GURPS: Old West, Adventure Ideas

Yee-haw! Today, we are rustlin' up adventures and adventure ideas from a few different Western-themed RPGs and converting them all over to GURPS. There is a severe shortage of stock, no high-falutin' magic, none of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo, rough and tumble Western adventures, but there is gold in them thar hills if you know where to look.

So we are looking for Wild West adventures with no magic, and they don't have to be for GURPS. They just need a plot, characters, situations, and an adventure progression. A great campaign starting location is also a massive plus for our adventure cattle drive. We will do all the converting to GURPS ourselves; getting our hands dirty down here on the wagon train isn't anything new to us 3d6 cowboys.

The fact that I started this roundup with the classic Boot Hill meant something. Well, there are five solid adventures for that system, y'all can throw a lasso around and round up for your Old West adventure collections. These also have the advantage of being free from all that hocus-pocus magic and weird west tomfoolery, and they are a straight-shootin, rootin-tootin good time.

Now, Mad Mesa here is a solo adventure! This means you can create yourself a GURPS 4th Edition cowpoke, saddle hand, saloon gal, vagrant, cattle rustler, bank robber, or some other man with no name and run him or her through this adventure all by your lonesome! You can read the entries, make your choices, and perform minimal conversions to make all this work according to GURPS rules.

Heck, rustle up a free copy of GURPS Ultra Lite (GUL) if you wanna create bad guys for your six-gun to blast at! This is right fine for creating NPCs as well, and even vamints like wolves and rattlesnakes can be quickly thrown together using this little book of guidelines. This works seamlessly with the full GURPS rules, and will get you quick stats for any character in this here solo adventure, or any of these other adventures you rustle up.

I hear you saying, Prove it! Alrighty, here's my GUL rattlesnake for ya, using three levels as my base:

• ST: Weak (8 HP, d6/2 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Rattlesnake Skill: 2 levels (+8)
• Rattler Poison: 1 level (+4)

Wut? Reading GUL, that rattler will attack at a -6 for a skill that needs training, so that blasted snake in the grass's base attack will be DX + skill - 6, or doing the math we get: 12 + 8 - 6, or a 14- to-hit. Pretty dangerous! It doesn't do much damage (d6/2 + 2), but the poison is where it gets you.

I used a skill level to give that varmint a special ability for rattler poison, which I am sure you could find in one of the GURPS bestiaries, but I treated it like a skill here for a quick-and-dirty pick. If a creature has a special attack or ability, treat it like a skill and throw a level or two at it. Note: Use a contested roll with the skill level for poison creature HT + skill - 6 versus character HT, which is 14 + 4 - 6 = 12- on a contested roll.

Yes, skills can utilize any ability, and even multiple ones, such as a giant spider with a web attack that has a to-hit based on DX and an entanglement level based on ST. And skill levels can be used to buy creature special abilities, attacks, and defenses. Damage? Use the STR table for the ability, plus levels of skill.

Of course, that snake is dumb as a box of rocks, so you could distract it by tossing a river stone past it and watching it snap at it, and that may give you a chance to bean that scaley viper with a camp shovel. Just remember to skin the thing for meat and its hide; the town trading post may give you a few buffalo nickels for that.

That rattler works with the full GURPS rules, too! And your players will be none the wiser, you are building these with the quick ruleset and not flipping through books to find this critter. This will mean faster play, a still true-to-GURPS experience, and using a supported and official system to guesstimate NPC and creature statistics. Guesstimate is one of those words that those folks from Philly use, and it means to spit in the wind and get a hankerin'.

If yer' not using GURPS Ultra Lite fer' your games, you are doin' a whole lotta work you don't need to be doin. Most NPCs and critters don't need to be designed using a fancy character sheet program, and these rules we got in this one-page game work just fine for 95% of anything you need.

Want more proof? Here's my GUL grizzly bear, and I will use five levels since these are supposed to be very dangerous predators of the wilds:

• ST: Very Strong (18 HP, 3d6 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Grizzly Skill: 2 levels (+8)

Woo doggy! That grizzly attacks on a 12 + 8 - 6 = 14- but does a whalloping 3d6+2 damage per hit.  This is a massive, legendary bear; for normal ones, I could do one less level of ST for 2d6+2 damage and 14 HP, and up the DX by a level.

Wait one second! You designed a rattler and a grizzly using the same GUL design system, and did it in less than a minute? And these work well enough with the main rules; no one knows the difference? That's faster than flipping through a 5E Monster Manual and taking 30 minutes to read a whole stat block! People who say GURPS is too complicated are full of hogwash. Making NPCs and monsters in GURPS is easier than 5E, B/X, or any other game on the market.

In fact, GUL is the key to quickly playing and converting these adventures on the fly, with a minimum of fuss and reference. Yes, if you have the GURPS Bestiary and want to run a full rattlesnake, be my guest, but this works just fine for our needs.

Pardner, I ain't doin' any more work than I have to so I can run these here Old West adventures, nor does having perfect stats matter all that much. Just look over yonder at D&D-land; they keep changing their monster stats every five years for the last fifty.

We got Mad Mesa, The Lost Conquistador Mine, Ballots and Bullets, Burned Bush Wells, and Range War for a complete campaign of adventures to play with GURPS Old West and the 4th Edition rules. You will get a decade of campaign gaming out of these five adventures alone, and they are worth checking out.

Some of these are right excellent campaign starters and home bases in their own right, with Ballots and Bullets featuring a small city as its home base of operations. While you can play through the main adventure, creating linked adventures for an epic campaign set in any one of these adventures would fill out a whole pickle barrel of adventure time for your cowpokes.

BH4 and BH5 are from the third edition Boot Hill, but they are still fine additions to your Wild West adventure library.

If I were looking for adventures and campaign starters, you couldn't get any more classic and good old-fashioned clean fun than these classic Boot Hill adventures. The old game's rules are so simple that they don't take up too much of the book, and you can just drop GURPS right in and make your own stories with one of the best generic universal role-playing games this side of the Rio Grande.

https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-TV-Western-Collection-Television/dp/B003ANP8CO/

Another downright mother lode of adventure ideas is any of these huge DVD collections featuring westerns, cowboy TV shows, and all sorts of rough-ridin' adventures. Sure, you've got to mess with those old-fashioned "movie disc" thingies, and maybe round up one of those movie disc players. If y'all can operate a remote and hook up one of those HDMI cables, you are gonna have a good time.

The quality won't be like a new-fangled 4K masterpiece, since some of these shows are as old as the hills, but all the work is gonna be done for you when you pop in a disc and turn an episode of some random TV show into a GURPS adventure idea.

