GURPS surges PoD into Retail Stores
“But GURPS is dead,” comes the frequent observation. Untrue, but frequent. With most releases coming via PDF, and nearly all of them only available via the in-house Warehouse23 store, unless you know GURPS, want GURPS, and pay attention to GURPS, likely you won’t see it.
Combine that with a relatively restrictive take on the game mechanics and IP (SJG has no Open Gaming Licence or similar thing, compared to the OSR, Pathfinder, and Fifth Edition, not to mention Fate, GUMSHOE, and others), and finding your way to GURPS is like finding Ultima in the Choose Your Own Adventure book “Inside UFO 54-40.” You could only get there by knowing it was there and doing a dedicated, patient search for it, page by page. That is, you can only find it if you know where and how to look.
No longer. As seen on the July 27 Daily Illuminator:
July 27, 2017: GURPS At Your Favorite Local Game Store!
You may remember that, not too long ago, we ran a special bundle of GURPS books as a pre-order at Warehouse 23. (Ten books with just one buy button? Sweet!) Well, our partners at Alliance noticed and asked us one question: Can we join in on the fun?
Good news, everybody! Alliance offered the same pre-order GURPS bundle to their retailers, so we can happily report that the recent GURPS print-on-demand softcovers will find their way into dozens of stores. This means a larger GURPS library at those stores, which should help generate some renewed interest in GURPS as we grow closer to the release of the Dungeon Fantasy box set this fall.
Thank you to Alliance for stepping up and working with us to get these bundles into retailers’ hands. We appreciate the support and look forward to collaborating on more bundles shortly.
This is fantastic news. Maybe not as good as this and some sort of Open Gaming Licence, but fantastic news nonetheless. Having discounted PoD available in gaming stores gives a shelf presence that will lead to new customers, new players, and an awareness of the game. The upcoming Dungeon Fantasy RPG should provide a nice entry point for the industry’s most popular genre, and then the natural flexibility of the system should break out from there. If the DFRPG is followed by other worked-example genres, I suspect it’ll start to occupy non-trivial shelf space. Certainly at least it’ll be there, to avoid the golfer syndrome: 100% of short putts don’t go in.
Welcome news, and perhaps an unanticipated birthday present for Dr. Kromm.
It may make a nice difference to sales, I don’t see it making much differnce to actual games being played.
That requires, among other things, the people who actually have GURPS books already to run actual games.
It’s a *lot* easier to have people that own books running the game if more people have GURPS books.
“I can’t find a GM” is hardly a GURPS problem though, and outside of GMless systems, nobody’s found a really good solution for that one.