Name your top 3 Gurps books of all time and why?

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by deanjday

Being quite new to Gurps and feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the books over the many editions, I thought it might be useful to get some solid recommendations from you veterans as to some of your favorite books.

Recommendations for "top three" really depend on what you're trying to do with the GURPS system.

If you're wanting "crunchy" historical detail, the GURPS High Tech and Low Tech books and their sequels are excellent. I'd consider High Tech to be crucial for any GM who wants to run a realistic "modern" (i.e., 19th century or later) campaign.

For historical accuracy, you can be guaranteed that any GURPS book which purports to cover a particular time period of genre will be at least "good enough" to get you started.

For Science Fiction, GURPS Space is a good basic treatment of the subject, although some of its astronomy is becoming dated and there are parts of the book which are mostly "fluff" or which are too specialized for some genres. There are also dozens of books which cover specialized science fiction settings.

For Fantasy, there are literally dozens of GURPS 3E and 4E books on the subject which you can pick and choose from depending on your tastes.

If you want examples of just how weird and specialized GURPS can be, take a look at GURPS 3E Cabal, Goblins, and Fantasy II.

For "unique to GURPS" settings, take a look at Banestorm, Infinite Worlds, and Transhuman Space.

[acrosome]

GURPS Horror by Ken Hite is one of the best supplements ever made for any RPG, period, IMHO. That's a hell of a book.

Otherwise, I like crunch:

GURPS Low-Tech
GURPS High-Tech

And honorable mention:

GURPS Martial Arts
and throw in the Low Tech Companions, too.

But really you should ask for favorite books in various categories. "Best three setting books", etc. You could also just have fun with the question "What do you consider to be CORE books?" For instance, I would include all of the above except Horror. I really couldn't conceive of doing a game without the tech books, social engineering books, Power-Ups books, etc. I would include Powers as a core book too, though I personally almost never use it since I rarely do super-heroics or other high powered stuff. It's still useful for a lot of other stuff, though.

[DreadDomain]

Systems and Genre books:

Powers
Horror
How to be a GURPS GM

Settings:

Cliffhangers
Transhuman Space
Cabal or Madness Dossier

Hang on, I was about to forget Conan

[Mr_Sandman]

The three I'd pick for interesting reads, thought-provoking, and inspiring ideas:

1. Thaumatology
2. Horror 4th edition
3. Infinite Worlds

The three that I feel like I'm most likely to use when building a campaign, characters, or running things at the table:

1. Action 2
2. Martial Arts
3. Tie: Social Engineering, or Power Ups 5 Impulse Buys

Three setting books that come to mind:

1. GURPS Mage the Ascension
2. Tales of the Solar Patrol
3. GURPS Camelot (This one I haven't actually used to run anything, but like a lot of the ideas in it.)

[sparcipx]

Originally Posted by Mr_Sandman

Tales of the Solar Patrol

I love this setting, one of these years I have to use it as the backdrop for a Rocket Robin Hood campaign.

[Tymathee]

GURPS Power Ups 6: Quirks, Power Ups 2: Perks, and Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons in that order. Quirks are wonderful for fine-tuning a character in small ways not possible by full-blown Disadvantages, and the character customization would surely suffer without them. Perks are similarly just as important. Dungeons is indispensable when it comes to running any sort of campaign involving dungeon crawling, and many campaigns contain dungeon crawling even if the GM doesn't think to frame it that way. Much of the advise within can be adapted easily for use with other genres.

[oneofmanynameless]

Thing's I'd Advise for a New GM
1. GURPS: Powers
To me this is like... basic set 3. Just how to actually use the rules laid out in Basic Set to build any ability or super power you could possibly want to make. How to work with the system.

2. GURPS: Horror
There are plenty of other supplements that could stand in for this one depending on the sort of games you want to run. But if I were to say "basic set 4" about something it would be this. Between a solid collection of character templates broadly covering many walks of life; to a basic bestiary built out for you; to excellent advice on how to structure a game, build narrative or dramatic tension, maintain a safe space at the table while exploring dark areas in game; and a worked up campaign setting, this supplement is a solid companion for any GM, particularly a new GM.

