GURPS: Forgotten Realms, Part 1

We're playing in a GRUPS: Forgotten Realms campaign. Where do we start? For me, I started with the gray-boxed set back in AD&D, so that is where I will start. A few ground rules are needed.

The only campaign material we will use is AD&D, first edition, Forgotten Realms books, campaign settings, and adventures. By the time AD&D 2nd Edition came out, the floodgates opened, and power gaming started. In the 2nd Edition campaign setting material, we get Planescape, Spelljammer, and a bunch of linked mini-campaign settings mixed in here. 

Another reason to put a gate on the 2E adventures and material is that this is when the huge novelization push began, and the 2E books begin to creep towards a high-magic setting and power level. I do not want the modern-day Forgotten Realms, especially the world of Baldur's Gate 3, and I don't want the world to feel like the pen-and-paper version of a video game. Larian did an amazing job, but that is not the world I started with back in the 1980s, nor is it how I see D&D.

It does pain me to see where this world went today. It is everyday modern fantasy, with magic that isn't special, power is handed out for nearly free, and nobody fears death. Combat isn't even a serious choice; it is the default one. Something feels deeply wrong with that.

This isn't to say some of the 2nd Edition material fits or would be perfect, and there was more good than bad, but if we want a solid foundation, we will stick to AD&D 1E and stop there, with 2E material only on a per-book basis.

We want to begin in a low-magic, grounded, family-and-kin-matter, feudal world where people die for their kingdom and lords. Monsters are the spawn of chaos and demons; the gods are distant and disconnected from the world. No more gods and their entitled children walking around here! That ruined our world when we took it to 2E, and the GMNPCs from the books flooded our game and killed all interest in this setting.

Monsters are at the gates of civilization, and the armies of the Realms are battling to clear lands, establish forts, and spread civilization as other lands fall to the hordes. A major, established city that "has never ever been touched in lore" could (and should) fall during a campaign. Sorry, Arabel or Waterdeep, you are paid for and could be burned to the ground. The refugees will start flooding the roads, and the entire map will be turned upside down.

I do not care about IP or "this goes against lore" - back in 1987, the lore we all point at and hold as sacred on the golden altar of Wizards IP was never written down, and the setting was very much up to us to write the history for.

So, why GURPS? Couldn't you do this in AD&D 1E or an AD&D 1E clone, such as Adventures Dark & Deep? Couldn't you do this in 5E? I can't do this in 5E without the bad habits forming and the world instantly turning into high magic at level three. With AD&D or Dark & Deep, I have more time, and while the game has deadly, realistic grit, it would also feel very authentic.

But still, at higher levels, we start down the high-magic road. We also go into a place where a fighter can have 50 hit points and shrug off arrows and repeated stabs from longswords. I get it: the heroic fantasy genre needs these conventions, and they make it easier for players to engage with the world. Still, even 1E, with all its deadly, save-or-die, low-hit-point, limited magic, starts to pull away from the grounded reality I want. By level 5, the game is fighting me again; magic isn't mysterious and special, and we are moving back into high fantasy. By level 10, with several magic items on each character, there is little thematic difference between that and a 5E starting character.

I want a world where one arrow from a 25-point goblin can kill a 500-point combat master. Maybe the arrow has poison on it, or it will infect a wound; they are nasty creatures. This is why they are wiped out to the last one, and that is the world that these types of settings are based on. Back in "real history," things were brutal and savage, and there was no room to leave monsters alive for the good feelings and positive vibes. They would be back next year to burn the village and take slaves. And do worse.

Should that be in games? It is my choice, so it is. If we divorce our fantasy games from the reality they are based on, I feel we lose something, and the Disneyfication of the entire genre begins. D&D these days is so far down that road that the game is unrecognizable.

I also want suspicion. People in my version of the world will be suspicious of magic. Shocking, I know, coming from today's fantasy games. Elminster will be accused of selling his soul to demons to gain power, and other mages will do the same, taking the fast road to arcane knowledge. Of course, he should stand as an example of how to study magic the correct way, but even he isn't such a cut-and-dried character. Mages have to make sacrifices and deals to reach that next level of power.

GURPS lets me do that. An OSR game does not.

GURPS also lets me define divine power and create real tension between different gods and the populations that worship them. The followers of gods on modern-day Earth don't always get along, so why should Fearun be any different? With distant gods, we are keeping the divine mysterious, miracles rare, and faith powerful. The less power divine magic holds, the stronger it will be in the campaign. Faith and religions matter. Elves that worship the moon goddess will be seen as strange, dwellers of glades where no sun shines, and emerging at night to pray to their goddess. Other elves may shy away from them or think they are strange. Some may feel they are a bit too close to the Drow for comfort.

