GURPS Shelf Cleaning Complete

That was a bit of work. Instead of one packed shelf, GURPS now has two shelves, and the game has room to breathe. I use bookends to let some of the books free-stand, and I use my plastic hexagonal dice containers to store dice alongside the books. As I pulled everything off, I dusted and cleaned it, which is essential. A dusty and cluttered shelf is a net negative for a game, so I regularly clean them and give them love.

The entire shelf looks like it is begging for someone to come along and play. I am a very visual person, so I like a shelf that appears less like storage and more like a game store display. The shelf needs to look fun and serve as a "call to action" for what is on it. Some of my books sit on wooden display stands to stay face-out, like the stands used to display fancy plates. I really go all out with my shelves, and keeping them looking accessible and fun is part of my hobby.

If someone walks by, they will know I am a hardcore GURPS fan, and I am proud of it.

One shelf is devoted to Dungeon Fantasy and holds all my fantasy-oriented books, along with the Basic Fantasy books and adventures I play with the system, using my BX conversion guide. I have the excellent Dungeon Fantasy books from Gaming Ballistic on this shelf, too, another highlight of my collection.

I display a few fantasy art books alongside the fantasy-gaming-themed books on this shelf, and it makes for an enjoyable display. Some of these are admittedly Conan-level muscular guys and savage female warriors like a Tor fantasy novel cover, but I grew up on these paperbacks, so they are cool and fit the style of world that is true to my heart.

I still feel the "No Armor, No Problem" rules (Bulletproof Nudity, B417) should stay in GURPS, since they are a mainstay of the savage fantasy genre, but I understand if they want to modernize the game; it will be sad to see them go. In my game, these rules will stay and apply to all genders equally. The original GURPS Conan adventures are some of the best ever made, and capture the genre far better than any d20 game ever made.

I love GURPS Conan. GURPS melee combat, plus a savage Conan-style world, is some of the best stuff in gaming. You can drill down into being a melee god, and it actually shows with your slaying power. Skill versus skill matters in this game, where in traditional D&D combat, it feels like whack-a-mole d20 versus AC on both sides. I can fight defensively and tactically in GURPS, and it works.

I like Basic Fantasy since this is one of the best versions of BX out there, playtested and number-crunched, and it mostly stays out of the way when I want to use the monsters, treasures, locations, and adventures for my GURPS game. Many are coming home to this great game, tired of the endless stream of OSR retro-clones, and just wanting something that is freely shared, works, and does not push the next crowdfunding campaign.

I love Basic Fantasy for its simplicity and expandability, and also serving as a "no frills" base to use with GURPS. Where 5E tends to strip over itself with constant rules and character expansions, and page-long stat blocks, Basic Fantasy keeps it clean and easy, and I can focus on the story and action with a minimum of throwing out paragraphs of rules and exceptional cases for character builds.

I have my 5E game, Tales of the Valiant, on my other two shelves. That is the game where I choose to delve into that level of depth and complexity, but the raw and clean nature of GURPS and fantasy keeps me coming back for more.

For fantasy, the combo of Dungeon Fantasy plus Basic Fantasy is my one-two punch that delivers. I get the depth and fantasy combat sim of GURPS, the simple adventures and easily convertible stat blocks of Basic Fantasy, and two great games that work well together and rarely get in each other's way. To have an entire shelf devoted to my collection, all my fun containers full of dice, and my fantasy art books creates a compelling "fun center" that is a part of my hobby that serves both as a source of pride and a functional "fun center" to game from.

My other shelf is GURPS and my science fiction comics. Most of my third-edition books are stored on the bottom shelf here, too. Something is amazing about using GURPS to play retro-future science fiction, like the serials of the 1950s, pulp-action, two-fisted, Martian agents teaming up with Earth gangsters, alien monsters creeping about in caves, and rocketing off to planets in the next galaxy, which captures my imagination.

This genre captures my imagination even more than Star Frontiers, which I love. Where Star Frontiers feels more like 2001 meets Star Wars, the retro-pulp genre of science fiction feels more open and speculative to me. Anything can happen in retro-pulp science fiction, where the more modern we get, the more sandbox-like the settings become, and I feel the sense of endless wonder draining from my adventures and the game becoming inwardly focused on politics and corporate greed.

Star Frontiers is a great setting, but it stopped at Volturnus and had a few modules past that, but it never became much more. The game needed a follow-up world of adventure, more on Volturnus, or another great module series that captured the laser-pistol space-explorers genre. Yes, you can have an open universe in Star Frontiers where "anything can happen," but the later adventures felt more inwardly-focused than enabling outward expansion.

Even Traveller, with its random subsector generation, felt more "what is out there" than Star Frontiers, and encouraged outward-focused exploration. Traveller fell down assuming space was settled, and games like Stars Without Number do the "random system generation" with themed planets and adventure seeds much better.

While I love Alien, there is only so much 1970s anti-corporate cynicism I can take. Corporations these days are bad enough, from insurance companies to greedy AI-bubble VC tech firms. Why do I want to roleplay that? I roleplay to escape this world, not live a virtual life in it again. Of all the anti-corporate genres in role-playing, Cyberpunk does the genre the best, since the game's core concept is built more around fighting back instead of suffering underneath it.

