Play Starts at Character Creation

This was a summer of watching my Star Wars hopes come and fade. I got excited enough to start planning a campaign, but the energy never quite arrived. It felt like anti-energy: the Expanded Universe still feels like a better place than the one we have now, and the new material leans harder and harder on nostalgia bait. When you see that bait, it is always the lure and never the hook underneath.

Star Wars feels dead, uninspiring, and tired. I need to put it away for a while.

So I am back to my own science fiction. Back to the old standby: GURPS characters inside a Cepheus Engine universe. Starship rules and procedural generation from one system, character creation and resolution from the other. Clean-room, palette-cleaning, low-level science fiction—getting by, dodging pirates, trying to make payroll and survive.

My own stories will always be more compelling than telling my version of someone else’s franchise. They will be smaller, tightly focused on interpersonal conflict and a local struggle: surviving, making payroll, helping someone who cannot pay you back, or carving out a tiny difference in a galaxy too large to notice. The Jedi and the Rebellion feel vast and increasingly undefined; their original meaning was spent decades ago, and every new version has to dig the same bones up and rearrange them. Being chased by space pirates through an uncharted system and forced to hide on a world no one has named yet means far more to me than any of that.

That preference is not just taste. It recognizes what GURPS actually does well.

In many games that center on powers and skill selections, play begins after character creation. The sheet is a finished tool; the story starts once the numbers are locked. In GURPS, play starts during character creation. The choices you make, what disadvantages you accept, what relationships you define, what private codes and vulnerabilities you write onto the sheet, are already the first moves of the campaign. Those decisions do not wait for the first session. They begin generating consequences the moment they are written down.

Advantages, disadvantages, quirks, and the specific web of relationships a player builds are not flavor text. They are active forces. A Code of Honor, a Dependent, a Phobia, a Sense of Duty, an Enemy, a Reputation: these things do not sit quietly until the plot needs them. They create friction every session. They force choices. They turn “the party hides on an uncharted world” into “this particular group of people, with their particular debts and fears and private codes, tries to hide on an uncharted world.”

When the story stays small and local, those mechanical obligations have room to matter. The pirates are not a faceless faction; they are the concrete consequence of a Reputation or an Enemy someone took at creation. The decision to help a stranded colonist is not a side quest; it is a Sense of Duty check with real costs. Surviving the next payroll is not background color; it is the pressure that makes every disadvantage sharper.

GURPS is at its most alive when the fiction keeps asking the same question the players already answered when they built their characters: who are these people, and what does that cost them? The smaller the stage, the louder that question becomes.

The science-fiction frames that feed this engine best are the ones that keep the camera close and the outside world distant or unreliable:

Frontier and colony stories. A handful of people on a marginal world or remote station. Authority is weeks away. Resources are limited. Every personal flaw has space to become a crisis. The character sheet becomes the real map of the campaign.

Small-crew tramp freighters and working vessels. Not the mythic freighter with a destiny, just a ship that has to make payroll. Crew dynamics, debts, rivalries, and private codes of conduct generate more play than any sector-wide plot. Points spent on Contacts, Enemies, Dependents, and Social Stigma pay off constantly.

Low-myth procedural exploration. Generate the next system, drop the characters into it, and let their specific disadvantages and relationships decide what happens next. The interesting question is never “what ancient secret did we find?” It is “how does this particular group of damaged people react when the air recyclers start failing?”

Personal-scale cyberpunk or near-future grit. Cyberware as both power and vulnerability, identity erosion, street-level or corporate debts that map directly onto disadvantages. The system’s detailed treatment of social mechanics and personal cost makes the internal price of modification feel real.

In all of these, the rules and the fiction are arguing with each other through the medium of the character sheet. That argument is where GURPS is at its most entertaining.

I am not claiming these are the only stories worth telling in science fiction. I am only saying they are the ones that let GURPS do what it does best. When the stage stays small, the character sheet stays loud. The disadvantages keep working. The relationships keep costing something. The choices made in character creation keep mattering long after the first session.

