GURPS Books by Genre, and function

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GURPS has a lot of material available for it and this thread will list some of that. All the books here were taken from the GURPS Books page
GURPS Can handle any genre and adapt any setting but finding that one item among such a large list can be daunting (or worse you just miss something you could use) this will make it easier.
I am not including any out of print books, sch as those with expired licences.
Only books currently available from W23 are included. Third Edition is compatible with Fourth Edition so those books are included. Adapting Third Edition to Fourth is pretty easy, point costs often change but for Monsters and NPCs that is not important and the skill and stat numbers mostly mean the same. Damage, especially gun damage has changed but most weapons have already been converted for you.

Suggestions and feedback welcome. Some genres or settings could be different and a lot of material can fit into more than one category. This is just my ideas and will only get better with your feedback.
Genres
Action
GURPS Subpage
Want to play a modern day action movie hero?
This genre covers cinematic action movies including but not limited to: Die Hard, Fast and Furious, James Bond, Oceans Eleven, Sneakers,
Campaign Building: Action 1: Heroes; Action 2: Exploits; Action 3: Furious Fists; Action 4: Sidekicks
Settings:
Out of print books of special mention:

After The End
GURPS Subpage
The world ended, well almost.
Playing wandering survivors of a desolated world or maybe trying to keep a world on the brink from going over are the focus of these books.
Campaign Building: After The End 1: Wastelanders; After the End 2: The New World
Settings: Autoduel; Ogre; Reign of Steel; Zombies
Out of print books of special mention: Horseclans and War Against the Cthorr

Conspiracy
GURPS Subpage
Conspiracy theories are cool speculation and the source of many books and movies. Here are some chances to play in a world where they are real and maybe, just maybe your part of them rather than an unknowing pawn. Of course your probably still a pawn, but at least you know about it!
Some ideas: The TV series 24, Burn Notice and the classic "The Prisoner", movies like Angels and Demons, The Bourne Identity (also fits under Action), The Manchurian Candidate or National Treasure
Campaign Building: Black Ops; Illuminati
Settings: Cabal; Conspiracy X; Horror: The Madness Dossier; In Nomine; IOU; Warehouse 23; Wierd War II: The Secret of Gneisenau
Out of print books of special mention: Prisoner

CyberPunk
GURPS Subpage
Sneakers, Bladerunner, heck even Wargames! Messing with computers to get what you want is older than the world wide web itself.
Cyberpunk is about more than cinematic computer hacking though, it typically involves a world run by corporations where government is just another customer.
Campaign Building: Cyberpunk (Third Edition)
Settings: Cyberworld; Transhuman Space
Out of print books of special mention: CthuluPunk

Fantasy
GURPS Subpage
Easily the most popular genre in role playing games, it has several sub genres.
Dungeon Fantasy: Focused on expolring and looting dungeons or old ruins and selling the loot. Handwaves a lot of world building and social elements.
Epic Fantasy: Powerful magic and world caonquring (or saving) heroes.
Magical Worlds: Magic is really common and well known and the campaign is typically about working in the world.
Swords and Sandals: Typically very low tech and weak magic, Conan
Wainscott Fantasy: Modern Urban fantasy, usually secret magic.

Campaign Building: Fantasy; Thaumatology: Urban Magics; Underground Adventures
Settings: Banestorm; Castle Falkenstein; Conan; Discworld; Dungeon Fantasy; Fantasy II: The Madlands;
Out of print books of special mention: Horseclans, Myth, New Sun, Witch World

Historical
GURPS Subpage
Want to play in a historical setting on earth? Maybe an alternate earth where things diverged at one point in time?
This can make use of GURPS Timeline (list of important dates) and the wealth of Third Edition historical books.
Campaign Building:
Settings:
Out of print books of special mention:

Horror
GURPS Subpage
Scary campaigns can be really nice and GURPS Horror gives you lots of ideas on what to include, why and how to make a game scary.
Campaign Building: Horror; ScreamPunk
Settings: Horror: The Madness Dossier; Infinite Worlds: Worlds of Horror; Monster Hunters
Out of print books of special mention: Cthulupunk; Deadlands; Hellboy
Creatures of the Night is a series of Horror themed Bestiaries. Blood Types, Undead and Zombies are also themed Bestiaries likely of use.
Several Locations books also are Horror related.