The retro-pulp sci-fi genre feels like fantasy to me, with laser pistols replacing longswords. It is an escape from this world into a universe of infinite possibilities. Anything goes. I can invent a new "Solarion Empire" or purple-skinned space aliens in a star system and run infinite adventures with them as the bad guys and source of intrigue. I can drop a savage "John Carter" world anywhere I want to crash-land on and meet the local aliens.

There are times when sandboxed modern science fiction limits my imagination more than it stimulates it, and that modern pessimism and negativity feel like a wet blanket. There are times when I want it, and other times when I don't.

I do want to create a space for some of my classic crime and horror comics and play those using GURPS as well. One part of the hobby that gets lost for many on D&D YouTube is the inspiration it draws from outside the hobby. Yes, the classic adventures are fun, and random charts are great tools, but returning to the hobby's storytelling roots, where it all started, brings me great joy. Back in the 1970s, when role-playing games were just getting started, all they had were stories like this and "no way to play them." So they created games to play and drew inspiration from these stories.

In GURPS, that skull-headed Frankenstein mummy thing and that wizard-looking guy would be frightening NPCs, and worthy of a few rolls on the fear table. They could be deadly in combat, and the wizard likely has a few spooky magic spells. You should take care in a period game of the 1950s, where the weapons characters could bring to bear are a 0.38 revolver, a double-barrel shotgun, and a lever-action 30-30 rifle.

If any guns were allowed to start, given character backgrounds. Remember, part of the genre is beginning with everyone "like things are normal," and not everyone walks around with two M1911A1 pistols, a trunk full of guns, body armor always in the back seat, and ready for action. Monster hunters or bank robbers? Sure, go to town. Classic 1950s horror movies? Certain archetypes would have specific "movie prop" guns, such as a farmer with a double-barreled shotgun or a police officer with a revolver. A doctor or professor? You will need to find or buy a gun and have a reason that makes sense in the plot, without foreknowledge sneaking in. And if you can even use it effectively, it will be a question, as not every archetype will (or should) be a recreational shooter.

And that flying monkey thing could be deadly, too, or a constant pest that spies on you from a treetop for its master. Just this one image conjures up infinite scenarios and ideas for a GURPS Horror game, and I love it.

Well, my GURPS shelves are set for a fun 2026, and here's to a fantastic year of gaming and writing to come.

GURPS Shelf Cleaning, Inspirations, and Sources

I have a strange relationship with my game shelves. I like to keep them clean and unpacked, and I am huge on organization and displaying books on display stands. If a shelf gets too packed, it turns into clutter, and I don't want to pull a book out and play with it. I keep them loosely packed, display dice in clear plastic candy containers, and make the "display" a reflection of my hobby and interests.

I will put classic science fiction, crime, and horror comics on my shelves next to my GURPS books, as if they were GURPS supplements, and say, "Look, play me with GURPS!" This is another part of my hobby, taking inspiration from outside of gaming, before the days when everything was turned into a role-playing game, and "going back to the source." I have a story, art, and inspiration. Now, turn this into a story that can be explored using GURPS.

GURPS is my key to unlocking infinite stories in these worlds.

This is also why I am careful around conversions and sourcing ideas from role-playing games into GURPS. Yes, I have a BX game going where I do conversions, but D&D already draws from so many original sources; it is so many generations removed from those inspirations that the ideas have gone through several stages of change and rounds of aligning with the D&D ideal.

Even Star Wars is a retelling of many original stories, remixed in a new way, but we are at the point where even these stories are endlessly pulling "from themselves" and adding nothing new. Stranger Things can be seen as a show inspired by many of the great movies and TV shows of the 1980s, a "tribute show" in a way. Still, it needs that source material of dozens of pieces of 1980s media, arguably all of it better than the remix, to maintain relevancy.

The best quality metric with remixes is always, "Are you adding something new?" The moment a remix starts pulling more from itself than from its sources, or adding the magical "something new," it begins to fall into a self-referential trap of irrelevance. You need to know "the old show" to understand "the current show." The nostalgia trap begins feeding upon itself.

There is nothing wrong with Star Wars as a storytelling framework for science fiction. Just as there is nothing wrong with superhero stories as a framework for many genres, from exploring empowerment to watching the Rome-like fall of those seen as gods. Where I am careful is around elevating the current characters and stories into a god-like mythology, where there are no other smugglers than Han Solo, and no other supersoldiers than Captain America. The fact that player characters exist in role-playing games means there can always be another, and they can be greater (or not) than the ones that we already have.

Captain America, Han Solo, and Batman are just one example of an archetype. Role-playing games differ from media properties that elevate their "licensed IP" as the paragon of the ideal, all for profit. Role-playing games are typically centered around the players and their ideas, with their characters taking center stage. Yes, a player could play Captain America, but they would diverge from the Hollywood version almost immediately. I will always encourage a player to use them as inspiration and to do something new, from their imaginations.

