Recent GURPS Releases

Yesterday was GURPS-Day, but I was on a plane, so I missed it. Sorry.

My own book was the crack in the dam. Since then, we’ve seen a bunch of new GURPS releases, in addition to our monthly dose of Pyramid.

So, what’s new?

Well, we’ll start with my own work.

Technical Grappling cranks up the potential resolution for close combat, armed and unarmed. It’s been revised once since publication, and based on a pretty good forum discussion, I think there’s one more thing that probably needs to be done. And no, it’s nothing to do with Bites.

I’ve copied the e23 page for each book, and the cover images are live.

GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling 

For GURPS 4th Ed.

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Written by Douglas H. Cole
Published by Steve Jackson Games
51-page PDF (1.2 MB)
Stock Number SJG37-1644, $9.99

Master Grappling . . . or Face Defeat!

• Trained Strength. Discover how technical proficiency complements raw power.
• Control Points. Transform grappling from an all-or-nothing affair to a matter of degree.
• Position Revisited. Achieve leverage by jockeying for not only posture, but also facing and orientation.
• Armed Grappling. Control and entangle your foes with a surprising variety of melee weapons.
• Combat Options. Narrow your focus with the One Foe option, exploit Committed Attack to force a posture change, pass a limb to trap your opponent, and more.
• Techniques. More than 30 of them — some new, some modified. Use an Escaping Parry to break a clinch, or Change Position to establish a weight advantage.
• Fighting Styles. Learn Jacket Wrestling or Shuai Jiao — and distinguish between between bear and lion attacks — with six classic styles plus four specifically for animals.

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You Can Do Anything!

• Master the traits necessary to become a Ritual Path magician, from specialized advantages to the core and Path skills behind every spell . . . or alter them to fit your campaign needs.
• Learn how to craft rituals to produce the effect you want with the skills you have, and what can help or hinder you when gathering the energy to make the ritual work.
• Acquaint yourself with the benefits and pitfalls of various methods for making spell-casting easier, including charms, elixirs, grimoires, places of power, enchanted items, and more.
• Discover ways to modify the basic system, how to combine it with other magic systems, what awful things happen when you mess up a spell, and exactly what you cannot do with Ritual Path magic.
• See how the system works with over 80 sample rituals that cover all the major effects the average caster relies on, such as healing, injury, communication, and protection.

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Undead, Infected, or Just Plain Cursed?

• A rules-free survey of zombies by fictional and folkloric origin, physical and supernatural type, and dramatic role.
• Systematic guidelines for creating custom zombies to surprise your players.
• Ready-to-use examples for the zombie-master in a rush: B-movie and fantasy undead, living-but-infected crazies, necromancers’ pets, science experiments gone horribly wrong, surgical constructs gone disturbingly right, and many others.
• Rules for topics dear to the zombie-lover’s heart: horde management, splatter and contagion, cures, and even inventing new kinds of zombies!
• Information for those who must confront zombies, including gear recommendations, rules for avoiding infection and simply surviving, and templates for survivors, zombie-hunters, and zombie-makers.
• Advice on using all this in any genre. Who says zombies are only for horror?

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A Spire to Godliness

• Explore the immense structure from crypt to roof, discovering the artwork, relics, and other contents of each room. Detailed maps (including variants that preserve this site’s secrets) present all of the features mentioned in the descriptions, while GURPS stats spell out the challenges faced by visitors bent on unscrupulous entry.
• Learn key details about the community that supports the cathedral, including local political problems and prominent people. A map shows the church’s location relative to other significant buildings in its vicinity.
• Become acquainted with notable priests, lay workers, and other locals who might be found at St. George’s. Discover why the church is often the perfect meeting place.
• Unearth a dozen adventure ideas involving the cathedral, plus several lenses to customize the locale to different campaign styles and settings – whether as a place of power, a modern-day curiosity, or a despoiled former jewel.
• Peruse an extensive list of inspirational resources that can provide GM and players alike with more information about church architecture, religion in the Middle Ages, fitting fictional plots, and specific real-world cathedrals.

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Become the Best Martial Artist on Yrth!

• Discover more than a dozen armed and unarmed fighting styles specific to Yrth, and use the included lenses to focus suitable Martial Arts styles into Yrth-based ones.
• Find out how existing advantages, disadvantages, and skills work in a fantasy world, and augment your heroes with new perks, techniques, specialties, and variants.
• Fight like an animal (literally!) using expanded rules that cover everything from sharks to giraffes — or exploit guidelines that let you take the action underwater.
• Depart from the traditional! Power up styles with Imbuement Skills from GURPS Power-Ups 1: Imbuements . . . or use the included werewolf template and related abilities to bring out your inner beast.
• Live as a knight, legionary, mercenary, dwarf, or dark elf, thanks to insight into daily routines and suggestions for suitable character templates (including two new ones).
• Learn the martial history of Yrth’s civilizations — not only human, but also dwarven, elven, many others — and read about the great warriors who influenced that world’s fighting styles.

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Wield the Might of the Five Elements!

• Master more than 60 fully worked abilities — and 20 new perks! — spread across the five elements, from the literal (summoning water as fog) to the metaphorical (using water chi to target the heart’s fire).
• Combine Talent, Meditation skill, and the new Focus technique to push your elemental abilities beyond their limits and use them in powerful ways.
• Supplement cinematic martial-arts skills with peaceful but equally fantastic feats of Alchemy, Erotic Art, Esoteric Medicine, Fortune-Telling, and Herb Lore.
• Use the expanded advantages, disadvantages, and skills to build the magician you want — or just adapt the sample elementalist, Wang Laowu.
• Learn how the concepts of xing, qi, and yin and yang permeate Chinese culture, and then use that understanding to work this magic into your campaign.