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

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

Better Late Than Never in 2010

Darn. After bringing you timely updates for two straight years, I missed the last quarter of 2009 and skipped right to February 2010. Sorry about that! In my defense, I was editing Low-Tech and Low-Tech Companion 1-3. That's over 216,000 words on historical technology . . . full of costs, weights, and stats that have to be just so . . . with tons of tables to format, dates to check, and art references to get right. An editor can get sidetracked when dealing with such stuff.

Right, right – that's what I was doing. But what came out for GURPS from October 2009 to February 2010? Here's the exhaustive list from e23:

• David Pulver's Spaceships series grew by leaps and bounds, with Spaceships 5: Exploration and Colony Spacecraft, Spaceships 6: Mining and Industrial Spacecraft, and Spaceships 7: Divergent and Paranormal Tech. The titles are self-explanatory, but fans of mixing fantasy with spaceflight might be interested to know that they could do their thing with just Spaceships 1 and Spaceships 7.
• The Dungeon Fantasy series saw quite a bit of action, too. Phil Masters' Dungeon Fantasy 7: Clerics makes clerics less generic and more specialized to particular deities. Matt Riggsby's Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables is a monument to old-school random treasure generation. And Dungeon Fantasy 9: Summoners, also by Phil Masters, presents four new character archetypes whose shtick is conjuring up "pets." (Who am I kidding? I mean demons, undead, etc.)
• Infinite Worlds: I.S.T., by Steve Kenson and Kenneth Hite, is a freebie that updates the old I.S.T. supers setting for use in the Infinite Worlds meta-setting.*
• Range Ruler, from T Bone, is another freebie. Specifically, it's a spiffy game aid for those who like to fight their GURPS battles on combat maps.*
• William H. Stoddard's Thaumatology: Urban Magics is both the latest in the Thaumatology series and Bill's first sequel to Fantasy. It provides lots of advice and crunch useful for running high-magic games in built-up settings.
• Gene Seabolt's WWII: Red Tide covers the Soviet Union for the WWII series. Note that this is all-new GURPS Third Edition content and not a GURPS Classic item.
• Transhuman Space: Teralogos News – 2100, Fourth Quarter and Transhuman Space: Teralogos News – 2101, First Quarter are GURPS Classic material – sort of. Specifically, they were formerly free web releases for the Transhuman Space line, providing useful adventure seeds and campaign ideas. Now they're free PDFs that do the same thing.*

* These are FREE! You do have them, right? If not, then why not open a few new tabs and get those downloads going while you read?

Alongside all of that, Pyramid kept delivering its mix of GURPS crunch (artifacts, creatures, spells, templates, etc.) and generic background material (adventure seeds, campaign advice, micro-settings, and so on) for gamers who enjoy bite-sized inspiration. The titles say it all, but to review:

• Pyramid #3/12: Tech and Toys (October 2009) is all about ultra-tech, superscience, and psi-tech gadgetry.
• Pyramid #3/13: Thaumatology (November 2009) provides magical powers and items to support, well, Thaumatology.
• Pyramid #3/14: Martial Arts (December 2009) supports Martial Arts, with a heavy focus on new styles.
• Pyramid #3/15: Transhuman Space (January 2010) is the first Pyramid PDF that's all about the Transhuman Space setting.
• Pyramid #3/16: Historical Exploration (February 2010) looks at interesting customs, languages, peoples, and places hidden in the mists of time.

While I'm being a shill, I'll include my standard reminder: Pyramid requires no subscription. Each issue is like any other e23 release. You can pick and choose which ones to get . . . and if you missed a given month's installment, well, there's no fuss about ordering a back issue. Simply click and buy.

But wait – there's more! (Hey, shills are supposed to say that. We get paid for each utterance.) GURPS Classic also moved ahead during this time. Lists are good unless you're a boat, so here's another:

• GURPS Classic: Mecha
• GURPS Traveller Classic: Alien Races 2
• GURPS WWII Classic: Frozen Hell
• Transhuman Space Classic
• Transhuman Space Classic: Fifth Wave

There are still many more GURPS Third Edition books to convert. Turning printed materials into PDFs isn't as trivial as it's sometimes portrayed; the blender often gets clogged, and the extra liquid we have to add short-circuits the computer. But we've picked up the pace for sure.

In hardback, we released Genevieve Cogman's Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game. This is a GURPS supplement based on the award-winning science-fiction stories of Lois McMaster Bujold. It also works as a standalone game. Gamers who prefer electrons can get the PDF version here.

Which brings us to the hints, mad ravings, and totally off-the-wall guesses regarding what we might release in the near future. These aren't promises. By the time you read this report, some of this stuff might have been eaten by giant rats. It's all subject to change without notice or explanation. Did I hedge that with enough caveats? Good. In the order in which I dream about them:

• The beat will go on over at Pyramid. I can't share the themes of future months' issues with you, but said issues are among the most predictable of future releases.
• We have more Dungeon Fantasy projects in the works. Taverns (by Jason "PK" Levine and Loren Wiseman) might actually be out by the time you read this. We have the first draft of another volume in hand, one more being written, and two others in the planning stages.
• A follow-up to Psionic Powers is making its way through our various processes. I have no ETA on that at this time.
• David Pulver's Spaceships 8: Transhuman Spacecraft is in playtesting as I write this. It's the last item currently planned in the Spaceships series, although there might well be further volumes at a future date.
• As I hinted – okay, whined – at the top of this update, Low-Tech (by Peter V. Dell'Orto, Dan Howard, Matt Riggsby, and William H. Stoddard) is essentially through editing. So are three associated PDFs: Low-Tech Companion 1: Philosophers and Kings (by Riggsby and Stoddard), about the learned professions; Low-Tech Companion 2: Weapons and Warriors (by Dell'Orto, Howard, and Stoddard), with gear options for violent people; and Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics (by Riggsby and Stoddard), on the craft professions. We hope to see them all in 2010.
• There's at least one historical worldbook in the works. By "book" I mean "PDF," but this will be a somewhat old-school supplement about a time and a place – the sort of thing that would have been a soft-cover worldbook for GURPS Third Edition.

I should probably keep my mouth shut about anything more theoretical than that stuff, but of course I won't. Final-draft revisions proceed on Ken Hite's Horror. Peter V. Dell'Orto, Jason "PK" Levine, Scott Maykrantz, Matt Riggsby, William H. Stoddard, and Hans-Christian Vortisch have all handed in drafts of works that I haven't named here, which will be revealed in the fullness of time. And we're scheming with other writers regarding further projects. I think that 2010 is going to be a good year!

I'll close with my cunning incantation for ensuring that 2010 really is a good year, along with 2011, 2012 . . . We're always looking for exciting new 16- or 32-page GURPS PDFs. If you're a writer, visit the e23 Wish List (which we updated in January 2010, by the way) and take a look at what we want. Then download the GURPS formatting guide and WYSIWYG template, and shoot us a query. Don't worry about things like "too short" or "too specialized" . . . e23 thrives on delivering small items that fit poorly served niches. Pyramid would be equally glad to hear from you; check the Pyramid Wish List (updated in February 2010) to learn what we need there.