That is the game I want to play right now. Not the recycled myth, not the corporate sequel, not the destiny that was already spent decades ago. Just a few people on a ship or a station or a marginal world, trying to get by, and carrying the full weight of who they decided to be.

Put the big stories away for a while if they have gone hollow. The smaller ones are still waiting, and GURPS was built for them.

Removing the Design Bias: GURPS Plus a History Book

There are several excellent RPGs that let you play in ancient Rome. Each one is filtered through a small design team’s vision of what Rome should feel like at the table. That filter is often the best part of the game, and it is also what can get in the way if what you actually want is to play the history itself.

For Rome, we have Lex Arcana, with its alternate-history Empire that never fell and its Cohors Auxiliaria Arcana investigating the supernatural. We have the strongly Roman-flavored material in Arcanis for 5E. We have newer indie efforts such as Rome: The Historical Role-Playing Game. All of these are genuinely good games. In every case, the designers started with the setting and then put their own clear, deliberate spin on it. That spin is not a flaw. It is the product.

The same pattern shows up across historical and historical-fantasy gaming. A small team decides what matters most about the period, what gets detailed rules support, what gets romanticized, and what gets quietly left out. When that vision matches what you want, the game feels inspired. When it doesn’t, you find yourself spending time translating or fighting someone else’s version of the history you already love.

That design bias is frequently a strength. Lex Arcana is compelling precisely because the designers committed to a coherent vision: an Empire sustained by divination, threatened by the supernatural, and protected by a specialized cohort of investigators. The game does not try to be every possible Rome; it is this Rome, and that focus gives it energy and clarity. The same is true of RuneQuest at its best. The system, the magic, and the Bronze Age texture are so tightly bound together that the bias is the appeal. When a design team has a strong, unified take, the resulting game can feel more alive than a purely neutral toolkit.

Many of us play these games for exactly that reason. We want the designers’ particular flavor. We want the dramatic engines they built and the priorities they chose. There is real value in sitting down at a table and experiencing someone else’s carefully crafted version of a historical or historical-fantasy world.

The difficulty appears only when your actual desire is different. Sometimes you finish a good history book, or a primary source, or a focused academic work, and what you want is simply to play that. Not the alternate-history Empire that never fell. Not the Roman-inspired secondary world. Not the particular mix of intrigue, mysticism, and spectacle a given design team decided was most playable. Just the history itself, with whatever tone and emphasis the source material suggests to you.

Or perhaps you want your own unique twist. Rome plus ancient magic drawn from Babylonian sorcerers. Rome plus superheroes. Rome versus aliens. A spaghetti-Western style of Rome with gritty, tragic, larger-than-life heroes. Rome versus Vikings. These are the kinds of campaigns that almost never arrive fully formed in a published book, because no small design team can anticipate every combination a referee might suddenly want to run. When the idea is yours, the translation problem becomes even more acute: you are no longer just filtering someone else’s Rome. You are trying to force your personal vision through a system and setting that were never built for it.

GURPS removes most of those layers.

With GURPS and a solid history book, you already have nearly everything you need. The system is modular and relatively transparent. Status, Rank, Wealth, Social Regard, cultural Familiarities, martial styles, logistics, injury, and the rest are expressed in a consistent language you already know how to use. You decide the tone and the emphasis. You decide whether magic exists and what form it takes. You decide whether the campaign stays close to the historical record or swings into the wildly anachronistic. The history book supplies the vision; GURPS supplies the tools to realize it without having to decode someone else’s priorities first.

Official sourcebooks such as GURPS Imperial Rome sit comfortably in this process as optional support rather than as a required filter. The book offers ready-made templates, social structures, gladiatorial and chariot rules, provincial detail, and a useful bibliography. It can save time and add texture. Yet it never insists that you adopt a particular dramatic engine or a particular blend of historical and fantastic elements. You remain free to use as much or as little of it as the campaign requires. The same pattern holds for the other historical and cultural volumes in the line: they enhance the toolkit without locking you into a single authorial vision of the period.