Real tension exists here! This makes a moon elf faction a serious and interesting group in the world. Where they hold land is a meaningful, powerful, and important faction. This isn't "just a background choice in the player's handbook," but a choice with real weight and meaning behind it. Those moon elves are different and a bit strange. A goddess gives them real power. They are taken seriously. They don't like dealing with outsiders, and they don't tolerate sun gods or their followers in their lands.

How all these new fantasy games turn meaningful cultural backgrounds into supermarket cheese choices makes me tired of them all. Do I buy cheddar or Swiss? American or provolone? It doesn't matter; it is all cheese. Give me my strong cultural backgrounds tied to the map, a god, and a culture. Putting XY and Z together and saying, "here is my fantasy shape," devalues the entire world and every choice you make in it.

Oh, and we are tracking loads and encumbrance here. You would do that in real life, too. Set your combat load, what you are dropping in the backpack, and what is on the horse. You would do that in real life too, if someone asked you to walk 4 miles out of town to investigate a hole in the ground. Modern gaming makes you lazy and puts your mind in dependency mode, where the game tracks encumbrance for you.

But to be fair, if you put in the effort, I will give your gear superpowers and not make you roll to pitch a tent or use a rope in a normal situation. Your gear will exist to "instantly solve problems," and you will not have to make that roll. If you have a tent and camping supplies, guess what? You can make a camp. I won't be a pain about it, and I'll give you that rest (as long as encounters are rolled for). Bandages? Food? Water? Mirrors? Poles? Chalk? Oil? Spare bowstrings? Spikes and a hammer? That gear list has a huge list of "gimmies" if you spend the time tracking and storing them on your character.

Tracked gear is free superpowers. Treat it as a part of your character build.

I need to break from the OSR and 5E thought chains. I need a system that forces players to rethink magic, combat, skills, and power. I need my world to focus on family, faction, religion, king, and kin. Even the OSR comes with a set of baked-in assumptions about power and combat. A level 8 fighter can shrug off a good number of shortbow and dagger attacks. In GURPS, that is never the case. You will get a resurrection spell at this level. In GURPS, I can make that spell as rare as finding the Holy Grail.

GURPS makes escaping the matrix of "modern fantasy groupthink" effortless. Everything changes, and you can't take anything for granted. Playing GURPS in the Forgotten Realms feels like "putting VR goggles on" and actually living in the world.

Returning to GURPS Cepheus

Why not Traveller? I don't want the Imperium or all that framework. I get more enjoyment out of these at-cost, bare-bones framework games than I do from huge encyclopedic volumes that span shelves, with book after book of stuff I won't use. 

This Cepheus Engine SF-RPG, Basic Fantasy, and White Box FMAG are my current "go-to" GURPS references. Why? I simply need the basics, and nothing else. No fluff, little art, and few settings or examples of play. They are inexpensive and very fast to flip through and reference, almost like a rules appendix that I can dive into to pull a few systems and items from, and then duck out without spending a lot of time in the book.

SRD-based gaming feels so good to me. It is not because I don't like supporting creators; I will pick up the book and support it, but I appreciate complete, excellent SRDs, and they are very fast to use. I love the survivalist, holistic, DIY aspect of SRD gaming. Just give me the basics, and I will make the rest myself.

I don't want a coffee-table art book; I want a game manual. The fancier these books get, the harder they are to use at the table. But I get it: companies want to push us online and onto VTTs, so printed book quality suffers as the market shifts to collector sets. The VTT website will be the "real copy" of the game, the one most people see and use, while the physical book is just something to sit on a shelf.

Shifting back, why this? Also, why GURPS with this?

For one, I could play with a 2d6 system just fine, Cypher, or any other. What would happen is that after a few sessions, because I didn't invest much in the character, I would lose interest, and the game would fade away. For others, a convention, quick play, hotel distraction games, or one-shots? Cepheus is fine and works.

I love the simplified ship designs here, and the 2d6 starship combat. It works and stays out of the way, giving me enough crunch and detail to feel satisfied, but staying relatively generic and aggregated so I am not wrestling with vehicle designs in GURPS or huge range modifiers in space combat. GURPS benefits if you can park a wargame on top of it for the big stuff, be it Battletech, Car Wars, Cepheus, Knight Hawks, or any other macro-system tactical game.

If I can play "real Battletech" and then convert the pilot and gunnery skill levels from my GURPS characters, I am happy. Just because a game "isn't GURPS" doesn't mean we need to convert it, or it can't be fun on its own. Same thing with Car Wars or any other tactical miniatures game. If they work, we can play them and have fun, and we can play these wargames with others without any interest in GURPS; it is a win-win.

