it from being too generic. If a monster is really good at flying, give it a bonus there, and so on. You can also add penalties, such as making an unintelligent monster, like an ogre, penalize its IQ-based rolls, perception, and other areas where you want it to be weaker. This makes ogres that are easily tricked, or ones you can try to sneak by while they are sleeping.

For the effect value, I will calculate a base damage or effect die roll based on the hit dice, but otherwise, most results can be figured out using opposed skill rolls, like "spiderweb strength versus character ST."

The best part about wildcard monster skills is that they can be used for mobster thugs in a 1920s Noir game, alien creatures in a science fiction game, enemy soldiers in a WW2 game, planar creatures in a plane-walking campaign, robots in a steampunk game, armored clone troopers in a space opera game, zombies in a post-apocalyptic horror game, orcs in a fantasy game, or any monster or enemy for other setting or world imaginable.

I can even rate "non-monster" things, like traps or automated gun turrets with a similar system, as long as an opposed skill roll can be used to defeat it, there is no reason a puzzle, computer security, or a lock can't be given a wildcard skill. The characters make an opposed roll to beat it. This differs from the GURPS way of doing things by rating tasks with a difficulty modifier (easy, hard, etc.), but it gets us to the same place just as easily (and maybe with an extra die roll for the opposed side).

I do not need a massive bestiary for every world I visit, and this makes GURPS a faster and easier game to run for any genre than games that require huge monster books, such as D&D. While large, detailed bestiaries are nice and an invaluable resource (thank you to our devoted fans and community members who pour hours into these and generously share them), GURPS gives us the tools to "wing it" when those resources are not available, or we just need to have something quickly and off-the-cuff.

GURPS becomes very easy to run with the tools the game gives us; all we need to do is figure out creative ways to apply them to our games.

Western Realm Atlas, Worldbuilding

I like converting campaign worlds to GURPS, but I often feel the original systems were just "made" for them. My current campaign is set in the Aquilae world, which is an extraordinary setting over on DriveThruRPG, which is a system-neutral setting where you can do anything you want. It's just maps, roads, towns, cities, kingdoms, ruins, and terrain, and you fill in the rest. For creative people who want to fill in "what goes where," this setting is a fantastic canvas. Those who want a fully developed setting will find this lacking. I love worldbuilding given a set of parameters, and having a setting where I can just "fill in what I am given" is endless enjoyment for me.

Aquilae is sort of like a "paint by numbers" campaign setting, where you are given a premade picture, paints, what color goes where, and you fill in all the rest. True artists will hate these, but they can be fun projects that are relaxing and low-key chill. It doesn't matter if it looks different than the picture, as skill varies and people may make other choices. Do you want to put in a fluffy cloud layer in the middle ground? That is your choice, go watch a few videos on how this is done, practice, and add that to your masterpiece. Want to blend colors and create a pretty shade of green (for color 45) with a hint of blue and purple? Go for it! The guidelines are here, but you can be infinitely creative within them. In the end, you will have something you made by hand, with your own personal touches.

Everyone can feel like a world builder, just like everyone can feel like an artist.

Yes, GURPS: Forgotten Realms is fun, and it plays very nicely, but a part of me will always see that as the AD&D world, before all the novels, that it was in our campaigns. The same with Dark Sun or Greyhawk, those will always be tied to one version of AD&D or another. GURPS versions of these are fun, but I feel at home in them with a decent first-edition game, such as Adventures Dark & Deep, or even Castles & Crusades.

Also, other settings that were designed to fit a theme are fun, such as the Conan-inspired Savage Thule, but if I am playing GURPS, I am playing GURPS Conan. Some of the "flavored" 5E settings are very well detailed and make fine GURPS settings, but given a choice, I will play GURPS: Vikings over a Viking-themed 5E setting. While these are fun, they are more "best of" and "tribute" settings when GURPS can give you the real thing.

And Harnworld is also a fantastic GURPS setting, one of the best. This is my dream GURPS setting for a serious, meaty, political game. It is not so much a "dungeon" setting as it is a "Game of Thrones" one. I could put dungeons on the map, but the world is far more interesting to explore and meet the people of. Everything you can ever want in a classic Middle Ages setting is here.

Something keeps me coming back to the very strange and almost quirky Aquilae setting, a system-neutral setting by design, that lets you fill in all the blanks. It is nothing more than a giant hex map of cities, roads, and optional GM's information on ruins and other secret places. You do with it what you want. Harnworld assumes "you read the books," where this setting "has nothing." 

That is a freedom I like, since there is no required reading (while fun), and if I want this city to be one thing, and that another, I can just have it. This kingdom in the middle can be the evil one, and the two on each side are good, but weaker. There are plots and motivations in my head. If I need NPCs or taverns, I have plenty of random charts. Maybe the evil king has a black dragon he rides and sends on missions. There are ruins and dungeons out there, and I get to make them myself.