Those writers from the golden age of Hollywood, creating these "moving pictures," will probably be tickled pink that you are reusing their plots and stories for your "silly dice games." And these TV shows are so old; none of your players are going to know better. Use the GURPS Ultra Lite system and create characters, no good outlaws, and critters from the stock footage included in these films, and you will have some right good gaming.

And if you can't get your hands on this, there are loads of 10 and 25 Western movie collections to get your grubby hands on, and you can score them used or dirt cheap at places like Oldies.com.

https://www.oldies.com/Western-Movies/collection.cfm

What is this? A place you can pick up Western TV shows on DVD for as cheap as $2 per disc? And the Blu-rays are $4 each? I will stop trying to sell you things now, and I won't be getting any money for it. However, deals are available, and there are some amazing collections and affordable discs to own. If you are a fan of the genre, you will love having these to enjoy. 

Additionally, physical media remains a viable option in an age of streaming services, where content can be easily taken away. People have lost entire libraries of films they thought they owned forever.

Popping in a TV show or movie you never saw in your favorite genre is a far better experience than YouTube or random scrolling to find entertainment. Plus, all these do qualify as adventure ideas, NPCs, locations, and scenarios for you to use in your games.

Other western games are hit and miss for adventures, such as the 2d6-based Rider and the Hero System Western Hero (WH). The WH game does have a 44-page section in the back with campaign information, a few scenarios, and adventure seeds, so this is still a worthwhile idea book for creating period adventures using Western tropes. This is not as useful a book as the Boot Hill adventures, which I recommend getting first, but it still has a few good bits in the campaign section, as well as maps of trains, buildings, houses, and other period locations.

Rider has a dozen pages of basic information on adventure creation, along with the familiar act structure. Most of the book is 2d6 rules and careers, so it is not as useful as adventures written for the genre. This is not as helpful for GURPS referees and is more akin to a 2d6 version of the Cepheus Engine, designed for playing Wild West games.

The book is enormous; most of it consists of 2d6 rules, but there are some nice d66 charts for encounters, patrons, and rumors. I wish there were more charts for creating solo adventures, plots, factions, and other Wild West scenario pieces. This one is not as useful, but it is still an interesting game. Western Hero is the better buy.

https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-West-Stephen-Hyslop/dp/142621555X

I know I am done selling things, but this is another book in my collection. There are times when beautiful coffee table books, like the one above, inspire me. Just looking at the illustrations, pictures, and reading the stories is worth more than a written adventure, film, TV show, or a game designed to cover the subject, but you need that extra thing to make it feel real to you.

The Old West is more than "playing generic fantasy" and spinning up cowboys to shoot things. It is a love of the genre, the tropes, being a part of a massive sweeping change, and those frontier stories of seeing the last open expanse on Earth being settled. This wasn't just "them 'mericans" doing the settling, either; this was the entire world flooding in as immigrants, the European powers, banks, and the crushing power of the world moving in on a massive land rush for what would become a nation.

But in this grand, sweeping, oil painting of moving West, one you would see on a saloon wall, there are moments for personal stories, struggles to survive, tales of souls fallen to evil, lawmen and those who bring justice, pioneers, settlers, trappers and hunters, wagon trains, cattle drives, saloon gals, railroad workers, share croppers, townsfolk so poor they lived in dirt hovels and sewed clothing out of burlap sacks, farmers, ranchers, investors, schoommarms, cowboys, marshals, bandits, and so many others living a dream in a grand experiment and moment in time that did not last forever, but left its mark on us all.

Playing an Old West game is more than simulating a cowboy movie or screaming yee-haw!

It is about a more profound love of the genre, of this being a uniquely "American fantasy" with legends, myths, stories, giants, gunfights, and a mythology all its own.

One Great Character Versus Many Simple

First up, I love OSRIC, Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy, and all my B/X and First Edition games. These are S-Tier games for me; the math is correct, they don't use silly video-game number scaling, and the characters are simple. If I am playing a d20-based fantasy game, these are my go-to games. And I play a lot of solo, so having these "books full of data" makes the game easy for me.

But, in playing solo, why do I want to play simple characters? If I think about this in terms of computer gaming, this is the difference between a Skyrim character and one from an RTS game. I would rather have a fully detailed "CRPG character" in a solo-play tabletop game (with full gear, skills, backpack, magic systems, and ability scores) than a simple "RTS unit" with a few ability scores and no ability to equip or change them (attack, armor, speed).

Granted, playing GURPS solo with six characters begins to overload my will to manage that amount of complexity, as this is like running a six-person party of Skyrim characters and drowning in micromanagement and wishing things were simpler.

But for one to three characters in a "small party" game, GURPS does that fine and gives me a greater level of detail to each, which provides me with a greater level of satisfaction "per hour spent gaming." Running one character in a B/X-style game is a "thing," and I would probably get bored with it pretty quickly. Even four is not that hard, but when it comes down to those "small choices" that I love to make in GURPS, like what eight character points can be spent on, given what my character needs, it's excellent stuff.

In B/X games, so what? My bard has 1,600 XP out of 2,000, and there's nothing I can do with it except wait. What will happen in 400 XP at level two? My combat modifier and saving throws remain unchanged. I gain 1d6 more hit points and a level one spell.

Really?

The character does not get interesting until level five, and most games end around level ten. Even if you accelerate leveling to a rapid pace of one level per session, that is five 4-hour sessions to get to level five, or about 20 hours of solo play, with most of the "small choices" being around treasure and gear. Most of your interactions will not be rules-based ones. By that point, we get our first bonus to-hit, our first second-level spell, better saves, and a few class abilities open up.

An accelerated rate in GURPS is about five character points per session of play, with one to three being normal, but we are going on an accelerated pace to match our "level per session" that we used in B/X. This is a total of 25 character points in GURPS for our theoretical five sessions of play.

GURPS typically "levels up" character power every 50 points, so this is halfway to increasing a tier of power. The wonderful things I could do with 25 character points in GURPS blow my mind. If I engage in more social and performance activities, I can improve those skills; otherwise, I will apply my skills that I learned in combat. I could develop my magic, learn new songs, or improve the ones I have. I could create a new advantage based on my experiences and the story. If I went on a harrowing survival adventure, I could develop new survival skills.

The actions of my character will be reflected in their improvement.

That does not happen in B/X. 5d6+CON hit points, a few spells, some save numbers, and a few class abilities. Gear and treasure will reflect the most significant differences between fifth-level bards.

