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.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #6

Knight Hawks came out after the original Star Frontiers set came out, and we had already adopted starships from Traveller and Space Opera into our games. I wish this had come out at the same time, since we adopted the Star Wars-style "Millennium Falcon" trope into our games, turning starships into "space RVs" with anti-gravity, able to land on planets, and serving as flying hotels with antimatter engines.

Nothing kills science fiction faster than a magic space RV.

The ship lands next to space dungeons; there is no need for overland travel, landing at starports is a why bother, there is no need to carry shuttlecraft or orbital space planes, and the ship becomes "backup fire support" flying artillery for any ground mission. I have played decades of this, and having a destroyer hovering above the battlefield, turrets at the ready, really kills any challenge for the away team.

I wish our Star Frontiers campaign were a strict TL10^ game. Starships are these paper-thin, decks stacked like a loaf of bread, 1G acceleration, slow, weeks to get to a planet, dropship-carrying, atomic engines on sponsons, no artificial gravity, depressurize during space battles, flying cans with guns.

There are no magic "sensor beams," just radar and LADAR, and old-style radio direction finders. Telescopes and imaging equipment that detect brightness and radiated heat are used to detect objects at greater distances.

You should only have gravity when accelerating at 1G, a mid-point flip, and then deceleration at 1G provides gravity on the second half of the trip. There are no anti-gravity panels, and if you are in orbit, everyone is floating around. You need shuttles, dropships, starfighters with orbital capability, or space planes to get down to the planet. To get large cargo up, they fire it up on giant rockets that look like something from NASA or SpaceX. Starships are assembled in space and never land on a planet. Space stations handle interface duties and customs and provide 1G or gravity via giant rotating rings.

If you go on a mission, your ship needs to sit in orbit with a crew. You need a dropship and crew for that. If you land in a remote area, you need a flat space, and then you need to disembark an ATV or VTOL to get to where you want to go. If you will be there for a while, take camping supplies and survival equipment, including pressurized tents, solar panels, and life support units.

You need to take a ton of stuff with you for extended stays.

If your ship in orbit detects an unknown contact, and you know space pirates are in the area, they will go into action without you. You may be left stranded in your camp for a while, with your radio and heat-producing gear off, so nobody can detect you, staying silent to avoid detection. You may not know when your ship will return, if ever, since you both go radio silent. If you get on the radio, a pirate missile may come flying in from orbit at that signal.

And you won't be able to detect, see, or know what is up there in orbit, unless you get fortunate with your electro-binoculars and see it from the ground. You may have radio direction finders of your own that can help you detect objects in orbit.

The pirates may have dropped a satellite up there for some reason: to detect orbital ships, ground emissions, or radio traffic, or to relay communications. If you found that early, you could have blown it up or sent someone over to hack it and tap in, being wary of it being trapped with anti-tamper devices or explosives.

Big ships, like battleships, are a big deal and require a fleet. Most of the "grunt work" in the galaxy is done with smaller ships tooling about and solving problems. Fleets are expensive and for homeworlds, while colony worlds will have a handful of smaller ships for defense, if any. Space combat is closer to The Hunt for Red October than Star Wars.

Hard TL10^ is the way.

You get too high-tech, and it is the magic space RV landing on the planet. Even Traveller has this problem with its adventure ships. Go further, and you are teleporting to the surface. Very little from the GURPS skill list is needed, and there is no preparation or procedure. My TL10^ away-team has a small group of experts, including a doctor, a communications person, an engineer, security personnel, scientists, contact people, command, and others.

Past TL11, it is "the PCs get out of the ship," and one of them could be a bartender and another an entertainer. While that is great for light-hearted science fiction, more like Guardians of the Galaxy, it is not what Star Frontiers tried to do, or what I wish we had done.

For Star Frontiers, that genuine feeling is the TL10^ game, with lasers as the ultimate weapon and the entire universe closer to that 1980s ideal and vision of the future. This isn't smooth, ultra-sexy, future-tech, but that gritty, NASA-style, Interstellar, The Martian, Cold War naval battles, survival-in-space sort of game that GURPS does so well.

GURPS: Shadowdark

What? What in the what what?

