Three Feet Tall and Still a Problem

Basic Fantasy’s goblin is not Banestorm’s taxpaying citizen and not quite the DF3 racial template. It is dungeon chaff that becomes a problem in a hole. Convert the book in front of you.

Source: Basic Fantasy RPG r139, p. 104.

The box: AC 14 in leather and shield (11 natural), HD 1−1, one weapon for 1d6, Move 20'/30' unarmored, Darkvision 30', Morale 7. They stand 3 to 3½ feet and weigh 40–45 pounds. One in eight is a 3−3 warrior, one in fifteen in a settlement is a 5−5 chieftain in mail, a lair of 30+ gets a 7−7 king, and 1-in-6 (2-in-6 with a king) is a shaman with Cleric spells at 1d4+1. Dire wolf riders exist. Morale ticks up with a warrior or the king.

Those hyphenated Hit Dice are hit-point modifiers, not a second stat. Monsters roll d8s; 3+2 is 3d8+2, so 5−5 is 5d8−5. Attack bonus, saves, and XP still use the whole number of dice, except 1−1 counts as “less than 1 HD” on the XP table. That is why fodder is 10 XP and the king is 670.

The one decision that matters

Official GURPS goblins are almost always SM −1. BFRPG wrote a smaller animal. Three feet and forty-five pounds is SM −2.

Keep it. Reach C on most one-handed weapons, a short stride that still looks quick, and ST 8 that is dense rather than frail. If you would rather line up with DF3, stand them up to about four and a half feet, ST 9–10, SM −1, and stop calling it a BFRPG conversion.

Darkvision 30' is not GURPS Dark Vision. Thirty feet is a hallway. Night Vision 5 is the honest translation.

Natural AC 11 is unarmored human. No hide DR.

Morale 7 is Cowardice (12). Leaders buy it off or take Fearlessness. The +1 / +2 morale rules then fall out of the sheet.

Package and patrol

Goblin [−15]
ST −2 [−20]; DX +1 [20]; IQ −1 [−20]; HT +1 [10].
SM −2; HP +1 [2]; Per +1 [5].
Night Vision 5 [5]; Resistant to Metabolic Hazards (+3) [10]; Sharp Teeth [1]; Silence 1 [5].
Ugly [−8]; Cowardice (12) [−10]; Social Stigma (Monster) [−15].

Fodder: ST 8 DX 11 IQ 9 HT 11; HP 9 Will 9 Per 11 FP 11; Speed 5.50; Move 4 in kit, 5 stripped; Dodge 8, Parry 8, Block 8. Leather (DR 1), light shield (DB 1), cheap shortsword or spear, slings in the back rank. Shortsword or Spear-12, Shield-11, Sling-12, Stealth-12, Brawling-12.

Damage is 1d−3 cut / 1d−2 imp. They do not win duels. They win numbers, darkness, and the gallery over your shoulder.

Do not import the d8s

Rolled BFRPG hit points are not GURPS HP. Fodder at 1d8−1 feels like GURPS fodder — one honest hit ends them — but a 7−7 king’s 7d8−7 is ogre meat in a child-sized frame. GURPS HP is mostly mass. BFRPG HP is also boss budget.

Leave ST on the body. Buy the ladder as skill, armor, and a little Extra HP:

Role	ST	HP	Kit
Fodder	8	9	leather, small shield, weapon-12
Warrior (1 in 8)	9	11	same kit, weapon-13, Cowardice bought down or Fearlessness 1
Chieftain (1 in 15)	10	14	mail, weapon-14, Tactics-12, no Cowardice
King (lair of 30+)	11	16–18	mail, weapon-15, Combat Reflexes, Fearlessness 2
Shaman	8	9	fodder body, IQ 11, PI 1 or 2, boring, useful clerical spells

A lone goblin is a nuisance. Eight with slings and Night Vision 5 is a problem. The king in a doorway with two warriors is the actual fight. When the king drops, Cowardice does the rest.

Dire wolf: Basic Set wolf, a little Extra HP, same Night Vision so the pair can hunt at 3 a.m.

The other goblins

Banestorm p. 192 is 19 points, IQ +1, Night Vision 9, Impulsiveness. He pays taxes. DF3 is the PC-viable cousin: SM −1, Rapid Healing, goblin-kin stigma. Use those when someone wants to play a goblin. Use this one when you want the Basic Fantasy encounter table to survive contact with 4e.

When GURPS Needs the Huge Menu

Kitchen-sink fantasy is one of the most popular genres. A shared list of monsters, spells, and magic items gives a table an instant common language, and that is no small thing. D&D-like games have proven for decades that a well-stocked menu can be exactly why people show up.

At the same time, those lists can start to define the genre so completely that other possibilities get crowded out. A game built primarily out of catalogs is very good at some jobs and less good at others. The difference is worth paying attention to.

Kitchen-sink fantasy, and several other genres, often function like glossy, laminated chain-restaurant menus. For many tables the familiar menu is the entire point. For others it is mostly background noise. Knowing which situation you are in changes how much conversion work is actually worth doing, and how heavily the lists should shape the world.

When the menu is load-bearing

There are tables where the familiar list is not background flavor. It is the reason people sat down.

High fantasy that lives in the long shadow of D&D is the clearest case. Players arrive already knowing what a displacer beast does, how a fireball is supposed to feel, and roughly what a +2 flaming sword is worth. The shared catalog is the common language. In that situation, a GURPS game that refuses to provide recognizable versions of those things can feel incomplete or oddly abstract, even if the underlying math is elegant. The same pressure appears in certain supers games and in any heavily fantasy fan-favorite-filled setting where the audience’s attachment is to specific named powers, creatures, or items.

When the menu is load-bearing, conversion work (or a solid library of ready examples) stops being optional polish and becomes part of the product. A-I has made the mechanical side of that work faster, but the cultural side remains: the results still need to feel like the thing the table expected, not merely a point-balanced approximation. In these games, GURPS is being asked to function as a better kitchen for a menu people already know by heart.

When GURPS should refuse the menu

Other genres and other tables do not need the laminated list, and forcing one on them usually costs more than it gains.

Historical games are the obvious example. A Late Republic Rome campaign, or any grounded low-fantasy setting, is not improved by a thick catalog of generic monsters and magic items imported from elsewhere. The same is true of original worlds, most horror, hard science fiction, and any campaign that wants the system’s strength as a physics-and-character engine rather than as a content library. In these cases the absence of a pre-printed bestiary is not a gap; it is a feature. You build exactly what the story requires instead of carrying assumptions that fight the tone.

