As I mentioned in my Retrospective post, I haven't played a lot of GURPS, though I've long admired the ambition of its design. I recall seeing advertisements for the game in various gaming magazines long before I ever opened a copy of the rulebook. This one, from early 1985, really piqued my interest in GURPS, in large part because of the artwork, which had the kind of sober, serious – even a little dull – style that I often find compelling.
I never played it, though I did buy a few books for it.
ReplyDeleteThe use of Denis Loubet artwork particularly the figure drawings from his Cardboard Heroes is a key element of the look and tone of early GURPS products.
ReplyDeleteThe Viking and knight on this ad date back to the exquisite cover to the much earlier Game Design: Theory and Practice.
If you don't run GURPS as an rpg, I highly recommend it as a standalone boardgame for playing out battles with historical figures from 1/72 scale model kits.
Steve Jackson Games and (to a lesser degree) Hero Games owe a great deal of their success to Loubet's distinctive artwork. He did a lot of work on The Space Gamer, a lot of which was re-used in early GURPS books along with new art there and in Cardboard Heroes.
DeleteI think Loubet also had a hand with the paper figures included with Middle Earth Role Playing. Those are particularly outstanding.
DeleteFor me he is right up there with Erold Otus and Liz Danforth. Truly one of the greats!
Wow. I love Denis Loubet's work on the Ultima series of computer games. I did not realize he also did work on pen and paper games as well. That's great!
Delete"We've got all the bases covered, rules for both swords *and* laser pistols!" That's the tone i get from all those 80's-90's universal systems, they aren't really aware of genre in a meaningful way as they are the props from those different settings.
ReplyDeleteThrough the 90's and early 2000's GURPS was our primary system (systems?). It's still my favorite iteration of Deadlands and the system of choice I'd use if I was ever to run Vampire again. And its sourcebooks are fantastic. My favorite memory about the sourcebooks is when a university professor took a look at the bibliography for GURPS Aztecs and said, "This looks like my syllabus." I picked up sourcebooks for settings I'll probably never run just for the enjoyment of reading them.
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