GURPS plus a history book is one of the best combinations in gaming. If a GURPS sourcebook already covers the subject, that is excellent support and can save a great deal of time. But the real power comes from the non-gaming book itself, the actual history written for its own sake rather than for a roleplaying audience. That source grounds the campaign in reality and strips away the last layers of game-designer bias.

This approach is more than a convenient shortcut. It is a quiet theory of gamecrafting. Most published historical and historical-fantasy RPGs begin with a design team’s interpretation and then build mechanics and setting material to serve that interpretation. The referee receives a finished product: a particular Rome, a particular tone, a particular set of priorities already chosen. The GURPS-plus-history-book method reverses the process. You begin with the primary or secondary historical material and only then decide how the system will express it. The vision comes first; the mechanics are applied afterward. The result is a campaign whose shape is determined by the source rather than by the commercial and creative constraints of a small design team.

That reversal is liberating. It lets the referee treat history as the living foundation of the game instead of as raw material that must be filtered through someone else’s dramatic engine. It also keeps the campaign flexible. The same history book can support a tightly grounded political game one season and a wildly anachronistic “Rome versus Vikings with Babylonian sorcery” game the next, because the system never insists on a single authorized reading of the period.

In the end, the combination of GURPS and a good history book does not reject the excellent curated games that already exist. It simply offers a parallel path, one that places the referee’s engagement with the past at the center of the design process rather than at the margins. For many of us, that path is not only efficient. It is the most rewarding way to bring history to the table.

Still Reaching for the Old Books (And Why That’s Okay)

I’ve had the revised Basic Set on the PDF shelf for a while now, and I still keep reaching for my classic 4th Edition softcovers. The travel ones. The ones that have been to every table with me for the last twenty years.

I love the clearer language. I love the rules updates. Objectively, the new book is better. But after two decades of muscle memory, the revised edition still feels a little strange in my hands. I’m also stubbornly attached to those old covers; the multi-genre inspiration jigsaw that always made me want to run everything at once.

I keep telling myself I just need more table time with it. Change is hard, even when the new thing is an improvement.

For brand-new players? Highest recommendation. Start with the revised book. No question.

For the rest of us jaded veterans who began with GURPS 1.0 (and still get a little misty about 3rd Edition), we hold onto strange things. We’re the Strange Barbies of the GURPS world; hair chopped short, marker tattoos, one shoe missing, thoroughly played with, and still the ones the kids actually want at the table. Beat up, been down the road, seen it all… and stubbornly loyal to what we love.

Mail Room: GURPS Basic Set (4th Edition Revised)

I got my PDF today, and thank you. More on this soon, but it is a cleaned-up version of the 4th Edition books. Functionally identical except for language choices and tone, and many small improvements. There are a bunch of pages of new material too, though page numbers have been preserved. Two-column layout. At first glance, this feels like those still playing with older books won't notice many differences and can keep playing with those with newer books. Nice job.

GURPS, Shadowdark, and Breaking the Ice

I’ve been deep in Shadowdark lately. The real-time torch, the clean classes, the way a session can go from zero to “the light is dying, and something is moving in the dark” in under ten minutes. It’s hard to argue with. Sitting down to write about GURPS after that can feel like arguing with a stone wall. Why do I need so much game?

Shadowdark has a lot going for it. Speed of play. Accessibility for new players. Focused dungeon pressure. The way it makes exploration feel dangerous again. I can put the book on the table, hand out character sheets, and we are all playing something cool in ten to fifteen minutes, even with character creation, even with players completely new to the game. No session zero. No software. Players don’t even need a book. We just play.

That speed is real, and it is valuable. It is also a deliberate design choice. Shadowdark is optimized for the pure crawl: the tight focus on the next room, the next threat, the next torch. What it deliberately sets aside is the long arc: characters who carry history, social weight, political debts, and personal consequences across months of play. The kind of campaign where the dungeon is only one part of a larger world that keeps pressing on the characters even after they climb back into the light.

