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.

If a PC makes a roll to fix a machine and fails, should he know that he failed before he even turns the machine on to give it a test run?

I purchased a copy of the new revised edition (digital) and I am wondering am I the only one that while glad they have tried to bring it into the current era I am just not wowing over it. I opened it and get that muuuhhh it’s ok feeling. I don’t feel I have wasted my money because I love the game and I am proud to support the team. I just don’t feel like I would recommend running out and buying it. Not to mention 50 dollars for a reformatted pdf really hurts my soul. I personally don’t like the two column style, well at least it doesn’t pop out to me when I look at it. Maybe I am bias but it just feels like putting lipstick on a pig but putting them back in the barn

Does anyone else have it. Please note I am super thankful to SJGames for the hard-work that has gone into this. I am just not feeling the WOW I was hoping to feel. Just my first impression I don’t hate it but I am not as excited to get a physical copy now

What are your thoughts?

So, I found a bunch of edge cases the process and script missed.

The original workflow was to run a script that Claude created to hyperlink the entire PDF file. Then I would go in and cleanup a bunch of stuff. I would remove all links to page numbers references to other books. I would some errors it made in the Index.

Then I would run a script that would export the location of all the links into a JSON file and then import them back into a clean copy of the SJG PDF.

That worked well, but had some significant manual efforts. Not a ton. Probably 100 edge-case links that needed manual cleanup.

So, I fired up Claude Code and worked on it catching the edge cases and fixing them so I didn't have to. 90 minutes into the process, Claude's script was able to catch all the links and fix them.

At that point, I had a hmm… moment. So, I asked the LLM if it could generate a script. knowing all it knows now to manipulate the PDF directly without needing to use a JSON lookup file. And sure enough, it coughed up a script for me which I spot checked against the PDF, and it seems to work as expected.

The advantages here are:

1. This will work unmodified on future updates of this PDF. We're at version 1.1. When 1.2 or 2.0 comes out, you should be able to run the script against those PDFs without needing to do any additional work.
2. This should work on ANY GURPS PDF. I'll be testing a few more PDFs tomorrow since I bought all the bundles of holding.

I was hoping to post this tonight, but the night got away from me working on this. We'll see what I can come up with tomorrow.

The only thing the script doesn't hyperlink is references to other chapter. Some parts of the book say "See Chapter 2." I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble to add that.

B-Movies are often ripe fodder for... inspiration.

What are some B Movies that have inspired your games?

This one‑shot is a more casual trial session to see whether the campaign and our playstyle feel right for you, and for us to see if you’d fit in with the group. There’s no commitment tied to the one‑shot, but you should still only apply if the idea of joining the full campaign genuinely interests you.

The One-Shot

You are the “Sector 32 Crew,” a group of eclectic friends linked by fortune to work in the same stretch of frozen wasteland some sixty miles outside the mega‑city. The group consists of a demi‑human wolf biologist researching the bizarre interactions between the natural fauna and the area’s supernatural environment; a corporate patrolman who is a Half-Fire Elemental, relegated to this distant outpost for being considered a hothead; an EMS pilot who operates an anti‑grav ambulance and is frequently dispatched to this zone, and who is also secretly a Herald of the goddess Elliphorae with an enigmatic mission; and a dealer and purveyor of supernatural and ancient artifacts who can call upon the Spirits to gain foreknowledge of possible treasures, and whose stomping grounds lie among the many ruins scattered across the sector.

You begin, of all places, at your favorite joint in the city, retelling the strange events you all witnessed yesterday from your own points of view.

Here’s a link to the pre-gen GCS character sheets.

PM me to apply.

The Campaign

Take a look at the Campaign’s Promo for the full details, but as a quick summary:

• We currently have two players from previous campaigns, and we are looking to add 2 or 3 new members to the longer campaign.
• We can have up to 4 new players per one-shot session.
• The timezone is EST (UTC-5). Games are planned for weekly sessions of 4+ hours, either on Saturday or Sunday, usually in the afternoon, depending on the availability of most players.
• Characters start with 150 points, with up to 100 for powers. The disadvantage limit is -50 points, with 5 additional Quirks. However, we will be using 200-point, pre-gen characters for the one-shot.
• Solarok is a near-future (TL9) fantasy world that combines cyberpunk elements with magi-tech and spiritual and divine magic. It will deal mostly with exploration and confronting supernatural problems with technological or power-based solutions.
• You will need the GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Ultra-Tech. GURPS Powers is highly recommended.
• I’ll be using rules from GURPS Martial Arts, options from various GURPS Power-Ups books, and a few Pyramid #3 articles, but you don’t need to have any of those.
• You’ll be given a campaign guide with all the custom rules, additional equipment, guidelines for character creation, and world information. For the one-shot, though, you won’t need to learn anything about the campaign.
• We use Discord for voice and Foundry VTT plus GCS for the game.

