Customer Reviews:
GURPS Sci-Fi stuff rocks........2007-05-15
Customizable armor! Like energy cloth baselayer with the fit and feel of spandex (scuba lycrasuits or the compression shirt you wear under football pads) with DR 20 (melee attacks from non-superscience weapons from non-giants, handgun bullets) to replace the star trek turtlenecks for non-combatant military crew. Personal defelector shields, neural interface helmets, chameolon armor, printed computers on armor+clothing, particle beams (GURPS blasters), plasma weapons (star wars blasters), nanotechnology and all. covers TL9-12, strict. Scale is personal to small vehicles. Superscience items (shields, contragravity, time manipulation, psionic devices) are clearly marked.
This has been rushed-through the editing process, but SJGames is pretty good with errata updates.
Book Description
It's the technology of the posthuman age: biotech! Upgrade your old body with smart drugs and viral nano . . . or improve on nature with eugenics and gene-fixing. But it's not just about the future. GURPS Bio-Tech includes a full range of historical and modern medical equipment, from early vaccines to surgical robots, along with game stats for the world's most deadly diseases.
GURPS Bio-Tech also includes a complete set of character templates for bio-tech professions, rules for biotech magic, and two original campaign settings.
Say goodbye to your old body. Have you upgraded your genetics this year?
GURPS Fourth Edition supplement.
Customer Reviews:
Fantastic Supplement!!.......2007-08-31
Hi There,
I have been reading RPG supplements for a long time. This one is a very handy supplement, even if you're not playing GURPS. This book is well researched, and seems to add a lot along the lines of Genetic Engineering, and Medicine to the game, while distilling materials into SJ Games Excellent 4th Edition.
I am not an author, but in the interests of disclosing my affiliation with the product, I was a Playtester of the product, prior to release.
I was very impressed with how this product turned out.
Excellent Suplimet.......2007-01-10
The new Bio-Tech is a wonderful addition to the fourth edition of Gurps. It covers rule for physical modifications of species as well as medicine, and the use of magic in the field of biology. Overall a excelent product
Solid, Useful, Fun.......2006-11-29
Bio-Tech has been re-written and expanded for GURPS 4th Edition, and is physically impressive -- full colour, some reasonable art, twice as many pages. The text divides between theory and game-specific material.
The theory part is a fairly detailed and, so far as I know, up to date discussion of medical technology, selective breeding, genetic modifications to animals and plants, genetics, and cellular biology, with interesting speculations on gene therapies, genetic engineering and gross surgical alteration. Although interesting and instructive, the theory part is, from a game point of view, mostly fluff which explains the origin of some of the exotic advantages that characters can have in a hard-SF background.
Bio-Tech also touches on, then skirts around nanotechnology, presumably because this will be covered in more detail in the forth-coming Ultra-Tech, which is referenced throughout the volume.
The game-specific part lists genetic alterations to the human genome by tech level, surgical and therapeutic procedures to upgrade characters during play, provides new spells for magically based backgrounds, and provides rules for and examples of current and futuristic drugs and medical nanotech. It also features geneered animals and plants. The best and most immediately useful part is a chapter devoted to templates, human and para-human, that has been updated from the previous Bio-Tech book, and from Transhuman Space.
All the foregoing material is excellent stuff. Sadly, the final part of the book, which features two capsule backgrounds, is less good. One has clones of Alexander the Great ruling the world, the other is a short account of a slower-than-light colonisation fleet on its way to Lambda Serpentis. Neither of these parts is particularly well detailed, and I'd have preferred more information on bio-vehicles and bio-buildings. It is a minor gripe, though -- the meat of the book is more than worth the cover price.
Are you still using last year's genes?.......2000-03-15
In this age of cloning and genetically altered crops it's hard to create a game book that won't seem hopelessly outdated by next year. David Pulver (GURPS Psionics, GURPS Vehicles and other) has done an excellent job with GURPS Bio-Tech! Rather than a simple list of advantages and disadvantages available, David takes advantage of existing rules to explain how select gene-mods would work in game mechanics.
Also covered are modifications to animals, plants, alien organisms and a extensive section on germ warfare. (Better make sure that the target genome doesn't appear in your population!) Addition information discusses specific changes that bio-modification could bring to a society.