If I’m running a deep story and long-game campaign, GURPS is my choice. It does require players who buy into the model. That takes time: teaching new players the difference, showing them the value that advantages and disadvantages bring to the story and to their characters’ choices, and how character design itself shapes the campaign. It is not instant.

If I want clean, fast, instant dungeon crawling with new or casual players, Shadowdark is the clear choice. It delivers the best pick-up-and-play experience I know. I’m almost guaranteed a solid session, and people usually want to come back for more.

GURPS works when we want something more. When the table wants a deeper, more engaging story arc, characters who feel like they could walk out of a long, character-driven fantasy novel, GURPS delivers something few other games can match. It can also do the high-fantasy, almost superheroic style of play, so the toolbox is larger than many people realize. But for me, that character depth and deep historical gaming is why I keep coming back.

Shadowdark is my icebreaker game. If this is what people enjoy and expect, and they already know a little 5E so the rules feel familiar, then that is where we stay. GURPS is here for the deeper experiences. In theory, GURPS can do everything Shadowdark does, but it brings far more to the table and is more than you need for those “getting to know people” games. When a group starts wanting something more- deeper storylines, richer interactions between characters and the world, and the historical punch GURPS does so well- we already have the best tool waiting and ready.

The Late Republic Era

The more I read the GURPS: Imperial Rome book, the more derivative Star Wars feels. The Late Republic Era, the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire, is one of the best untapped settings in gaming. You get tough, violent revolts, riots, conflicts between social classes, the inflow of immigrants, and generals marching on Rome to take over the government.

This is a period of Civil War, and it is far better than the muddled, confused, pop-culture mess we get in Star Wars. Soldiers loyal to generals rather than the state? Armies that could decide politics, and used political murder and seizing property as a tool? When a commander left Rome, another would siege the city and take power? Slave revolts in the tumult?

The whole system was breaking down. The Republic was never meant to run a Mediterranean Empire, leading to local generals who became as rich as kings with huge personal armies. Murder and confiscation became commonplace, making compromise harder. Corrupt tax farmers and a massacre i

And Caesar marched on Rome to "restore the republic" and was assassinated, opening the door for an empire? The people grew tired of the chaos and chose an emperor. Just. Fix it.

And the system turned on him.

And they got worse.

It sounds like today, with "lists of undesirables" being shared (be they landowners, rich, the opposition, and so on), and the angry and starving populace set loose on them by proxy. Personal armies of the wealthy run private security. Groups and street thugs formenting riots and civil violence. And the current government couldn't care less and lets the chaos and blood run free on the streets. Those who share the news are factionalized along each side. All this is out of ancient history.

They don't teach this anymore because it is being used as a playbook.

And if the Republic does nothing to stop it, the populace becomes more receptive to dictators to fix it. Letting chaos foment plays into the hands of those who wish to seize power for themselves.

Read history. All of this happened before.

Every Star Wars movie needs to end with the same set of scenes and repeat the same story beats. The entire Star Wars genre isn't a story anymore; it is a formula for a soda or breakfast cereal. I don't get these stories there. It has become a repetitive, predictable, beat-for-beat formula creation where action figures are shaken around in play fights and nothing ever matters. They use history to seed the idea, but they refuse to give us any of the good stuff.

Mithridates VI Eupator was their "Darth Vader" and existed outside the Republic, slaughtering hundreds of thousands in the provinces and waging war on the Eastern flank (in the Black Sea area, again, sounds familiar). This was also the origin of the archetype of the Eastern despot who used poison, mass violence, spies, assassins, and intrigue.

This set up a multi-year series of wars which trained generals in civil war, where generals got the idea they could rewrite the political map. Strongmen inside the Republic were created, setting up the roadmap for dismantling the Republic. The system ended up eating itself.

