There’s literally a book called How to be a GURPS GM that’s a pretty good blend of system agnostic and GURPS specific advice. Additionally, Chris Normand has a pretty good Intro to GURPS video series on YouTube
Sounds like a good resource, but I guess what I meant was a setting to run a game in (e.g. a campaign set in the Inner Sea or Sword Coast) with enemies and grabbags of challenges with balanced NPCs for side interactions and such.
They have several setting/adventure books, a lot of IPs choose to my heart: Star Trek, Discworld, Girl Genius. You can get their Infinite Worlds book which is kinda the default setting. It’s a multiverse thing so technically your homebrew is canon, but they lay out a bunch of What-if settings like “What if the Nazis won?” or “What if Rome never fell?”.
There’s also Dungeon Fantasy, which is a Powered by GURPS module which gives you pre-built character templates and enemy stat blocks and adventures and stuff. If you’re used to D&D, it’s a fairly gentle transition with familiar themes.
The thing about the challenges and side interactions though, is that once you get a feel for setting difficulty modifiers, you can import that stuff from anywhere. The best part of GURPS is running homebrew. Its strength is that you can write any scenario you want, with the confidence that you can make it work mechanically somehow.
The people on the Discord are generally pretty helpful if you need help, although just about anything you want to do has already been theory crafted on the Steve Jackson Games forum.
GURPS Lite is available for free, and includes the basic rules on how to do things, combat, etc. It doesn’t include the introductory “What is a GM?” stuff to save space; though that does show up in the Basic Set. You can extrapolate quite a lot from just what’s in Lite - a lot of the stuff in even the Basic Set that’s not in Lite is corner cases (how far can I jump? What can I shift or drag, instead of lifting?), clarifications (how long does it take me to dig a hole?)… and lots more skills and abilities!
Mook has some very basic combat examples worked through here
In a little different vein, Feral Sword Wielding Wizard has some fight scenes from movies he’s gone through and labeled with GURPS combat maneuvers, so you can see how they work! (Just keep in mind this is with a bunch of optional rules!)
If you like Actual Play shows, the Film Reroll podcast plays exclusively in GURPS. They play a fairly light version of the rules, but still make custom mechanics for various settings that show how modular of a system it is.
The show takes the premise of a movie and plays it out as a roleplay campaign. My favorite is Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, in which the GM tells the players they’re playing an obscure teen romance from the 80s so that they wouldn’t know they were in a horror movie. I probably wouldn’t recommend that for a table, but the actors know to expect tricks and it works very well as entertainment.
I wish GURPS had taken off more.
I’m doing my part
I was curious about this some years back.
Are there any published materials on how to run a game in a GURPS system?
There’s literally a book called How to be a GURPS GM that’s a pretty good blend of system agnostic and GURPS specific advice. Additionally, Chris Normand has a pretty good Intro to GURPS video series on YouTube
Sounds like a good resource, but I guess what I meant was a setting to run a game in (e.g. a campaign set in the Inner Sea or Sword Coast) with enemies and grabbags of challenges with balanced NPCs for side interactions and such.
They have several setting/adventure books, a lot of IPs choose to my heart: Star Trek, Discworld, Girl Genius. You can get their Infinite Worlds book which is kinda the default setting. It’s a multiverse thing so technically your homebrew is canon, but they lay out a bunch of What-if settings like “What if the Nazis won?” or “What if Rome never fell?”.
There’s also Dungeon Fantasy, which is a Powered by GURPS module which gives you pre-built character templates and enemy stat blocks and adventures and stuff. If you’re used to D&D, it’s a fairly gentle transition with familiar themes.
The thing about the challenges and side interactions though, is that once you get a feel for setting difficulty modifiers, you can import that stuff from anywhere. The best part of GURPS is running homebrew. Its strength is that you can write any scenario you want, with the confidence that you can make it work mechanically somehow.
The people on the Discord are generally pretty helpful if you need help, although just about anything you want to do has already been theory crafted on the Steve Jackson Games forum.
GURPS Lite is available for free, and includes the basic rules on how to do things, combat, etc. It doesn’t include the introductory “What is a GM?” stuff to save space; though that does show up in the Basic Set. You can extrapolate quite a lot from just what’s in Lite - a lot of the stuff in even the Basic Set that’s not in Lite is corner cases (how far can I jump? What can I shift or drag, instead of lifting?), clarifications (how long does it take me to dig a hole?)… and lots more skills and abilities!
Mook has some very basic combat examples worked through here
In a little different vein, Feral Sword Wielding Wizard has some fight scenes from movies he’s gone through and labeled with GURPS combat maneuvers, so you can see how they work! (Just keep in mind this is with a bunch of optional rules!)
If you like Actual Play shows, the Film Reroll podcast plays exclusively in GURPS. They play a fairly light version of the rules, but still make custom mechanics for various settings that show how modular of a system it is.
The show takes the premise of a movie and plays it out as a roleplay campaign. My favorite is Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, in which the GM tells the players they’re playing an obscure teen romance from the 80s so that they wouldn’t know they were in a horror movie. I probably wouldn’t recommend that for a table, but the actors know to expect tricks and it works very well as entertainment.
So much
https://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/