Here the conversion impulse is often a distraction. The energy spent translating another game’s catalog could be spent making the few things that actually matter feel precise and inevitable. GURPS is unusually good at that kind of focused work. Trying to stock a full chain-restaurant menu in these games usually produces something that feels both over-built and under-specific.

How much menu do we actually need?

Most tables do not need the full laminated catalog on day one.

A short, familiar core is often enough to make a fantasy world feel complete. Orcs, goblins, dire wolves, zombies, and skeletons already cover a surprising amount of ground. They give players recognizable threats, establish the setting's basic tone, and let the game start without waiting for a comprehensive bestiary. GURPS already has solid treatments of most of these creatures in the existing books, so the work of getting them to the table is modest.

Does an adventure need more than a dozen monsters? I could do a great adventure using six to nine beast stat blocks. How many of these are conversions versus creatures that can be pulled from GURPS books? Are there some that are "close enough plus a power?" I could take a stock panther and quickly mod that with a few special powers and have 95% of a displacer beast in GURPS. Orc sorcerer? Tack a few spells on a normal Orc. Some monsters can be rough sketches using GURPS Ultra Lite, and nobody will notice.

GURPS has a lot of fantasy bestiaries that cover a lot of ground, and the tighter focus of GURPS means you are not fighting through dozens of different monsters in a dungeon adventure. The rest of the classic list can wait. You can add displacer beasts, beholders, or more exotic undead later if the campaign actually calls for them. Starting small keeps the conversion burden light and prevents the world from being defined by a catalog that no one has opened yet. In practice, a short menu is frequently all a table needs to feel like it is playing “fantasy” rather than an abstract exercise in system.

Final Thoughts

The practical question is not whether kitchen-sink lists are good or bad. It is whether, for this table and this genre, the familiar menu is the reason people showed up, or mostly noise that gets in the way.

When the menu is load-bearing, the work of conversion (or of building a solid set of recognizable examples) is part of delivering what the players actually came for. When the menu is noise, that same work often distracts from the tighter, more specific design GURPS does especially well. The system can serve both kinds of game. The skill is recognizing which one you are actually running, and then spending your effort accordingly.

GURPS, Shadowdark, and Breaking the Ice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GURPS as a High Fantasy Game?

Sure, why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GURPS: Zero-Level Funnels

A few games have the concept of "zero-level funnels" in the system, most notably Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. The game has a mode of play where zero-level characters (without a class) are rolled up randomly, and each player gets a few of them to control, such as four, and they get a random profession (farmer, baker, butcher, gong-farmer) that determines their starting "skill" and equipment. A character may get a chicken and a pitchfork as starting gear, while another may get a bag of flour and a rolling pin.

The result is a hilarious "last person standing" style of play where characters are sent into danger and sacrificed to solve the adventure's challenges, traps, hazards, and puzzles. The characters with terrible ability score rolls are typically disposable mooks, while the highly desirable characters are held in reserve in the hopes they survive.

The characters that survive become the choices for player-characters, who are graduated to first level when the campaign begins.

You can do a zero-level funnel in GURPS pretty easily. I would stick to very low-level character point totals, 25 or 75 maximum. If you have GURPS Character Assistant (GCA) from the Warehouse 23 store, create a library with GURPS Basic Set, GURPS Fantasy, and GURPS Magic, and you can apply randomized 75-point templates from GURPS Fantasy as your starting characters. They have archers, bards, knights, holy men, and a good selection of fantasy archetypes.

If you ever get duplicate skills or selections from a randomized template, don't worry about it; just play with what you got. When your zero-level funnel is done, then allow players to "rebuild" the character with a few extra character points (maybe allow a total of 100), and give them a chance to clean up the skill list, add a few they want, and clean things up to make a platable and well-rounded hero. Stick to most of what was there, and you could make tweaks like replacing a few disadvantages that don't make sense and cleaning things up so the character fits how they were played in the funnel, while getting rid of things that make the character unplayable.

If your character survives, this is the part where players can "create a level one character" and make those tweaks. Do not care about balancing points, either; if some come out 60-point, and others 120-point, just roll with it. When it is time to create "level one" character, pick a ceiling above the highest surviving point total, and set the design point limit there. So if you have characters from 80 to 120 points as your "level one pool," then set the ceiling at 150 points, and let them design for that.

My random "spellcaster" ended up with two spells, detect magic and lend energy, along with bad temper, bloodlust, overconfidence, and gluttony. This guy will be a hoot to play as he steals food from the monsters, and if he is ever denied a chance to chow down, flies into a fit of rage and starts trying to kill everyone in the room. I dare say this is a more hilarious character than anything I would get in DCC or Shadowdark, just due to GURPS' excellent disadvantage system creating memorable personalities to throw into the meat grinder.

His spells? Well, he can lend others energy and detect magic, so if he is ever in a funnel with a magic trap, he will be useful. He does not have a direct attack spell, but, hey, it is a funnel; make do. If a referee is feeling generous, throw a spell scroll with an attack spell in the funnel somewhere and allow a CP spend on the spot to buy it.

My barbarian came out pretty useful, an impulsive pirate from an uneducated, mundane background. He can also throw sticks! The radioactive wasteland could be interpreted as a magic-blasted wasteland from some mage war in the long-lost past, but as a mundane background, he doesn't know why the land was blasted raw; it just is what it is. Hey! We are getting worldbuilding happening here, too! I would consider this barbarian a keeper. At only 58 points, I have a lot of room to tweak and build with when he "graduates" to a "level one" hero.

This archer does not even have a ranged weapon skill. Since he has overconfidence, maybe he lied and thought he could make it as an archer without knowing how to fire a bow, and just got by winging it, and is now stuck in a terrible situation. He has leadership, too, so maybe he figured out he could get an officer's role without doing too much archery. Even a "junk" character like this can become a memorable and hilarious personality with a little imagination.

The lying archer seemed like a randomized, mistake, garbage character, but now I imagine him with a compulsive lying disadvantage and never buying him archery, yet carrying around that bow and pretending to know what he is doing. He has a smallsword, so have him fight that way if needed, and he can pump that skill up to be a highly effective close-in fighter who is still useful to the party. Buy bluff and intimidate skills and let him use the bow to threaten others and get his way, if push comes to shove. He never knows how to shoot the thing, but he uses it as a tool to get things done.