My bard in GURPS? Specialized in social, combat, magic, survival, or any other area relevant to the campaign I am playing and "what is going on." The character will morph and change to reflect the game I am playing, and be specialized in those areas of campaign interest. If I am doing more of a social campaign, guess what? My bard's skills will improve in social areas, and my character will reflect the campaign. And remember, in GURPS, there are a few areas of social skills, so these can be specialized social interactions (with supporting advantages, and an expansion book focusing on the area).

MS Paint strikes again. -Hak

In B/X? Level five bard, extra hit points, slightly better to-hit, a few class abilities, and spells. No better social skills, magic is a fixed path, and I may get some magic items to help me out? If I need survival skills, I need to find a ranger, and the improvement can't happen inside my character (without houseruling it).

In 5E? Forget it; find a Kickstarter book for $60-100 that improves the social aspect of the game, and add it to the pile of books to fix the system. 5E is notorious for shipping a basic tabletop game that requires a few thousand dollars' worth of add-on books to play the way you want. The grift is so high here that it is off the charts.

GURPS works perfectly, even with just the core books.

And it gives me greater satisfaction with fewer characters.

GURPS Just Drops In

GURPS fans are familiar with this, but since my other blogs have been gaining a lot of new views, we may be attracting a lot of new readers here, as my sites are like a spider's web of games and interests. There are times when I like to write thoughts for people who stop by and wonder why I cover GURPS and why I consider this game one of the best of all time.

GURPS just slots into anything. While I know Castles & Crusades gets called a "Rosetta Stone" game for any edition of D&D, the real Rosetta Stone game for any setting is actually GURPS. While Castles & Crusades has a modern-pulp game called Amazing Adventures, nothing compares to GURPS and the promise it delivers on:

• Any character.
• Any world.
• Any time.

That last one, any time, is so amazing. Unlike D&D and even Pathfinder 2E, you are limited to one world and a very narrow range of technology. Even if you try to use D&D for a "swashbuckling high seas and pirates" game, you will have characters flinging fireballs and magic missiles, and it will just feel like "a D&D game with pirates." It won't really be anything different than putting pirates in a Forgotten Realms campaign, and you will be back to square one.

Eventually, D&D's meta-setting will creep back into the game, and you will be doing planar travel and leaving those grand-masted pirate ships behind. The entire point of your campaign will be lost. The game's rules are designed for a specific planar progression path, and even these days, extensions such as bastions will hinder you every step of the way. What good is calling your bastion a "pirate fort" if it can never be attacked and destroyed? Who cares about pirates if mind flayers and beholders are sailing around on much-better spell-jammer ships?

In GURPS, I can work with my players to define a game, including the appropriate character types, the technology level of the game, and the campaign's flavor. If there is no magic, there is no magic. If the only way of travel is tall ships, walking, and horses, that is it. If the game focuses on pirates and the navies of early colonial nations, that is the game. If the players are the commanders of a pirate ship, we can use generic NPCs for the crew, and do not need to create every character on the boat.

And I can do all of this with the basic GURPS books, and the extra sourcebooks exist to do more of the work for you in researching the area of interest. You buy a sourcebook, and you now have an "expert resource" to draw from! This makes your period-specific game even more authentic and realistic, and provides suggested ways to handle the different challenges of playing in such a setting. You get setting ideas, character options, history, flavor, settings, special game systems, and adventure suggestions. The book reads like a wealth of information and resources, engaging your mind and sparking excitement about exploring a world like this.

One of the biggest challenges to GURPS is getting fluent enough in the system to "get there." However, the most straightforward approach is to download the free GURPS Lite, invest in a sourcebook, and simply wing it to the best of your ability to start to see if you like it. Yes, you will likely be "playing it wrong," but there is nothing wrong with that! We all start playing any new game completely wrong, and the process of learning something new is fun.

You will be creating basic characters, rolling 3d6 or less, sailing around on pirate ships and having swordfights, firing your flintlock pistols, hearing the roar of the cannons, and completing a sample boarding action to steal the treasure of a corrupt and wealthy merchant king.

Accept that you are doing it wrong, have fun, and use that experience as a springboard to learn different parts of the game that interest you, step by step.

Now compare this with the D&D and 5E models. You want a pirate-themed game! Let's either wait for a Kickstarter project or go search DriveThruRPG for a 5E pirate-themed supplement. If it is a Kickstarter, we are likely waiting a year for fulfillment and out a hundred or more dollars. If we want a hardcover on DriveThruRPG, that is about the same price as these days, given shipping.

Let's say we can find one. Let's hope it is well-researched and generic enough that we can use it for our setting. It may be tied to its own setting and have shark-men or something, which may be cool, but all of a sudden, our historical game is out the window unless we want to limit character options.

Now, let's set up our game. We want a historical game, so here comes the massive list of "no's" in character creation. We need to cut out most of D&D's race and class options just to get something close enough to what we want. None of what remains is a perfect fit for the characters we want, and eliminating certain classes and powers will significantly alter the game and disrupt the balance. D&D will continuously fight us when a character levels up, and you need to tell a player "no" on every option.

D&D's spells and default world model will fight you, too. You need to start banning planar travel spells, all of the gods, healing magic, spells that replace cannons, most of the magic items, various monsters that just don't fit, and the ban lists just go on and on. Just to get a new player into the game will require them to read a list of banned options and items as long as a book report. The game's balance will be broken. It will likely work for the first five levels, and then the game will break apart, and the challenge will be gone, or so impossible that people will wonder why they are playing this freakish mess.

And we don't have ships, cannons, history, a world, ship battle systems, and there is so much else we need to buy or create ourselves. Forget it, let's just play D&D with this set of rules. It is too much work trying to make it do anything else.

It is a lot of work just to play that pirate RPG that you may have seen in a movie and wanted to explore.

Becoming fluent in GURPS, a game that people say is "notoriously complicated" (it really isn't), is far easier than modding even the core books of 5E to do a new idea. D&D is only suitable for D&D. Even teaching GURPS to new players is easier than modding 5E and paying tons of money to Kickstarter books that will never support the simple thing that you want.

I just want to play a pirate! Give me a saber and some daring-do sword fighting skills and acrobatics! Give me a flintlock pistol to fire a single shot off as an attack option! Let me swing on a rope over to the other ship and join the fray! I want to be a pirate!

Okay, D&D says, you are a fighter. Are you wearing plate mail? Because you need plate mail. Even if you are a rogue, are you sneak-attacking? Picking locks? The D&D class abilities are all wrong for this! Nobody wears a plate on these ships; it is too heavy to swim in, and that is certain death by drowning! And don't give the excuse of "well, I have quick-release straps." Good luck with that when you are dropping like the ship's anchor into the cold darkness, and rolling to remove each piece.