This book is tailored to the GURPS game system, but with a bit of thought could be used for virtually any game system.
Book Description
GURPS Basic Set: Characters combines information from the Third Edition GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Compendium I, plus hundreds of new and updated rules! This 336-page, full-color hardcover contains everything you need to create and play a GURPS Fourth Edition character.
Customer Reviews:
Pretty Good.......2007-01-10
An awesome upgrade to GURPS 3rd Edition. Full colored and illustrated book, some new rules added and some old rules banished, creating a better balanced and understandable system.
Five stars again to SJG.
The best Gurps compilation.......2007-01-10
The "Gurps 4th Edition" just fixed all "Gurps 3rd Edition" weakness. The two books are so great. The color and hardcover look and feel are some big diference between the books and the the old versions.
The bad comercial thing: are two books, and you need to have both if you want to be a Game Master.
The "Characters Guide" have lots of resources to make a rich character and the "Campaigns Guide" have a good Game Master stuff.
If you want to have some good RPG System, well, you need to buy "Gurps 4th Edition", but you need some time and practice, cause the game system is so rich, then the rules number is high.
A nice improvement over 3rd edition........2006-11-12
The idea behind GURPS is that it provides a set of core rules that can be adapted to any setting (thus the "universal" part of General Universal Role-Playing). It does a good job of this, although it is better suited to a somewhat more realistic feeling than heroic wackiness. A human isn't going to take too many sword hits and shrug them off.
The strong point of GURPS is character generation. Players are allotted a number of points to build their characters, and may buy characteristics, skills and "Advantages" (things like the ability to use magic, being wealthy, or any of hundreds of other things), and may get additional points by taking "Disadvantages."
This new 4th edition is in by far most ways an improvement over 3rd edition. They closed a lot of loopholes and fixed a number of less-than-optimal things. I like the changes to combat especially.
There are a couple of things I would have done differently.
1) They took the skills out of psionics (and every other supernatural system, for that matter), making it purely advantage based, but they left magic as skill based. They really should have made each magic spell into an advantage too, because now it's not as well balanced with the rest of the system as it could be. Couple this with the fact that you can now take IQ at 10 points a level if you don't take the associated Will and Perception, and you can easily have a Wizard character with an IQ of 17 or so in a 100 point campaign, who can buy spells at a very high skill level with 1 point.
2) They should have dumped the "earn character points through study" system. Yes, it's easy to just ignore it, but if you get stuck with a GM who goes by the book you may very well find yourself wasting a lot of time with tedious accounting issues.
4th edition institutes a good set of rules that allows the GM to create powers and abilities by modifying Advantages with an extensive set of Enhancements and Limitations. This is really nice for the workaholic GM, but the GM who lacks huge amounts of free time is going to be hoping for supplements with some a lot of sample powers worked out for him or her.
Much better than D&D (d20).......2006-07-10
Well written, nice arts, easy to understand system, easy to learn and flexible. Much much more flexible than d20, and also much more realistic. Having played d&d for some times now, I was getting rather frustrated about the lousy you-hit-me-I-hit-you combat system. With Gurps, things are much more dynamic. Give it a chance, you won't regret it.
Great System.......2005-11-10
The fourth edition of GURPS doesn't disappoint. This time, the basic book has been split into two volumes. This one deals with the creation of characters and can be considered to be the player's guide. The genius of the GURPS system is that anything is possible. If you can dream of it, you can play it. It's a great system for those who would like to establish a game with a sense of independence and creativity. If you haven't tried it, I recommend that you give it a try.
Product Description
Save the World . . . or Destroy It!
GURPS Powers is the ultimate book for the ultimate characters in the new Fourth Edition of GURPS! Here's everything you need to create every kind of amazing, off-the-chart superhero you can imagine . . . as well as amazing wizards, wuxia fighters, shamans who command spirits . . . even gods!
Written by GURPS Line Editor and Fourth Edition co-author Sean Punch, GURPS Powers introduces some new rules, but it is mostly about using the rules that are already in the GURPS Basic Set to cover superpowered characters, megawizards, and earth-shattering psionics. GURPS Powers also include guidelines for "special effects" and several different ways to vary a power on the fly -- two crucial concepts for comic-book superheroics.