This is GURPS. You can get away with this here, and the design system supports it. The tactic of bluffing with a bow you don't know how to use is supported in the rules, and you can pump these skills and abilities up to a high level and support them with force-multiplying advantages.

You can't do this in D&D 5.5E, DCC, or Shadowdark.

My randomized "mistake" characters are coming out better than my boring optimized designs.

GURPS is hands-down cool.

We don't have great random starting equipment tables in GURPS, so borrow one from another game. You don't want to be buying and equipping four randomized characters, so either do a cold start, such as all the characters being stuck in a cell without gear and organizing an escape from the goblin fortress, or some other cold start where the characters wander into trouble and must find, steal, or figure out gear. As an option, give everyone their highest-trained weapon as a starting item. You can also create your own tables.

Once you can get beyond character generation and use the randomized template characters, you get over a huge hurdle to running a funnel. From there, it is just printing the characters out, handing them to players, and letting them use their imaginations.

And with these types of quirky, randomized, sometimes hilariously limited characters, your funnel experience could be better than it is in games that directly support the funnel-style adventure. Letting players figure out randomized disadvantages and skill lists, and come up with stories? This is insanely fun! Running the angry glutton mage or the lying archer through a funnel is going to be a fun game to play and outshine experiences in other games.

And you can do zero-level funnels better in GURPS.

GURPS Is the Best Low Fantasy Game

While I love Rolemaster, Runequest, Hackmaster, and a few of these other "real fantasy" games, GURPS has killed the entire genre for me. The low fantasy versions of 5E, the Conan game, any of the new "dark and gritty" low magic versions of OSR games, and low-magic variants of D&D? Yeah, those are all gone too.

GURPS killed the genre for me.

GURPS does it all better.

While these books are excellent sources of inspiration, GURPS will always be the system played at my table for them. it works the same way every time, is easy to pick up and run, and has the best combat system - and it works without combat even better than most "combat only" games.

Even a game like Shadowdark, brilliant in its own right, pales in comparison to GURPS. What thief character do I want to play? Shadowdark's d4 hit die, backstabbing, and advantage on a few skill check areas, or my fully realized GURPS thief character?

It is no comparison. My GURPS thief wins every time. This is a character who has much deeper development, a greater sense of who they are in the rules, and a more configurable and customizable skill set than a simple 3d6-down-the-line OSR thief. My GURPS thief also beats my 5E rogue by a mile, since my GURPS thief actually feels like a thief and not an MMO DPS class.

My GURPS thief feels like a real person, someone with a backstory with supporting rules to back that up, and will engage me on a deeper level than any OSR or 5E game. In a solo game, my thief wins by a huge margin, even over games designed to have solo modes of play, like Dragonbane.

When my thief navigates through a world, that character in GURPS will have a much more engaging and deeper experience than my OSR or 5E thief. The "GURPS effect" of feeling like a VR headset was put on you will hit immediately, and I will feel immersed in the world, with everything around me suddenly vividly real, mattering, and my every action has consequences - good, indifferent, or bad.

Sure, my 5E rogue gets "cool powers" - but, so what? Those are only good for combat, and they don't help me tell a story. Most of them are promises I will never play long enough to enjoy, having but never really needing. Or the fact that I only get combat powers means the game forces me down a "choice path" of violence first, thinking later.

GURPS? I can run a campaign out to 500+ points of character abilities and not get into one fight. Combat isn't the focus of this game; perhaps it is stealth and social intrigue in a Venice merchant house? Maybe my character has competent fencing skills and some excellent training, but solves most of his problems through intimidation and Machiavellian scheming.

"He's pulled his sword a dozen times, but never used it."

That is a great GURPS character.

Why all these "roleplaying-focused" streaming shows aren't using GURPS is beyond me. GURPS curb-stomps D&D 5E in terms of roleplaying support and actual in-the-book rules that support character backgrounds. It is not a guess, player choice, or sitting there and making it all up - all the character options for flaws and advantages are in the book, rules written, and ready to be used.

And for realistic, gritty combat? GURPS has dials that turn that up to 11, or down to 1. It beats many of these other "real fantasy" games without even breaking a sweat. You have as many or as few "realism rules" as you want here.

And GURPS is far, far easier than many of these games to create characters for and run.

GURPS Basic Fantasy: BF1 Morgansfort

Basic Fantasy is one of the most amazing projects and games ever created. Free for everyone to play, a hybrid OSR game that mixes the best of modern mechanics with old school gaming. And the one part most overlooked is that this game was tested extensively, and the math just works flawlessly. People will play other OSR games and come back to Basic Fantasy just because the math and balance are solid here, and there's no wonkiness or silly stuff that breaks immersion.

And the books are free for all to enjoy.

It is one of the most generous communities in gaming, and the books are printed at cost and sold for zero profit. This isn't some $200 botique OSR game meant for crowdfunding profits; this is a movement to keep gaming free for everyone, forever. I wish more communities were like this one.

And this is one of my favorite systems to convert to GURPS. No offense to the creators, these adventures are amazing in Basic Fantasy and should be played there, too. But as a GURPS adventure engine, Basic Fantasy is a snap to convert adventures into GURPS, the AC values cleanly translate into DR values, and you can even use the HD and hp numbers nearly as-is in a hybrid conversion model.

And the adventures, towns, maps, and worlds are so well put together, they are amazing. There isn't too much detail, but there is just enough to get the mind working. They are the perfect blank canvas to work on, not so blank that they are nothing, but with just enough detail to expand and fill in yourself.

They also feel on the low-fantasy side of the genre, where magic is still rare and special. I could play these almost entirely low fantasy with GURPS, even without magic, and they would work perfectly. I like being able to control how much magic is in a setting, and I have a few setting books that overdo it with the magic to a point where the setting feels unusable.

Converting

BX hit points and damage are very compatible with GURPS, and if an orc has 4hp, let him have that, and he becomes a BX-style mook in GURPS that typically goes down in one hit. I am not looking for everyone to have 10 hit points in GURPS, and 1-2 HD creatures will often have less, but by the time creatures get 6+ HD, they will be tougher in GURPS, almost like boss monsters, and it will all balance out.

If a basilisk has 6 HD in BF, that will be 6d6+12 hit points in GURPS, or about 34 hit points on average. a DR of 5, and ability scores of about 16. Attack skill will be 17, and powers that total 30 character points. I have a B/X conversion page that works pretty well. The only difference is that converted creatures will be a little tougher at higher levels, but if you treat them as boss monsters, they will be fine. Lower-level creatures will go down fast like mooks, but that is fine in the genre, too. GURPS is deadly enough that a 2 hit point goblin with a skill of 12 can kill you pretty quickly on a critical hit with a shortbow.