Even in 5E, each piece of plate armor would be an action to unhook, with a roll that can fail for each, and that can add up to dozens. The armor is lost forever. If you are wounded, you likely won't even get a few pieces off before you drown. Even healthy people would struggle, and it would be a miracle to survive. You would need to pull off a Houdini-like escape.

In GURPS, here are the handful of skills you need. You have a few ability scores. Over there are your hits and move score. This is how combat, parries, and dodging work. Okay, now you know the game. Here comes a merchant crewperson with a saber. Now you can fight them in one-second combat rounds. Do one thing and don't worry about "action types" or "action economies." What one thing do you do? Close? Do defensive? Draw your flintlock so you can fire next turn? Can you quickdraw your flintlock and fire in the same turn? Do an all-out attack?

All the combat options are built into GURPS' combat system and not hidden in subclass abilities across a dozen classes. They are not hidden in feats. Anyone can accomplish these things if they possess the necessary skill levels. GURPS combat is easier than D&D, since nothing is off-limits and every combat option is universal.

But I have superpower-like abilities in D&D! If that is a part of your game, give casters "magic superpowers" like fire bolts, magic shields, healing hands, and other powers. You don't even need to use the spell and magic system. GURPS does that too. If you want a realistic world with no magic, you can do that too. If you wish to have a special magic system, just a thaumaturgic or shamanistic one, you can do just that, too. You don't have to "take the whole bag" of the D&D spell and magic system.

Becoming fluent in GURPS, which is not particularly difficult, is far easier than modding D&D.

And once you do, you unlock the ability to create any game, in any world, at any point in time. If you want to make "My Favorite Movie: The RPG," you can do that, too, without D&D getting in the way.

So many doors are open to you once you grasp a few simple GURPS concepts. All of these are in the free copy of the GURPS Lite rules.

Playing D&D is like playing a video game.

Playing GURPS is like getting an education and being able to make any video game you can imagine.

Starfield

I have an admission, I just started playing Starfield. Are you this late to the game? Past its first expansion? Past the paid mods? Past the point where all the modders supposedly gave up on the game? Past the point where all the YouTube channels are trying to bury this game with clickbait videos?

Yes, I am that late.

I will avoid all the previews and trailers of movies and wait for the film so I can be surprised. I will not spoil the experience. I'll wait for a game to patch up and "get good" before committing serious time, and I'll avoid the playthrough videos. I will avoid spoilers.

Now I am playing, and for the first few hours, I am enjoying the immersion.

And I know, the game is broken, gets repetitive, has serious flaws, lacks depth, and all of the other things I have heard about it are likely true. The hardened, jaded gamers are probably right on this one, and I will likely end up feeling that way, too, by the end.

But there is one thing I love about this game.

It is the illusion of living in a science-fiction universe.

Granted, I know nothing, and I will eventually see how fake everything is, how this is all a Hollywood stage set, and how this is just a huge ruse and the wool is being pulled over my eyes. You are living an elaborate lie. All these systems are just fake, and you have not hit the grind where you hate everything in this synthetic digital life.

And yes, getting your first starship for free was strange, maybe it was a mod, I don't know. Also, how people immediately trust you and give you jobs and positions of power is also strange, but a game has to be a game, you know. I also have a few mods that liven up travel with POIs and combat encounters, so this will be more like an RPG experience where travel is combat-filled, allows exploration, and is engaging. There will be a lot to do out here.

But I am enjoying this "magic trick" for what it is, for the first few hours that I do not know better, and I am actually in a living, breathing, science fiction universe where I am a tiny person in a sea of stars.

Then I thought of GURPS: Space, since this is totally GURPS: Space. This is what living in a science fiction RPG is like. I don't like the "make it Star Wars" mods for this game, since it's not Star Wars. This is our best example of a generic science fiction universe (minus intelligent alien life) that we can see, explore, and exist inside of. We have human factions, alien monsters, and a mind-boggling number of worlds. We have cities and outposts. There are corporations and space criminals. We have space stations and ships flying around out there in the stars.

Having a living, breathing, visual model of a universe is an inspiration.

This is cool.

Know when inspiration grabs you, since it is the ambrosia and nectar of the gods when it comes to roleplaying and creating universes and adventures. This is what drives us, these magic feelings where we feel anything is possible, and all I need are the tools to express it.

GURPS is the best toolbox in the world to build dreams with.

The Cinematic Campaign

"The 'cinematic' campaign is one where realism doesn’t rule – because if it did, it would constantly get in the way of the story. In a cinematic campaign, swashbuckling heroes can defeat dozens of foes because the story calls for it. Spacecraft whoosh or roar in the silence of space because fast things whoosh and powerful engines roar. Rightness always overrules mere correctness." - GURPS, Basic Set, Campaigns, page 488.

Cinematic here seems to imply "pulp adventure," but in reality, it can refer to any cinematic genre. The rules favor pulp, as it is the best example of a cinematic style, but I argue that any style is a valid one, as long as it is established, adhered to, and agreed upon when the game begins.

If you are playing a GURPS: Back to the Future game, you need that fish-out-of-water, time-travel, slapstick humor level of genre. I usually have three qualifier words to describe my settings, and I stick to those as a universal rule. If something conflicts with a rule, then it "gets in the way of the story" and is changed. In Back to the Future, people aren't getting shot and stabbed, so that does not happen like it would in real life. If it does (in Doc's case), it is the "bullets make someone fall down" sort of moment, like an old-time Western TV show, and it gets later retconned.

However, GURPS gives us the freedom to establish these cinematic parameters and reach an agreement on them before play. Unlike modern "dramatic narrative systems," this is done more traditionally, and the narrative parameters affect every aspect of the game, allowing players and the referee to equally adjust outcomes, actions, and suggestions on what happens next.

In a GURPS: Looney Tunes game, the destructive weapons from ACME, Inc. would not be treated as realistic weapons or devices of destruction. If a player wanted to come up with a slapstick gag of their own, it fit with the theme, and it made people laugh, then let it be.

Since society, for the most part, has lost its imagination (due to the Internet, AI, YouTube, smartphones, and so on), we see newer games go out of their way to replicate a theme through their rules. Games require the "training wheels" of narrative control to establish a theme and tightly control the action through extensive lists of "dos and don'ts," along with mechanical systems, in an attempt to reproduce free-form imagination. In a modern Looney Tunes game, you would likely use a currency of "Looney Points" that allows you to make toon-based special attacks, and have to look through long lists (or desks of cards) of "gags" and "slapstick moments" to throw a pie in someone's face.