GURPS Powers is a Fourth Edition GURPS book that completely replaces the Third Edition books GURPS Supers and GURPS Psionics. Like our other Fourth Edition supplements, it's a gorgeous 240-page, full-color hardback.
If you've got a high-powered campaign . or high-powered players . you want GURPS Powers!
Customer Reviews:
This system works to a point.......2006-12-15
I just ran a GURPS Powers campaign, where we went through several adventures using the system detailed in this book.
The players were very pleased with the system, and we had a lot of fun for several months. After each adventure, I would award them with a few character points, to allow them to buff up their characters. The idea was to start the campaign with characters about as powerful as the X-Men, and to gradually develop them until they were about as powerful as members of the Fantastic Four, which is of course, a much more powerful group.
As the players grew their characters, I compensated by raising the point totals of their opponents. This worked for a while, until some of the damage totals from energy attacks became so high that the heroes who used energy damage became much more powerful than the slugfest types, who used their fists instead of energy blasts.
It got to the point where if an energy blast hit someone, they were reduced very far in hit points and the combat didn't really resemble a comic book like setting. I have to wonder how much playtesting the makers of this book really did.
All flaws aside, it is a very comprehensive system with a rich array of powers and ways to build a super hero character. In fact, the possibilities are almost endless. You can create a character like Superman, Wolverine, The Hulk, The Human Torch, etc. Everything is there, with the usual point system that GURPS is famous for. This also means that you can link up campaigns of super heroes with other campaigns, as all of the rules are pretty much the same.
We then attempted to create a campaign which resembled the "Dragonball Z" comic book series. We tried to build a frieza character with 1-million points, just to see what he would be like. I found that at these astronomical totals, the entire system would have to be overhauled in order to have the types of battles depicted in the comic books. Otherwise, you would have characters instantly killing anyone with less than say, 50,000 hit points (by using either a high powered energy attack or a series of multiple attacks with their 50,000 point strength).
Heavy stuff here.......2006-08-21
I had real problems deciding whether or not to buy this book. The biggest stumbling block was the lack of information about the book from anybody besides SJ Games. What would I be getting for my hard-earned money? SJ Games tried to help by showing some pages on their website but they didn't help me make up my mind because I just couldn't get a good feel for what the book was about. I finally decided to buy the book because I'm contemplating running a campaign with Psionic and/or Super powers and this book seemed to cover those topics in greater depth than the basic books did and I've had good experiences with the previous books in this series.
Now that I've read the book I can see why people have been reluctant to try to describe it. GURPS Powers is very much more than a simple repackaging of the 3rd edition of GURPS Supers and GURPS Psionics. The authors have put considerable thought into the whole concept of "Powers" (what they are, what they can do, why they exist, etc.) for all roleplaying genres and have developed a radical new structure for how to implement them within the GURPS rules without doing more than adding a few enhancements to the existing system. This is a truly astonishing accomplishment and frankly I don't have the skill as a reviewer to do justice to their work but I will try anyway.
The first couple of chapters lay the groundwork of their basic concepts, it's necessary to at least skim through these details but it's pretty dry stuff and leaves the reader wondering why they bought the book. Then chapter 3 (Examples) starts to weave the whole meaning of their work together in a very readable fashion and things start to fall into place. The book gets better and better from that point forward.
The key to their revolutionary thinking (and I don't have near enough space here to explain it at length) is that most roleplaying games have some sort of extra-ordinary powers at work. This could be cybernetic, psionic, magic, gods; the list is pretty near endless. These extra-ordinary powers are frequently the key to making the game enjoyable for the players. What would Banestorm be without magic? Or most of the Infinite Worlds without the super-science and dimension-crawling aspects? Would "Carrie" be as interesting if the protagonist could only play practical jokes on her tormenters?
Stepping forward from there, the authors show how to use their theories to create new roleplaying worlds or enhance existing ones. How about creating a mage who has superpowers rather than spells? In many ways that works better for simulating some author's magic systems than the standard "wizards cast spells" model that GURPS Magic uses.