I prefer superhero games where all the heroes and villains are new, original ideas, and not tied to any IP. There is nothing wrong with the licensed ones; it is just my preference, as I have more freedom to explore a character when it is not tied to decades of history. If "America Man" rises or falls because of his actions, that is his story, and it won't be second-guessed or contradict a story from an issue back in 1972. The character can even die in my game, and his story will end there.

Captain America is a zombie, doomed to be retconned, recast, and resurrected for all of time. The idea is strong, the character is iconic, but a part of me likes to "live and let live" and let the human underneath tell a complete story: live a life, have an arc, succeed or fail, and pass on the legacy or tarnish it forever. That is just me, I like stories, and I am more of a humanist who likes generational stories.

There are times when I prefer to go straight back to the original stories and sources, and pull the ideas in without them being filtered and translated several times, losing the original magic that made them special and new. Yes, what I am doing with GURPS is "remixing these stories," but there are as few generations of retranslation as possible between me and the original idea. The "telephone game" of translations and retellings can twist and warp the original idea into something completely alien.

Also, there is a trap of seeing a monster in the D&D context rather than the one in your head. Orcs always have one hit die and are thus weak. A bugbear is a three hit die monster with the following abilities. Those were the original interpretations by the D&D designers back in the 1970s. Should they be your interpretations? Do you have your own feelings on how challenging a particular monster should be? Or do you defer to the D&D numbers and abilities?

One way is not correct or wrong, but I do want people to ask themselves that question before adopting the "D&D version as the definitive standard for all of fantasy." It is good to question assumptions.

My GURPS shelves are currently feeling packed and cramped, and I don't have room for my inspirations. GURPS to me is more than just one game, or "the game you play other games with." I guess this is what makes GURPS different for me, rather than "just another game." With a game like Rifts or Palladium Fantasy, I am playing in their universe with their stuff.

With GURPS, I am telling my own stories with my own stuff.

I go back to the original sources for inspiration. I am careful around second-generation or deeper resources, retellings, and reinterpretations. I question other designers' work and ask myself, "Is this what I feel is right for me and my stories?"

I make room on my shelves for my inspirations. I reduce clutter and remove distractions that detract from the story I am trying to tell.

For me, GURPS is my storytelling tool and I surround it with the stories I want to tell.

GURPS is Still Home, Urban Fantasy

I am in a few other games, and my blogs reflect my current interests. But I keep coming back to GURPS. This game does not let me down. I will think up a concept in another game, and I have to jump through a dozen hoops just to get to that point. In some games, it is not possible at all. In others, you need to OSR "say it is so," and you won't have rules for what you want to make happen, nor a good way to handle it.

You just guess and keep moving on.

While that is old-school, I like having rules to cover things I wouldn't expect to need to handle. A good example is urban fantasy, which ranges from the overt of Shadowrun to the Covert of Vampire: The Masquerade. Shadowrun was an early GURPS game for us, the first edition we could not figure out, and there were way too many dice to roll, floating target numbers, and we just gave up and converted it all to GURPS.

This was a fun game; admittedly, I ran it much more post-apoc than vanilla Shadowrun, where the megacities were the last bastions of humanity and the wilds were overrun with ruins and monsters. It kept the focus on the cities, and anytime the group had to venture out into the wildlands, it was a paramilitary-style operation. There were semi-secure land routes on major transit corridors, but those were constantly under attack by monsters and strange magic surges.

Vampire, we played it by the rules; the system wasn't too bad, and we knew some LARP groups in college, so it was all cool. Still, if I were to play any Urban Fantasy today, GURPS would be my best bet. There is so much to mix in, and you need a cross-genre game that can pull in elements of fantasy, science fiction, hacking, modern weapons, martial arts, magic of specific traditions, and so many other areas that combine to make the genre work. While the "book powers" are incredible, they are nothing I could not do in GURPS just as easily, and I would have far more options to choose from.

d20 tried to do urban fantasy, but it came off strange. Sort of like, "here are 3.5 modern rules, now, um, do Shadowrun with it." We tried to make this work, but it never felt right. The Urban Arcana setting was interesting, but it felt like off-model Shadowrun. 3.5E Greyhawk was a lot more fun and classic for that system, at least for us.

Again, GURPS does this better, and the only thing that would come close is something like Cities Without Number, with fantasy races shoehorned in there. This would work, but again, it would feel like "off-model Shadowrun" and sort of strange. It would be easy, since I would import BX fantasy races and play, but it would feel a bit pointless. It needs a story and a reason for existing beyond "let's do it."

What GURPS does better is in the unknown. With all of the above, you know what you are getting into. In Vampire, you are getting the classic conflicts and clans. With Shadowrun, you are getting the mutated fantasy races, magic, and monsters. With Urban Arcana, you are getting D&D 3.5E with cyberpunk seasoning.

With GURPS?

I have no clue what I am getting into. I can limit it down to "secret vampires" or open it up to "fantasy races in a modern world." If each of these games exists on a slider bar of "secret world" to "everything in the open," then GURPS does them all. Better yet, the extent of the secret conspiracies and what could be going on in the shadows can be anything.