You see this in Daggerheart with special attacks from characters needing "hope points" to trigger. The cool attacks, best special moves, and other narrative moments are controlled via in-game currency. In my GURPS: Looney Tunes game, if my fire-breathing dragon has a "fire breath," I buy that as a power, give it a fatigue cost, and we are good. Now, my dragon can breathe in everyone's faces and turn them into a charcoal briquette. Yes, fire breath is a "narrative power," but it is just a power, and we can put any cost on it we want, as long as it fits the theme.

But note this game design strategy. You give up something, your ability to use your special attacks and powers, and give control of that to an in-game system. In GURPS, we are used to "characters being the master of their destinies" and being able to spend FP for powers, and those resources being internal character components. In Daggerheart, we are in narrative game land, and now parts of our characters exist externally and within the current context of a game and session.

Internal versus external designs, make note of this. GURPS primarily relies on the former.

GURPS being GURPS, you could invent a "hope" secondary ability score, start it at zero, and throw points in there on even rolls, give the referee fear on odd rolls, and use it as an alternate fatigue source. Or you could make some abilities "hope-powered" for a -20% modifier to their cost, since this pool controls activation. There, now we have GURPS: Daggerheart.

It is not as elegant or "design slick" as the Darrington Press game, but GURPS exists in a tinkerer's universe, where we love our strange, bolted-on, and hacked-together creations. We are more like coders on this side of the hobby, and we will kludge together rules and subsystems to simulate any experience in our game, since the tools we have been given are amazing and powerful.

Where other games give you these "drag and drop" game creation tools that can't do much beyond what the creator allows, GURPS is more like a full C++ or Java coding environment. GURPS is one of the first "Professional RPG systems," with Champions being the other.

I saw a GURPS Fantasy mod that gave clerics a "healing touch" superpower that cost fatigue instead of using spells. No skill roll needed, no buying spells as skills, just pay the fatigue cost and heal. Is this a valid way to do magic? Shouldn't we be using the systems in the book in the magic chapter, or Dungeon Fantasy spells? This is GURPS. If it works, it is magic. Whatever way you want to do it is right.

Which circles back to cinematic campaigns. We had to go down the "design rabbit hole" to prove a point; any method to get to a desired outcome is valid in GURPS. You can design a magic system a hundred different ways, and as long as it works for you and fits into the game's framework, it is a sound system.

So if you establish your cinematic campaign parameters and use them to move results to "rightness" rather than "correctness," then you are on the right track. In Looney Tunes, if you put your face in front of a pirate cannon, humor will result! You won't be simulating realistic terminal ballistics and rolling tons of damage dice, just say "something silly happens" and make up the funniest result, and move on.

Similarly, if you are playing a GURPS: Rom-Com game, you will abide by the "romantic comedy" cinematic campaign parameters, and everything in the game will be seen through that lens. Don't just think this is for pulp adventures or comedy, GURPS can do it all.

Note the use of the word "lens" here, which is a constructive framework for describing cinematic campaign parameters to players. People understand "we are using a comedic lens" to grasp that concept.

Also, if you are playing a GURPS: Slasher Movie game, you could force everyone to take a "do something stupid" disadvantage, which requires a self-control roll. The Final Girl (or Guy) does not need to take this one, either. Now you will have someone heading down to the basement when the power goes out, looking for the fuse box. Here is a hint: don't always kill off the character who fails this roll. Let them turn the lights back on, make it back upstairs, and kill off a character who was smart and stayed upstairs but wandered off to grab a snack.

That is an example of using the tools GURPS provides to simulate a genre within the design system we were given. The "cinematic parameter" means all but one of the characters at the table must take that "do something stupid" disadvantage. Roll for it, or draw straws. Let players decide how many points they will get for that disadvantage, too, whether they are "slightly stupid" or "completely foolish." If you play this right, the most foolish of the group will be getting everyone else killed, and the players will be rooting for that character to get it next.

In a Rom-Com game, you could use similar disadvantages to shape character actions, and create a pool of character archetypes with templates, such as: the too-cool guy, the wing man/girl, the bestie, the cheerleader, the nerd, the jock, and so on. Yes, they are stereotypes, but they are also genre conventions. In a modern narrative game, they will create these for you and put them on cards for you to use, fill them full of special rules, and invariably sell you more in expansions. In GURPS, we have the tools to do this all for free.

However, we only put in the work when we need to. If we're playing a Rom-Com with these character archetypes, go ahead, put in the work, and make it happen! If all you want to use are "cinematic parameters" to achieve the same effect, that is fine too; save yourself some design work and just get started with those ground rules. If you want to create custom disadvantages with "compulsive behaviors" like jock, cheerleader, and so on, do it that way. When a character has a moment to do something "the most nerd way," and it would make things more difficult or hinder the character (these are still disadvantages), then make a roll when it feels right.

In a way, the default parameters of GURPS are characterized by "hardcore realism," which is how the game earns its reputation. However, the game needs to start from this point to reach every other, and you are often paring back the rules to make things work as you want them to. The game instructs you to do this on page 489, under the rule "Damn the Rules, Full Speed Ahead!" Run a game with wildcard skills (page 175), talents (page 89), and ability scores. Ignore most of the rules and run GURPS Lite combat and skill resolution. Now you have a B/X-style game that is simple, fast, and fun.

You can develop your Rom-Com game the same way: make a list of talents, wildcard skills, archetype disadvantages, and let players throw together characters out of those parts. You do not need to spend a few hours building characters with the character creation tools and worry about buying levels of driving, languages, fashion sense, and computers. Doing this will likely turn players off. If the genre says "simple, archetype characters," then that is how you will play the game and build characters.

Doing things this way also dispels the biggest myths about GURPS: that the game takes forever to create characters, is overly complicated, forces you to sort through hundreds of skills, has complicated combat, and only supports hardcore realism. None of that is true.

Play the game straight from the book, just like it is in 5E? That will happen. But the game goes out of its way to tell us not to do that. Every rule is optional. You build games with these rules. You pick and choose. The game is a toolbox, and you don't always use every tool in the box to do a job. If all you are doing is hanging pictures, all you need is a hammer, perhaps a drill, and a screwdriver for mounting picture studs. Do you need to use the pipe wrench, strap wrench, or blowtorch? For most nails, the hammer will do.

Taking a little care in setting up your game and deciding how you want to play it will make the game more enjoyable to play and share with others.