The strange thing that kept occuring to me as I read this book was that I couldn't figure out who was the intended audience for this book. Although it is very interesting and useful for generating super-powered characters, the lack of new abilities means that the book isn't absolutely necessary. On the other hand, this book is an absolute must-have for any GM who is contemplating a campaign with anything more exotic than historical or modern adventuring. But the book is almost exploding with good ideas for generating new characters...
One of the things I've already assimilated from the book is that, as with all GURPS 4th edition books, the GM needs to carefully decide what level of complexity they are willing to tolerate and stick with it. There was an example in the book of what a group of Supers needed to do to move 10 tons of concrete rubble that left me completely in the dark. Not because the example wasn't clear, it was perfectly clear, I just couldn't figure out why anybody would want to go through so much paperwork in their roleplaying.
Although this is true of GURPS in general, it is particularly true of Powers because of the implications of superpowered roleplaying. It's obvious that a sword can parry a mace, but Mr. GM, can a flamebolt parry a laser beam? The players are all looking at you and want a reasonable answer as soon as possible.
As the authors point out, modern science is frequently not useful in answering superpowered rules questions so consistency on the part of the GM is vital. One of the most important parts of the book is a couple of chapters that help the GM think through the implications of their decisions BEFORE they will occur in play. This is a godsend and is easily worth the price of the book by itself.
Another valuable section of the book assists the GM in figuring out how powers will affect their campaigns and helps the GM to find interesting plots that will keep the players coming back for more. The final section of the book briefly discusses nearly all genres that use powers and the conventions that govern playing in them. Although I thought I knew most of them, I found enough interesting material to keep me going for a surprisingly long time.
I haven't looked at the index simply because the book is superbly well organized and I don't think I'll have any problems finding anything I'd need to know on short notice. The authors have made excellent use of color to help organize the information and highlight important items. My only quibbles are that the artwork is somewhat lacking in both creativity and quantity and there are fewer roleplaying examples than I'd like, I find the examples to be extremely useful in understanding the points the authors are trying to make.
In conclusion, this isn't an easy book to comprehend but is well worth the reader's time if they are willing to invest enough of it.
Product Description
Munchkin Cthulhu
Customer Reviews:
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.......2007-07-21
I was very happy to see a Cthulhu addition to Munchkin... well, besides the level 20 Cthulhu monster in the Munchkin Bites set. This set adds in cultists, which is a nice addition when you have more players, as cultists get bonuses for other cultists being in the game, though it's very difficult to stop being one. The other classes are investigators, professors, and monster whackers. There are no side-kicks in this set, which was kind of a bummer. It would be nice to include some research assistants or something like that. You don't have to have read any Lovecraft to appreciate this set, though it helps if you want get the jokes and puns.
Great fun with great puns.......2007-05-23
My sons (11 and 14) really enjoy playing this game. As a long-time reader of the Cthulhu Mythos stories, I get all the jokes although they're lost on my sons. I look forward to playing the other Munchkin games.
Excellent addition to the Munchkin line up.......2007-05-18
Another wacky and fun Munchkin version, this time into the mind bending world of HP Lovecraft's Ancient Evils From Beyond The Stars (and possibly under the bed). The best feature is the "cultist" mechanic, that speeds play and adds a few great twists to stabbing your buddies in the back! The jokes are not as fun and inspired as in "Impossible", the classic Munchkin sets or "Bites!", but there are still plenty of chuckles, puns and groaners.
Wanna be a cultist?.......2007-05-12
If you're a fan of Steve Jackson Games Munchkin (the card game that spoofs D&D) and know something of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories (perhaps you've played the very excellent Call of Cthulhu) then you MUST get this card game. It's a fun, easy-to-learn, non-collectible card game.
It follows Munchkin rules and could be used as an expansion, but it's even better stand-alone. There are some new Cthulhu specific rules. There's a new cultist class that's hard to get rid of. And the rule for summoning in -goth monsters is a very special new way to mess with the other players.
But, for me, it's all about the puns. Just hysterical.