For characters? GURPS gets me invested. This is the same sort of thing that happens with some people and 5E. While they bounce off BX characters, 5E gives them enough choice and depth to keep them coming back for the next session. For me, 5E is a game I always try to like, but every time it fails, I end up storing the books again. Depth that leads to immortality and choice paralysis is a horrible game for me. I'll solo-play characters with a dozen printed character sheets each, and I will give up. With level 8 characters, that can easily go up to 16-20 printed sheets (with spells), and suddenly my collected character sheets are longer than a typical 64-page game from 1980.

With GURPS? Two sides of one sheet of paper, and you rarely get onto a third or fourth, unless you have spells or a lot of special powers. GURPS has relatively easy characters with an amazing amount of depth, which is a winning combination for me.

And Cepheus gives me a built-in sandbox where I can iterate through play. If I have no ideas and I am not using an AI, then just give me a book full of tables and let me run with it. While GURPS is the perfect game engine for a simulation, Cephus is a fine sandbox to play it in. This is also sort of the Battletech effect: I love giant mech combat, and adding the personal side of it with GURPS makes both sides that much better.

GURPS Gives Me More with Less

GURPS has a core ethos I can use to paint over a high-magic, 5.5E version of the Forgotten Realms and bring the setting back to its roots. It is the difference between a picture made from a prompt and a real painter layering watercolors, with judgment that comes from years of doing the work.

Seeing the Realms as a low-fantasy place again feels like coming home. The setting is no longer about gods, gates, and planes, and no superhero plot is waiting to flatten a town so the multiverse can have another CGI battle. I do not want that scaffolding in the game. It makes “here” smaller.

The map I create with GURPS is the map I want to explore.

D&D 4E made planar cosmology the main setting of D&D. Earlier editions laid the groundwork; 4E institutionalized the idea that around level 10 you become a planar adventurer. Campaign worlds started to feel like MMO starting zones. That is what made Pathfinder 1e appeal to me over that game: it stayed on one world and treated the planes as places that supported it, not a main thoroughfare through the middle of the campaign.

Anytime the multiverse comes up, it kills that precious starting town at the heart of a fantasy game. The NPCs become nobodies. That dwarven blacksmith with the daughter with big dreams fades away. The tavernkeep with the scar and the eyepatch becomes a memory. The special place you defended against gnolls and the first Orc armored division is nothing next to the City of Brass or Sigil. Here is another portal to Ravenloft; want to go on the ride? I have already been on that ride, and they changed the parts I liked.

Unlike 5.5E Forgotten Realms, in GURPS I cannot assume the Harpers or anyone else have automatic access to “level 20” spells and classes. At some point, that high-level framework sitting over the map ruins the storytelling, because I always have to factor it in. In GURPS, the numbers reset. Powerful NPCs and big spells can still exist, but they are under control, and they don't blow out lower-point characters just by being on the page. These are effects out of GURPS Magic. If I say a spell is not in the world, it is not in the world, and that does not feel like a house-ruled variant of the official boxed set.

In GURPS, Elminster still has to approach a ruin with care. Even as a thousand-point character, he can be surprised, bled, and made to respect a threat. A 25-point goblin’s lucky arrow is not a joke he can ignore. He will happily take a squad of a town’s militia - mere 50-point guardsmen - with him into the dark.

The fast-food version of modern campaign settings, stacked with power creep and expansion content people expect to have on the table, is why I do not want to touch those books as written. With GURPS, I have control over the world I present.

In 5.5E I feel I have to take the whole pile and make something out of it. Tales of the Valiant is an impressive toy chest - thousands of monsters and spells - and it is still too much menu for me to wrestle with.

When you lift the massive rules framework off a setting and look at the place again, what do you like? Do the ties to family, clan, and kingdom come back into focus? Does the setting even support those ideas, or does it assume a cosmopolitan freeway running through the front yard?

With GURPS, the focus narrows; I care about one hero, their build and loadout, and I can immerse myself in a world I loved a long time ago and live in that moment again.

Returning With GURPS

I have been shuffling the rest of the game library because I feel 5E is moving away from my interests and fantasy; the classic campaign worlds are being remade into lesser versions, and the fantasy art I grew up with in the 1980s is Photoshopped and censored, and I feel the worlds that TSR built are slowly dying off. There is only so much recycling a property can take before it's no longer what it was. Like paper fibers in a bag, recycle them too many times and what holds the bag together breaks apart into dust.