It is much more of a sandbox canvas for my ideas than it is anything else. It gives me a map and names, and I do whatever I want with them. Another thing I like is that the world does not rely on a set of monsters being the villains; I can use whatever I like, the monsters from Dungeon Fantasy, some of the excellent GURPS bestiary conversions on the Internet, my B/X converted monsters, or any other monster I want. Also, there are no assumptions on fantasy races here; if I wanted this to be all human, I could have that. I can put the standard four here, or go all out with the modern mix.

Anything I want, I can have.

Just like GURPS.

Starfield

I have an admission, I just started playing Starfield. Are you this late to the game? Past its first expansion? Past the paid mods? Past the point where all the modders supposedly gave up on the game? Past the point where all the YouTube channels are trying to bury this game with clickbait videos?

Yes, I am that late.

I will avoid all the previews and trailers of movies and wait for the film so I can be surprised. I will not spoil the experience. I'll wait for a game to patch up and "get good" before committing serious time, and I'll avoid the playthrough videos. I will avoid spoilers.

Now I am playing, and for the first few hours, I am enjoying the immersion.

And I know, the game is broken, gets repetitive, has serious flaws, lacks depth, and all of the other things I have heard about it are likely true. The hardened, jaded gamers are probably right on this one, and I will likely end up feeling that way, too, by the end.

But there is one thing I love about this game.

It is the illusion of living in a science-fiction universe.

Granted, I know nothing, and I will eventually see how fake everything is, how this is all a Hollywood stage set, and how this is just a huge ruse and the wool is being pulled over my eyes. You are living an elaborate lie. All these systems are just fake, and you have not hit the grind where you hate everything in this synthetic digital life.

And yes, getting your first starship for free was strange, maybe it was a mod, I don't know. Also, how people immediately trust you and give you jobs and positions of power is also strange, but a game has to be a game, you know. I also have a few mods that liven up travel with POIs and combat encounters, so this will be more like an RPG experience where travel is combat-filled, allows exploration, and is engaging. There will be a lot to do out here.

But I am enjoying this "magic trick" for what it is, for the first few hours that I do not know better, and I am actually in a living, breathing, science fiction universe where I am a tiny person in a sea of stars.

Then I thought of GURPS: Space, since this is totally GURPS: Space. This is what living in a science fiction RPG is like. I don't like the "make it Star Wars" mods for this game, since it's not Star Wars. This is our best example of a generic science fiction universe (minus intelligent alien life) that we can see, explore, and exist inside of. We have human factions, alien monsters, and a mind-boggling number of worlds. We have cities and outposts. There are corporations and space criminals. We have space stations and ships flying around out there in the stars.

Having a living, breathing, visual model of a universe is an inspiration.

This is cool.

Know when inspiration grabs you, since it is the ambrosia and nectar of the gods when it comes to roleplaying and creating universes and adventures. This is what drives us, these magic feelings where we feel anything is possible, and all I need are the tools to express it.

GURPS is the best toolbox in the world to build dreams with.

GURPS: New Bundles of Holding!

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/July2025GURPS

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Pyramid1

Let me pass this along from the GURPS Discord server to amplify it. We have two amazing Bundle of Holding offers for GURPS, and these only last a few weeks, so jump in!

We get one amazing collection of GURPS 4E Essentials for only $20! Get started playing now with this amazing collection of:

• GURPS 4E Basic Set
• GURPS Template Toolkit 1
• Adaptations
• How to Be a GURPS GM
• GURPS 4E GM's Screen
• ...with extra items for a threshold price boost!
• GURPS 4E High-Tech
• Ultra-Tech
• Low-Tech
• Bio-Tech
• GURPS Mass Combat

If you ever wanted to get started with the best RPG ever made, now is the time!

The first Pyramid collection includes five years of magazines for $50, featuring over 2,400 pages of articles and reading material. This is almost too good to pass up! I have not gotten many of these issues, so you know I will be jumping on the Pyramid magazines. There is a second one coming, too, and I am jumping on that.

It feels like GURPS: Christmas around here all of a sudden.

GURPS as a Forever Game

There's a new question on YouTube: "What is your forever game?" This is a sort of question asking, "If you could only have one game, what would it be?"

Many are pointing to AD&D 2nd Edition, which is a good choice for a dungeon-style game. Others recommend Savage Worlds, which is also a good choice and arguably better than AD&D, as it can be applied to any genre. But in my mind, there is only one forever game. It is a no-contest, hands-down winner.

The best forever game is GURPS. It's not even close; even if I had to create character sheets by hand, it would still be GURPS.

The versatility of this game is fantastic. I can adapt any book, movie, IP, TV show, comic book, or graphic novel into a game. I can take any setting from any other pen-and-paper game, fantasy to sci-fi, and turn it into a game. I can take any video game and turn it into a role-playing game. Put GURPS in front of anything, and it becomes a game.