Customer Reviews:
Yet Another Winner from S J Games.......2000-06-23
This is another comprehensive worldbook from SJ Games. It's designed for GURPS, but it could be used by ANYONE wanting to design an Egypt-based RPG. In fact, it should be useful to fiction writers wishing to set fiction in ancient Egypt--just throw out the game statistics and use the chapters on history and culture.
It's in chapters such as these that SJGames supplements shine. A richness of detail backed by solid research put at the fingertips of any GM the basic and not-so-basic knowledge that turn a generic adventure into a vivid, fulfilling story set against a rich backdrop.
Egypt is more than pyramids and mummies, and this book proves it. You want to know about the historical rulers? The details of the religion--and how it changed over time? The technologies we understand (and those we don't)? It's all here.
An egyptologist might find this book lacking; a gamer will probably find more than she needs.
Worth every penny.
Book Description
The Future Is Yours!
Now updated for GURPS Fourth Edition, this is the ultimate toolkit for any campaign between the stars.
Explore options for space travel and technology, from the realistic to the miraculous. Design alien races and monsters.
Create campaigns of every style, from science fantasy to space opera to star merchants. Build worlds, from asteroids to Dyson spheres.
With this book, you can create anything from a single alien beast to a whole galaxy of civilizations and star systems... quickly and randomly, or with a detailed step-by-step process that's true to biology and astrophysics as we understand them today.
Customer Reviews:
GURPS Space.......2007-05-12
This most recent version of GURPS SPACE had virtually nothing new in it in comparison to the previous books. I really felt that I wasted my money.
Great!.......2007-01-10
This book is great! It covers all about space campaigns, at any detail level you want. Worlds, Star maps, Races and etc.
The book is beautiful, too!
It just don`t go deeper into building starships, but I think I know why. That is much more about engeneering and I bet SJG will soon release the Vehicle Builder in its 4th edition to help in this matter.
Great book!
What do you expect?.......2006-08-01
What you will get out of GURPS Space depends on what you are looking for. It does not have any stats for weapons or technology, no rules for spaceship construction and no rules for space combat. For that, Interstellar Wars is a better book, but neither are up to 3rd Edition standards (space combat is fairly boring as defined in IW).
Space is good for designing star systems and worlds, and has some decent material on alien life. If you want to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations, then this book is good.
If you want to build the spaceship that will take you there and be able to defend yourself when you meet hostile aliens, this is not the book.
That is about it. 3rd Edition Space is a better book.
Not perfect, but pretty good.......2006-06-26
This is the fourth iteration of GURPS Space. It's got a lot that's new, quite a bit that's appeared elsewhere in more primitive forms, and a few relics that have been recycled from GURPS Space 1, 2 & 3.
Bad bits first:
The book recycles a small amount of faily bland and pointless text about interstellar societies and "generic" organisations in chapter 1 and expands on most of this information in chapter 7. Thus, some of this text is a bit redundant. It also includes the irritating joke organisation "Special Justice Group" (SJG, like the publisher, Steve Jackson Games).
There are no game statistics for equipment in the book at all, and no ship design system.
Steve Jackson Games uses the avoirdupois system in preference to metric. So do most Americans, of course, but it just seems unscientific for a scientific game book.
Good Bits
The vast majority of the book is devoted to hard science concerns; possibile and miraculous technologies, world and starsystem generation, and alien life. These are excellent. The technology section contains no examples, but is nevertheless thought-provoking and useful. The worlds section is as accurate and up to date as the authors could make it, and is a vast improvement on all the prior GURPS spaces and, for that matter on any star generation system by anyone else. The same goes for the alien life chapter, which is more detailed than any other that I've seen.
The remainder of the book has solid advice on how to create, fine tune and run a space campaign, and sample templates for character creation. It's all good stuff.
Finally, should you buy this book? If all you want to know is "how does a 3rd Ed. TL8 gauss needler translate into a 4th Ed. weapon?" then no, because the book doesn't tell you that. But if you want to design and run a scientifically plausible, richly detailed space game for any games system, then yes, this book is definitely worth the money.
Customer Reviews:
Other Books.......2007-09-03
GURPS Magic is one of the many competent supplements for Steve Jackson's Generic Universal Role Playing system.
