GURPS - Generic Universal RolePlaying System

GURPS High-Tech
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GURPS Martial Arts
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GURPS Supers
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GURPS Ultra-Tech
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GURPS Powers
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News · Books · Resources & Play Aids · Creator Support · Fourth Edition FAQ

Welcome to the Generic Universal RolePlaying System!

With GURPS, you can be anyone you want - an elf hero fighting for the forces of good, a shadowy femme fatale on a deep-cover mission, a futuristic swashbuckler carving up foes with a force sword in his hand and a beautiful woman by his side . . . or literally anything else! GURPS has been the premiere universal roleplaying game for almost two decades. The new Fourth Edition makes it even better!

More than 1,500,000 copies are in print - not counting foreign editions. GURPS Lite, a 32-page distillation of the basic GURPS rules, is available for free download. We also have dozens of GURPS adventures and e-books available on e23.

Whatever your favorite roleplaying genre might be, GURPS can handle it. More about GURPS...

New GURPS Releases

Here are the last ten GURPS books (both new titles and reprints/revisions) we have shipped. Click on a cover to go to that book's page.

GURPS Thaumatology GURPS Spaceships GURPS High-Tech GURPS Supers GURPS Martial Arts
GURPS Powers GURPS Ultra-Tech Transhuman Space: Changing Times GURPS Mysteries GURPS Campaigns

Here are the last ten GURPS supplements released on e23. Click on a cover to go to that item's page.

GURPS Infinite Worlds: Collegio Januari GURPS High-Tech: Pulp Guns 1 GURPS Black Ops GURPS Places of Mystery GURPS Power-Ups 1: Imbuements
GURPS Cabal GURPS Spaceships 2: Traders, Liners, and Transports GURPS Alternate Earths GURPS Celtic Myth GURPS In Nomine

GURPS News

The March of progress . . .

The big news of February 2008 was the long-awaited release of Basic Set: Characters in PDF form. No longer will you have to hide a hefty hardback from the boss when creating characters at work! Other PDF releases in February were two 4e originals – Creatures of the Night 3 and Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level – and a 3e classic, Transhuman Space: Spacecraft of the Solar System.

We hope to sustain the pace of PDF releases in March, and so far we're making excellent progress. Within the first week of the month, we released both Phil Masters' Infinite Worlds: Britannica-6 and a PDF edition of the GM's Screen. Dungeon Fantasy 4 is slated for later in the month. We'll close out March with – wait for it! – a PDF version of Basic Set: Campaigns.

Thus, we've continued to meet our goal of having one original GURPS release each month and two for most months. This comes at the cost of red eyes and cramped fingers, but it's a good burn.

All signs point to being able to keep our promise in the future, too – we have many projects in the pipeline. Spaceships 2: Traders, Liners, and Transports is edited and in layout, and will have all the rules you need to include business and finances in your Space campaign. Both volumes of Hans-Christian Vortisch's High-Tech: Pulp Guns are in playtest. And we'll see more Creatures of the Night and Dungeon Fantasy PDFs, too . . . at least two more of each of those are in the works.

Don't worry – we haven't forgotten about hardbacks. Thaumatology is announced for June, and speaking as its editor, I promise you that it will do for magic what Powers did for powers and Martial Arts did for combat. We have at least one more hardback in progress for 2008, and I'll go out on a limb and mention that we're also working on contracts for an important new hardback for 2009. Of course, I can't name either of these just yet . . .

To keep the pipeline full, we continue to update our Wish List. Preapproved outlines for the Agencies and Disasters series are already in house and queued up to go on the list. More are in the works. Now there's no excuse not to write those short supplements on No Such Agency and the zombie apocalypse, is there? Is there?

What About All My Third Edition Books?

We know that our fans have a significant investment in the Third Edition of GURPS. One of our goals in the Fourth Edition design process was to make sure that your entire library would not become obsolete overnight.

While the new edition is different, it's still GURPS. Many Third Edition books will be good to go for Fourth Edition play with a minimum of conversion – and a conversion guide is available here. Most of the information in our typical worldbook or sourcebook – the thorough historical research, the detailed setting descriptions, the roleplaying advice for both players and referees – is usable with any other game system. That's still true now that the "other game system" we're talking about is GURPS Fourth Edition.