Some people won't play urban fantasy in GURPS since they have no clue what they are getting into. I love it, but some are more comfortable with predictable things. I critique kitchen-sink fantasy for being too predictable and like comfort food for fantasy gaming. I love it, it is what I grew up with, and I will never stop being a fan. But I have done it for a few decades. There are times when I want to be surprised, like when I started gaming and did not know all the monsters by heart. With Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Vampire, and many other games, I know them. It feels like walking into a McDonald's and knowing what I am going to order.

Easy? Familiar? Comfortable? Yes.

Unexpected? Risky? Discovery? No.

There has to be a balance between the familiar and the new. I like my orcs and goblins, but I like new things, too. I want to be surprised.

Also, when it comes to Cyberpunk, I want the world to be mine, not knowing all the same mega-corps by heart, and I want to figure them out for myself. Cities Without Number is an excellent resource for GURPS, too, since you can use the random tables in there for any game and just enjoy a randomized, procedural world with surprises around every corner. With vampire clans or werewolf tribes, all I would know is that "they are out there" and nothing about them until I meet them.

Randomize them all, and figure things out when we get there. Yes, if I were playing with others, there is a benefit to having a lot of work done for me. But solo? I need to be surprised, or I will get bored.

I like the unpredictable and new.

No other game does that like GURPS.

GURPS: Super Spies

We loved the old TSR Top Secret game back in the early 1980s. This was our first modern RPG, and it was quickly replaced by Aftermath, since that game did more of everything, and gave us far more bang-bang for the buck. But we had fun with the game, and it lasted alongside AD&D for a while. Star Frontiers and Aftermath took away all the time for this, and we quietly dropped the game for greener pastures.

There is an updated game, Top Secret: New World Order, but it has little to do with the original game mechanics. It looked fun, but I did not get into it after buying in. I would love to see a Kickstarter to reprint the OG Top Secret books and adventures in hardcover. I would support that.

Top Secret is an interesting game that was released in the late 1970s; it is very dated but cool in a retro way. It is a mix of Bond, the Mission: Impossible TV show, Dirty Harry, Charles Bronson, Three Days of the Condor, and other 60s and 70s British spy thrillers, mixed with American action movies.

The game seemed to have two personalities, one wanted to be the suave agent picking locks and wearing a tuxedo to a posh casino, and the other wanted to be a submachinegun-toting commando in a wetsuit on a daring commando raid. Many players used this as a modern combat game back in the day, forgetting the agent's style and class, dressed in a tuxedo and sipping a martini.

The 007 Game we had was fun, but we never really got into it. This game killed Top Secret for everyone else, since fans went for the real thing, and the TSR game was lost to the winds. I loved this game, though it had a few licensing issues, not being able to mention a few characters and organizations from earlier movies due to the IP's licensing mess at the time.

Yes, even licensed games can run into licensing issues.

This game flipped the script on the spy genre, and the classy agent was back, and machinegun combat was deadly and to be avoided. The game had far more tools to be cool, a robust skill system, and many things to do outside of combat. The Louisiana sheriff from the Roger Moore movies appears in the encounter tables, even as an overseas tourist, which is a hilarious footnote to this game.

It does sound familiar, since in GURPS, combat is deadly, as it should be.

There is also a retro-clone of the Victory Games spy game, minus the IP, with the rules cloned to the best of their ability. This is a cool game that captures the fun of the original and is recommended if you loved the 80s version and want to play an updated version today with a new rulebook. This captures the suave agent feeling of the 00-game; combat is deadly, and you get to do all the cool "spy things" with an updated and modern set of rules. Highly recommended if you loved the original game, plus you can get this in print from DriveThru.

Ninjas & Superspies was more my type of game, having grown up with UHF channels showing dubbed martial arts movies on Saturday morning, Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee films, and that 1970s Kung Fu vibe being the gold standard of being a super cool "bad dude." This also had all the toys, vehicles, modifications, and other genre gear, along with more martial art types than you could shake a fighting stick at.

Like the 00-game, Ninjas & Superspies has a robust skill system that gives you much more to do than "just shoot things." Many skill picks are given to you, ensuring competency in a bunch of areas of knowledge, like putting a GURPS character together with a series of templates. In the Palladium game, if you choose Guerrilla Warfare training, you get a bunch of skills and abilities you would pick up in that specialized training. In GURPS, you would pick a template with those skills. So the games are similar in how they create templates, but Palladium still relies on a class-based system.

I still play Ninjas & Superspies. The martial arts and moves in this game are fun. The game is dated to the 1980s, but that is not really a problem since that is when all the best movies, TV shows, martial arts movies, and action cartoons came out.

We have two excellent 3rd Edition sourcebooks that cover super spies and espionage! GURPS Espionage is the older book, and it offers some of the best campaign advice for running spy-based games. This book beats all the other games on this list for getting you deep into the mindset, lingo, and terminology of these services and agencies. The GURPS sourcebooks are superior to many of the spy games here, since they cover the subject rather than tripping over themselves writing rules.