Or, handy when you want to be on the receiving end of the Game Master interdimensionally hi-jacking you from the present day setting into a magic using environment. Handy for him, anyway!
A comprehensive magic system.......2006-12-12
GURPS Magic is a must have for any fantasy campaign which includes any sort of spell casting or magical items.
The system is divided into several spell categories, including fire, air, earth, water, food, knowledge, enchant, necromancy, etc.
Like the other aspects of the character development system, a spell caster must invest several points to be able to cast spells. They then must build a "tree" of spells, starting with the most basic (such as produce fire, create water, etc) and building up to the more powerful ones, such as force field, fireball, body of lightning, etc.
Playing a spell caster in GURPS is vastly different from other systems, such as Dungeons and Dragons. I had been accustomed to blasting huge groups of monsters with fireballs and cones of cold in the DnD system. As a GURPS wizard, I found that a single fireball would drain my fatigue to the point that I had to wait a few minutes (which means until the next combat in GURPS) before casting another one. Spellcasters have to be much more clever in GURPS, casting spells which do little damage here and there where they can help the party. While they can become quite powerful, their power has been greatly reduced in comparrison to other systems. Your players who are used to the DnD system might not like it.
Several spells enable casters to summon elementals or animate dead bodies. A few monster stats are listed for these sample creatures, but it would have been a lot more useful if these had been listed in greater detail, or perhaps with a bit more variety.
The book also explains the rules for creating magic items. These are a must for any fantasy campaign, and can be quite interresting.
A great effort, but..........2005-03-14
I've raved about the 4th edition basic books in prior reviews now it's time to look at the 4th edition Magic book.
The authors have tackled a very large subject here. They are attempting to replace the old GURPS Magic, Grimoire, and Magic Items 1 in one book. But the biggest challenge they are facing in writing this book is that the old 3e GURPS magic books were boring. The problem wasn't so much the writing (which could have been better) but the spells themselves. GURPS has long been known for having a... well, generic universal spell system (GUSS?) that really didn't appeal to a lot of players.
Now to this book proper:
The editing is as good as ever, the artwork might be even better than other 4e books, and the authors have added flavor by highlighting spells in fun 2-3 paragraph stories at the beginning of each college of magic. There is a lot of interesting material about black magic, alternate magic systems, etc. The alchemy section was just plain good clean fun with lots of potential mayhem. The index is much better than in previous books of this edition.
So why the four star instead of another five star rating? Simple, the book strives mightily but can't overcome its generic beginnings. The authors were obviously aware of this problem and offer quite several ways to get around it (rename the spells, use an alternate magic system) but don't quite do a good enough job to warrant the five star rating so I'm giving it a 4.5 star rating.
Like GURPS Fantasy, this book is literally stuffed with ideas, it provides SO many ideas and possible spin-offs that the GM will need to give extra thought before starting a campaign to exactly what they want the players to experience. Otherwise some wiseguy player is going to say, "Can I use this neat little idea on page 93 that will wreck the whole concept of your campaign? Can I? Please, please?"
All in one book!.......2005-02-25
This book is great. Just like the other 4th ed. books you get a hard back, full color book. The book includes everything from both magic books in 3rd. ed, plus magic item and alchemy information. There is so much information in here it is hard to believe. Although my initial reaction to the price was a little mixed, once I had this book in my hands and started reading it I had no regrets.
The book contains the complete magic system expanded from basic set and alternative magic systems. The magic system covers casting spells including cooperative casting.
The book also contains information of creating magical items and complete alchemy rules along with a good list of elixers.
If you are not convinced yet go on over to the sjgames web page where you can view some samples from inside the book (table of contents in particular).
Very Good but...............2000-02-19
I agree with the previous reviewer except on a couple issues. I do not like the way demons are handled. They are made to be very weak against a truly good hearted person. I also think they could have made alot more mundane magic and high powered magicks. THey stuck to the middle gound and fleshed that out very well. There were very few high powered magicks explored.
