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 haven’t GURPS’d in quite a few years and I’m having a bit of a mental block while trying to relearn the systems.

The thing is, the very first few pages of the character book define the thesis of the project as it being a preservative effort for the full scope of what story telling through roleplaying is fundamentally, to preserve the explorative experience via defining things in a modular code base.

However, because that code base defines everything: The structures within are very rigid for a roleplaying experience due to the fact that roleplaying lives best within the creativity of improvisation, which rigid structures oft do not allow.

From reading the thesis, having played it myself, and reading other tales I know this is a mental block due to the fact that the actual rigidity and fluidity of the experience is all up to the individual GM.

As a newborn GM that understands the fundamental philosophy, is there any advice that I should take in from the community to enable myself to not get so caught up on… what is essentially “rules lawyering”, so that I can enable and nurture free-thought that is evoked by the systems? I don’t want to use the systems as a prison.

I’m curious when and why you’ve chosen to use GURPS over a bespoke game for a genre or setting, except when it otherwise doesn’t exist. Is it just because of familiarity with the system?

(Eyeing the revised basic set hardcover as a newcomer…)

I'm looking to pick up a physical copy of GURPS Supers. The POD on Amazon is completely black and white. The PDF I own has some color in the headers. Do older copies have any color in them or are they also completely black and white?

I have recently noticed that Unnatural Features comes in levels.

What's the difference between each of the different levels of Unnatural Features?

Does anyone have an example of what "Unnatural Features 1" would look like compared to "Unnatural Features 2"?

I'll be referring to GURPS as "The System" now. Who's with me?

edit: I’ll be willing to compromise with “The RPG formerly known as GURPS.”

(Might be used for the dark magical settings, either as another necromancer device, or other dark or "savage" schools of magic)

Ritual sacrifice engine (Interplanetary): [any], TL2^ Cost: $1M for SM+7 (I'm too lazy to scale the rest)

Instead of fuel, it uses bloody sacrificial rituals, binding the souls of victims to haunt and pull (or push) the ship until they're exhausted and leave this realm.

Once appeared in space, it requires sacrifice of living people equal to amount of cabins in a habitat 1 SM smaller, to reach 0,1g acceleration for 1 hour (meaning getting total delta-v of 2,2 mps). A larger (or smaller) sacrifice will proportionally increase (or decrease) the acceleration throughout these 24 hours, thus also changing the delta-v gain, but no more than 1,5g per engine system! There are no rocket equation bonuses from additional "fuel tanks": the "fuel" mass stays in the ship!

Workspaces are filled by TL-relevant engineers, priests and mediums who command the souls for maneuvering.

Optional rules:

1. Usage of volunteers for sacrifice increases the soul's resource 3 times (to 72 hours), makes the engine system require 1 SM fewer workspaces, and complicates the boarding missions against the ship. ("When country orders us to be the heroes...")

2. At TL6 or above, and +100% cost, and instead of engine, priests may make souls toil the machinery, and serve as TL-appropriate factory unit (and source of 1 Power Point), if sacrificed souls at the moment are worth 1g (scales). Cosmic version uses powerful demons, demigods, especially horrid rituals with no less horrifying price, or something else appropriate in the setting. ("Still better than hell...")

3. The working engine leaves unholy signatures, +4 to detection rolls for observers with supernatural senses, and becoming a Beacon for paranormal encounters. ("Hey Great Judge of the Underworld! You suck!")

4. Light-hearted: It might be suited for using specific animals instead, which increases the system cost and habitat places expenditure by 1 SM. ("And now to marinate all these pigeons for the next year of travel... Trust me, you'll get used.")

5. System might refill or get refilled from the Soulburner reactor.