Mind you, get access to one high-tech firearm, and even that 9 HD dragon with 63 hit points, a skill of 20, and a DR of 9 is going to go down fast. To those with bows and pointy sticks, that dragon will be terrifying and take dozens of men's lives and a few siege weapons to take down, if it is even possible, or the dragon doesn't flee early.

This is a converted reality versus the actual baseline GURPS reality. The world will have that "video game" feeling in places, but this is how the gods decreed the world, so it shall be. GURPS Ultra Lite fills in most of the rest.

My conversion is more "GURPS in a BX reality" than "GURPS in a realistic reality," where GURPS drives the engine of a BX-style world, BX values are imported from standard bestiaries, and the differences between high- and low-HD creatures create a natural balance. There will always be "hero orcs" generated like characters, but the rest are background extras in a Peter Jackson movie, left with their converted HP and HD ratings.

This also saves me a ton of conversion work, while leaving the door open for me to create custom hero monsters with the character creation tools. Oh, and kudos to the GURPS community that does these amazing conversions! If you want to play with "real reality" stats, please visit those sites and creators and support the amazing work they do.

The GURPS Campaign

I would start in Morgansfort, even as just a hired bow guard on the walls, and run a campaign telling his story. Since there is a refugee component to the setting, with new settlers arriving, I would expand the fort by adding wooden houses huddled around the outer walls, and place the newcomers in them.

The castle itself is a bit small for a few hundred people, and putting them gathered around the fort for protection makes sense. There are humanoid attacks, so the fort's defenders would ring a bell and rush everyone inside before slamming the gates shut. This puts pressure on the new workforce outside the walls to be digging an outer defensive moat with pikes, and putting up a temporary wooden wall before a large outer stone wall can be constructed.

There is room for it on the local map, and the cliffs on the water could be left open for now. There could be an argument on how large the outer walls should be, if they should stay 120 yards from the fort, or extend out all the way to the road. The scattered farms would also need to be considered, and they would need to expand dramatically in the near future. We need the wall. The humanoids keep attacking. The refugees are not safe out there. And we need to keep everyone fed and productive while putting every able-bodied person to work.

And that is it.

That is the campaign.

Keep it simple, use the included dungeons as a source of adventure, but leave the main story of the first few months, the building of the wall, and all the struggles around that, along with fending off humanoid attacks and finding their source. Keeping the game simple will ensure its success, and give me room to go any way I want with it. If the players want to train soldiers from the new arrivals, great. Do they want to direct the construction of the wall?

Do they serve as peacekeepers and constables among the new arrivals? Is there tension among the refugees, or between them and the town? Are the workers cutting logs getting attacked? Are the farms being raided while starvation looms? Is there a clan of dwarves in the hills who could help with stone, if they get help (or gold) for their services?

And since this is BX, could the orcs or goblins be negotiated with? Turned against each other? Could you find a good dragon who could scare them off (in trade for a favor)? Or perhaps find fae and get them to help, and not attack those cutting trees down for the town?

Keeping the starting point simple ensures longevity and playability.

It also gives the players the freedom to go in any direction imaginable.

Some may just want to "up and leave this dump."

Others will stay.

Some will head out to learn the secrets of magic.

Others will eventually make this the seat of their new domain.

That is fine by me.

I don't need "the magical stairs" and the "1000-year curse" with the "planar concordium" coming into play here. Some 5E modules go way too hard on the planar, multiversal, and high-magic stuff, and they lose me. I do not need any of it. I want humanistic, relatable, down-to-earth stories of struggle and sacrifice. In 5E, my characters would get so powerful that they would cease to care about Morgansfort. This is 5E's problem: You get so godlike that the world is beneath you. Why would the town ever trust people who get planar bastions at level 5 and are never seen again?

In GURPS, I can have an 800-point character who still cares about this place. That character is still very grounded and real to the world. While they may be around the world on adventures from time to time, this will always be home, and they will never outlevel it.

That keeps me coming back to turn the next page of adventure.

GURPS-Finder, Part II

GURPS-Finder is likely a go. After my gaming area in the water-damaged den is rebuilt, I am setting up my gaming table, breaking out my six crates of Pathfinder pawns, bysting out my hex tiles, and putting them in waterproof containers on the space's shelves, just in case it happens again.

I do not care too much about the 3.5E rules, nor do I care too much about simulating everything in Pathfinder, nor the world. I am happy with a straight GURPS Fantasy experience, more grounded and realistic, with low-magic, gritty combat, and all the great things GURPS brings to the table. I want the world to feel real and grounded, and GURPS brings it.

I am not pulling out a library of Pathfinder 1e books; I have the PDFs, and those are just reference. To be honest, Pathfinder is just the "look and feel" of the world, serving as "generic fantasy pawns" so I can play the game the way I want. Granted, I likely have more monsters than I will ever use, more shapes than I could ever create stats for, and unless I limit this down to a core set of pawns, it will overwhelm me quickly with just the ones I have out from the Beginner Box.

I could honestly play with just the ones from the Beginner Box and have more than enough pawns for an entire campaign. Where Pathfinder and 3.5E, and by extension, the OSR and D&D, tend to be "macro" with many varied shapes having similar AC, hit point, and attack stats, GURPS monsters tend to be more detailed and interesting. Dragons alone can do a lot of things in GURPS, and the stat blocks for one can easily go a page in length of powers, defenses, abilities, and other design choices.

GURPS monsters are, by and large, far more interesting than their d20 counterparts. Just one can be a threat, where, again, in d20 games, you tend to need a dozen humanoids just to fill out an encounter and to give the game's AoE powers utility and worth.

That fireball spell? Save it for room #8 with the 40 kobolds, or be prepared to slog through melee all night. Some of the D&D's original tournament modules were designed this way, as puzzles to figure out with the one-shot powers of the party. These days? Here is a short rest. Please get all your AoE spells back. Thank you for playing.

Then again, I have no problem estimating a ST and hp value, and giving a monster a "bang skill" in GURPS, such as Black Dragon 20-minus, and estimating the strength of attacks, level of defenses, and special abilities from that. Simplified monsters may be the way to go for a more pulp-action, fast-and-loose game.