IMPORTANT NOTE. Take a good look at the “Major Modifications” section of the promo. This is not your standard GURPS ruleset. Take a quick look at the homebrew Mental Health rules and make sure nothing there is a deal-breaker.

This is going to get nerdy, so bear with me.

I've spent the last 2 days adding hyperlinks to the GURPS 4E Revised PDF so that all the page number references are now hyperlinks that will take you to that page in the PDF.

Full disclosure – I did this with the help of the Claude LLM. There were close to **THREE THOUSAND** page references, so doing it by hand was not a job I could undertake. But it's something I wanted. I did some by hand, and spent a lot of time cleaning up what the LLM did for me until I got to a point where I think 100% of the hyperlinks work properly now.

A hyperlinked PDF is something I woule love to share with the community, but the PDF is obviously copyrighted, so I can't just put it up somewhere without violating US copyright law and impacting SJG bottom line.

But luckily, PDF is well known format and you can manipulate them using scripts. So, with the help of Claude, I found a way to make this a DIY project.

I spent a lot of time manually cleaning up page references that pointed to another book, and fixing page references the LLM chose not to hyperlink for some reason.

I have a JSON lookup table that lists all the pages that need hyperlinks and the text that needs to get hyperlink. Sometimes the lookup text will just be (p. 22) and sometimes the text will contain a word or two prior to the page number if the same page number is mentioned more than once on the page. So the lookup table may have see Animal Empathy (P. xxx) I spent a lot of time manually cleaning up page references that pointed to another book, and fixing page references the LLM chose not to hyperlink for some reason. As far as I can tell, the JSON is complete and it doesn't contain enough text to be a copyright violation.

The JSON completely skips the Table of Contents (since it's already hyperlinked) and it completely skips the top of Page 1 (Unification), since that talks about how the book got organized, and it's reference to page numbers is not relavent to the rules.

So, using an LLM generated script, the JSON file and your legally obtained PDF from Steve Jackson Games, you can use the script to hyperlink it.

So my question is, is there interest in this script to make your legal PDF hyperlinked, or am I going to get a bunch of "take your AI slop and go elsewhere" messages? I don't want to share this if it's just going to lead a constant stream of negative Karma and negative comments.

The script tells me there are 2,847 page references in the book, not including the table of contents. If SJG had hyperlinked this by hand in Adobe InDesign that would have been a massive amount of work.

Some notes about the script:

• This will only work on verson 1.1 of the PDF, which is the current version as of the day of this post. If a new version comes out, I'd need to test it to see if any text got moved around. But testing 2847 page references to see if anything broke is a massive effort. So, don't expect a quick turnaround on any future PDF updates from SJG
• I'm pretty sure I am not violating SJG copyright here, but IANAL. I don't think 2 word snippets linked to a page number inside a JSON file is a copyright violation.
• The script completely ignores ther Table of Contents, since that's already hyperlinked.
• Any page number references to an external book have been cleaned up and removed. So, if you click on a page number and it goes nowhere check the text in front of it to make sure it doesn't name another book.
• You need to be pretty geeky to run this thing. You need to install python and install the PyMuPDF module for it. I'm on a Mac and can probabaly write some Mac-specific documentation. But I don't have a Windows machine, so I can't write Windows documentation.
• I might be able to provide some support for Mac users. But I would need support to be a crowdsourced effort for Windows users.
• I would LOVE bug reports of links that are missing and not working.

So, let me know if you're interested in seeing this thing.

A player I am helping build a caster for a campaign using the Sorcery rules (idk if that matters here). And they wanted a power like Frieren, who can conceal her mana levels from people who could scan for that. I was wondering two things; 1) how to do that and 2) is it actually worth the effort?

My best bet was Invisibility for Detect but that sounds weird

As it says on the tin, for the 4th edition of GURPS, what books/suppliments would be recommended to grab, outside of the core books of course?