I can come home with GURPS, though. I can play the original Low-Fantasy world we started with in the Forgotten Realms, give it new life, and just play with GURPS. Low-fantasy Forgotten Realms was one of our best AD&D campaigns: gritty, low magic, and full of danger; family and fealty meant something, and it wasn't this overpowered science-fiction setting wearing Ren Faire garb, with mixed European accents and voice actors everywhere.

When a mysterious horse rider rides up in a battle, someone in the group points, recognizes the family crest, and shouts, "I know his family!" - that is a cool moment. I get that in GURPS. In D&D 5E, all I get is people checking their character sheets and piecing together their next turn's action economy. They mentally shuffle powers and actions like a Magic: The Gathering player shuffles through their deck.

And there are players who won't play anything else except 5E. It doesn't give me much hope in the hobby outside of my small corner of it.

But playing GURPS here gives me hope. Harpers aren't immortal gods who can swoop in and solve every problem with a wish and resurrection. Even they can get speared, take an unlucky hit, and bleed out. Melee combat is a serious choice, which opens up the social and house-family games of courtly intrigue. Walking out to handle the bandits yourself is one way to do it; getting the local lord to lend you five soldiers to back your expedition up is another.

Who you know and who you are related to matter. It isn't about entitled power trees that hand you importance. You need to make your own importance in this world that cares little if you live or die.

You have to play a smart and careful game in GURPS, and magic begins with the mundane, almost parlor-trick, acts of manipulation - which can be used to great effect. Magic is about creative use again, tricksterism, and subterfuge. Creating a shadow to make an enemy think someone went down the left hall instead of the right. It isn't about becoming an invincible combat god with maximum damage per turn.

Even being a mage or rogue isn't something you may want to announce, and you could take the secretive route and have a cover while studying magic in secret, or take things on the sly. In D&D, not announcing your class and role is unthinkable. In GURPS, hey, I am an alchemist and crafter of tonics, and I have the skills to back it up. My magic? Very few know about that. Me? Being a rogue? Are you serious? I am a mercenary archer, good sir! The game does not force me to announce my class, or make it so obvious that all my great roleplaying goes out the window.

I don't know; it feels like there is so much wrong with current 5E that I don't even feel it is a relatable game anymore. Sure, I can get into the powers part of it and theory-craft, but that is not why I play a game. Walking into a kingdom with guaranteed godhood and a power tree meant to blow main battle tanks off their tracks isn't my idea of a fantasy game. An OSR game gets me to a better spot with less hassle, but GURPS gives me so much more, plus the skills and roleplaying advantages I need to back up the campaign.

GURPS feels like putting on a special pair of magic glasses that lets you see any world in an entirely new way.

That's why I love this game.

Games on the Coffee Table

FATE is on the coffee table. The GURPS books sit on the shelf beside it, and it's not a small shelf. On a weeknight, I play what I have in front of me.

I want something that starts when we sit down. FATE does that. You write a few things about the character, you write a few things about the scene, and you are already in the middle of a sentence. I have been looking at first-edition Cypher for the same spot on the coffee table. One number for the challenge, one pool to spend, and you can name the problem after you have already put dice on it. FATE still wants a skill written somewhere. Cypher pulls a difficulty number out of thin air, and it works.

GURPS will do a rules-light night. I have done it. Fifty points, a short list, and run with GURPS Lite. It is not the same night as opening FATE. Even when I swear I am keeping it small, I will open GCS and get lost in the weeds. I love doing this, so it is part of the play, but I get dragged into the detail-loop of balancing a load and armor profile, dropping the backpack for an extra point of Move, and suddenly I am designing down to the last point and pound.

That is usually when I put GURPS back and pick up the other book.

Some nights I don't want the detail, and just want the story and moment. Cypher does that well, while FATE has a quirky dice system that is the star of the show.

FATE is the four dice with plus and minus, and the new aspect you throw on a person, a room, or the whole evening. That loop is why I keep coming back: a fun night filled with laughs and silly stories. What it will not give me is grit or weight to make a compelling campaign.

Cypher is the one that will tell anything. Some of the best Road Warrior games I have run were first edition, and I never filled out a GURPS vehicle write-up or unfolded a quarter-inch Car Wars map. This motorcycle is a level 2 threat with a light weapon. That one is level 2 with a medium weapon that will starve. The van is level 4 and has guns.

The tension rises as pools run dry and the rests are eaten up. Then you notice the level 2 bike is the same number as a level 2 goblin, and the number does not care which one you meant. I start wanting a weight, a range, a real magazine. Cypher will carry a long arc better than almost anything I own. Starting it, or coming back after months away, can feel empty. Sometimes I love that single number; other times I stare blankly and wonder what I am doing.