And there are whole shelves of games I do not need if I have GURPS.

During the Pandemic, the first game I started collecting was GURPS, because if the world ended, I knew that game would give me the most fun in isolation. I would not need "content streams" for it, Kickstarter projects, or anything else but the two core books. Software is nice, but GURPS is not that hard to hand-create characters for. The other books were still great to have, but not really core to the "forever" game.

That still holds true; games have come and gone since GURPS, and very few of them have managed to keep my attention. With 5E, it is always "the latest thing." With OSR games, it tends to be "the gold standard." Then there are a few publishers who put out interesting stuff. Some use very unique art styles, such as those found in Dragonbane or Dungeon Crawl Classics. While GURPS is not the most popular, nor the most complete, nor the most compelling art, it wins where it matters: in the rules.

The rules of the game are where it matters. If I am going to play a game "forever," all that will matter are the rules. Everything else is secondary. While 5E has a lot of rules, the entire game is a house of cards that, at its core, is no different from an OSR game; the difference lies in the intricate, carefully designed, finely tuned, and fun-optimized class designs and those "trees" of options. This is no different from an MMO with a "talent tree," and one thing about those designs is that they have a short lifespan before the tree needs to be cleaned out and updated.

Character classes designed like talent trees put an artificially short lifespan on your game.

I would rather have a game that offers a comprehensive, DIY character creation system.

For a "forever game," I will get sick of 5E's character classes after two or three campaigns and be looking for something new. The choices will be the same. Exploits will be found. Some options and combinations will be garbage. The only way to keep this system fresh is to multiclass, which extends the game's lifespan somewhat, but it ultimately reveals critical exploits that break the game. Another option to keep the game fresh is to continue purchasing expansion books to acquire the limited number of class options they offer.

D&D 2014 and 2024 were always "live service games" that dropped a few new things in each book, forcing you to buy them to alleviate the stale set of options and refresh those character builds.

With GURPS, I am the designer. If I want to break the game, I can, but out of respect for the game and my campaigns, I won't. The options never get stale. There are no "talent trees." I don't have to pick a character archetype, which is a limit on choices. With GURPS, I have an infinite number of options.

There is a power curve in D&D games, much like in video games. If I lost that and switched to a flatter-balance system, like GURPS, I wouldn't mind at all. Not all worlds should "scale" like a videogame, and flat-balance fantasy worlds where skill matters and hit points are lower are entertaining. Every blow means more, and the game is more deadly. Magic is more powerful. Every point of skill is critical.

You do not need a lot of enemies to have challenging encounters, and on a flat power level, enemy skill matters more, and the game is easier to balance. I can have a small, one-on-one combat in GURPS and have it mean more than a one-on-one combat in 5E or an OSR game. My fighter is facing off with a goblin in a dungeon room? That could go a lot of ways, good, bad, or somewhere in between, with 5E or the OSR. I may lose a few hit points. I will heal, and in 5E, it is gone after the next short rest.

With GURPS, that goblin's life meant a whole lot more. People often prefer not to think about this, and D&D provides them with an easy set of "rose-tinted glasses" to look through when considering combat. In GURPS, I have the skills to defeat that goblin through many more means, without killing, and like a proper old-school game of the 1980s, combat is deadly and serious business. No matter how good you are, one lucky hit can be your end. "To kill" is a vast choice narratively. In D&D, they reduce killing to making enemy sprites flash and disappear, much like in a video game.

GURPS will give more narrative weight to combat and violence, resulting in a more satisfying experience for storytelling. For a forever game, GIRPS will win in the narrative storytelling area every time.

What makes the perfect forever game?

It isn't the number of books, the art, or whether it excels in one niche; if it has pool mechanics, uses tokens or cards, or is even a generic game.

It will always be the rules that elevate a game to the status of a "forever game."

For me, GURPS is it.

Power is Earned, Not Given

The best part about GURPS is that there isn't a game designer sitting behind the curtain telling you what your character can and cannot get. I pick a ranger. Well, I have limited choices. I am "allowed" a subclass, which only one of them will be helpful anyway, since I am optimizing my build, and I am not taking 2-weapon fighting if I am a bow specialist.

All the choices are laid out for me.

In a tiny little box.

And then, a few months down the line, you get this strange feeling that you aren't keeping up, and other players are having way more fun than you. Then you go online. And your worst fears are confirmed. Yes, in this edition, the ranger sucks again, and we will be waiting for a book that fixes them, again.

Some 5E variants get the base classes right, like Tales of the Valiant. D&D 2024 features some hilariously overpowered builds and classes, which are intended to sell the game. Even when a game like ToV nails the base classes, I'm still sitting there, getting what the game designer gives me.