Part of me doesn't want that, and I want the gritty realism where having plate mail in the party means thinking about running a logistical supply chain to support storage, hauling, asset protection, and repairs of your high-end gear. This is how it worked with knights in medieval times: plate mail was not cheap, nor was it casual, everyday wear. They needed squires and an entourage to support that "main battle tank" lifestyle.

In many OSR and D&D games, the brain gets turned off, click, and plate mail becomes something you pay for once, set an AC value, and forget about for the rest of your character's adventuring career (until it gets upgraded to a magic set, then that is next to be forgotten about). Pathfinder 1e sort of holds that model up as an ideal. Once you buy plate armor, forget it; that set becomes a permanent part of your character's skin, and it never needs to be thought about again.

With some GURPS characters, I can carry around two sets of armor, plate for the heavy fights, and a lighter set for town adventures. Now, the supply chain is needed.

It is the same with magic. In Pathfinder, bam, you get the good stuff right away. In modern fantasy gaming, it is even worse; you are getting infinite-use attack cantrips glued to your hands that permanently give you a "laser pistol" to fire off every turn, with no cost or limitations. This "MMO-ification" of the fantasy RPG is one of the worst things to happen to fantasy gaming. Magic without a cost and price is not magic; it is a "video game shooter power" that players get trained to expect, or the game "isn't any good."

The GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game forces you to buy cantrip-like spells, like affecting fires, far before you ever get to a fire-bolt-like power, and it all has a cost. Even if it is ever reduced to a zero-cost spell (through high skill), there is still a skill roll involved, and that could critically fail. There will always be a cost, be it hitting a friend, corruption, mutation, or some other strange and unexplained effect on a critical failure.

Minor, "cantrip" magic is cool in GURPS, where in D&D, it feels like a joke. There are so many fun things crafty mages can do with the lesser magic spells, and I find constant uses for them. If you can put out a torch in a room full of guards and sneak by, all the better. Mages are tricksters in GURPS, where in D&D, they tend to be boring DPS classes.

Magic in modern fantasy games gets boring since there is so much of it.

Magic is the unexplained and mysterious, just like the mystery of life and death. Take that away, and magic is not magic. You live in a silly video game-land where power is entitlement. Fantasy is not fantasy if it is a "tabletop MMO," and this is how D&D 4E utterly failed. We still see those same D&D 4E "World of Warcraft" design goals in fantasy gaming: a removal of the mystery for the certain, being able to plan and explain everything, guaranteed power for all classes, the removal of death as a mechanic, turning the game into a cozy-lifestyle experience where players are expected to "log in and buy cosmetics" every day.

Why do I want that? I get it easier by paying someone else $15 per month. D&D is just a slow-playing MMO where they expect you to pay $200 up front for books and to read a thousand pages of instruction manuals. Then again, if there are no RAM and video cards left because of AI, maybe this is how the MMOs of the future will be played. I will flip the sarcasm tag right here, but you get the point.

There is a chance I just give up on the pawns and do my own thing. I like GURPS tactical combat, and the fantasy battles are amazing fun. I could probably simplify this idea and have more fun by limiting the number of pieces I pull out. Maybe a smaller game with less will be more fun.

I will take things as they go.

GURPS Powers: Superheroic Fantasy, GCS vs. GCA

I am researching how to start a GURPS Supers game, and I bounced off both the GURPS Supers and GURPS Powers books pretty hard and nearly gave up. I want an easy way to get started. Many superhero games on the market have systems where you pick powers, and it is very simple to select a power, or a set of related powers, for your character and get playing.

With GURPS Supers, they have some nice archetype templates to get started with, but these are expensive, hundreds of points or even 1000-point characters, and I don't want that much superhero to start with. Give me a 250-point starting hero, please, with a few street-level abilities to do a few amazing things, and let me buy new powers from there.

And then I stumbled across GURPS Character Assistant's Sample Powers section, created from a three-book library of GURPS Characters, GURPS Powers, and GURPS Supers. I can pick one of the sample power frameworks, such as ice in this case, choose an origin, buy a talent to help with skill rolls, and then buy a few powers in the "ice area" to build my starting hero from.

Do I want flight, ice armor, an attack, creating ice, alternate form, slippery, or other related powers? A list comes up, and I can choose. I am in, choose my powers, and out, and the rest of my character is up to me, using the standard GURPS creation tools - a journalist, scientist, whiz-kid, soldier, or what other archetype I want my ice hero to be.

This is an area in which GCA seems to outshine GCS, and I love GC. Still, for superhero games, this makes it easy and deciphers the power books to a level where I could put this in front of a new player and have them design an ice hero without staring at endless lists in the GURPS books, not knowing what something is, and pulling their hair out.

While the templates in GCS are immaculate, perfect recreations of four-color comic heroes and excellent starting points for creating comic characters, for a beginning, street-level campaign with lower point totals, GCA's system feels easier to get started with as a "power picker" system that guides my choices and gives me a great list of related powers in a focused area.

This "sample power creation" system is also hugely useful for a GURPS Fantasy game that does not rely on magic spell lists of arcane and divine spells, but more on a superheroic power framework where "my cleric has life power," and you buy subpowers like a superpower system. If you look, this one has healing, undead-damaging powers, regeneration, and a bunch of other related powers.

Combine this with a light power (divine source), and you can have a holy laser and blinding powers. Huh, all of a sudden, 5E's power lists that looked cool to start, look weak and limited compared to a full power system that lets you build a fantasy hero like a true superhero and combine powers in interesting ways, while all sharing the same source of power. I could play this "holy laser cleric" in GURPS and have a ton of fun with them, and not even need to worry about Dungeon Fantasy, the traditional OSR style "spell lists of divine and arcane origins," and just play my superpowered fantasy hero who heals the injured and shoots holy lasers from their fingertips. Powers use fatigue and energy reserves, so it is all balanced and fun.

I could do another cleric who combines life and cold for a Norse Cleric of Freya, or another who combines life and telepathy for a Greek Cleric of Aphrodite.

Wait, you mean I don't need to buy multiple 5E Kickstarters at $70 each to get these subclass options? Uh, yeah, GURPS has been doing this for decades, wake up. None of this is "new game designer invented technology," and 5E is actually exploitative in how they sell character build options we have had in GURPS for longer than most 5E players have been alive.

Yes, you can play GURPS Fantasy campaigns without "spells as magic skills," as GURPS Dungeon Fantasy would have you believe. And G: DF is an amazing game! You can play straight with the powers book, and just say "these powers have a divine/arcane/natural/etc." source. GURPS does it both ways, and probably a hundred other ways nobody has thought of yet.