I really love GURPS Espionage, and it is up there with Top Secret as one of my favorite spy supplements and games. The section on spy lingo at the end is worth the price of admission. Top Secret had a section like this, but this is much better and more complete.

There is also an Operation Endgame espionage adventure by the same author, available here.

GURPS holds up better than most of these games, and it is far better supported. If I were playing with an organized group in weekly play, I would go with GURPS. The rules and support are superior to most of these games, and you have the best character designs in gaming.

Spycraft, the D&D 3.5E spy game, I have but never got into. I love the comic-style art in this game, but, like anything in the D&D 3.5E era, it is rule-after-rule and too much game. There was a time in gaming when 3.5E was king, when everyone overdid it with rules, and it is still like that with 5E. Spycraft is still a heck of a game, and if you are into it, I envy you.

I only have time for one game this in-depth, and I choose GURPS.

I don't have the time for anything 3.5E these days without character creation software, and for me, GURPS does all of this more easily and with greater flexibility for my characters. Even GURPS feels rules-light compared to some of the games I have on my shelves, with only two core books, and most of the rules can be optional if you use GURPS Lite as your core system.

The other GURPS book is GURPS: Covert Ops, a more modern take on the genre, a world of special operators, and a more military-themed and Bourne Identity and Mission Impossible take on the genre. Where the earlier book was more the classic spy movies of the 1960s-1980s, Covert Ops feels more like the movies of the 1990s to today. This is another excellent book if you want to update your game to more modern tools and techniques.

GURPS and Palladium are simple core systems built around a straightforward success roll. Spycraft is super text-heavy, with page after page of character powers, feats, classes, and other choices to make. There are times when my eyes glaze over, and I can't even read a 3.5E game since there is too much text, too much to read through, and far too much to piece together. Of the games on this list, Spycraft is the most complicated, including GURPS in the comparison.

To do a good spy game, you need some reference materials and inspiration. There are plenty of books in the genre, and the obvious ones are obvious. Get yourself a movie encyclopedia and a guide on your favorite films, and you will begin to build a framework library to pull from. GURPS can do any of these sorts of "movie games" flawlessly and with outstanding historical accuracy.

Especially with the sourcebooks previously mentioned. GURPS: Action should not be overlooked either, for a more modern action-movie treatment, and this has the bonus of being written for the 4th Edition, full of templates and great genre advice for action movies, which many spy movies also fall into.

You would not go wrong by starting in GURPS Action, and then pulling in some of the technical talk and genre advice from the espionage books. This is the best route to go, since you get full 4th Edition templates, action-movie-like genre rules, plenty of suggestions on handling "spy stuff," and lots of other genre support. This is the best way to go in GURPS when doing a super spy game.

I would love to see all of GURPS Action in a nice hardcover.

The film guides are essential, since you may prefer a narrow range of films over others and want to set your game during a historical period, such as the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. Having the look and feel of those films will give your game and presentation much more authenticity, and they will also be helpful if you want to create characters and organizations inspired by some of the greats.

You can play in the era of a particular movie, or even replay the events of the film yourself and see how it comes out. My brother and I used to do this: go scene-by-scene through a movie, set a starting point and an end point for something the PC had to do, such as "escape the motorcycles chasing you," and then play through that scene using GURPS. We would then laugh as it came out completely wrong and move on to the next scene, the best we could do (if the characters were still alive).

Sometimes a dramatic change would happen, such as Oddjob being killed in an early scene, and we would have to replace him with a new NPC for the rest of the movie, like Chopjob, Oddjob's much thinner brother, who was into martial arts. Blame the PCs for losing the golf game; one of them tries to run Oddjob over with the golf cart, and they accidentally kill him.

Sometimes the PCs would die, and the "second team" would be sent in to replace them. "Major Kill" came in as a Connery-inspired cigar-smoking commando with twin Uzis and plenty of hand grenades, and he proceeded to shoot his way through every problem in Live and Let Die.

Those alligators never stood a chance.

I am also a film buff and historian, so I love all this trivia and period-piece information. There is a special magic to being able to pull this off, and not just default your games to "the current year." Given how countries and borders change, you may need an almanac or book on the era you are interested in, just to keep you grounded. There was once a place called Yugoslavia, which was part of the Warsaw Pact. China was not always a superpower, and it had terrible famines and internal struggles. The Soviet Union was often the big bad guy.

I could pull off a 1960s superspy game without it being campy or trite, and it takes a special sort of suave, debonaire attitude as a referee to make it happen. You need to get into the chic, swanky, bow-tie, Monte Carlo-exotic destination vibe of the postwar world. The world of the rich movers and shakers, the giants of industry, the generals and politicians, the spymasters, the hard-nosed reporters, the field agents, and the playthings of the rich. You are a VIP, someone nobody knows, but you turn heads with your calm attitude and perfect style.

GURPS would do this game very well, and it does not have to be 100% shooting and combat. A referee needs to be able to build tension, suspense, and run those ticking clocks the players are constantly working against. You need to provide clues, opportunities to sneak into hotel rooms and look around, chances to tap phones, search for eavesdropping devices, arrange clandestine meetings with contacts, and watch your targets in plain sight while pretending to be a tourist or high-stakes gambler.