Humor
Gurps Subpage
Sometimes its nice to have a little fun without serious roleplaying or complicated plots. Steve Jackson Games has always been a producer of humor and GURPS gets its share of love here.
Campaign Building: Atomic Horror;
Settings: Casey & Andy; Discworld; IOU; Y2K
Out of print books of special mention: Goblins

GURPS Mars Attacks coming in December!

Martial Arts
Sometimes a subgenre of Action or others there is enough here to call it a genre of its own. Play martial artists from the local boxer at the gym to high end Wuxia combatants and anything in between.
A lot under Action above can also be used here.
Campaign Building: Martial Arts;
Settings:
Out of print books of special mention:
Useful books include Gun Fu; Martial Arts: Technical Grappling

Monster Hunters
Campaign Building:
Settings: Monster Hunters
Out of print books of special mention:

Space
GURPS Subpage
Campaign Building: Space; Spaceships
Settings: Prime Directive (Star Trek); Transhuman Space; Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game
Out of print books of special mention: HUmanx; Lensman; Mars; Planet of Adventure; Planet Krishna; Terradyne; Uplift
Space Atlas and Bestiary series off additional support

Supers
GURPS Subpage
From gritty street heroes of pulp and modern fiction to four color supers who can crack planets GURPS can handle it all!
Campaign Building: Powers; Supers
Settings: IST (International Super Teams)
Out of print books of special mention: Wildcards

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Support Material
So you decided on your genre and either used an existing setting or built your own. Next is fleshing it out and adding optional material to tweak it to suit your group.
Some books will help you with prebuilt locations or adventures which are great for saving time or providing worked examples.
Monsters and foes can be found for specific genres such as Creatures of the Night (Horror), Dungeon Fantasy Monsters (Fantasy), the genre world building guides like Fantasy and Space; and finally in Third edition books such as Fantasy Bestiary or Space Bestiary which will require a little bit of conversion but not much.

Other books are more GM guides that help you run a certain style or build your world.
GURPS Fantasy and GURPS Space give world building guidelines. GURPS Adaptations gives guidance for converting your favorite book or movie to a GURPS setting.
GURPS Mysteries helps with creating and handling player investigation stories. GURPS Cops and GURPS Covert Ops, or Espionage are all good Third edition books that can help.
The GURPS Social Engineering series goes over the social interaction rules in loving detail to provide help in running anything in that vein, Court Intrigue, finding a fence or informant, corporate espionage, or even finding a good party. Additional books in this series include Back to School (Dojos, High Schools, college, and more) and Pulling Rank (Working as a member of an organization).
Boardroom and Curia and City Stats help you build organizations or cities with short easy to read templates. Dungeon Fantasy 17: Guilds is great for building DF guilds.

GURPS Martial Arts and Technical Grappling as well as more setting specific books flesh out the combat system with both realistic and cinematic options.
Like Guns? Gun Fu (cinematic) and Technical Shooting (realisitic) expand the options for gun users.

Need equipment? Low Tech focuses on pre-industrial, High Tech is up to the modern age, and Ultra Tech explores Science Fiction.
There are tons of specialized gear and equipment books and even Loadout books for quickly equipping your character.

Magic your thing? Look at the Thaumatology line for options other than the default magic system (which has its own line of books). Rules for designing your own system, tweaking an existing one or already battle tested systems catering to virtually any taste.
The Powers books go over new abilities and even include a few that can be used as your magic system (GURPS Chinese Elemental Magic, Divine Favor, Power Ups 1 Imbuements, or Sorcery) or for a supers or epic Space Opera setting.

And of course there is the support of these forums where most GURPS authors, staff and fans regularly read and offer answers to questions or ask their own. The GURPS Forum includes a subforum of fan sites. These include blogs, animal encyclopedias, fan conversions, House Rules. settings, game recaps and much more.
Spammers and Flamers are not tolerated and quickly dealt with by the mods so its a friendly place.
I want to call out The GURPS Repository as a special resource here as it also provides an index and many other resources.
Another great one for animals

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Copied from forum regular Gef in response to another thread. Good advice for a newcomer to GURPS.

