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

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Otaku

I thought you were not including core books?

I wasn't. I excluded Characters and Campaigns. Those are what I consider the core books.

[maximara]

For me it is

*Magic: a more logical magic system than what existed when it first appeared.
*Fantasy: An excellent expansion that brought all its chapters together in a fantasy world what was not another Tolkien rehash.
*Thaumaturgy: the book that allowed one to create any magic system one wanted

[malloyd]

Undoubtably the one I've gotten the most personal entertainment out of is Vehicles 2e, for 3rd edition. But as a freestanding toy more than anything - it's been almost useless for actual use in *GURPS*.

Most inspirational, I still have to give it to GURPS Voodoo - origin point of the system that's since turned into Path/Book Magic, Sorcery etc. and full of a bunch of other cool mystical stuff I at the time mostly didn't know.

Most useful now, tough call. I refer to Power Ups 2 Perks probably more than anything outside the core books (or I would if I hadn't done it so much I remember most of it without needing to...) but I think for most actually useful I'd have to nominate one of the GM focused books for one of the PDF lines - like Dungeon Fantasy 2 or Action 2 - these are quite helpful GMing aids well outside the lines they are specifically for.

[Boge]

Not including the core:

Martial Arts - this feels like it should be core rules. There's a lot of good stuff in here to add more options to combat and character builds.

Low-Tech - Goes into a lot more detail for medieval campaigns, especially for equipment.

High-Tech - Like Low-Tech but for more modern or futuristic campaigns.

[Bud]

Glad to see so many of my favorites mentioned!
All the "historics" - Aztec, Celtic Myth, Vikings, and some great moderns such as Mysteries and Horror deserve note. Easier to do a top 20!
But if only picking three, I'll mention a couple ...

My three, in no particular order...

1 Horseclans Loved the novels, and this was one of the very early GURPS books. I think the first appearance of mass combat system, and the shortest version. Amazing cover (from one of the novels). Second appearance of psionics, and also had religious magic. Like so many GURPS books, I think it'd have done better with more published adventures, but Horseclans had all the tools to build on.

2 Ice Age... Which even had an 11 page scenario in its mere 64 pages. The first specific prehistoric rpg? Rules for Shamans. Jobs table with income in $kins. Perfect for running Big Lizzie. Which brings us to...

3 Old West There are a few good western rpg's out there, since the early days, but I don't feel like they get a lot of play considering the potential - probably more people doing crossovers such as Deadlands. But Old West was very well done as a sourcebook (as GURPS books tend to be), this is more of a favorite due to subject matter (I love westerns!).

Glad to see Conan, and Thaumatology, got a mention, same with Fantasy Adventures, and lets give Space Adventures a runner up. The specificity of books such as those (and space atlases) makes running adventures more viable - especially since I don't have the same time to prep and write as I did back in the day!

If this was a list of 4 books, I'd put Unnight!

Really cool to see what the rest of you mentioned, I'm going to skim through a couple (ie Myth and Voodoo) that I haven't read for many years!
.

[ericbsmith]

GURPS Space, 2nd Edition. Easily one of the best written genre supplements for GURPS, and the first one I ever purchased (in a double pack BOGO with Space Bestiary). The 3rd Edition updated the spaceships rules, but didn't change too much else. The 4th Edition somehow loses the magic for me.

GURPS Fantasy, 2nd Edition. What this book does right it does really right. Somehow both historical and fantasy, lots of different areas to adventure in, and lots of plot hooks. While GURPS Banestorm is a worthy successor, one of it's failings for me is that it solves several of the adventure mysteries that the previous edition set up to be major plot elements a GM can use without setting up some good new ones. What Banestorm does right is giving more flavor to all of the unique areas to adventure in.

GURPS Time Travel. Another Genre book with a good presentation for all sorts of different time travel frameworks. GURPS Infinite Worlds literally contains all of the same information from Time Travel with a lot of extra for the Infinity Unlimited gameworld, but the fact that it pushes that setting as the primary and gives short shrift to the other frameworks makes it somewhat inferior to me, though a good purchase for GURPS 4th Edition.

Honorable Mentions: GURPS Vehicles, GURPS Traveller: Starships, and GURPS Spaceships. I like building things, and these books let you build things. I've spent way too much time on my Spaceships Spreadsheet. WAY too much time. But I enjoyed it.