Sometimes, my brother and I would do these silly game conversions just to see where they ended up, and we would spend a weekend playing them. Many times, we would learn something new about both games, and while extremely strange and off-the-wall, these conversions were a load of fun.

So, let's play GURPS: Shadowdark.

First up, what even is this? We need some ground rules for the conversion. Let's say we want this played with GURPS characters, according to the GURPS rules, and we want to fold in the parts of Shadowdark that make sense. We will lose all GURPS races, skills, and magic, and prefer to use Shadowdark when possible. Damage will be GURPS, with character HP being done by GURPS rules, and monster HP being rolled by the hit dice. Otherwise, all combat and damage will be done with GURPS. Advancement will be entirely Shadowdark.

The goal is to use as much of the Shadowdark book as we can, use the classes, ancerties, and advancement of Shadowdark, but play as much as we can using GURPS rules. There are still a lot of fun tables in here, and plenty of ideas for GURPS games. Even if we later "play it 100% as GURPS," we will have had fun for a while and done something completely off-the-wall and silly.

Advantages and Disadvantages

We will need to hack GURPS to support the 5E advantage-and-disadvantage system. For advantage, roll 4d6 and drop the highest. For disadvantage, roll 4d6 and drop the lowest.

I see this being an official rule someday. Huh, we already found something interesting.

Character Creation

Create your GURPS characters as usual, but do not buy a racial template or skills. Just focus on abilities, advantages, and disadvantages. Set a lower point limit, such as half normal points, since we are not buying character skills or magic. You may end up with some pretty high abilities, but this is a game meant for fast character creation and frequent deaths, so get used to it.

All you do is buy and set ability scores, and pick a few advantages and disadvantages. Character creation will go quick. This is good! These characters are supposed to be disposable.

Ancestery

Use a Shadowdark ancestry pick, and just write down what they tell you. If a pick gives you +2 HP, just add two to HP and do not pay any extra. From here on in, everything is free. Talents are those abilities rolled on the charts. And +1 to attack or spellcasting rolls is treated as a +1 skill level.

So far, this game is coming together. I feel it will mostly be "rolling equal to or under ability scores" with modifiers, and ignore most skills (and even unskilled penalties). This is like the OSR; we do not have much use for skills.

Skills

But we still have a few! We only have a handful of skills in the game, and you gain these "bang skills" when the rules say you do:

• Ranged Weapons!
• Ranged and Melee Weapons!
• Spellcasting (Arcane)!
• Spellcasting (Divine)!

Note that some abilities give you both attack roll and damage bonuses! The half-orc gives you a +1 to attack and damage rolls with melee weapons, so this is treated as a +1 skill and a +1 damage modifier in GURPS.

All damage modifiers granted in Shadowdark translate over to GURPS into melee damage. There will be times your attack bonus differs from your damage bonus, and other times an ability will increase both.

Okay, this conversion is a mess. I'd like to know why I am doing this Frankenstein conversion. But let's keep hacking and going! There is always this mid-point regret where you just want to give up and say, 'This is a stupid idea.' This is it.

Ignore the feeling, and keep going.

Hit Points

Hit points start at GURPS standards, and extra hit dice are rolled per level. A d8 is a d6+2 in GURPS, and a d4 is a d6-2 (minimum 1). You will be slightly tougher than Shadowdark characters, but both GURPS and Shadowdark are so deadly that it won't matter. You pay nothing for them in CP when you level up.

When you get a level, roll for more hit points, as usual for Shadowdark. This does break GURPS slightly, but you are going to need the hit points, trust me. This is one where we would run a campaign through and test. If characters with 50+ HP in GURPS turn into a slog, we would halve the HP gain per level. Nothing will be perfect the first time through, but that is okay.

When we do conversions like this, we always put sticky notes on things to test them at the base level and adjust later if they are broken. This is a game-design skill worth learning: set a baseline, test it, and stick to it. Something that feels broken early may not be broken later. If it breaks later, correct it, then run another complete test.

How do I know this? We played a D&D 4E campaign from levels 1-20 with dozens of characters. That game was never tested past level 10; there is no way. How could they never see what they did to turn denial powers, hit point totals, and stun locking? We had a high-level combat run for 43 rounds, and we were so happy when it ended that we quit the game.