And forget doing this in D&D 5.5E. If someone doesn't throw up the X sign, the players will gate out to the planes and walk away. There are so many races everyone will be a fantastical outsider. Character builds outshine the setting. D&D is really only good for telling character-centric D&D stories.

GURPS gives me the configuration, control, and historical data to do this type of story right. I can limit magic. I can control backgrounds. The character design system supports campaign connections. Players must engage and interact with the campaign world. GURPS is a dream come true compared to the alternatives.

I am not fighting the system to tell a story like this.

This is how you fall down the rabbit hole of history. You find an era that fascinates you, that pop culture weakly tries to rewrite, and you find the real thing. The imitation now looks illiterate, and the real thing that actually happened is so much better.

Because it is all happening again.

GURPS as a High Fantasy Game?

Sure, why not?

Give them a pile of points and let the players go to town crafting fun, high-magic powers, special fighting abilities, and racial innates. This is an easier game for those used to the GURPS system, especially those who have played superheroes in the system before, but this is completely possible. Or, do your first game like this, make the powers all minor ones that aren't on a cosmic power scale, and have fun with it.

I saw a video on a GURPS Fantasy game that skipped GURPS Magic (and Dungeon Fantasy) and just gave clerics a "healing power" that cost fatigue points, almost like a superpower. It just works, and that power can be improved and enhanced with character points later. You don't need a full 5E "power tree" and class system to do high fantasy powers; you can just buy them "as powers" and assign whatever magical power source you want to them.

You don't even need Dungeon Fantasy or the GURPS Magic book. This is one of the easiest things to do, and it is pretty simple to do with just the two core books. GURPS Powers just gives you a lot of premade powers to pick and choose from, along with suggestions for making them interesting.

In fact, you can do better in GURPS: design your "fantasy vampire hero" with all sorts of classic fantasy powers, like mist form, turning into a bat, hypnotism, strength, limited invulnerability, and just play your character like that. No "character class," no "race that levels up" - just a powered fantasy hero that can do all sorts of cool stuff, and you begin from there.

In GURPS, you are less of a character in a video game, and more of a character in a movie. You have starting versions of "all your cool powers," and you go from there. If your "high elf magic archer" has power shot, storm of arrows, long jump, stealth, dual wield, whirlwind, and arcane shot as powers, that is what they have. Design those (it is easy), get permission, and give them to your character. She does not "get those from a class"; she just "has them because that is her unique archery style," and she is unique and cool.

Every character in the world can have a unique power set and type of abilities, or you can create standardized templates and give them to everyone who trains like that, thus creating something like a "class." This is your choice. Or, you can start her with "the archer class" and add a bunch of unique powers to her, and have something like a "hero character" out of the Warcraft universe. Maybe she is a banshee archer with "spirit shot", "soul blade", and "bone storm" as special powers, in addition to the standard archery template.

While 5E doesn't require you to think and gives you powers from a list, your choices are very limited, and you end up the same as everyone else who made the same choices.

GURPS is far, far better than 5E when it comes to customization and crafting special powers. Anything you can imagine, you can do. Some don't have the imagination to play like this, and that is fine, but there is a part of me that wants to play a unique hero with a custom power set. Imagine if a 5E crowdfunded book promised you could "design your own class" and "design your class's powers and abilities?" You would be all over that book and excited!

Well, GURPS does all that today. And it isn't that hard to learn. All you need are the core books, and I would recommend GURPS Fantasy and GURPS Powers to make it all easy and give you a list of sample powers to start with. You will have far more than 5E gives you in terms of characters, and you may want to pick up a GURPS Fantasy bestiary as well to have a few monsters.

From there, your high fantasy game could begin tonight, and you could be adventuring in an entirely new world. And honestly, you will have far more customization than 5E gives you, and far better characters that support GURPS' inbuilt roleplaying mechanics without external narrative dongles like inspiration, hope/fear, or story points.

The only hurdles are getting used to the game's core rules and understanding the power system in GURPS. Once you get a basic understanding here, there is nothing holding you back.

GURPS is a far better high fantasy game than many realize.