[sgtcallistan]

More generally: the genre and historic books are almost campaigns in themselves.

More, small, niche, campaign or game-sized books: adapting what other might call a theme or a movie.

Swashbucklers, Celtic Myth, Cliffhangers, Rome, China, Russia, these are the realistic ones.

Banestorm, Voodoo, Gun Fu, Dungeon Fantasy, Infinite Worlds are theme or worked campaign books. More power to them.

[vicky_molokh]

'Of all time' makes this a hard question. Because I'm finding myself drifting towards different tastes in terms of gaming and especially mechanics. Looking at where I spent most of my time, over the course of the gaming 'career', I suppose I'd have to pick these, even though they don't exactly reflect my current interests.

Bio-Tech. I like biomedical topics in general, though on an amateur level, so it's an ongoing field of interest. I like the book for the glimpses of a setting (vaguely proto-THS, it seems), for the various modifications and products available in it, the 'crunchy numbers' that allow creating some degree of coherence in what the PCs can invent, build, or buy on the biomedical front. Bonus points: some look at low-tech biomedical topics.

Spaceships series (expanded with some Pyramid articles). Vehicles are cool, and the series offers a balance between detail and ease of use (contrast the older VE2e, which was way higher on detail, but way harder/slower to use). Despite all the flaws, I spent a lot of time using Spaceships. And not just for actual space vehicles.

Social Engineering. Rules for social interactions don't get enough love in RPG systems. This book offers an expansion of rules into the direction. It offers some clarifications on things that people misunderstand about the basic rules (relating to Influence Skills), it fleshes out important 'self-evident in hindsight' frameworks like the Reference Society, it offers various ideas for social activities that PCs might be interested in performing (but players may not always realise).

Some books that failed to make the top three but are still cool in my book:

Spoiler:  

On the crunchy combat side: Martial Arts and Powers, for more builds and mechanics to use in combat.

On the tech side: Ultra-Tech and High-Tech. Despite the flaws, they offer catalogues of interesting stuff PCs would want to have on an adventure.

On the setting side: Transhuman Space, including Fifth Wave and Deep Beyond. Because it's such a living breathing world with interesting tech and a serious approach to science.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Spaceships series (expanded with some Pyramid articles). Vehicles are cool, and the series offers a balance between detail and ease of use (contrast the older VE2e, which was way higher on detail, but way harder/slower to use). Despite all the flaws, I spent a lot of time using Spaceships. And not just for actual space vehicles.

This is, as a side note, the one point where my tastes really differ from yours. I would rather use Vehicles 2, and I wish it had rules for spacecraft. I've attempted to read Spaceships at least twice, and maybe more, and it's never made any sense to me; I can't even get to the point of starting to design a spacecraft to test drive its system. I don't know what it is that holds me up, but I just can't make it work for me.

[Phil Masters]

Off the top of my head:

Three books about which I am obviously biased:

• GURPS Arabian Nights: You never forget your first time. Actually, I could write this much better these days, but that's life.
  
• The Discworld Roleplaying Game, 2nd Edition: A gig I really wanted, and I think I got it about right.
  
• The 4th edition Steampunk Line: I'm counting this as one book, because that's what it would have been if the company was still doing full-sized GURPS books with any regularity. A worthwhile subject, and I got one or two things on paper that I wanted to get written.

Three books I just like without bias:

• GURPS Goblins: A thing of strange beauty. The funniest roleplaying book I've ever read (in my opinion), and also a great setting. Needs a comprehensive update, but never mind.
  
• GURPS Cabal: Ken Hite nails so much about horror-fantasy just right.
  
• GURPS Bio-Tech (either edition, but the latest is best): GURPS acknowledges that this subject needs a whole extra book and isn't just a chapter in (the excellent) Ultra-Tech.

Three other books I might recommend for someone looking for campaign ideas:

• Transhuman Space: May be showing its age by now, but TS is still perhaps the best hard-ish SF setting line available, and the core book is where it starts.
  
• GURPS Celtic Myth: Just an entertaining body of myth.
  
• GURPS Martial Arts (4th edition version): Not so much for the rules, though they aren't at all bad, as for the sense that styles of combat should be a key part of an adventurer's character.

But that's just now. Ask again another day and you might get a different list.