Of course, the very "crunchy" rulebooks, such as the old GURPS Basic Set itself, the two GURPS Compendium volumes, and GURPS Vehicles, are outdated. There's no way around that; that's the point of a new edition.

But most of the collection will still be completely useful. See this ludography for a more detailed list of Third Edition books that are easy to use with GURPS Fourth Edition – and still in print!

Fourth Edition Products

Here's a list of Fourth Edition products we've already released, through first quarter 2008.

  • GURPS Basic Set: Characters covers everything you need to know to create a character in GURPS Fourth Edition.
  • GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns is the GURPS Fourth Edition GM's best resource for planning and running games.
  • GURPS Lite is a 32-page distillation of the basic GURPS rules.
  • GURPS Update is the official conversion guide from Third Edition to Fourth Edition.
  • GURPS GM's Screen. Four-panel cardboard screen with GURPS Lite and 48-page GURPS Fourth Edition insert of conversion notes, charts, forms, and tables.
  • GURPS Fantasy, by William H. Stoddard. This book is all you need to build a fantasy game of any type, whether your model is Tolkien, Jordan, or Leiber.
  • GURPS Magic. Hundreds of spells for GURPS Fourth Edition, including almost everything from the old GURPS Magic and GURPS Grimoire, plus dozens of entirely new spells!
  • GURPS Infinite Worlds, the first core setting for GURPS! Jump between timelines and explore weird alternate Earths!
  • GURPS Mysteries, a downloadable product from e23, is designed both for the GM who wants to create and run mystery adventures and for players who want to create and portray more effective investigators in any setting.
  • GURPS Casey & Andy, a downloadable product from e23, is a setting book of comic-book mad science and diabolical plots.
  • GURPS Character Assistant is the new, improved computer application for generating characters.
  • GURPS Banestorm brings the world of Yrth into the Fourth Edition, updating the background and expanding it to 240 full-color pages.
  • GURPS Powers is the ultimate creation guide for superhuman characters with every kind of amazing, off-the-chart superpower you can imagine . . . all the way up to gods!
  • GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars, the Fourth Edition corebook for GURPS Traveller, encompasses a whole new time period in the Traveller universe.
  • GURPS Lands Out of Time, a downloadable product from e23, explores everything you need to, er, explore worlds with humans and dinosaurs together.
  • GURPS Space is the Fourth Edition tool kit for creating space campaign settings.
  • GURPS Bio-Tech revises the technology from GURPS Bio-Tech for Third Edition, and collects material from Transhuman Space, GURPS Ultra-Tech 1, and GURPS Ultra-Tech 2.
  • GURPS Changing Times updates Transhuman Space to Fourth Edition.
  • GURPS Ultra-Tech pulls together the best of the "tech book" classics from David Pulver, and updates them for Fourth Edition.
  • GURPS Martial Arts updates the Third Edition book of the same name with dozens of new techniques and styles . . . plus an entire chapter of expanded combat rules. This one busts out of the normal GURPS format to 256 pages!
  • GURPS Spaceships is a completely new design system for ships, allowing GMs to create SF vehicles in minutes!
  • GURPS High-Tech is the comprehensive catalog of modern era guns and gear.
  • e23 also has Fourth Edition support, including the ever-popular GURPS Magic Spell Charts.

Future Releases

As time goes on, we'll be announcing GURPS Fourth Edition releases that don't yet have a definite spot on the schedule:

What Else Is New?

GURPS in Other Languages

GURPS isn't just in English. Here's the current status of our translation projects:

Japanese – The Basic Set: Characters was released in the summer of 2005 from Kadokawa Publishing, and other releases are following. Kadokawa released a number of Third Edition books, including several excellent original backgrounds.

Korean – Dayspring Games was the first overseas publisher to translate the new edition of the Basic Set, and releases continue.

Portuguese – Devir Livraria, in Brazil, is our oldest licensor, and their translation of the Basic Set will appear soon.

We have no translation agreements for other languages . . . yet . . .

I've Got More Questions . . .

And we've got answers, we hope. Please see our list of Frequently Asked Questions first. We will do Pyramid chats to discuss the new edition, and staffers frequently participate in the discussions on our forums. If you're not a Pyramid subscriber, the new GURPS pages have a lot of information, and we'll be adding more . . . lots more . . .

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