If all your fantasy heroes are "uniquely designed superheroes" in your campaign world, then that is how it is. They get CP for adventures and buy new powers in their spheres, enhance the ones they got, or add a new realm of power to their repertoire. GURPS will never tell you that you are playing the game wrong for handling something the way you choose to.

Magic as skills or magic as powers, it is your choice.

GCA and this "sample power picker" are extremely powerful and worth the price of admission. It enables these sorts of superheroic fantasy and street-level superhero games easily. While I love my GCS program, GCA still has a place, and it has a few of these "killer features" that make the app a worthy character-creation tool in my GURPS toolbox.

Replication versus Storytelling

I suppose with science fiction, I am far more interested in storytelling than replication. I could go all-out with a Starfinder conversion, but what am I doing? My Star Frontiers conversion is closer to my heart, and Starfinder just feels like too huge an undertaking; it would be "just to have" rather than something I really want and need.

I would love to have a great Starfinder conversion, don't get me wrong.

Still, even Star Frontiers feels limiting to the stories I like to tell using science fiction. It is a great classic universe and sandbox, and simulating the universe would be a nostalgic throwback, but I have to ask myself, "Why am I playing science fiction?"

Many science fiction games can't even answer this question.

You will get this huge game, full of space monsters, starships, classes, gear, and starmaps, yet it will strangely feel empty, like there is nothing to do. The hook isn't strong, the obvious isn't as obvious, and there is no "why" answering the question of why you should live and adventure in this universe.

With some science fiction games, it is all about money, and that is a motivation, but not one that really drives me. Original Traveller and Space Opera fell into that category for us. Other games, especially Starfinder, are about levelling and "powering up" with better gear. Star Frontiers falls into the "pulp adventure" category, like Savage Worlds or Amazing Adventures, and those are the sort of self-driven motivations I like.

A great simulation can be a motivation for adventuring, too, especially a very well-done conversion with highly compelling GURPS templates. There is nothing like getting a great, blue-collar, GURPS template, like an astronaut, and taking that character through a crisis and a small adventure, especially in a universe where that sort of adventure would not normally "be a thing" like in Starfinder, where the game is mostly mixed combat and exploration, with light roleplay, and very sparse skill use (typically meant to overcome obstacles).

This is that "immersion factor" that GURPS can create.

Can you do a "chef adventure" in Starfinder? Sure, but I would bet 100cr that another group of space goblins is in there somewhere as a toss-in combat encounter, there is a map, and it breaks down into pawns moving around and trying to get to an end boss. In GURPS, you have the skills to do a really great chef adventure, with history, ingredient knowledge, cooking, and even social skills coming into play, along with various advantages and disadvantages.

GURPS throws the brakes on a typical "d20 experience" and forces you to slow down and enjoy the journey, and all the skill rolls, failed self-control rolls, and encounters along the way. With d20, it feels so streamlined and abstracted that I lose the smaller details, and I just want to clear the next room, search for treasure, and move on.

In GURPS, the small things matter more. Even my character, the advantages and disadvantages, my skills, and who I am with my history. My gear is part of my character build, and my loadout matters. Where gear is stored, and weight matters a great deal. A lot of games hand-wave off gear and encumbrance, and in GURPS, you aren't wearing armor you can't carry.

Plate mail isn't an AC entitlement; it is heavy! Some of these games ignore how heavy a suit of plate mail is, and you can walk around fully decked out in plate armor at a D&D STR of 10 and never suffer a movement or encumbrance penalty. The rules supersede reality and even common sense, and "because the numbers," we end up with a situation where character armor is maxed out because the rules would break if plate mail were casual clothing. Even a full suit of chain mail is heavy. I rarely have a GURPS fantasy character who can wear plate armor because the STR requirement to move is so high.

A lot of fantasy games "go silly" due to the math, and they drift off into unreality-land. Sure, a plate pauldron and chestplate count as "plate mail," and the rest of your fantasy outfit can be Hot Topic. "It's fantasy," they say, and there is a point where it is "too much fantasy," like how an abstract rules light game is "too simplistic" to the point where nothing means anything anymore. If everyone can wear suits of plate mail weighing 75 pounds and move around like they are in jogging shorts and a tank top, I check out.

Seeing a 5E player's face when I tell them their character in a suit of heavy plate has a move of 2 because they are heavily encumbered is priceless. Yeah, that armor you are wearing is as heavy as two of the boxes of Pathfinder books that I own. "But it's fantasy!" does not cut it anymore. Fantasy needs to be based in reality to even qualify as fantasy, or we fall into a kid's game of "nuh-uh" and "I am Godzilla, so it doesn't affect me."

I am honestly tired of the "it is fantasy" argument being used to ignore reality. Yes, fantasy is why we are here, even in science fiction, but fantasy is at its best when we have that contrast between the "grounded world" of reality, and then the fantasy of fantasy that makes everything seem so special and amazing. Using fantasy to say "reality does not exist here" makes everything meaningless and unrelatable. It devolves into "nuh-uh" -isms, and the argument comes up again and again, the next time to justify something more outrageous and often, game-breaking.

"I can wear plate mail with an average strength and move around normally!" No, sorry, you can't. Spend the points on a decent STR and give something else up, and you have "earned" that "fantasy." For many GURPS fantasy characters, just managing to wear DR 2 heavy leather is a major victory, and plate mail is an endgame goal.

I can carry around a heavy machine gun all the time!

Of course, they would let me into the bar with it!

This is a fantasy!

Again, our Car Wars experience was our wake-up call decades ago. No, they won't let you into the bar carrying heavy weapons or explosives, and if you think you can try because "this is fantasy," those running the place will likely unload on you. This is Car Wars. Life is cheap. Few care about your feelings. Please roll up a new character, and try to make them less stupid this time. Or they may have been smart, who knows? The world doesn't care, and I am not pulling punches.

In GURPS, your gear and loadout are half of your character build. Character power is not all contained in the rules and "oh my gosh" powers the book throws at you. Games that ignore the encumbrance rules are an instant red flag, and you will likely see the game bestow all sorts of kewl powerz on you to distract you.

This is also why some of these kewl powerz games are difficult to translate into GURPS, since they rely on a baseline of divorced reality that wildly differs from GURPS'.

