Help! Skills Outside of the Core Books

[Kesendeja]

I'm trying to find all the skills listed outside of the core books. It seems that every-time I open a book or article, there's another skill popping up.

If you beautiful people could just let me know what's where it would be a lifesaver. (I'm think I'm finally caught up with buying the last of the 4th ed stuff, so it's a daunting task to go though.)

Truthfully it's the Pyramid's that's scaring me.

I'll try and make a list in the second post for quick reference, since this might be something useful in general.

[Kesendeja]

Master List
Skill Name (Book) (Pg #)

[ravenfish]

Non-core skills I can think of offhand (ignoring new specializations of Expert Skill, Hidden Lore, Professional skill, etc., which are too numerous to mention, along with spells, custom skills for specific Power abilities and new magic systems, etc., and also ignoring systems which alter the skill system in it's entirety rather than merely adding new skills, such as Wildcard Skills and whatever Power-Ups 10 is).

Martial Arts introduces the cinematic combat skills of Hypnotic Hands (p.61), Lizard Climb (p.61), Precognitive Parry (p.62), and Sensitivity (p.62).

Powers: The Weird (p.5) suggests a pre-TL6 counterpart to Electronic Operation called Machine Operation, for operating complex devices that aren't electronic. Whether this counts as a new skill or just a renamed one is an open question.

New required specializations of skill categories for which new specializations might not be expected include Oarsmen (a new variety of Crewman, being a counterpart to Seamanship for galleys instead of tall ships) and Gonne (a variety of Guns for firing the very earliest firearms that predate stocks and triggers), both on Low Tech p.10, and Crossbow (Speargun) (High Tech p.201), which would really just be a new skill if creating those weren't highly discouraged in 4e. [EDIT: Along with the further Crewman specializations of Aircraftman and Landshipman for helping to man huge steampunk contrivances in the sky and on the ground respectively, introduced on p.16 of Steampunk 3:Soldiers and Scientists.]

Further edit: Other unexpected new specializations include Navigation (Underground), which claims to be required instead of Navigation (Land) when in areas with a complex multi-level structure, and Survival (Underground), usable both in natural caves and in artificial delving that have become inhabited by wildlife. Both are found on p.21 of Underground Adventures.

[Varyon]

Yeah, a lot of stuff is just new Specializations of existing skills, like Expert Skill (Thanatology) for necromancers (DF9), the new Specializations for Guns from the Pyramid article, various Professional Skills from LTC3 (like Glassblower, Brewer, Butcher, etc), and so forth. I suppose Path skills are arguably new; I think they first showed up in Thaumatology, but they also feature in Thaumatology: Ritual Path Magic and Dungeon Fantasy 19: Incantation Magic. Technically every spell in the College Magic system is an individual skill, meaning every one that isn't in Basic Set would need to be listed - from Magic, Bio-Tech, various issues of Pyramid, etc. That alone probably accounts for the vast, vast majority of skills outside of Basic Set, probably dwarfing even the lists of different Specializations for existing skills.

Oh, also Power Ups 1: Imbuements, and the expansions on that (I think all found in Pyramid articles), would arguably need to be included here.

[Phil Masters]

Crewman (Aircraftman) and Crewman (Landshipman) (Steampunk 3, p. 16) are technically just specialisations, but they verge on being new skills. (See that book for some other new stuff.) But yes, 4e is designed so that most "new" skills are presented as specialisations.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Kesendeja

(I'm think I'm finally caught up with buying the last of the 4th ed stuff, so it's a daunting task to go though.)

Truthfully it's the Pyramid's that's scaring me.

You know you're not required to do this? GURPS isn't only "proper" when you have everything ever written for it.

I worry sometimes that people think that lacking supplements means they don't have everything they're supposed to have to play GURPS.

If you're just a collector and want to finish your collection... that's a different story.

[Kesendeja]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

You know you're not required to do this? GURPS isn't only "proper" when you have everything ever written for it.

I worry sometimes that people think that lacking supplements means they don't have everything they're supposed to have to play GURPS.

If you're just a collector and want to finish your collection... that's a different story.

Obsessive collector. Also I tend to run really weird games....

[ravenfish]

Belatedly, it occurs to me to check whether someone else has done this work before, and apparently there is a wiki with a fairly detailed listing of GURPS skills and specializations (including sources). It is apparently not completely comprehensive, as it excludes a few of the odd specializations mentioned in this thread, but it does draw on much more than the Basic Set.

See additionally the same site's lists of imbuement skills, wildcard skills, techniques, and spells.

[dataweaver]

I seem to recall one of the Disaster books introducing a genuinely new skill (as opposed to a new specialization); though I'm not recalling which book it was or what the skill was.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Kesendeja

Obsessive collector. Also I tend to run really weird games....

Note that running a weird game doesn't mean you need to find some official skill or advantage that fits the weird thing you want. You are perfectly entitled to make up your own, even ones that partly or completely overlap something that already exists somewhere, if it fits the game you want to run. There are dozens of traits I use all the time that got created as house rules like that over the decades.