3. GURPS: Supers
On the totally opposite end of the scale in terms of tone are the brightly colored super heroes. Supers covers how to handle high level games, from building powerful powers driven characters or cinematic action heroes, to flashy action driven drama and narratives not build on suspense, to specialized rules for high powered characters. What Horror doesn't cover in terms of implementation Supers does.

Honorable mentions:
GURPS: Fantasy brings basically everything GURPS: Horror does (with some obvious tonal differences) although I found Horror much easier to parse, or even straight up read, when still newer to the game. Fantasy is a little better for lower TL levels, while Horror is a little better for mid and higher TL levels. Horror also covers more "investigation" style stuff so I'd probably end up pairing Fantasy with Mysteries if I was to focus on it instead.
GURPS: Template Toolkit 1: Characters is phenomenal, especially as you get deeper into gurps and want to make your own character templates instead of use example ones or make things up on the fly.
GURPS: Psionic Powers, GURPS: Divine Favor, GURPS Thaumatology : Chinese Elemental Powers, and similar supplements are really solid alternatives to Supers, although they lack the worked templates and don't cover the cinematic action hero side of things.

Personal Favorites
1. GURPS Powers: The Weird is a deeply creative exploration of what you can do with GURPS, including exploring concepts that underlay weird science and thaumatology alike. I love it.
2. GURPS Power-Ups 6 : Quirks because quirks are better for bringing a character to life than anything else. Marvelous character and depth, quite rapidly.
3. GURPS: Thaumatology deserves its own credit for creative alternate systems and getting you thinking about things. What powers is to the advantage system this is to the magic system... and even though I exclusively use "magic as powers" these days I still reference it and it's ideas constantly!

[pestigor]

I have all the 4e Hardcovers but I usually run with just the Basic books and use stuff from my 3e collection as I'm not very rules focused when I run, just enough to give the players some agency.

For 4e books that I'll go back to
#1 Fantasy as it's generic and full of ideas to build something I want to run as opposed to being focused on the Banestorm setting (which is a great setting but not the kind of fantasy I like to run.

#2 Thaumatology because when I put a setting together I'm not a huge fan of Gurps magic.

#3 Horror because the first print of the 1st edition was my first Gurps book and I like to mix some horror elements into most of my games

3E

#1 Cliffhangers because when I'm not running fantasy I like this era

#2 Religion because not being religious it's a huge blind spot and I don't want it to be just another form of magic or priests being relegated to "Combat medic"

#3 All the country/historical books (Japan, Russia, Imperial Rome [not a country but it's in this group] et. al.) because of the through research I didn't have to do in the Library in the late 80's early 90's to make a setting "feel" real.

Honorable mention: Burrows and Bunnies because I'm a huge fan of Richard Adams' work and a huge fan of Stephan O Sullivan.
Edit: I always wanted to explore an all out war against the Efrafans... :)

[Sorenant]

GURPS Transhuman Space because it's my favorite setting, exquisitely detailed scifi world that doesn't rely on dystopia, apocalypse, aliens or other similar devices to create conflict. It's just good old human struggle. Also it has catgirls, which is definitely a plus.

GURPS Thamatology: Sorcery because it permanently changed how I deal with magic. I already tended to use Powers as Magic but it was too expensive and more limited than I wished, then comes Sorcery solving all of these problems. It also feels more like magic than plain Powers as Magic, that bordered on superpowers.

GURPS Action 4: Specialists for similar reason as above. Presenting players with character creation has always been a problem even with curated trait list and supervision, and I didn't like templates as I felt they somewhat kills GURPS' flexibility. Action 4 presents a good middle ground that gives the freedom to build a character however the player sees fit with neat skill packages that saves them the work of figuring out what does (goes with) what.

Honorable mention: GURPS Lunal. A nice setting book with very interesting (sometimes whacky in a good way) ideas that introduced me to GURPS.