New to GURPS and needs some guidance.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by awarnock

Hi yall! I'm a Pathfinder player who's recently got the itch to run a sci-fi campaign with mechs, starships, aliens, and mercenaries (No Amorphous blobs of carbo-silicate, though.) I've looked and from what I can see, GURPS is probably going to be the best system for what I want, which is a mashup of cyberpunk, space opera, and real-robots mecha.

That said, I've never played GURPS before and the only place I know of that might even have a group is an hour and a half away. What would be a good way to get my feet wet? I have the Basic Set (both volumes), and I understand the How to be a GURPS GM book is a good place to start as well. Is there anything that I would need, or anything that would make my life easier as a GM, beyond that?

Thanks in advance, and I hope that this isn't too annoying to everyone. :D

Most people are glad to see another GM embracing GURPS, and will do what they can to help.

GURPS Spaceships volume 1 will make your life a lot easier. It's an excellent resource for easily making a wide variety of spaceships and starships. And if combined with the right issue of Pyramid volume 3 (I forget which one, but others can tell you), it can even be used for making mecha and other ground vehicles and all types of aircraft.

It's very coarsegrained, but my own speculations into trying to make it slightly more fine-grained always suggest to me that it's not worth the bother. And with the "split system" rule having become official as of one of the later Spaceships supplements, it's much less necessary; perhaps not necessary at all.

I'm a bit hesistant to tell you to buy all the supplements for GURPS Spaceships, though, since for a new GM that's a serious cash outlay, given that most of their pagecount consists of spaceship writeups, with each supplement having very, very few new rules and options.

But do get the GURPS Spaceships core book.