This is a monthly r/GURPS thread for anything and everything related to your own campaigns. Tell us how you and your friends are making out. Update us on the progress of your game. Tell us about any issues you've run into and maybe we can help. Make suggestions for other players and GMs.

This is a monthly r/GURPS thread for anything and everything related to your own campaigns. Tell us how you and your friends are making out. Update us on the progress of your game. Tell us about any issues you've run into and maybe we can help. Make suggestions for other players and GMs.

I designed a multiversal adventure made of 5 encounters, each set in a different RPG IP, but entirely playable with GURPS 3E. Designed for 4 players with 300-point characters, and it culminates in a final battle against Vecna (AD&D Ravenloft version). Vampire: The Masquerade — The Wolfsbane Sabbat Pack The characters find themselves on an abandoned American highway at night, where they encounter the Wolfsbane pack: a Sabbat biker war pack that once even killed a Garou. The fight takes place between an abandoned gas station and a deserted 90s diner. Real weapons, Harley-Davidsons, no theatrics — gritty, gothic, and brutal. Shadowrun — Typhon Zero, Artificial Drake From asphalt to rain-slick neon. On top of the Keiji-Macrotech Arcology in Seattle, the PCs confront Typhon Zero: an artificial drake, technomancer, and master of drones, surveillance systems, and urban networks. He hacks movement, vision, and perception, turning the environment itself into a weapon. Warhammer Fantasy — Count Sigismund, Champion of Slaanesh The portal opens in an Imperial noble estate. No spikes, no chaos symbols — just a dignified country manor. But in the ballroom, the Count dons his Slaanesh regalia, revealing an unnervingly beautiful and deadly warrior. His weapon overwhelms the senses, turning combat into a seductive and horrifying ordeal. Lex Arcana — Decio Varrone, Augur of Hecate In southern Magna Graecia, atop a coastal hill, stands a weathered Roman-Greek shrine to Hecate. Decio Varrone does not fight with steel but with fate, insight, and denial. Three elite gladiators defend the sacred ground, and when it is profaned, the Canis Nigris—an ominous ritual manifestation—intervenes. This is not just physical combat, but a test of will, intuition, and destiny. AD&D / Ravenloft — Vecna, the Demi-Lich of Secrets Final portal: Cavitius. A petrified fortress shaped like a cracked skull, floating in a desert of ash. Whispering corridors of bone, stagnant air, warped time. Vecna waits — not as a boss, but as a consequence. The last battle is not merely survival; it is what remains of you afterward.

I’ve prepared the antagonist stat blocks and the descriptions of the locations where the encounters take place. I don’t own any Shadowrun material, but I was able to find enough information online to run that scene properly. More than a traditional adventure, this is structured as a sequence of encounters — I ran something similar many years ago.

I’m running it for two different groups, and I plan to reuse it at least a couple more times. I’m open to any suggestions on how to manage or improve this “encounter-based adventure.” I’m also considering hiding an item or resource in each scenario — something the players can discover and claim. If they manage to collect them, these rewards will grant an advantage in the final confrontation with Vecna.

I’d love suggestions on what kind of items or resources I could place in each setting — something thematic, useful, and tied to the encounter, but especially helpful against Vecna at the end.
Player characters can be freely created, but they must be “good-aligned” protagonists.

I dont really understand repeated attempts. Lets say that im foraging or searching or picking a lock, am I allowed as many attempts as I want? That seems like Id always succeed given enough time. I know the campaign book says I have to wait to try again and the next try has a penalty, but how long do I have to wait?

Em um jogo de gurps supers, é possivel psquismo, pode-se utilizar quem tenha o poder de teleporte, utilizar o nh na pericia no lugar da esquiva ao se defender de um ataque?

So, running a SW fantasy campaign now (in the world of Terrinoth; not a super fan of Genesys, so that's why the conversion, but I like the world). Finished the third session recently. Premise is that the PC's land was overrun by giants; they are leading the efforts to retake the land. For lack of a better term, characters are rather social-leaning (though they have other skills). One is a noble with thieving skills, one is an old man merchant magnate with high influence, and one is a druid (which is a major organized religion in the setting).

My issue is, in the current game, SW really only has, at best, three social skills (Persuasion, Intimidation and Taunt). This is okay for what SW is tuned for - action adventure games. However, this game has become strongly more social/politics/war game, and while I thought SW could handle it (I think the mass combat rules are pretty good), it does not, at least, not satisfyingly for me, as the GM. I also find the dice a bit swingier than I'd like: fun for players when they roll and it explodes, but hard on GM planning. So missing that sweet bell curve.

I'm thinking of migrating the game to GURPS 4e, and have a few questions; especially helpful if people know both systems!

