Gurps Basic Set: Campaigns

Been a long time GURPS fan and I think the 4th edition is absolutely great.

I've been contemplating the purchase of this book for a couple of years now, and finally broke down to make the purchase. The physical object itself is a thing of beauty. It has the lovely full color design and quality printing and binding that past purchasers have come to expect from GURPS products. This isn't a product for somebody who wants to buy it and run a game the next weekend. GURPS itself is less a game than a toolkit for making your own game. Once you have the rules, you need to either create your own setting and character archetypes (what GURPS calls templates), or you need to purchase one of the many game world books published for use with the game. Fortunately the book provides a lot of good guidance and examples. The published material that describes game worlds is also excellent. The high quality of this supporting material is what helped me decide to purchase GURPS Basic Set: Characters, Fourth Edition and GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns (4th Edition). Given that caveat, I recommend this product for any gamer who wants to expand their gaming into new directions. There's nothing revolutionary here, but this toolkit gives you what you need to produce any other kind of game that you want to play. You might want to play ghost hunters right now, but in six months you can switch to a space opera, and six months after that to cape-wearing super heroes. And for any of those options, you can purchase additional supporting material, or just wing it on your own. The number of games you get by purchasing this one set of books makes it an excellent bargain for the serious role player.

GURPS is one of the most, truly, generic systems around... and that's no suprise since it's the first. In this fourth edition, SJ games brings to bear their 20+ years of experience with this system and delivers an excellent addition to the GURPS line. The system is fully able to be employed in any genre from fantasy, science-fiction or horror and it flexible enough for even the most creative of gamers. If it has any weaknesses they would be: 1. too many options: some gamers might be overwhelmed by the number of options available. Keep in mind that the game can be as simple or as complex as you like. 2. all of the "flavor" is on you: GURPS (since it is generic...duh) is not set up to convey flavor through the design of its character sheets, the naming of abilities or the graphics in the books. Flavor is ALL up to the game-mast ... on the otherhand, perhaps those are strengths.

Steve Jackson Games split the 4th edition Basic manual into two books, the Characters book and the Campaign book. Characters provides everything you need to know about creating a character while Campaigns provides the information needed to run a campaign. I didn't like splitting the book when I first heard about the concept but I have to admit that it makes sense now that I've read both books. This book is an extremely ambitious undertaking, even bigger than Characters, and putting the two together would have made the system too big, expensive, and difficult to easily digest. The Campaigns book is probably the single best rules editing job I've ever seen. The best example is probably the evolution of the combat system. GURPS 3rd edition combat *sprawled*, the GM had to pick and choose which of the two sets of combat rules and which of the optional rules he wanted to use. Then he'd frequently regret his choices when he wanted something to happen that required rules he hadn't chosen to use. As a result, when I GM'd I used a fairly simple hybrid of GURPS, D & D, and Rolemaster rules (simpler than they sound) that got to the intent of the rules but was adaptable enough to do what I wanted. I tried using the GURPS combat rules several times but just couldn't quite make them work. Combat now works beautifully. Somebody over at SJ Games took that massive mishmash of rules and beat it into a rules set that is breathtakingly simple but does everything required. I recommend buying the book for the combat system alone but that's not all! Believe it or not, everything is like the combat system! Folks, this is the most streamlined set of rules I've seen since AD & D 1.0 and it covers everything in greater detail and realism than AD & D ever did. There are frequent examples that clarify the fine points. The artwork is frequent, interesting, and in color. The book is extremely well organized and has a good (but not great) index and the production quality is WAY higher than you get in all those d20 books. In short, this is a remarkable evolution in the GURPS system and I STRONGLY recommend this book for frustrated GM's of all varieties. There's sure to be a little something here for everybody if you only look for it.