Retrospective: GURPS Space

When Steve Jackson Games released GURPS in 1986, it was already clear what kind of roleplaying game it wanted to be. Unlike TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons or GDW’s Traveller, GURPS didn’t offer a default setting. Instead, it presented itself as a toolkit. It was intended as a modular, universal system one could bend toward whatever genre one preferred. What gave this claim weight wasn’t its rulebook, which was necessarily broad in its content, but its supplements. Each one attempted to answer the question, "Could this generic system really handle everything from dungeon crawls to post-apocalyptic road wars?"

One of the first such supplements Steve Jackson Games released was GURPS Space (1988), co-written by William A. Barton and Steve Jackson himself. In hindsight, it feels like one of the pivotal books of the line, the one that established GURPS’s reputation as more than just a flexible rules engine. It showed how you could take a broad genre, in this case, science fiction, in all its wildly different incarnations, and provide the referee with the tools needed to create (or recreate) any SF setting he could imagine.

By the late ’80s, science fiction roleplaying was in a state of flux. Traveller (in both its classic form and the then-new MegaTraveller) was still the reigning champion of the genre, but its dominance was showing cracks. West End’s Star Wars had burst onto the scene in 1987 with cinematic flair and wide acclaim, while TSR’s Star Frontiers had quietly stalled, its last release appearing in 1985. Against this backdrop, GURPS Space (1988) offered something no other SF RPG of the period did. It didn’t compete on the basis of a single setting, canonical future history, or a familiar franchise license. Instead, it handed referees the raw materials with which to build their own universes, be they grounded hard SF colonies, two-fisted pulp romps, or baroque planetary romances in the tradition of Vance and Burroughs.

It was precisely this approach that first caught my attention. At the time, I hadn’t yet played or even read GURPS. I knew it only dimly through advertisements, probably in Challenge magazine. But when I finally encountered GURPS Space, I was enchanted. Here was a book that didn’t tell me what science fiction ought to be but instead gave me the tools to make it whatever I wanted. I bought a copy almost immediately, followed by GURPS itself, largely on the strength of this one supplement. This would have been around 1990 or ’91, just after the release of the second edition, which is why the cover you see above accompanies this post rather than the original 1988 cover.

I was not disappointed. The worldbuilding section alone struck me as one of the most useful pieces of RPG design of its era. It provided step-by-step procedures for generating star systems, planets, ecologies, and cultures that felt simultaneously playable and evocative. The alien-design rules were equally impressive, demonstrating how the flexible mechanics of GURPS could be harnessed to create a wide array of nonhuman beings, from the truly strange to the more familiar. Even the treatment of technology impressed me. By abstracting progress into “tech levels” (an idea borrowed and refined from Traveller), the book offered a simple but powerful shorthand for describing entire societies without resorting to endless lists of weapons and gadgets (though, in time, GURPS would provide those as well).

Of course, GURPS Space bore the characteristic style of the line: dry, methodical, almost textbook-like. GURPS Space was never going to win any rewards for its writing, nor did it offer the convenience of a ready-made universe. This is both a strength and a weakness. For referees seeking inspiration and tools, it was definitely a godsend. For players wanting a game they could pick up and play straight away, however, it could feel intimidating or even sterile. Of course, that was the point. GURPS Space wasn’t trying to compete with the likes of Star Wars. It was offering something entirely different: freedom. 

Taken as a whole, GURPS Space is one of the most significant supplements in the history of the line. It established the idea of GURPS as the “toolkit RPG,” a system whose real strength lay not just in its rules but in the genre handbooks that supported them. In my own case, it was the book that convinced me GURPS supplements were worth buying even if I wasn’t actively playing the game (which, truth be told, was most of the time). I wasn’t alone in this. Many referees I knew freely admitted to pillaging GURPS books for ideas and procedures to import into their homebrew campaigns. I strongly suspect Steve Jackson Games realized this and leaned into it, tailoring its supplements to appeal as much to curious referees as to dedicated GURPS players.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why GURPS Space made such an impression. It is fundamentally optimistic about exploration and the potential of alien contact, yet flexible enough to support darker, more cynical futures. It treats science fiction not as a single genre but as a sprawling field of traditions, each with its own possibilities. Above all, it captures what Steve Jackson Games was attempting to do with GURPS, namely, provide tools rather than a finished product and trust the imagination of referees and players to supply the rest.

That is ultimately why I still look back fondly GURPS Space, even though I don't play GURPS nor am I likely to do so anytime soon. Like so many of the supplements that followed in its wake, it doesn’t prescribe so much as inspire. Every table, every guideline, every suggestion is an invitation to ask questions and ponder answers. It’s not a book that hands you a ready-made campaign setting but one to spark ideas you might otherwise have not come up with on your own. In that sense, it’s less a manual than a launchpad, still capable of sending the imagination into orbit nearly four decades later.

What the @!¢%*# is GURPS?

Though I was a fan of Ogre and Car Wars, both designed by the American Steve Jackson (not the British one), I didn't pay close attention to the other games his company was publishing. Consequently, when GURPS arrived on the scene in 1986, I largely paid it no heed, aside from the very peculiar advertisements I remember seeing in the pages of Dragon and elsewhere, like this one.