The Weird Fantasy Genre

With weird fantasy, one of the best games that tries to dive into it is the great Dungeon Crawl Classics game. The dungeon is not supposed to be "the normal," as entering the dungeon is more like Alice stepping into the looking glass. This is the upside-down world, where nothing should work or seem normal, and a place apart from reality, like a near-death perception-altered experience.

D&D 5E turns dungeons into video-game levels, boards in a strategy guide to clear. This comes from D&D 4E, which is why modern Wizards D&D is not D&D. The classic D&D experience is defined by that "Beyond the Looking Glass" dungeon crawl, of a dungeon master using their twisted imagination to create an out-of-body experience in other players' head spaces.

I have had my 5E groups go through a dungeon without fear. All my AD&D groups had fear.

Making D&D into "influencer fantasy" with slavish influencer art and the yoke of nostalgia guts the game's spirit and power. Wall Street has stripped D&D of its identity. D&D 2024 is not D&D. It is a tabletop game influenced by Diablo IV.

Is it fun? Yes. Like a video game is fun.

Dungeon Crawl Classics tries to achieve this by using strange dice and random charts, but the charts ultimately define and limit the experience. True out-of-body existential discovery and horror cannot happen if everyone knows the results on the charts.

The charts will prevent you from truly discovering and realizing what we all once knew with these games in the 1980s. The Satanic Panic happened because more and more people were being enlightened (look up the late-80s enlightenment movements, like crystal therapy, and so on), and AD&D 2nd Edition was created to put the genie back in the bottle. Wall Street stopped mass spiritual enlightenment in 1989 when D&D was at its height of cultural influence.

Note: This is not what I actually believe, but to get in touch with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, this is where your thinking has to go. A game is a game, but many in spiritual movements latched onto AD&D as a transcendental tool. Religious groups responded to this and pushed back. 

To get into the proper gonzo mindset, you must free yourself from the idea that tabletop games are simple replacements for video games (2000-2020) or consumer-driven, identitarian lifestyle gaming (2021-present). When you feel "the game is more than just a game," then you have the proper mindset. 

All that sounds crazy, but trying to understand that concept and theory will put your mind in the correct mode to run weird fantasy games. This is not just a video game with goofy stuff or some superhero power fantasy where you are "meant to kill the monsters." Kitchen sink fantasy, while fun, ultimately leads to "videogame-ism" and puts you into a mindset where you will never reach this higher state of enlightenment.

Wall Street took over D&D and made it "safe" again. Even DCC refuses to go to some places, and keeps itself safe for every audience. The collection of things considered to be in "kitchen sink" fantasy shrinks as controversial topics are bleached from the genre, such as half-races and succubi. And stale and controlled is what most of today's "gonzo fantasy" becomes. It is a commoditized fantasy, featuring goofy elements like silly hats, big mustaches, talking bananas, and strangely drawn art. You get the visuals right, but not the heart and soul.

With kitchen-sink fantasy, I love how familiar it is, but the world it creates feels like any version of D&D. Gonzo goes a step beyond that. For me, it is a starting place, a doorway to that more enlightened, mind-altering, and almost spiritual place. It is the "normal" from which we jump into the "abnormal."

True gonzo fantasy is like stepping through the Looking Glass.

Part of me dislikes the kitchen-sink genre since it leans too hard on D&D's tropes. Our games become nothing more than "D&D simulators" compared to our stories and imagination. Yes, they are D&D simulators coaxed in realism, but GURPS can do so much more than power a simulator.

Shadowdark does a little better, and it "gets" what the dungeon should be, if in an abstract form, where "the dark" is a powerful, evil, irrational metaphysical force that wants to consume the party and all that is good. We are making progress, but we are not yet where we need to be.

However, Shadowdark also begins with a more humanistic and ordinary world. We can't enter an altered state of heightened perception if we start out in that "101 fantasy races eating cupcakes in a town" mess of fantasy art we get in D&D 2024 these days, which looks more like a Target ad than it does D&D art. We must start with a more "our world" humanistic, grounded base to get that stark difference and experience that perception shift.

These people playing as anthropomorphic dragons or gentrified orcs will never experience a heightened reality because identity swapping dulls their experience and senses. You are so focused on your new self that you never see the outside or witness the stark differences between realities. If a human begins to change into a dragon, that is special. Who cares if you get to start as one and be the same as everyone else?

In GURPS, we have tools to help us journey towards true, authentic, pre-1989 weird fantasy thinking. One of the best is GURPS Cabal, designed for more conspiracy-minded campaigns and urban mysteries. But trying to imagine all these strange planes and dimensions intermixing with a medieval world where they don't even know science yet...

They can't even explain combustion or bacteria. How will they understand a strange point in space where two dimensions cross and the rules of how the world works are entirely different in one or more ways? What happens when a figment of a reality comes close to our own and only affects one aspect of mental perception? There could be a place where you try to write in your native language, and all that comes out is strange alien gibberish.

This place will never be explained, and you will never tell the characters the real reason why. They may never figure out the worlds they inhabit. We have enough trouble in this world trying to figure out the unexplained. Imagine a world of myth, trying to make sense of it all.

Of course, players forget history in modern gaming, and fantasy worlds are just Ren Faire-dressed modern worlds. Of course, these worlds have scientific knowledge because ...magic! GURPS players know about and respect Tech Level, so you will find a player base here with a more profound understanding of history and the progression of technology.

Another great resource is GURPS Powers: The Weird, which initially explores the concept of weird science. However, the later chapters touch on topics discussed in the Cabal book and delve into this genre's power types and sources. You get some great power ideas that places, people, or monsters could have, such as illusions that can heal or harm, scale adjustment, and other strange, mind-altering ones that break your perceptions of reality.

Mix all this with GURPS Fantasy (or Dungeon Fantasy), and try introducing "the weird" into a game world. Don't make "everyday magic" a part of the world; keep wizards and other casters mysterious and rare. Magic is not understood, accepted, or a technology metaphor. It is not used in everyday life by everyone. Magic can be feared as "something that steals your soul" - even if you rely on it for convenience. Wizards must keep their work secret for fear that someone may stab them in the back for being a devil worshipper.

Then, introduce the weird.

Make the population fearful. Make the strange happening truly strange and not reproducible by "simple magic." Something else is going on here. You will begin to experience the reality warping sensation of seeing characters deal with something they can't explain, and their players can't either. What do you do next if you can't explain it, dispel it, understand it with divination, go into a dungeon and turn it off, or wish it away? D&D assumes you have perfect knowledge and control of your world, and that everything on the spell and power lists will be able to solve every problem in the universe.