And you need those cover skills! Don't tell me you are going to walk into Monte Carlo with an 11 minus in gambling and proceed to blow every roll and get laughed out the door, or stuck on the penny slots. And if you have no history or other interesting knowledge skills to "strut your stuff" on wines, history, public figures, political movements, art history, fine food, or other topics the bad guy may have an interest in - what will you talk about with him over the baccarat table? The weather? Sports? Movies? Speaking of sports, you need some good ones there too, like golf, tennis, alpine skiing, chess, horse racing, or other activities. You will need to do well and play a sharp game with whatever the bad guy is into.

Part of the problem with this game is managing a skill list that may grow as long as your arm. Secret agents are the worst skill monkeys in gaming, and the things they need to know to hold a cover or do well in casual conversation are daunting, to say the least.

Pick a cover occupation, a hobby, a sport, and an esoteric area of interest for your agent and focus on those areas. Do well in those, and don't try to do everything. Also, pick a combat style and a favorite weapon. Finally, select an area inside the agency to specialize in, such as investigations, security systems, breaking and entering, assassinations, technical specialties, vehicles, underwater operations, charm school, or other "agency expertise," and focus on that as your specialty.

The movie superspies tend to be Mary Sues who are instantly good at anything and everything, depending on what the writer needs. I never knew he was an expert lawn darts player! Who would have known he knew that much about the Ming Dynasty? I never knew he was a master go-kart driver. Beware of the films that make a lot of stuff up on the fly, and consider realistic experiences and character types.

With GURPS, you need to focus and narrow your specialties. This is more like Mission Impossible than it is 007, especially with lower point totals, so keep that in mind. There is nothing wrong with being a specialist in underwater demolition who enjoys waterskiing, competitive swimming, yachting, naval history, sailing, SCUBA diving, and survival. You will go on a lot of boat missions, but the bad guys tend to love yachts, so you will fit right in and be a tremendous asset.

Just make sure the rest of the players sort of know what areas you will focus on, since the "desert survival agent," and you will probably be fighting about what mission you want to be sent on. Building a team of agents to work across related areas will enhance your team's ability to collaborate and complete missions.

Just like in real life, specialists will be able to handle more dangerous missions, while generalists will be unsuited for anything other than basic applications of the skill. Sometimes, a general SCUBA skill will get the job done if all you need to do is swim onto the island undetected.

One player plays the SCUBA agent, another plays the face who goes to the party, another plays the party member who picks locks and breaks into safes, another plays the disguise expert, and another plays the team leader and mastermind.  If the team complements each other, the players will have more fun, and you will be able to switch between them when they break up, and keep that tension high. Suppose the VIP is trying to get back to his office, one player is distracting him, another is trying to pick the wall safe, and one keeps the security system disabled. In that case, it is a super high-tension moment and worthy of the type of game we are trying to run.

Vehicle drivers and gunners? Make them NPCs, and focus players on the people who will be "boots on the ground" in these mission areas. Otherwise, everyone else will be having fun at the party or sneaking in, while the chopper pilot sits there on his phone and waits for everyone. The player playing the door gunner will get bored and ask to strafe the yacht with machine guns and rockets.

This is a game type that requires a lot of coordination and planning on both the player and referee sides. You all have to be fans of the era you will be playing in, or else just default to the modern day. Your team needs to be designed to work together. Each character needs to be a well-thought-out person, able to work a cover job, while managing their agency specialty, and balancing combat skills for when things go wrong.

Also, you are more "designing a team" in party-based play than you are designing a single agent. There is a big difference between a single-agent game and a team-of-experts game. If you are playing solo, you will need to handle many contingencies while still excelling in a few key areas. If you are playing with a team, have a session zero where the group discusses who will cover what, and don't be afraid to steer them toward a direction you know will come up, or to point out if they leave a critical area uncovered.

"Okay, so the commandos parachute in, and you are dropped off at the trail at the base of the mountain since none of you know how to parachute. You arrive five hours later, too tired to walk, and Major Kill smiles as the villain's base lies in ruins around him as his commandoes clean up the mess. All right, agents, I found a few interesting things..."

This is one of the most complex types of games to pull off, since you need to be a super fan, know the system, and be able to design characters to fit those roles and work together. The referee needs to adjust the missions and challenges so players can succeed without throwing the whole team into the Arctic, where they have zero survival skills and will all freeze to death.

But if you pull this off, and you can balance the tension the genre requires with the sneaky-sneaky spy action, peppered in with tense combats with real stakes, you will have proven yourself to be a worthy mastermind of the superspy genre and adventuring.

GURPS really does have the best support for spy games in this entire list and history, primarily because you can focus a game on the Basic Rules and the spy books, start in Action to make it more like an action movie, and add the spy stuff from there. A good 25% to 50% of the entire GURPS library can also be used as support material, which is a considerable amount of information and support. Want bio-tech, cyborgs, martial arts, modern guns, military hardware, and the list goes on and on? You have it all.

You have your mission, agents, and there is no time to waste.

This blog will self-destruct in...