Yes, except maybe Horror depending on how much of that flavor you want.

Powers could be thought of as the sequel to Basic: Characters.
Martial Arts could be thought of as the sequel to Basic: Campaigns, at least for the combat system. If you want wrestling to make sense, also get Martial Arts: Technical Grappling.

And I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Action 2: Exploits, which isn't so much necessary as really handy. Maybe worth a higher priority than horror, and cheaper, too.

Having more books on your shelf doesn't make a better game. Really understanding the core system does. And the official sources don't give you much help there because the market seems to prefer rules to commentary on how to use them, which is a shame. This forum and the many blogs out there are great resources. Not meaning to disrespect the others, but I think Doug Cole's gamingballistic is a good place to start, with the GURPS 101 and Melee Academy portions.


Here are some things to focus in on, in no particular order:

****GURPS gives Social traits equal billing with Mental and Physical. Who's more powerful, Sampson the Combat Monster, or Delilah who can seduce a combat monster? Or the king who can hire a whole bunch of combat monsters? The main mechanic for social traits is the reaction table. For the face man, rolling on the reaction table is like rolling to hit for the fighter, so make sure you grok this table and don't nerf it by deciding every NPC's attitude in advance. The table can look a little intimidating, but it's really simple - every 3 levels improve reactions by one stage; on the positive end that goes from service with a smile to "everything within their power to help." That's huge, especially when the person who likes you has lots of power. You can learn Influence skills to improve your likelihood of a positive reaction, but they're all dependent on circumstance; sometimes Sex Apppeal is appropriate, and sometimes Intimidation is the better choice.

****The 3d6 system generates a bell curve. In a 1d20 system, every +1 is +5%, but in GURPS, +1 can be as high as +15% or as low as zero (if your skill is already 16 or higher). Skill 10 is a hobby, skill 12 is entry-level professional, skill 14 is experienced. For these folks, +1 is 15%, 10%, and 5% respectively. Routine circumstances grant +4, meaning that "entry level pro" does all routine things reliably. Make sense? In a game where PCs have skills in the normal people range, it's all about the bonuses, and people ask "what will give me a bonus to this skill?" Expensive equipment becomes very important because it gives a small bonus. GURPS handles the "normal people" range very well as long as you remember to make the bad guys normal too. By comparison, high point-value games are all about the penalties, because whenever you roll against a skill higher than 16, you're wasting it. People ask, "What special benefit can I get if I accept a -3 penalty?" This is the cinematic level where PCs make difficult things look easy.

****GURPS is skill-based, and skills are based on attributes, but there's an important stand-in for attributes: Talent. If you feel like you need tons of points to make a character proficient in his field, you're probably overlooking this important advantage. Pick 6 skills critical to your character concept, get a +4 bonus to them (along with a rep in your field) for just 20 points, same as the cost for just 1 level of DX or IQ. This makes a lot of sense. Musical Instrument skill is based on IQ just like scientific skills, but not every gifted pianist is equally gifted in the field of particle phsyics, and vice versa. The GM has to approve every specific instance of a Talent, but being generous with approval never seems to hurt anything. If you're going to use Martial Art styles, you should approve any Talent which encompasses the skills of one style.

****You can apply modifiers to basic advantages to make them a lot different. You can also change the special effect or interpretation to change the feel, even though the mechanic is the same. For instance, Luck (Combat Only) could be defined as dirty tricks instead of lucky breaks. Common Sense, which gives hints from the GM, could be defined as Divine Inspiration. You can use limitations to reduce the cost of advantages (typically the supernatural ones) by a whopping 80%. This is great for players, because they can afford more cool stuff, and great for GMs because it gives them a way to screw with the players' cool stuff. Example: Some power defined as a divine gift, maybe Dark Vision from the God of Secrets, trying to get the cost down to a mere 5 points. A gadget the size of a holy symbol (or wand or medicine bag) is worth -40%. Having to follow a code of behavior is worth -10%. Having to prep the ability with a prayer every morning is worth -20%. Paying 2 Fatigue Points when the divine energy courses through your body is worth -10%. As a GM, you have to approve all such builds, so the question is, will you run a game where these matter? If the bad guys know to steal the holy symbol of an empowered priest, then -40% is absolutely worth it. Even if the PC is never deprived of his power, the lengths he goes to prevent that deprivation are worth the discount.