This is how it was with AD&D for us, of which the excellent Adventures Dark and Deep is my stepping stone. When we entered that dungeon as characters, we felt like we were stepping out of this dimension and into another. There was a transcendental experience that was more than playing a video game or running a simulation. The dungeon door was the portal to another universe. Today, the above game carries on that mantle.

GURPS was created in that era. When we played GURPS, we stepped out of this world and into another on a different path, but it was there. This was when we stepped into another world entirely, created using the alchemical parameters of the game, and felt like we were somewhere else. While in AD&D, the dungeon served as a metaphor for moving into another reality, in GURPS, entering a world nobody had ever seen before was referred to as a "dimension shift."

GURPS is the more mind-expanding game, and it doesn't need the dungeon metaphor for the shift.

But you still need to build the grounding metaphors, establish the parts of the everyday world to relate to, and then contrast the differences between the world we perceive and the one we cannot.

Genre and the Centralization of Character

What is a genre? Does character serve genre? Or is it the other way around?

GURPS takes a unique approach, placing the character at the core of the game. Everything in GURPS, including the genre itself, revolves around the character sheet. The core of GURPS is character creation, which is the game's heart.

But aren't other games centered around character creation? Not really. I like GURPS because of the moment when the movie is blurry and the director focuses the lens on the main character in the film—the character. GURPS gives this "deep focus" where the hero is the most important element of the game. Experience, genre, and even the rules of "life" serve the central character concept.

Some games that use a generic-style character creation system tightly tie themselves to the genre and game world. Examples include Runequest, Traveller, and other games that tightly tie the experience to a setting.

GURPS's design has an almost "old school Hollywood" feel. The player is an actor taking a role, and the character on the sheet is the role being played. It doesn't matter if James Earl Jones is playing an evil sorcerer in Conan or a government official in a Tom Clancy movie; he is the player and brings everything he can to each role he takes on. Those two characters are so different, showing the actor's grasp of the role, character, depth, and range of this actor's profession.

Contrast this with modern games, which assume "you are the character" and the rules never allow you to live beyond yourself. Or they enable you to cosplay an internal identity, but it still is you under that face paint and foam rubber facade.

There is a massive difference between costume and make-up, who the character is on the inside, and their life experiences. Many players will say, "A dwarf is someone with a Scottish accent," and stop there. There isn't a life experience; you aren't acting; it is just a silly voice.

In GURPS, the character sheet is the "actor's notes" on who this person is. A part of the experience is living "outside the genre," and the character and how that character is played define the role and go beyond genre. An actor brings so much more to a role than a face and a voice, but the character the actor plays is also "not the actor."

In GURPS, I give myself a kleptomaniac or greedy disadvantage. I may not have a greedy or thieving bone in my body, but as an actor, I need to figure that out and use my life experiences to make this "role" come alive at the table.

That dwarf in GURPS will have a list of advantages and disadvantages outside of that silly accent. He may feel guilt over a loss in his past life. He may hold a grudge. He may have dreams. He likely has deep flaws.

Another troubling part about today's games is that they "sell a life experience" as the game. Life experiences happen outside the game, and they are what you bring to it to enjoy the game better. You end up playing every game with yourself as a character actor, playing yourself. You don't have range; if someone hands you a character sheet with something outside your life experience, you can't play that character.

Even if a game is about a list or a subsystem experience, you still need to bring your "acting chops" to a table and not let the game - or even your own self - define the character you play. That character sheet is the heart of the game; in GURPS, this focus is built into the game.

It's interesting how some games prioritize different elements over the character, like most generic fantasy games, many sci-fi genres, and even some modern Euro-style fantasy games. In these games, the 'lists' they provide are the core experience, and the collection of things 'is' the experience. D&D has embraced this approach, with licensed IPs taking precedence over generic fantasy elements. Mind flayers, beholders, and copyrighted content are featured as the 'bad guys' rather than generic villains like dragons or evil sorcerers. This caters to the players' preferences, but it's important to note that not all list games' are 'generic fantasy.'

This also covers Star Wars, Star Trek, and other sci-fi games that feel more like the 'list' of licensed IP gets put before the character. You play those games to experience the genre simulation. Understanding this variety of game elements can make you a more knowledgeable RPG player or designer. Many GURPS games fail since referees need to convert everything to have a complete experience.

Some games are such vast lists of stuff that it would take decades to convert them all over. Yes, you do not need to convert for a great experience, but there is still that feeling that a phonebook's content needs to be converted to have "all the options."

A mechanical system is built and placed before the characters in some games. In a game like Forbidden Lands, this fantastic "world generation engine" is mixed with preset encounters in the book, creating a dynamic game experience. The characters are the impetus of action and change, but the character sheet is not the "center of the world." You can still bring your "acting gravitas" to a game like this, but the natural appeal of the game is experiencing the "random systems" inside of it and seeing what world it creates for you.

These games aren't bad or wrong; they are just different. Games like The Walking Dead or Twilight: 2000 are incredibly fun, like a hybrid role-playing wargame and board game. They are the closest we can get to having a video game of the experience, and they give us resource subsystems and abstracted mechanics and deliver a more extensive simulation than "just a character."

You can play Twilight: 2000 with GURPS, sure. But the game delivers so much more than just one character. Again, this is a focus thing. Are we more focused on a character or the entire event around them? For some, playing through the whole event without the "character as focus" delivers the experience they want.

We can also borrow these generation systems and play the game using GURPS rules. This works as long as you can define where one game stops and the other begins. You still lose something, but you gain what you like about GURPS.

But there are times when I want my experience to center on that character and how I bring them alive with my ability to translate what is on that sheet, through my life experiences, to a character in the game who is not me.

Most of what is in GURPS, the advantage and disadvantage lists, are things outside my experience, the "not me" things I need to translate to make a character come alive.

This is why when I play a genre with GURPS, I focus more on the character than a generic list of stuff I need to convert over. I drill down on a character; the world and "junk in it" are secondary. I have books with stuff in them that I can use, and all the GURPS sourcebooks provide 90% of what I need. Most of the other 10% is something reskinned and "flavored" as something else. Converting things becomes an impediment to the fun of the game and also does not play into the strength of the system.

GURPS is a system that puts a character sheet first in an infinite plane of blank hexes. How those hexes appear, what is in them, and how you interact with them is the lens that genre and worldbuilding create.

But the character sheet is the pivot point in which everything else revolves.

How You See the World

GURPS is unique in its approach to character development. It starts with an average zero-point character, a ten in every ability, no skills, and the default chance to do everything. This character is a nobody and an everybody, representing the baseline average person. As the game progresses, this character can pick up skills through education and evolve into something more, reflecting the theme of heroism, sacrifice, and the potential to change the world.