Even the boss monster was begging for it to be over.

This is what happens if you skip testing or create echo chambers.

Classes

Pick a class and follow the Shadowdark rules and suggestions. When a class says "add half your level to attack and damage rolls (round down)," just do that. So a level 2 fighter will add one to all attack and damage rolls, so a +1 skill level modification and a +1 damage adjustment (to melee and ranged) is applied. If a talent lets you modify stats, do so as instructed, but do not adjust your character points.

Thief skill rolls are done with advantage and made against the character's attributes. A thief figuring out how a trap works would be an IQ roll, while disarming would be a DX roll, while forcing open a stuck window would be a ST roll, and so on.

Spells

Use Shadowdark's spell slots, spells,  and casting rules, but roll spellcasting checks in GURPS with IQ and your appropriate Spellcasting skill. Priests cast off Will, while mages cast off IQ. Mishaps are rolled as usual (keep a d12 handy, or use the d2/d6 method for generating 1-12 results).

Shadowdark damage is GURPS damage. Ability rolls (such as the confusion spell's WIS check) are best translated into GURPS (like a WILL check on 3d6 or less).

Damage and AC

Damage between GURPS and Shadowdark is one-to-one. Use GURPS weapon and STR damage for characters, modified by any modifiers given by the game. Thief backstabs add weapon dice as noted. Calculate GURPS DR based on armor types in GURPS, as usual.

GURPS DR for monsters is (Shadowdark AC - 10) / 2 (rounded down). If you want a faster-playing game, halve the monster's HP; otherwise, leave it as usual and treat higher HP (30+) monsters as boss monsters.

Backgrounds

When you roll up a background, treat that as a "bang skill" and make rolls as usual against it, and the referee could rule that these have an advantage in certain situations.

All Other Rules

Darkness, exploration, danger levels, luck tokens, gear slots, and all the other rules go by Shadowdark standards. We are just using GURPS for combat, skill rolls, ability rolls, and damage. You are not getting character points for GURPS experience; you get Shadowdark XP and advance the level charts in that game. You get talents and extra HP when the game tells you to.

If a roll should be difficult or easy, apply a suitable modifier to the 3d6 roll. Ignore the Shadowdark DC system and substitute with GURPS die roll modifiers.

Some rules, such as survival, falling, exposure, bleeding, food, and water, will be better handled in GURPS. Make a judgment call when the situation comes up, and "handle it in GURPS."

Go Play GURPS Shadowdark!

The conversions we did were not complicated, nor did they try to make everything fit perfectly into the GURPS rules and framework. For this, abandoning traditional GURPS character advancement and putting yourself at the mercy of the Shadowdark rules for XP and talent rolls would lead to some hilarious situations. If we felt something was horribly broken, we would issue a ruling and fix it, adding it to our conversion rules.

What I love about this conversion is letting thieves make an ability roll for their skills, without even using a skill level. Theives just work "as they do" and this is a helpful way to handle NPC skill and ability rolls without needing a skill. Got a town sage and want to make a skill roll for them? Give them an IQ and roll 3d6 against it.

So, I did learn something and got a new tool for my GURPS toolbox!

Also note, this is not a perfect conversion, and you will need to make adjustments and rulings on the fly. This is another excellent skill to learn, since it comes up in pure GURPS games as well. Game design is experimentation, but it also requires patience and testing to ensure something is broken, not just a knee-jerk reaction. High hit points at higher levels may not be a problem. We don't know until we test.

And these mutant-chimera game conversions are fun ways to spend an afternoon and learn something about both games. Often, you will find yourself going back to GURPS for everything and tossing the conversions. But you may end up with characters and an adventure framework you like! You may enjoy the "digest-sized" dungeons of the Shadodark adventure as "GURPS mini dungeon runs." You may keep that format and introduce a new type of fantasy game for GURPS.

For the most part, GURPS and the superb combat rules should carry the game, and you will start to "feel holes" when it comes to the skills you are used to having for searching, hearing noise, and knowledge. For these, just make ability rolls, as needed, and chalk it up to Shadowdark not having all the tools that GURPS gives you. Make the best of it and enjoy the simplified game while still keeping the best parts of GURPS running the show.