As my first entry, let's try to marry one of the stalwarts of "traditional" play with an old-school sensibility found in the OSR sphere. I doubt that I'll achieve a match with the Old School Primer or the Principia Apocrypha, but as previous scholarship has shown, it's a big tent outside of a dungeon.
Where to start from?
The first and second editions of the Generic Universal Role Playing System was released in 1986 as a box set, with no big difference between the two. The material was then revised, amended and collected as a single book in 1988. This was the basis for a lot of setting books, from the historic (Japan, Middle Ages, Vikings) to various genres (Space, Horror, Fantasy, Super-Heroes) and a surprising amount of licensed settings (Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld, David Brin's Uplift, Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun, even video games like Myth or other tabletop games like Vampire: The Masquerade or Blue Planet).
Given all the various genres, it's no wonder that this accumulated a lot of optional rules, additional skills, powers and weapons. When a (slightly) revised 3rd edition was printed in the 90s, it came with two compendiums, that listed all of those, so that you didn't have to look into e.g. GURPS Fantasy Races to find the special abilities of your new character, or into GURPS Martial Arts for advanced combat options that didn't necessarily have anything to do with dojos or samurai ryus.
And finally, in the early years of this millennium, a fourth edition came out. The basic book was split across two hardcover tomes, and tried to approach things even more from a balanced "physics engine" of a game. In the mean time, a few additional magic systems, super powers and optional rules for cinematic action games, dungeon crawling (not our type) and post-apocalyptic scenarios have come out, so maybe there's a 5th edition just waiting...
Given that old-school games lean towards sleek, early editions, we should probably stick to something early.
Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?
So that's the first edition, right?
Now, wait a second. There are actually two even older games that could qualify. The first being The Fantasy Trip, a game that started out as a one-to-one combat simulation, and later added magic and more dungeon crawling. But alas, it's not GURPS. If you want to do old-school gaming, grab it, a few years a new release of the old version was kickstarted and is still available.
But alas, that's not strictly speaking GURPS. But we still don't have to go to the full first edition box. Because right before that came out, we got Man to Man, a relatively short (60 pages) book that's just about creating simple characters and letting them have some arena-style fights.
The only skills it has are weapon skills and Running. Isn't that just perfect for some OSR vibes?
You get...
- 12 Melee Weapon Skills
- 8 Ranged Weapon Skills (includes Throwing anything)
- 3 Unarmed skills
- Fast-Draw
- Running
- Lotsa weapons & armor
Man to Man is available as a high-quality scanned PDF at DrivethruRPG and Steve Jackson's own Warehouse 23 store. Print on demand versions can be had at Drivethru and in some local Amazons.
What do we need to add?
I'm not going to say that this is what we should just stick with this and call it an old school day. Starting the headline with a number was probably the first hint here.
This "Old School GURPS" thought experiment aims at investigating what we can take from the regular, D&D-lineage Old School movement(s), see if that works with GURPS or what we can provide as alternatives.
As an artistic constraints, I'm trying to not just grab things from the full first edition or even later ones. Even if some of that is freely available in GURPS 3E Lite, I'm aiming for people just needing to grab Man to Man and adding my own sprinkles of rules & rulings.
Coming Attractions
I'm currently thinking of the following areas to investigate
- Additional roles & "classes" – GURPS has the Fighting-Man/Fighter pat down, what else do we need?
- Magic – no matter whether we will have a specific "class" for this, we definitely will need some sorcery to go along with our broad- and shortswords.
- Procedures – Dungeon and wilderness exploration in the OSR context actually adds some rules, not just rulings. Or at least tries to stick with those in the ancient texts, to a degree that might be a bit beyond me. But I'll give it a try.
We'll continue in this series with having a look at what we can find in the only adventure publishes for "GURPS 0E": Orcslayer!