GURPS is a very down-to-earth, holistic, almost traditional view of life. It is a game that models the "base character" around us, something very relatable and familiar, and it can model an average life. This is one reason I love GURPS; the default character is not some marketed, overly fantastical CGI hero with artificial power. There is no "level chart" with a pre-programmed track of "amazing powers." The starting zero-point GURPS character is like you and me.

And then something magical happens.

You can be that fantastical hero, that ultimate warrior, or that circus acrobat rogue. You can unlock the secrets of magic or the power of the divine. Slowly, point-by-point, your character becomes more than average and ordinary; your character becomes fantastic. It is not the same "assumed progression" as a level-based game; your mage could veer off into becoming a stealthy rogue for a while. Your bard could don plate mail and become a front-line fighter. Your nature-loving druid could pick up sailing and pirate skills.

GURPS stands out for its organic character development. It does not rely on multiclassing or layering artificial progression tracks. Instead, it allows you to unlock the secrets of power naturally and delve as deep into each one as you desire.

You unlock the secrets of power naturally and explore each one as deeply as you want. With each point spent, you go further in your chosen direction, and it does not even have to be combat or magic. You could become a skilled alchemist, artist, performer, historian, or another role, and your "adventuring abilities" could support that field of study. A long time ago, in the 1980s, someone said this about GURPS, which is still true today:

In GURPS, you can design a scientist character and have them be as fun to play and essential to the party at the table as a fighter.

The old "d20 Star Wars" game was put out by Wizards, and one of the design goals was to make technician and pilot characters "just as fun to play" as combat characters and space wizards. Part of the complaint against many sci-fi games was that "starship crews and technicians were useless" in ground-based adventures, and they had the "Shadowrun hacker problem" of only being useful in a tiny part of the game that sidelined the rest of the party.

Shadowrun and Cyberpunk have had this issue for decades, but they created the problem with lists of programs, such as magic spells and dungeon maps of computer systems, that hackers had to explore in VR. They made a mini-game inside the game for one player.

In GURPS, you can give your scientist or mechanic a few combat skills if you want, and this is if "combat is seen as fun" at your table. If combat isn't fun, you do not need all these combat abilities that d20 games force on you. That 20-sided die has a bloodthirsty legacy, and while this is a strange way to look at the hobby, I get the feeling that a d20 is mainly rolled out of hate and violence. The die is so synonymous with murder-hobo play-styles that entire games are now being designed to "streamline and gamify combat" better than D&D.

Combat in D&D-style games is getting to be like the worst parts of gun culture, fetishizing "what bullet gives the most stopping power and killing potential." Which d20 game makes violence the most enjoyable and "fun?" MCDM RPG eliminates the to-hit roll! Nimble 5E makes combat fast and fun! Tales of the Valiant gives you "luck points" for missing stabbing someone with a knife! Here is your D&D multiclassing optimization build for maximum damage per turn! Fun-death-fun!

Every argument against video games in the 1990s becoming an orgy of death and violence applies to d20 tabletop gaming today.

And they make it worse by gamified violence with abstract mechanics. Some tabletop games will have a "killing spree" mechanic, and it will go too far.

I love my 5E books, but they go too far with the death and violent focus. They are too focused on power. They try to cover it up with happy, colorful, diverse art, but once you lift the veneer, you will find it is stuck on there with the blood of hundreds of monsters, intelligent humanoids, and animals.

But it comes back to that "average Joe or Jane" character I started with. Violence to them is out of the ordinary, shocking, and deadly. It is a last resort. Combat in GURPS is, by default, deadly, so you look for other ways around the problem. This is old-school play more than B/X does old-school play. In GURPS, you can't have a few hundred hit points and laugh off repeated stabs with a knife like in D&D. In B/X, you can have 80-100 hit points and AC of -2 and laugh off dozens of goblins and kobolds. And in 5E, it gets even worse.

Even if you gain much "combat power" in GURPS, you are still rooted in reality. You are good; you can dodge and block many attacks but are not invincible. You still need to be careful. A pile of hit points, AC so high you can't be hit, and an action economy that stacks the deck in your favor will not save you from a lucky shot. One goblin with a lucky strike can take down your 500-point superhero.

You still need to think and role-play, and you still need to approach conflict intelligently. Your non-combat skills are just as necessary as your combat ones, no matter how much combat power you accumulate. In fact, in GURPS, your non-combat skills are often more critical since adventures typically involve solving a series of problems based on real situations.

If you get a scientist or hacker character in a d20 game, that character is seen as "unfun" and "dragging the party down." The character "monopolizes game time in a single-person minigame" or is "only useful once per adventure for a single skill roll."

GURPS lets me create worlds that aren't bloodthirsty d20 slaughterhouses. Breaking away from that mindset is hard, so I picked up an old-school module like Keep on the Borderlands. This adventure feels like a pen-and-paper ARPG, a killing and grind-fest that I remember fondly, but these days, tossing a fireball into a room full of 40 goblins feels more like a war crime than an adventure. I love this module. It is an essential old-school primer written by Gygax himself, but these days, we have adventures that better fit my idea of roleplaying and what I like in a game.

Trying to play old D&D modules with GURPS feels very strange. I feel as if I am taking people from the real world and dropping them into a peculiar "crazy circus of death and looting." It is almost a "wonderland of madness and infinite power gain," sort of a maniac beyond the looking-glass world where death and killing are entirely justified by the acquisition of power and wealth.

Anything is justified to reach the next level, right?

It sounds like something a blood-soaked Mad Hatter would say.

I would roleplay with the orc and goblin tribes, convincing them to leave the area and find a better way of life—to "leave the maze" and settle the land somewhere else. My GURPS playthroughs are strange, alignment-less negotiation sessions in which my heroes aren't the "kill them all" tropes but sensible, pragmatic, what-are-you-doing realists who try to solve the problem there rather than "go through the keyed rooms and gotta kill & loot them all."

If the temple of evil is keeping you here, then help us destroy it. Then, you can be free of this evil prison and forge a (possibly good) life elsewhere.

Again, my characters aren't the B/X or 5E tropes.

They act like real people would. That 10-point every-person comes to mind.

It tells how a game's design and "content" can lock you into a power-hungry and bloodthirsty mindset and behavior. It is also a story of how these companies can lie with art, flowery words, or comfort-food nostalgia. Players have been "killing their way" through Keep on the Borderlands for 50 years!

Why shouldn't I do the same?

Stop.

Why should you?