Getting into the Cypher mindset, or getting back into the game, is not always easy. Wanting the grit and detail of a full simulation will also fight you.

GURPS can be a middle ground, but how I play is more on the simulation side. This is why I love the game. Playing a GURPS Fantasy game where every last arrow in that quiver matters, where you need to drop that backpack in a fight, and where your armor coverage matters. Am I wearing a helmet? Do I need to buy one? How can I survive this fight? Everything in GURPS gets personal, like a fight against a gnoll, and it stays out of the macro and aggregation and rolls in the dirt of the simulation. GURPS gives me the real experience: I want the little things to matter, and it stays out of a fantasy land of abstraction.

But to be honest, some days I just want the abstract, and wading through the details feels like too much after a long day. I pick games that don't fight GURPS, but instead give me quick moments of inspiration or fast, 30-minute thrill rides. They sort of belong together, and they don't. In my living room, they all get along well.

GURPS at Our Table in the Late 1980s

In the late 1980s, I watched GURPS replace AD&D at our table. All the kids were switching, and it felt like a relief not to fiddle with class and level just to play. Science fiction and modern games never sat right in that frame; in GURPS, they felt natural, and we loved that.

That was the quiet stretch from 1987 to about 1992, before Vampire, Cyberpunk, and Rifts showed up and before Magic: The Gathering landed in the mid-1990s. For a while, GURPS was what we played after we put AD&D down.

I love the OSR, and I love my AD&D, but even we gave it up for Aftermath, GURPS, and a few others. We were part of that crowd looking for something that fit better. It is hard to set the OSR on a pedestal when I lived through the years when people were already hunting for the next game. AD&D will always be my best memories of the hobby.

D&D has always treated the job as the important part. GURPS leaves room for the person as much as the job.

You can run it hard or light, but the default is one-second combat turns, tight actions, short lethal fights, and a character build that has room for the person sitting behind the sheet.

I watch 5.5E hand out Strength because you were a Farmer and Dexterity because you were a Wayfarer. I could haul furniture in a city and want the Strength bump. I could grow up rural and know nothing about farming. D&D still throws a canned life at the table and waits for a nod.

GURPS rejects that. You design the character with your history as a guide and your imagination as fuel.

The Book of Dreams

I get the feeling GURPS has a lot of potential as "the game where you get to be creative." Not as an engine to run other game settings, or as a historical simulator, but as a general place of creative expression and for coming up with fun characters with interesting powers and abilities. I remember when I first saw a cleric design use a healing superpower as their holy healing ability, and the "class" didn't use traditional GURPS magic mechanics.

My first thought was, "That is not the way to do it."

Then my second thought was, "Why not?"

It works; it is quick and easy, and it communicates the concept without pulling in a massive subsystem. A cleric could be seen as a character with a collection of "holy powers," no matter where they come from. Yes, they are still essentially a superhero, but again, who cares? If that is what a "cleric" is in this world, so be it. GURPS should be a place where, as long as you are working inside the systems given, that is the "right" way to do it.

It is a more positive, holistic direction, and it fits the design and focus of the new book. I am also reducing my sarcasm here (with help) and trying to refocus on GURPS being a "creation engine" that beats 5E at its own game. If 5E is the "ultimate fantasy character creation system," then GURPS can be "the ultimate anything character creation system." It takes a more positive direction, focusing on GURPS not as "the game you go to when other games fail" but as "GURPS being the best character creation system ever, come and play with us!"

People play 5E because they feel they can be creative and make cool character builds.

GURPS is a much better game for that.

But the tone should be positive and supportive. We can be the "ultimate supportive creative place" and do things with character builds that 5E would take yet another crowdfunded book to accomplish. I am sorry; I am slipping into my sarcasm again, but yeah, 5E is an expensive hobby if you want more character options. The core two GURPS books (one, now) give you infinite "5E character option books" in just a small, focused game. You can spend $2-3000 on 5E books and not have 10% of what the base GURPS game gives you. GURPS will take a little more work to get started, but you will be happier having learned it and built it yourself.

That is not the point, though. It is not "look how much money you need to waste on 5E"; it is "we have such a cool, creative, and fun place over here." I spent a lot on 5E books, and I hate people telling me I wasted my money. I bought them because I felt something. In many cases, I am still looking for it. Sometimes the books I have stop being used as 5E books and become more inspiration for GURPS creations. They still see use.

The goal is to live up to that "book of dreams" feeling on the new GURPS revised hardcover.