GURPS vs. Palladium

Back in the late 1980s, everyone we knew stopped playing AD&D and played GURPS 3rd Edition. Everyone loved how GURPS did everything, and you did not have to learn a new set of rules to play another genre. GURPS killed AD&D for so many of us, and it was then that you began to see AD&D's popularity decline.

And then Rifts happened. A lot of those I knew gave up GURPS 3rd Edition for Rifts. And there was a massive crowd from D&D who found Rifts easier than GURPS, which increased the Palladium game's popularity on that side of the hobby, too. It was a little of both, the massive crowd from D&D that played Rifts drew in a lot of GURPS players, and Rifts became an early '90s juggernaut with a ton of MDC and giant hyper-cannons.

The influence of anime, the Robo-Tech and TNMT games (welcome back Turtles RPG, mine is in the mail), and the cross-genre nature of Rifts meant that many of us with a half-dozen campaign worlds could cross them all over and play Rifts without losing that much, and standardize on the Palladium system. Palladium did amazingly well during the rise and fall of AD&D 2E, and many who played a lot of AD&D 1E did not see much new in 2E, and never upgraded (which should sound familiar today).

Cross-overs of existing, legacy campaign worlds with Rifts were huge and meant you did not need to throw out your beloved characters. You can do cross-overs in GURPS 3rd, too; that is the point! I know.

But Rifts was huge in the 1990s; along with Vampire: The Masquerade, these two games killed AD&D 2nd Edition and GURPS for many of us. By the end of the decade, TSR was bankrupt, and D&D was dead. We even lost interest in gaming for a few years, keeping our games boxed up and unused. College was done, and we moved on.

The Bronze Age of the hobby began with Chainmail, and the Golden Age ended with Rifts.

Rifts was the last major old school game before the modern era began with D&D 3.0.

GURPS 4th was created in the modern, post-2000 era of D&D 3.0 and 3.5, and the games we know today. Palladium did a few post-2000s games, but Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, and Palladium Fantasy were some of my favorite games in the 1990s. They are still d20-based games at heart, plus a great percentage-based skill system, and who cares if one is roll high, and the other is roll-low? It works.

Palladium Fantasy is in the same boat as Rolemaster for me: the "better D&D" made in the 1980s and 1990s that everyone in the know loved more than the mass-market D&D "for kids" game we saw it as, especially with the censorship in 2nd Edition. Everyone I knew loved Rolemaster and Palladium Fantasy far better than D&D. Rolemaster was deep, complicated, and wildly different, but the charts always delivered fun. GURPS was another game that was very different from D&D and also required a lot of relearning.

Palladium Fantasy was close enough to D&D that you knew how to play it by just learning a handful of things, and then you magically knew how to play the game. If you gave people pre-gens, they could figure most of it out from the character sheet. Palladium Fantasy is like "Advanced AD&D" with a lot more thought put into classes, magic system, the world, playable races, backgrounds, and combat systems. Where AD&D felt flat, Palladium Fantasy went into far more detail.

Palladium was the far easier game to switch to, as a result. Even Rifts was not that hard for D&D players. Learning GURPS and Rolemaster were massive undertakings, and with the hobby on the decline in the 1990s, people just wanted something easy and exciting, with great art and a fun premise. If the game was easy to learn, could do cross-over campaigns with all of your games as starting points, and had very reasonably-priced books, it was a winner.

I'm not losing my D&D world; I'm just crossing it over into Rifts. Oh, there is a Palladium Fantasy game, too? Let's use that for our fantasy characters and then toss them into a rift where they can go find power armor and laser rifles, and play alongside cameos from every comic and pop culture reality possible. AD&D doesn't allow us to do this, so Palladium Fantasy is better.

We did not overthink things too much back then, not like today.

Yes, the above conversion also describes GURPS. But in Rifts, the cross-dimensional reality is baked in, and the system is close enough to D&D that everyone can just jump in and play. I could sit D&D players at a Rifts table and have them fluent in the system in 5 minutes. GURPS? Not so easy. We need to go through point buy, and even with pre-gens, the 3d6 system is still very different than a d20 system. In Palladium? Roll a d20, beat a 5, you hit. Beat the AR value? You go past armor. It is a two-layer AC system that is not hard for D&D players to pick up.

We have only gotten "culture and background" in D&D character creation in the last few years, and all three of these other games: GURPS, Palladium, and Rolemaster had them back in the 1980s. In 2050, D&D will get a decent skill system, too. If D&D has one fatal flaw, it is that nostalgia keeps holding it back, and it will never drastically change for the better (or worse, as D&D 4E proved). D&D will never change, and as a game, it is stuck in the past to an extent that playing AD&D is still the best experience you can get. Live by the nostalgia sword, and die by it.

Palladium was free to innovate, and the addition of the SDC system gave everyone that "stamina hit point" system, serving as a "light wound pool" that heals very rapidly before hit points are reduced, and the characters take serious injuries that are far more difficult to recover from. D&D (correction, modern D&D) is stuck with "short rests" and the entire hit point pool being the temporary pool, with zero "real" hit points for serious injuries, and characters can pop up, heal instantly, and sleep off shotgun blasts to the face.