What's most immediately striking to me about this ad – aside from the painful lack of a question mark – is that nowhere does it explain what GURPS actually stands for. That's probably intentional, since the oddity of the game's title is memorable and might serve to pique interest in it. By the time I first played GURPS in the early '90s, it was already common knowledge that this was the Generic Universal Role Playing System, so it never really bothered me. But to a contemporary reader of Dragon? I wonder what he'd have thought.

For Every Era ...

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. 

Retrospective: GURPS

Though I've never been a devoted user of universal roleplaying game systems, I've long been intrigued by the idea of them. My first brush with the concept was probably Basic Role-Playing, which I encountered through the first edition of Call of Cthulhu in 1981. Chaosium used BRP (derived from RuneQuest) as the foundation on which it would build the rulesets of its other roleplaying games, like Stormbringer. Ringworld, and the aforementioned Call of Cthulhu. Hero Games did something similar with the rules of Champions.

For me, the appeal of a universal system lay in the promise of never again having learn new rules just because I wanted to play a new game (or setting). As both a referee and a player, I'm indifferent to rules, except to the extent that I forget them or confuse them with the rules of another game with which I'm also familiar. In general, once I find a ruleset that works well enough for my purposes, I stick with it. This probably explains why I've played so much D&D and Traveller over the years, despite the existence of purportedly "better" systems for fantasy and science fiction: I know these rulesets and they're more than adequate for my purposes.

In my youth, I knew plenty of people who had adapted the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to their favorite genres or settings. This was, I gather, a common practice in the days when there were only a handful of different game systems. Even at the time, this felt odd to me, despite my affection for D&D and my facility with its rules. Nevertheless, I understood the impulse. Why reinvent the wheel? Why did every RPG have to have its own unique – and frequently idiosyncratic – game system? Wouldn't things be easier if you and your fellow players had to learn just one ruleset rather than a new one every time you started a campaign?

So, when I first heard about Steve Jackson's "Great Unnnamed Roleplaying System," I was more than a little intrigued. Though I had never played Jackson's previous RPG, The Fantasy Trip, I knew it was well regarded and, from what I had gathered, the then-upcoming GURPS was designed as a successor to and an expansion of the core concepts behind The Fantasy Trip. Plus, I was a very big fan of Jackson's Ogre and Cars Wars, both of which my friends and I played regularly. By my lights, this pretty much guaranteed that GURPS – or whatever its "real" name would eventually be – would be a winner.

The first publication to carry the GURPS name, Man to Man, was released in the summer of 1985, along with a collection of scenarios entitled Orcslayer. Man to Man was a kind of preview of GURPS, presenting the game's combat system. I never saw a copy of it at the time – indeed I've still never seen one – so its release came and went without much notice from me. By the time the full GURPS Basic Set was published the following year, in 1986, I had largely forgotten about the whole thing, so it too escaped my attention. I'm not entirely sure why this was, though I suspect, given the timing of its release, that I was distracted by other matters. 

When I did finally see a copy of GURPS, it was already on its third edition. This would have been sometime in the late 1980s. The game was no longer sold as a boxed set with multiple booklets but as a single softcover volume. I ordered my copy through the mail, based on an advertisement I'd seen somewhere (Dragon? Challenge?), which reminded me that GURPS did indeed exist and that I'd once been quite interested in the project. I was very happy to receive it, along with a copy of the GURPS Space supplement, since I was then, as I am now, more or a sci-fi fan than a fantasy one.

I was very impressed with GURPS when I first read it. The rules were simple and easy to understand. The presentation was similarly straightforward – a no-nonsense layout with black and white art and informative little sidebars throughout. I loved how modular everything seemed, with skills, advantages, and disadvantages all capable of being added or swapped out, depending on the setting and genre of the campaign you were planning to run. Likewise, the supplementary material, like Space, provided lots of tailored options for the referee to consider. All in all, GURPS exceeded my expectations.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to play much GURPS in the months immediately after I first bought it. It wasn't until several years later, after I'd graduated from university and moved to my present home, that I rectified this. My local friends had played GURPS extensively, having effectively abandoned all other game systems in its favor for several years beforehand. They thus knew the system's ins and outs and were quite happy to share their thoughts on the matter. By and large, their experiences were positive, but they also recognized that, at least in its third edition – things may have changed in more recent editions – the rules creaked somewhat the farther one got from the power and technological level of medieval fantasy. In short, GURPS had something of a scaling problem, particularly as one moved toward science fiction.

This was disappointing to hear, but it didn't stop me from making use of GURPS several times over the years. Whatever its flaws might be, it was still a simple and convenient way to play campaigns that deviated from those presented in other commercially available RPGs. It was a terrific "toolkit game" and its supplements were often among the most inspiring and best researched I'd ever seen. I continued to support the game for years, despite playing it only sporadically. That's no knock against the game itself so much as an acknowledgment that, despite my appreciation for it and what it tries to do, GURPS never succeeded in joining my list of go-to RPGs. I definitely think there's a place for a game like GURPS, which is much more accessible and user friendly than, say, HERO. That said, I'm much less convinced these days that a one-size-fits-all universal system is even possible, let alone desirable and so GURPS remains on my shelf, unplayed.