Do I want my ranger to do something different? Then I need to multiclass, and I will never reach level 20 in my primary class. There are multiclass builds that are traps and doom your character to never being viable at higher levels of play. Some are horribly broken.

In GURPS, I am the game designer. I have the power. My ranger is precisely who they are. If they want to be a bard for a while, and then a mage, I pay the character point costs and do my best to reflect what my character has learned.

This does come at a cost. I can design a 300-point character who has a few hundred skills, all at 11- and "knows it all," but never really reach the power level of other 300-point characters who spend their points wisely. There is a "design maturity" in play here, not to exploit and have one 24-minus skill, so players are encouraged to spend sensibly and not cheat themselves when handling character improvement. Stick to the skill level guidelines and use those numbers as realistic values for "who is best in the world" in this campaign setting.

Also, GURPS relies on nobody taking advantage of the rules. This is entirely unlike 5E, where designers are often required to prevent players from exploiting the rules. GURPS is a more mature game where the referee and players collaborate to create stories and balanced characters that make sense within them. There are no narrative mechanics or pools; the game does not need them. The character is king in GURPS, and they also define the stories in which they participate.

In GURPS, I earn my power, and if I really want something, it means I do not get the other thing I may wish to have, either. Nobody "gives me powers for free," I pay for them. There isn't a game designer and their magic wand flying around and hitting you every level up to grant wishes.

I want that cool combat reflexes advantage to reflect my years of battlefield experience. In that case, it will come at the expense of my tracking, survival, hunting, wilderness navigation, archery, and other skills I use every day.

I need to make a choice every time. What will be more useful to me? What does my party need? Are we finding ourselves struggling to survive in the wilderness, or do we need me to perform at a higher level in combat?

Every choice is a hard one.

I am not "falling asleep until level three" and grinding XP any way I can. I am not "looking seven levels ahead" and getting bored with my current set of powers. I may have ten character points saved. What am I going to do with them? Do I really need a skill now? Do I wait for that really cool thing? Is there something else I want to learn or do?

And given enough points, my GURPS character can wipe the floor with a similarly epic 5E character any day. The power level in GURPS scales to any level, as long as you can conceptualize it. Refactor your fantasy heroes into superheroes and push them even further. Or start your characters as superheroes in a fantasy setting, just frame the powers as "fantasy superpowers," which is precisely what 5E is doing. Fire blast? That is a magic power. A mage has that. Make it a superpower and call it magic. No spell slots needed, just a FP cost. Want a new superpower? Pay the CP.

You can design your powers any way you want here. Want your ranger to have an "arcane explosive shot?" Design it as a superpower. Buy it with CP. You have it. There is no need to look for a game that does that, or wait for a third-party Kickstarter book, and spend more money.

GURPS is the superior game, especially if you're passionate about game design. You have the tools.

GURPS is also a better narrative game than the overly complex and convoluted systems that are emerging today. They are pretty, but turn out to be bookkeeping nightmares after a few sessions, and you just want your life to be simple again with a character-focused system that puts you in control.

While these "railroad advancement games" can be fun if executed correctly, they are challenging to implement, and we end up with numerous versions and flavors all competing to achieve the same goal. Wizards has been redesigning D&D for the last 25 years and still hasn't gotten it right. People have given up and gone back to the OSR. GURPS has been sitting here all along, and it remains a solid, fun, and compelling game.

With hard choices that force me to think. These are not taken away from me by a game designer who "knows better than I do."

If my ranger wants to go all social skills for the next 50 CP and get involved in kingdom intrigue, that is how the story goes, and how my character develops. In D&D, I gain XP, and my social skills remain the same, yet I somehow improve at killing things? How does that help the story? How does that reflect what my character is actually doing? Am I happier playing this court intrigue storyline with lousy social skills that will never improve, and somehow I can kill the next owlbear easier?

The game forces you to be a better killer with every level, and disincentivizes you to do the things currently happening in the storyline that you enjoy. You are not rewarded with better social skills in any way. You could consider a feat, if the game offers social feats, but that's a weak solution to the problem. And in most cases, you are waiting for the book to come out that has the social feats you want, and it is too late, having spent more money on things the game should have had when you needed them.

Be careful of these games that put your advancement on rails and take personal growth and character development away from you. That does not help the story, make you any better at playing in it, or accurately reflect your character's growth and development.

These games can hurt your storytelling because they refuse to let your characters learn and grow from it.

I want a game that allows my characters to grow in response to the events unfolding in the story, whether through combat, social interactions, exploration, science, survival, repair, medicine, or any other narrative arc in any area a story can go. I want a game that "stays out of my way" and doesn't introduce narrative pools and mechanics that can detract from what we all want to happen. I want a game that forces me to make tough choices as I progress. I like the referee to be freed up to be creative.

GURPS is the superior narrative storyteller game.