The same applies in science fiction. A lot of games feel like they can treat armored battlesuits like casual jumpsuits, and I get it. Mass Effect does that (due to limitations in the character model and its simplification). Still, it breaks my immersion to have armored battlesuits as everyday clothing. I like those armored suits to feel special, to have to store them on a rack and put them on before a fight, and to be forced to fight without them when on shore leave or in social situations that go wrong. I feel the same way about heavy weapons, being forced to wear casual armor, and carrying screens in lower-threat situations.

Yes, you can ignore it all in GURPS and play "rules light," but I love the game's simulation aspects. They create new build options, gear loadouts, and being a character is more than a progression chart and powers. Part of my storytelling is gear and the character's equipment.

Many science fiction games get it wrong. Your high-level power armor becomes your everyday outfit. You haul around laser-heavy machine guns to bars, and have enough space explosives strapped to you that you could level a starport hangar. Despite an average STR, you can carry around an armory and a heavy weapon that weighs 50 pounds.

We had the same problem with Car Wars roleplay 40 years ago. The character is not the car, and the 3 DP "body armor" can't be worn everywhere. Pretty soon, you need to get out of the car, visit a bar in everyday clothing, and live your life without four wheels under you at all times.

Once we realized that, the world of Car Wars came alive. The world was a real place, and not just a map of quarter-inch squares, with a grid line every inch.

Immersion forces you to think about how your character equips themselves and how that affects their movement through the environment. It affects social reactions and can be forbidden in many places. You are forced to store your good gear, and you have to decide where in the game world to store it. You can't just throw expensive weapons and armor all in a cart and leave it parked on a street corner, and the "high-level game" in science fiction involves having your own ship, base, or secure vehicle to store gear in.

This is why medieval knights had bodyguards, squires, a trunk holding their plate mail, a few warhorses with horse armor, and an entourage. Just to support "full plate," they had a supply chain following them around, and the budget in gold to roll in big.

GURPS science fiction is really good and thinks about all this stuff, and it forces me to slow down and think about it, too. Other games? They fall into the rules-light trap and hand-wave away the complexity.

I don't want to simulate that.

Book of Maps: Tor Akul Campaign Setting

This is an interesting book. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08J21KNJJ

I love these system-neutral campaign setting books, and this one features a huge area of the world, and an amazingly detailed large city map with districts and names of every establishment in the city. If you wanted to run a fantasy-themed urban campaign with GURPS, this is a spectacular resource and place to start, with plenty of gritty and dark fantasy inspirations, especially with such a huge red-light district featured here. A thief's campaign is right up this setting's dark and crime-filled alleys.

The rest of the world is mostly left for you to fill in, with lighter details as you start exploring the world, with many places left to your imagination. The central city and another town are the stars here, and the world is a great tapestry to create upon.

I can't find a PDF, and I don't really want one. There is a certain magic to a book without a PDF, as if it were an ancient find before the digital age, and I am left to leaf through the pages and make of it what I wish. Would a PDF make this more useful? Clearly, yes. Do I need one to play? No.

We get a few dungeon maps with numbers, but they are left for you to fill. We also get maps of the main city, a town, and a keep. We have brief descriptions of various places in the world. Most of it is left up to you. Most of it has an old-school flavor, but it's left generic enough that converting it to GURPS is trivial. We get "levels" of some characters, but no stats, and that can be used as a relative character point value for these NPCs.

This one is Amazon-only, and a strange find by a hobbyist who printed a world for you to make come to life. It has a generic feel, presented in a plain format, in full color, and even the title font is a bit basic. The maps are beautiful, and the descriptions are just enough to get my mind working.

It is also not that expensive, and it is a good starting point for you to fill in the rest. This is also a labor of love, and that enthusiasm shows through the setting. While this is not done by a professional publisher, you can feel the love and attention to detail here in the descriptions. That creator enthusiasm is contagious.

In contrast to the genre-best HarnWorld, where you get every character, map, and door down to the lowest level of detail, this book is more freeform and loose, giving you more room for your imagination and creativity. HarnWorld is clearly the superior setting, far more detailed, with so many more NPCs, a richer history, and more detail in every location.

HarnWorld has a very medieval feel, and it feels more traditional, with humans, dwarves, and elves represented. As for other races, like the more modern ones, you will need to fit them in yourself. Tierflings and Aasimar don't fit in as well here and would stand out starkly against the more realistic world, not to mention Dragonborn, Dark Elves, and other exotic kin. While the big three races have lore and history here, the others you will need to make up yourself, or just leave them out entirely.

Tor Akul is the more freeform setting, with less detail, scarce NPCs, and generic descriptions rather than exacting detail. If you want a generic setting with maps and a few loose descriptions, and you don't want much detail, then Tor Akul is a fine backdrop for your ideas. The capital city map is the star of the show here, where HarnWorld lets you go anywhere, explore, and have maps and NPCs ready to use. I could easily fit exotic kin into this setting and give them a homeland on the map.

HarnWorld is my ultimate GURPS fantasy setting.

Tor Akul is a more generic, malleable, interesting, and "fill in the blanks" setting with a single book and beautiful maps, where you can do whatever you want. If you wanted, the main city map could be dropped into any campaign world and used as-is, and the rest of the world could be ignored.

I like this book; it is inspirational and a fun starter for DIY projects.

Where Other Games Fall Short...

GURPS just does everything well.

I run a few other gaming blogs because I have been in the hobby so long, and my leading SBRPG site is still going strong 15 years in. My sites have probably been scanned by so many AI agents that my wisdom is now part of the global consciousness from role-playing games, from now to eternity.

I was trying to discover the best version of D&D on one of my other sites, and settled on the idea that AD&D Second Edition (and the retroclone For Gold & Glory) are the best D&D you can get. Yes, this is a heavily censored edition of the game, with half-orcs, demons, devils, and assassins removed, but the rules make a few significant fixes. Also, all the cut content was restored later in the Outer Planes Appendix and the Complete guides, so it is there if you look. Also, other free games like OSRIC have all of those, and First and Second Edition are the same game, so everything ports in without needing any changes.

And For Gold & Glory is easily one of the most generous games in the OSR, and one I will happily support. The art is all public-domain works by the great masters, so this game features some of the best art in gaming today, and every piece is stunning and authentic to the period. Compared to the AD&D Second Edition POD reprints, this book beats them all. It makes me want to play a historical fantasy game based on the book's pictures. Also, while AD&D 2E is a dead game that can't be expanded or have adventures written for, FG&G is a community game that allows for all of that. The FG&G PDF is free and can be freely redistributed without profit. Only OSRIC comes as close to this game, and is another favorite of mine (even as a GURPS resource).