Palladium First Edition and GURPS are 100% "meaty hit points" with no stamina pool that takes damage first, leading to more deadly and realistic games. In the second edition of Palladium Fantasy, they adopted SDC for "soft hit points" to make the game more heroic, and align with all the other game's rules. I say "align" since nothing in Palladium perfectly aligns; it is all custom-fitted for crossovers, and MDC kills anything anyway.

Again, back in those days, we houseruled a lot and made a bunch of stuff up. Nothing had to be "perfect" like it is today. The book and rules got you in the ballpark, and you houseruled the rest.

GURPS is a simulation game in comparison. The combat, once you learn it, is some of the best fantasy combat in gaming, and the characters are clearly head-and-shoulders above all these games. But to understand it, everyone needed books and a lot of time. For a hobby on the decline, and Magic: The Gathering stealing players from our groups, nobody wanted our players to buy and learn something too different than what they knew.

Back then, the Palladium System was like Dungeon Crawl Classics is today. A system built for fun, easy to get into, and similar enough to what you know that you could not understand what you are doing, and sit at a convention table for the game, and have fun. The big difference is that Rifts has great cross-campaign support, giant freaking robots, lasers, and hordes of interesting bad guys.

While Palladium Fantasy and Rifts can easily replace any D&D or 5E game, they can't really replace GURPS. For me, GURPS hits differently and gives me some of the best character-focused systems in gaming, where every choice matters. GURPS also feels more grounded for me, where Rifts and its MDC feel like everyone is walking around with anti-vehicular weapons.

But truthfully, Rifts and its MDC (mega-damage) system are far more survivable than Car Wars, and we played Car Wars for years and never complained about it. In Car Wars, my character is a 6DP ant moving at a snail's pace around a freeway of vehicles armed with weapons that do multiple dice of damage, and would scratch the paint if they ran my character over. In Rifts, they hand out MDC armor everywhere, and it is not that hard to get a ton of MDC armor in a normal-looking suit. You never take it off, and your standard weapons are now worthless, but that is beside the point. It is science fiction, and pea-shooters should not touch space marine-style armor.

Rifts says to utilize SDC situations and environments, and it is good advice. Treat MDC weapons and armor like rare military gear, and run a mostly SDC world in the cities and settlements. Demons and dimensional beings are MDC creatures, so there is a fundamental imbalance in the power levels the game tries to navigate.

But a part of me likes the contrast. If you roll with magic and dimensional beings, it is like hanging around the Avengers, and everyone is flinging MDC powers around you and at you, so armor up. You have no choice, but these are your friends, and they need you alive when they are hurling bolts of magic that could tear through steel, and fighting the same.

Suppose you roll on the other side, as in the human-only fortresses of the Coalition's megacities. In that case, I can picture a world where only SDC weapons and armors are present, even among the police forces, since police body armor and weapons can be stolen, and the MDC-geared military can be called in for more serious threats. You could play a strict SDC campaign for years on the Chi-Town streets and never see an MDC weapon or creature. The Coalition military is the MDC force, so high-powered play options are there, too.

Rifts is like Car Wars if the cars were the characters, and they only had 1 DP of interior hit points once damage got through. It is dehumanizing and terrifying, but this is what modern tank crews deal with on every battlefield. If any damage gets through the tank's armor, good luck with that. Rifts assumes "every soldier becomes a tank," and this natural progression of warfare continues. Once any damage gets through, that is it, game over.

Still, even in light MDC armor, if a car going 100 mph hits you, your armor will be fine; the person inside will resemble a milkshake. Common sense still applies. In a mech-like MDC battlesuit? The car will wrap around your ankle, and you will shake it off like you just stepped in something.

Sure, outside of those "personal tank suits," regular guns still work, and that is one of the challenges running Rifts. But, I can't say it is unrealistic for science fiction, given the way weapons are becoming, and the march of technology makes every gun more and more lethal.

GURPS still does the "massive damage by high-tech weapons" thing, and high-tech armor is butter against weapons with high armor divisors. So, you are still just as dead if a 12d6 weapon hits you with no armor on in GURPS. Rifts just shorthand resolves the whole thing, tells you to roll 1d6 MD instead of 12d6, and one point of damage is death. In both games, science fiction tends to go "off the rails" compared to a more balanced role-playing game like Star Frontiers.

Most science fiction combat tends to be on the one-hit-kill side of things in gaming. GURPS can be like that in fantasy.

But going back to the comparison, it takes a reasonable amount of time and effort to learn GURPS this much to get to a point where this sort of science fiction combat is possible. With Rifts, I could throw D&D players into a mech battle without them knowing much more than 5+ on a d20, and they can play instantly. This is why Rifts killed a lot of interest in GURPS, at least in our groups back in the 1990s.

GURPS gave devoted players a much deeper sense of satisfaction, of course.

But Rifts was the far easier game to both play and get started with, given the core 1994 book was only $25 and was all you needed to play.

But truthfully, all of these games of the 1990s are things I love. This is when my brother and I had the most fun gaming, and the games were amazing.