Book Description
GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns combines information from the Third Edition GURPS Basic Set and GURPS Compendium II -- plus our new core setting, with infinite possibilities for timeline-hopping adventure! (You don't have to play in the core setting -- there isn't some game-altering metaplot -- but it's there if you want it.) This 240-page, full-color hardcover contains everything a GM needs to create and run a GURPS Fourth Edition campaign.
Customer Reviews:
AWESOME...but you must be creative.......2007-09-17
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.
Pretty Good!.......2007-01-10
An awesome upgrade to GURPS 3rd Edition. Full colored and illustrated book, some new rules added and some old rules banished, creating a better balanced and understandable system.
Five stars again to SJG.
The best Gurps compilation.......2007-01-10
The "Gurps 4th Edition" just fixed all "Gurps 3rd Edition" weakness. The two books are so great. The color and hardcover look and feel are some big diference between the books and the the old versions.
The bad comercial thing: are two books, and you need to have both if you want to be a Game Master.
The "Characters Guide" have lots of resources to make a rich character and the "Campaigns Guide" have a good Game Master stuff.
If you want to have some good RPG System, well, you need to buy "Gurps 4th Edition", but you need some time and practice, cause the game system is so rich, then the rules number is high.
Nice book, too bad Amazon's stock is all damaged..........2006-08-02
While the book is great, I have received no less than 3 damaged versions of this book from Amazon. Clearly their entire stock is messed up as each replacement they have sent has the same problems. Namely, sticking pages where glue leaked from the spine during binding, scuffed and soiled covers, and heavy dings or crushed spines. Order from someone else!
COMPLETE your GURPS Book 2 of a the classic Basic GURPS set.......2006-04-25
This book 2 of the GURPS basic set (4TH EDITION) The last edition was a single book of 256 pages plus instant characters section, but so much material was add to the new edition it would have weighed in at a total of 576 pages, while suitable for stoping bullets, a but unwieldy for gameplay, so Steve Jackson games have divided everything a player has to have is in book one, basic system rules and everything for character creation, just enough combat to get a player into the game. The rest of combat is this book. This book goes into detail for what a GameMaster needs to know about physical feats and combat (in greater detail). It covers vehicles and technology. It includes stats for animals and some monsters, along with a guide for world design and Game Mastering itself. "Tool kit chapters let the GM make artifacts, character abilities, and entire game worlds (in fact an infinity of worlds, alternate, parallel, cross-genre, etc.) Don't get me wrong this is just for GMs. Players who enjoy detail and the creative side of the game will find this book inspiration for beginning their own campaigns. My point is it's not required, but Basic Set GURPS: Characters and Campaigns are designed to work together, pages and chapters are consecutively numbered and the index covers both books and repeated in both. SJ games has made the system easy to play, easy to learn and easy to get hooked. They have also made the new Basic Set easier to carry around. GURPS stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System and it is just that, it is the perfect for linking already existing d20 systems, creating cross-genre campaigns or making campaigns based on any book, movie, TV series or concept you or SJ Games can brainstorm (before the Wizards of the Coast edition we used GURPS to run Star Wars and Dr. Who campaigns).
www.sjgames.com/e23/ is an excellent resource for pre-generated PDS ranging from short adventures to whole sourcebooks. Like D&D, there is a considerable amount of GURPS material out there, either new and updated or old and out-of-print, anything you can imagine (Fantasy, the Prisoner, Horror, Swashbuckler, and loads of other supplements). The GURPS main web site is good too, www.sjgames.com/gurps/ most books and supplements hotlink from Amazon.
Customer Reviews:
It's not about balance.......2006-04-12
This supplement is great! The powers that affect modern technology can really add a powerful edge to any adventure. And as for the magic players that can't figure out how to make psionics work the way they want it to, just put all of your points into kinetics. When your character can snap the necks of any of your adventure's villans with an unskilled push, you don't really need to be creative.
Dissappointment.......2000-02-19
I owned this book. I got very excited. I was very disappointed. THe Pisonics were so much weaker than magic. THe balance was not there for the two systems. They were also very differnt. That made for stumbling in the game. Loss of fluidity. Hopefully they will revamp it.
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Gurps Bio-Tech
Gurps Space (GURPS: Generic Universal Role Playing System)
GURPS Martial Arts
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GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns (4th Edition)