****The combat system has 3 layers: The basic layer which is simple, the tactical layer, and the cinematic layer which basically breaks the rules of the tactical layer in favor of characters who can do things that only work in myths and movies. The tactical layer is complex, yet far less complex than you'd expect for the level of simulation it achieves. This is where GURPS shines (as it should, because this is where it started, as Man-to-Man). Choose your layer for the needs of your campaign. If the PCs are detectives who will get in the occasional fight, but the focus is always the investigation, go basic. If some PCs are wizards and the warriors need to be able to keep up, go cinematic. If fighting is a centerpiece, especially if you want to highlight differences in style between equally effective fighters, go with the tactical layer. The cinematic layer blurs the differences, so if you want cinematic competence without the blurring, raise the point level of the campaign so that all those fighters have skill 20+ and can soak big penalties for doing hard things (instead of making hard things easy, which is what the cinematic rules do).

****GURPS is a tool-kit for building campaigns, and you have to do the building yourself. The more you put in, the more you get out. If your time is limited, then limit the scope of your campaign accordingly. If you have time, build your own fantasy martial arts styles on the following rubric: 6 skills, of which 1-3 are required (a cheap Talent can cover them all). 3-6 techniques for the main skill, including Feint and anything specific to that skill, like Crack for whip and Hook for axes and Bind for fencing. It's generally only cost effective for one character to buy a couple techniques per skill, but 3-6 allows different disciples of the same style to have different signature moves. 0-2 techniques for secondary combat skills. 2-6 style perks; remember you need 10 points in a style's skills/techniques per perk (and you can have a personal discovery from outside your style for every 20 points in combat skills). Houserule suggestion: If you feel a perk is critical to a style, make it required but allow it to exceed the usual limits. For instance, if a style is focused on a weapon that is used one-handed with one skill, two-handed with a different skill, then maybe Weapon Adaptation should be a signature perk.

****Learn the combat system in stages. Ideally, get the group together for an experiment, just a bunch of one-on-one fights with some different pregen characters at different point levels. Make sure you try spear-versus-sword to see how reach works. Make sure you have a character with Peripheral Vision to see why it's fully worth 15 points, one with High Pain Threshold to see why it's only worth 10, and one with Combat Reflexes to see why it's the best bargain in the game. Figure out all the ways to reduce the other guy's defense so you can actually hit: get to non-shield side, get behind 'em even better, Feint, Deceptive Attack, take his weapon away. Play with the bonuses (All-Out/Committed Attack, Telegraphic Attack, Extra Effort) and the penalties (Hit Location, Rapid Strike). Make sure you run this long enough to see shock, stun, knock down, and play with the options and posture penalties for getting back up again, see when you should attack or defend all-out. Do some ranged combat to appreciate how every +1 skill means you can shoot 50% farther. Have an archer versus a swordsman to see how much ground the swordsman can cover while the archer draws, nocks, aims, and shoots. Serve beer and pizza and ask at the end, "So, do we wanna try this in a real campaign?" If you can't get the group together for arena night, then at least do all this solo; it pays off big time. You don't always have to use minis on a hex map, but if you do it sometimes, you can visualize it the rest of the time. I started this monster paragraph with "learn in stages" and I mean it; if you can arrange a break from the main game for a second arena night after everyone gets the basics, or if you could maybe start each session with one out-of-campaign one-on-one while waiting for the stragglers to show up, it'll pay off in your main campaign, and it's better than having only bad guys do the cool stuff hoping the PC's catch on. Knowing the combat system is worth 50 points on your character sheet.

Good luck!

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