Steve Jackson Games recently teased a revised 4th Edition of its universal RPG, GURPS. Here’s what we know so far.
GURPS is a name that conjures up meticulously detailed sourcebooks that often involve a lot of the real world, for some reason? But it’s also a robust RPG engine. The Generic Universal Roleplaying System (GURPS is an acronym you see) helped Steve Jackson Games carve out a niche in tabletop history. And now, it seems, there’s a revised edition coming out in the not too distant future.
GURPS 4th Edition Revised – Cleaned Up And Out Soon
The initial tease of the revised edition came at Gamehole Con, but more information has since surfaced on SJG’s very own GURPS forums. Including the fact that the revised 4th Edition is going to be focused primarily around wording and layout. The goal is to make it “easier to use and read,” while maintaining maximal backwards compatibility.
And that’s a line we’ve heard before. You can see for yourself how backwards compatible D&D’s new edition is with it’s old one. But unlike D&D, GURPS 4th Edition Revised intends to keep even the page references the same between printings.
So what then, will be new, in the revised edition? Here’s a taste, courtesy of the SJG Forums:
“It is definitively not GURPS Fifth Edition, or even a GURPS Third Edition to Fourth Edition-level change! […] It will not make edition-level changes to point costs, modifiers, prices, weights, etc. All rules changes will be additions, in clearly marked addenda “chapters,” so that people can easily decide what to retcon into Fourth Edition campaigns.”
The main goal is to clean up the language, clarify the rules, and in general make it more readable. Even that sounds tricky in not wanting to change the page references in the other books in the series. And yet that is exactly where SJG’s priorities lie in this upcoming new publishing.
They go so far as to say that compatibility is “the single most important element” – though it is by far not the only task. After all this is an edition revision. It’s “far, far more” than a new printing. So while it’s not a complete overhaul, you can expect to see a better layout, cleaner language, and more than 25 pags of “best of” rules plucked from the last two decades.
Keep an eye out for GURPS 4th Edition Revised “soon”!
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