1. How to model the Druid? One of his "schticks" is that he often shapshifts (though 99% into birds to do recon). I can model this with the Shapeshift advantage at 15 points, but that only covers one animal, right? He shapeshifted with a spell in SW that let him, up to a certain point, shift into many different things. Is there a spell in Magic that would do it? Or bite the bullet and give them enough points so he'll have the 100 he needs for the Morph version of Shapeshifting? Also, regular spell casting (my current idea, using Power Investiture) or Advantages as Magic (though that means less overall flexibility I'd imagine)? Could also use the Powers: Divine Favor splat (I have it in PDF but have obviously never used it).

2. How many points? Characters started at Seasoned, and are halfway to Veteran status in SW terms. 300 points? Keep in mind, another reason I want to do this in GURPS is for detail - for example, they'll need to buy some combination of noble rank, administrative rank, merchant rank, and religious rank to cover who they are.

3. The merchant player has invested in the Connections edge in SW: he's in contact with a group of Dwarven weaponsmiths as part of his business. I assume Group Contacts or Group Allies?

4. We played out the whole group has contact with a city theives guild; the guild has given them some toughs to escort them around. They also made contact with a mercenary army that's given them around 150 soldiers as their "own" troops (tied officially to the noble in the party). I'd obviously give these as a "free" advantage to the group as part of their points. How? Again Ally or Contact Groups?

Everything else I can handle without much thought, but these are vexing me a little. I've run GURPS 4e in the past, but the last time was maybe 5 years ago, so I have to blow the dust off my knowledge and relearn some things.

For books, I plan to use the Basic Set, Mass Combat and Social Engineering. I have PDFs of Magic and Divine Favor, as mentioned above. Folks? Ideas and suggestions?

Looking around to see if anyone knows of any resources that could save me some time in making a Zombies at my Neighbors setting/game.

Basically Kids with kid like skills, baseball bats, soda, and water guns esthetic fighting off novelty monsters.

Current plan is to just reskin some skill/advantages/weapons but if there is something close out there would save me a lot of time.

Ok, I’ve never played a ttrpg like Gurps or d&d ever in my life. However, in the last couple of weeks, I found Gurps and did a little bit of research. From the amazing amount of feedback I’ve received here on Reddit, I decided to purchase these 3 books: Basic Characters and Basic Campaigns 4th Edition. And I also decided to purchase How to be a GM 4th Edition.

So, as I said, I’ve never played a ttrpg before. Without having said experience, can I still perform as a GM? Is it possible for someone totally new to ttrpg, with these 3 books, to be an interesting GM?

Or, should I get my feet wet and try to find my first game as a player?

Sidenote: I don’t know anyone irl. I had planned on doing all my venturing online.

And with that being said, I have been invited to a private Gurps discord, but I don’t think it’s the actual Gurps discord. If anyone could help me with a link to official Gurps discord, I would appreciate it very kindly.

I appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks.

Lets say a party stumbles upon a hut in the savanna, folks inside are asleep. The party wants to attempt to block the door somehow and light the hut on fire.
As a GM how do you handle that? Do you ask how they do it?
What checks do you roll? What rules do you consult?

Thanks

(Here is video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHnrYCqlv9k )

Mathematics is a language that describes reality and the universe. And since the nature of reality is shocking in cosmic horror, the logical conclusion is that studying it can lead to madness. The motif „magic, if it works, is really mathematics and physics, the understanding of which exceeds the human mind” appears in Lovecraft, for example in „Dreams in the Witch House”. This usually works on the principle that the Necromicon and other „books of magic” contain scraps of advanced knowledge obtained from inhuman beings, which superstitious sorcerers then treat as magic. Therefore, it should also work the other way round – a professional scientist should be able to discover dirty and blasphemous secrets through scientific research. Here are some viable candidates for „scholars who looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into them.”

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) – Austrian-American mathematician, physicist and philosopher. He dealt with, among others, theory of relativity (which in itself negates the image of the world that „common sense” dictates to us), deriving from it equations intended to prove the possibility of time travel. Towards the end of his life he went crazy, among other things. believing someone was trying to poison him. When his wife was hospitalized for a long time and was unable to taste his meals to prove the lack of poison, Gödel starved himself to death.

Georg Cantor (1845-1918) – German mathematician, creator of set theory. Over time, he delved deeper into mysticism and claimed that mathematics could be used to reach conclusions about metaphysics. Some Christian (Cantor himself considered himself a devout Christian) philosophers of his time claimed that Cantor’s mathematical theories were contrary to religious dogmas (it was something about proving the existence of an infinite being, other than God – I am not a mathematician, I don’t really understand what is going on). Cantor was tormented by bouts of depression, sometimes so severe that they led to hospitalization.

Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) – Austrian physicist, pioneer of the kinetic theory of gases. He theorized the “Boltzmann brain” – a hypothetical self-aware entity that emerges from chaos through random fluctuations. Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world arose from a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. He committed suicide by hanging. „If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is the result of random fluctuation, and it is much less likely to be so than a level of organization that produces only self-aware self-aware entities, then in any universe with the level of organization we see, there should be a huge number of solitary Boltzmann brains floating in unrecognized environments. In an infinite universe, the number of self-aware brains spontaneously, randomly emerging from chaos, along with false memories of life like ours, should far outweigh the number of real brains evolved in the observable universe, arising from unimaginably rare fluctuations”. Did I understand it? Not really, but it sounds quite Lovecraftian – self-aware beings emerging from chaos, our world as a result of random processes taking place in the „higher” universe… it’s easy to spin a cosmic horror out of it. And let's theorize that Boltzmann’s suicide was due to the terrifying conclusions he had reached…

Paul Ehrenfest (1880-1930) – Austrian-Dutch physicist. He researched the theory of relativity (which, as I mentioned, very often leads to „crazy” conclusions about the nature of reality) and laid the foundations for quantum physics (which is even crazier). Towards the end of his life, he fell into severe depression and shot first his son and then himself.

Grigory Perelman (1966) – the only still living member of this group, a Russian mathematician. He had a brilliant career in Russia and the USA. His greatest achievement was presenting evidence for the so-called Poincaré’s hypothesis regarding the shape of the universe. Unexpectedly, in 2005 he left his job and broke off all contacts with the scientific community… And not only that – he stopped leaving his apartment, communicating only by phone or through the door. He consistently rejects all job offers and awards (including the Millennium Award worth one million dollars!).

Each of these gentlemen (except Perelman) lived at the turn of the 20th and 19th centuries. Each of them can be used in the scenario – either as a living and active NPC, as a dead source of knowledge (in the form of unpublished notes containing mythical secrets), or as a background reference („Don’t think about it, Professor X conducted research in this direction… and how did he end up?).

This is just small part of the full, free brochure full of Lovecraftian inspirations from the real life, science, history and culture: https://adeptus7.itch.io/lovecraftian-inspirations-from-real-life-and-beliefs

This was originally a reply to this post, asking how to build a specific monster.

Polycephalic Manticore

Point Total [63]

Attributes:

ST 17 (No Fine Manipulators -40%, Size -10%) [35], DX 13 (No Fine Manipulators -40%) [36], IQ 4 [-120], HT 11 [10]

HP 17 [0], Will 11 [35], Per 12 [40], FP 11 [0]

B. Speed 6 [0], B. Move 10 [20], Dodge 10, B. Lift 58, EHE 578

SM +1, Weight 600 lbs., Length 10.2 ft.

Advantages: Acute Hearing 3 [6], Acute Taste and Smell 1 (Smell Only -50%) [1], Claws (Sharp Claws) [5], Combat Reflexes [15], Discriminatory Smell [15], DR 1 (Tough Skin -40%) [3], Expanded Litter 3 [3], Extra Attack 1 [25], Extra Head 1 [15], Extra Legs (Four Legs) [5], Fur [1], Illumination [1], Impaling Striker (Stinger, Cannot Parry -40%, Limited Arc (Straight Ahead) -40%) [2], Night Vision 5 [5], Silence 3 [15], Teeth (Fangs) [2], Temperature Tolerance 1 [1], Toxic Attack 1d (Cyclic (Halted with Physician roll, 10 second interval, 7 cycles, Resistible) +150%, Follow-Up (Stinger) +0%, Resistible (HT-4) -10%) [10].

Disadvantages: Cannot Speak [-15], Hidebound [-5], Horizontal [-10], No Fine Manipulators [-30], Restricted Diet (Obligate carnivore) [-10], Short Lifespan 2.5 (12-15 years) [-25], Social Stigma (Monster) [-15], Wealth (Dead Broke) [-25]

Features: Taboo Trait (Fixed IQ) [0]

Skills: Brawling-15 DX/E [4], Stealth-13 DX/A [2], Survival-12 Per/A [2], Swimming-13 HT/E [4].

~

Note: The ST, HP, SM, weight, and length values are all based off the assumption that it's the size of an average tiger; increase or decrease these as desired. Consult this table for HP/weight relationships.

So our group is about to try some sort of monster dungeon campaign. I got a radomly generated image of a creature that I'm trying to work on developing. Its a two-headed quadraped like a cat/canine with a scorpion tail and some sorts of glowing stripe markings.

Beyond Quadraped is there templates out there that are having two head and the scorpion tail?