In the Second Edition, we get Story XP, which is more like GURPS's XP system for achievements and difficulty, which shows D&D was chasing GURPS (3rd Edition) in the 1990s, and they were. Everyone I knew quit AD&D First Edition for GURPS, so they needed to compete with the market leader. Level limits for non-human characters were raised to around 12th level, and while level limits are silly, this made them all but ignorable since few games even got to that level, and if you ever did, you ignored them anyway.

We also got the original core bard class and not the freakish hybrid of First Edition. This was a cool bard, very difficult to play since it was a half-arcane caster, and the bard's abilities were particular and of limited use. Even the combat song required 3 rounds of singing, without attacking, to get going. You had to be a great player to make a bard work; otherwise, you were just a mediocre archer with a few arcane spells. I would rather have a new player play a thief or a mage. You had no bardic inspiration nor healing spells! This was a challenging class, but great if you knew how to make it work.

We played AD&D 2E back in the 1990s, and this game got us back into AD&D, mainly because of the GURPS-like XP system and the increased XP values of monsters, easily ten times the old BX D&D game. Also, there was zero XP for gold, so the greed motivation in the game was gone, and this was more of a heroic storytelling game where Story XP doubled your monster XP if they were defeated on a quest. We read the original Forgotten Realms novels and loved those stories, and the game did a good job of being "the game of the novels."

GURPS was still the better overall game.

In GURPS, if you held a crossbow to someone's head, that was a tense moment. In AD&D 1E or 2E, if you were high enough level, you laughed it off unless DM Fiat kicked in and they called for a save or die roll, which was rare, and if you were high enough level, you made it anyways. The same was still deadly (by the rules) and required resurrection saves, but GURPS did that tense moment far better than games with bags of hit points. Resurrection in GURPS is exceedingly difficult or impossible, with the spell costing 300 FP and one try (GURPS Magic, p. 94), and it can be ruled impossible in some settings.

To bring someone back to life in GURPS, you all but need ceremonial magic and a circle of casters (GURPS Magic, p. 12). To get that 300 FP, you need a lot of casters with the skill over 15-, ten times the casting time (20 hours), there are baked-in failure rates, and you get one try. This is not a spell you can "pay the temple 500 gold to cast" and be on your way, like this was a video game and an extra life.

In 2E, resurrection requires a system shock roll, ages the caster 3 years, and has a maximum number of times equal to a character's CON score. Still, this is beginning to feel like a video game, assuming you will die multiple times, and NPC healers are there to suffer aging effects. In 5E? The cost is laughable: 1,000 gold, and you need a long rest before you can cast spells again. The subject also requires a long rest and gets a -4 on all rolls (um, we do have a disadvantage and fatigue system here in 5E) until they do.

GURPS does a better job of creating a profound, realistic, and dramatic game. Death still means something here. Part of me feels like the fantasy genre has been ruined by the D&D-isms and assumptions baked into it, and that going back to GURPS is the only way to clean my palette of the video-game-inspired mechanics in today's fantasy games.

If we don't push back against these D&D tropes, the entire hobby will become a mobile game where we will be expected to buy currency, boosts, characters, items, and stamina for real money.

All that great art in For Gold & Glory that I have been posting in this article? That is more GURPS than AD&D. I love the game and its art, but to me, this feels like GURPS art because of the weight and realism of these pieces. They come from an era before the concept of "role-playing" gaming existed, and they are all-time historical greats. For Gold & Glory is worth checking out (for free), just for the art and inspiration it brings to fantasy.

It comes down to a question of why you play the fantasy genre.

For me, I like the grim reality that GURPS brings to the table, and everything becomes a serious, weighty decision. Healing isn't free, and death is all but final. GURPS is like a hardcore game where you get one life, and you live with your decisions, good or bad. If your character gets a bad rep, that sticks with them, and they will feel the repercussions of that for the entire campaign.

In D&D, especially 1E and 2E, I can still ignore much of the danger and its consequences. In 5E, it ignores all the threats, and there are no consequences. The new "rule zero" in D&D 2024 is "everybody wins," and I immediately check out, that is not why I play role-playing games.

Would I rather play a thief in AD&D or GURPS? This one is easy, and GURPS is a clear win. While thieves in AD&D are simply a weak martial class with a collection of skills plus backstab, thieves in GURPS are real people. In GURPS, I am dealing with disadvantages and reputation, and the campaign world matters all of a sudden. In AD&D, thieves "just are" some sort of "class choice" on the "choose your class" screen in a video game, and they sort of exist in the nether. If my GURPS thief blows a kleptomaniac roll and goes for that shiny necklace, fails, and the town guards show up - that is a real problem.

Death is real, so I need to have the skills to escape, since fighting and killing guards will lead to worse consequences, or I can surrender and deal with some time in a cell, maybe some manual labor for a few months, or being sent out on a dangrous mission that is all but certain death (but finding a way to succeed and pay my debt to society in the process with a smile and smirk on my face). Hey, GURPS referees can have fun with the whole "prison time" thing as well, and give thieves some creative ways to pay off that debt by taking on dangerous missions for the constables.

A highly skilled thief is also an asset when a town has monster troubles, and this is a resource that innovative mayors can make secret use of. Even if the mayor is embroiled in inter-faction politics, those missions could get very interesting as the thief is sent after political enemies to gather (or plant) dirt, steal from, or otherwise weaken the mayor's political foes. All of this is done under the table, of course, and the thief can walk free for a few favors.

Or, I could have the skills to talk my way out of the whole mess. None of the above ever happens.

But back in AD&D, I will just hide in the shadows or climb a wall to escape the guards. I never needed to make a self-control roll or suffer a bad reputation, so there is no societal cost for choosing to be a thief. Death is no big deal, especially in 5E. Thieves just sort of "are there" in D&D, with few interesting things driving them or painting how others see them.

If I take the same above logic and apply it to a bard, mage, fighter, cleric, druid, or any other fantasy role, then you can begin to see why GURPS just does fantasy better. My characters are part of the world, required by the rules to interact with it, and for the world to interact with me. With great, creative refereeing, even these "failure states" that would kill characters or imprison them in D&D-style games are easily turned into new plots and adventures in GURPS. Yes, blowing my self-control roll put me here, but it does not mean instant death or rolling up a new character unless my choices are horrible.

Where other games fall short, GURPS delivers.