Hello, I am a Game Master (GM) and I like to over-prepare. This is a fan blog that collects my homebrew material about running tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) using the Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS). If you’re not familiar with this stuff, check out a definition of tabletop role-playing.
GURPS, first published in 1986, is one of the most successful and long-running tabletop RPGs around. GURPS was referred to by Rolling Stone magazine as “a role-playing game so deeply geeky it makes Dungeons & Dragons seem like varsity lacrosse.”
GURPS may not have a lot of name recognition with the average person, but it’s kind of a big deal. A famous celebrity player of GURPS is bestselling-author George R. R. Martin, and there is speculation that Game of Thrones started as a GURPS Campaign. The best known use of GURPS ideas in video gaming is the spectacularly successful Fallout franchise.
If you have heard of GURPS, it has a reputation for being the Encyclopedia Britannica of RPGs (while D&D is the Budweiser). But don’t worry, GURPS is easy to learn if it is set up for new players.
If you haven’t heard of GURPS, check out the page: “What is GURPS?” There you can download free PDFs with more than enough rules to start playing right now.
About the Blog’s Content
On this blog I primarily post sci-fi/fantasy/horror material about three settings. (Spoilers ahead!)
- 1980s Horror. To help new players learn the game, I run a series of short one-shot games with published adventures that can be linked into a campaign. I made pre-generated characters that can be passed out so that you can start playing right away, and these use a much-simplified character sheet for new players. All adventures are based on a PG-rated cheesey horror movie sensibility. Everything is set in 1983.
- The Deeps of Lyrae. In the far future, humanity has invented a jump drive, conquered the stars, and forged them into an almost inconceivably large interstellar empire. Yet news only moves as fast as a starship. The vast distances between systems mean that each journey to a new planet might discover anything. This is a variant of GURPS: Traveller and I focus quite a bit on space travel and shipboard life.
- The Land of the True Game. An advanced space-faring society discovered psionic mutants among its population and exiled them to a distant planet for study. It then (drumroll) destroyed itself. Cut-off from home, most of the mutants descended into a state of medieval feudalism, while a mysterious cult kept advanced technology alive. Meanwhile, the planet turned out to be inhabited. (Creepy music.) This is my GURPS adaptation and expansion of some of the ideas from The True Game series of novels by Sheri S. Tepper.
About the Title
The blog title refers to the GURPS rule Requires Concentrate [-15%], an advantage modifier from GURPS Power-Ups 8: Limitations, p. 17. It means that a super power requires a concentrate maneuver in order to be used, just like this blog.
Requires Concentrate 