Consistent-Point-Cost Character Templates for Genre/Historical Settings

GreatWyrmGold · 08-06-2020, 06:37 PM

I'm starting to plan a campaign for a group of players who have little to no experience with GURPS, where they create characters from just about any setting* and get pulled through a number of other settings, to show off the breadth which GURPS allows and throw them into really wild scenarios that D&D and Pathfinder don't really support.

But they have little to no experience playing GURPS, so while I won't forbid them from making their own characters from scratch, I want to be able to point them at a nice library of templates to reduce the workload and hopefully inspire ideas they didn't think of.

GURPS Action 1: Heroes gives eleven 250-point templates (each with a 20-point lens, with five provided and guidelines for more provided) that would cover most kind of modern or near-modern action characters; GA3: Furious Fists gives five more (and another lens). However, most of these sixteen templates and six lenses are primarily useful for creating characters from vaguely modern settings; they're not so good for Spartan warriors, fantasy knights, or space pirates.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Adventurers has a bunch of templates, five of which look good for no-magic characters,* though the Martial Artist obviously has significant overlap with the Furious Fists templates. And...that's all of the official 250-point character templates I could find.

Which brings me to my question: Do you know where I could find official (or at least well-put-together) character templates which could fill out other character archetypes? Ideally these would be a few more 250-point options, but I'd also be happy with enough (say) 100-point or 300-point or whatever templates to make up for the loss of the above sources.

*I won't let the players create just any characters within that setting; I'm forbidding magic, superpowers, cool cybernetics, etc. Which has more to do with limiting initial character complexity than anything—I have plans for introducing those kinds of subsystems later.
So this means that templates with magic and the like are basically useless, unless the magic is concentrated in one section that can easily be trimmed away and replaced with more advantages/attributes/skills.

08-06-2020, 06:37 PM	#1
GreatWyrmGold Join Date: Oct 2011	Consistent-Point-Cost Character Templates for Genre/Historical Settings I'm starting to plan a campaign for a group of players who have little to no experience with GURPS, where they create characters from just about any setting* and get pulled through a number of other settings, to show off the breadth which GURPS allows and throw them into really wild scenarios that D&D and Pathfinder don't really support. But they have little to no experience playing GURPS, so while I won't forbid them from making their own characters from scratch, I want to be able to point them at a nice library of templates to reduce the workload and hopefully inspire ideas they didn't think of. GURPS Action 1: Heroes gives eleven 250-point templates (each with a 20-point lens, with five provided and guidelines for more provided) that would cover most kind of modern or near-modern action characters; GA3: Furious Fists gives five more (and another lens). However, most of these sixteen templates and six lenses are primarily useful for creating characters from vaguely modern settings; they're not so good for Spartan warriors, fantasy knights, or space pirates. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Adventurers has a bunch of templates, five of which look good for no-magic characters,* though the Martial Artist obviously has significant overlap with the Furious Fists templates. And...that's all of the official 250-point character templates I could find. Which brings me to my question: Do you know where I could find official (or at least well-put-together) character templates which could fill out other character archetypes? Ideally these would be a few more 250-point options, but I'd also be happy with enough (say) 100-point or 300-point or whatever templates to make up for the loss of the above sources. I won't let the players create just any characters within* that setting; I'm forbidding magic, superpowers, cool cybernetics, etc. Which has more to do with limiting initial character complexity than anything—I have plans for introducing those kinds of subsystems later. So this means that templates with magic and the like are basically useless, unless the magic is concentrated in one section that can easily be trimmed away and replaced with more advantages/attributes/skills.