News · Books · Pyramid · 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 . . .

Here are the last 15 GURPS supplements (including reprints and new editions) we have released, either in print or via e23. Click on a cover to go to that product's page.

Hazy Shade of 2011

Ah, winter . . . season of short days, long nights, and icy winds (at least my pals in Brazil get nice weather this time of year). Here we are at the end of 2011 – er, start of 2012 – looking back on the merely cool autumn. "Yeah, but what's new and what's coming?", you might ask. I'll begin with GURPS releases since my September update, specifically the latest e23 originals:

• The big news of the quarter was Bill Stoddard's Social Engineering, which offers something that a lot of RPGs kind of gloss over: detailed rules for social interaction. This is not a "social combat system"; we favored a task-based approach over Just Another Kind Of Fightin'.
• You could regard Transhuman Space: Martial Arts 2100, by Phil Masters, as support for the Transhuman Space setting or as a Martial Arts follow-up. Either way, you get futuristic ways of booting people in the head.
• Over in the Low-Tech series, there's Low-Tech: Instant Armor, by Dan Howard. If you would rather buy your armor off a list than work it out by cross-indexing armor type with body part and then checking for special exceptions, you'll love this thing.
• That Sean Punch guy added another volume to the Power-Ups series: Power-Ups 3: Talents. Finally, you can get all the Talents in one place, along with a few new ones and some optional rules.

Also, while it isn't precisely new, GURPS Character Assistant was updated on December 13, 2011. If you don't already have the official software for creating GURPS characters, now would be a good time to get it.

While we're discussing old standbys made new, I'll note that we didn't forget the classics. We delivered PDF versions of Third Edition publications for every part of GURPS that has a "Classic" imprint:

• GURPS Classic: Faerie and Shapeshifters.
• GURPS Traveller Classic: Sword Worlds.
• GURPS WWII Classic: Hand of Steel and Return to Honor. With that, all of the former print products in the series are available as PDF.
• Transhuman Space Classic: Orbital Decay . . . marking the final conversion from print to PDF in this series, too!

And then there's Pyramid, which kept up its monthly pace even when that meant poor Steven Marsh staying up all night, pulling his hair out:

• Pyramid #3/36: Dungeon Fantasy (October 2011) is our first all-Dungeon Fantasy issue, dragging gunpowder, horror, and many other themes into the dungeon.
• Pyramid #3/37: Tech and Toys II (November 2011) supports Ultra-Tech with additional rules for computers, weapons, robots, repairs, and more.
• Pyramid #3/38: The Power of Myth (December 2011) looks at the big picture, providing practical advice on using prophecy, creation myths, gods, and all that good stuff in your campaign.

The previous list comes with my usual postscript, which is that Pyramid is a periodical but doesn't have the limited run of a paper magazine. It's a series of ultra-short worldbooks and genre books for GURPS. While you can subscribe, that isn't necessary. Each issue is a permanent addition to the GURPS line.

Indeed, all of our PDFs are always available at e23! However, that doesn't mean we don't occasionally publish on paper. For instance, GURPS Tactical Shooting, by Hans-Christian Vortisch, is now out in softcover. It probably isn't thick enough to stop bullets, but it's definitely the place to look if you want to know what common household items will stop bullets. Depending on your household, you may find the firearms and tactics useful as well.

With the news out of the way, it's time for the weather report – that is, crazy predictions. Everything on this final list is guesswork. Oh, it's informed guesswork, but playtesters ask for revisions, titles change, and schedules get shuffled. Such is publishing! Bearing that in mind, here are some things we're working on:

• Pyramid is always a safe bet . . . as long as you keep buying it!
• Dungeon Fantasy is going strong, and you should see Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon (by Matt Riggsby) and Dungeon Fantasy 15 (by Peter V. Dell'Orto and y.t.) before too long. The first is in prepress, which the second just entered the production process.
• Two new entries in the Power-Ups series (Power-Ups 4 and Power-Ups 5) are in rough PDF form as I write, and should show up in early 2012 barring utter disaster.
• For those who like pre-made places, we have three Locations manuscripts in the machine – one in PDF form and awaiting art, the second in editing, and the third in our review process – as well as a Hot Spots draft in editing.
• Jason "PK" Levine is hard at work on a new genre treatment in the vein of Action, Dungeon Fantasy, and Monster Hunters.
• There's still more Transhuman Space material in the editing process.
• Ultra-Tech: Weapon Tables (to accompany Ultra-Tech) and that short freebie that Jason "PK" Levine is updating from Third Edition to Fourth Edition both remain in the pipeline. Yes, for another quarter. There really, truly has been progress, though.

I'm leaving out everything that isn't at least as far along as editing, because it's all far enough out that mentioning it would be unwise. That said, at least a dozen projects are past the outline stage, in the works, and not covered by anything I've said so far. Those who like to sniff out hints should watch the GURPS thread in my blog, which I update Friday evenings. I've been known to give out clues there!

Would-be writers, meanwhile, should check out the Pyramid Wish List (updated November 17, 2011) and the e23 Wish List (updated November 4, 2011). Then download the GURPS formatting guide and WYSIWYG template. After that, start working on a query. All that stuff up there . . . it only sounds like a lot. We always need more!

– Sean Punch