It’s been around 25 years since I last ran a campaign using the GURPS rules.

Most of my GURPS campaigns were very short: run as “filler” between longer campaigns in other systems. The GURPS system was always a hard sell, both to my players and to me as GM. Character creation was a pain point, but fortunately that was a one-time thing for players. I’ve never had a group of players interested in detailed tactical combat, probably because I’m not interested in it. We limited ourselves to the Basic Combat system (Chapter 13 in the GURPS 3e Basic Set), but combat could still feel like a slog at times. The last campaign I ran using GURPS was set in Escore in Andre Norton’s Witch World. It ran for over 80 sessions, played over four years. This was the longest GURPS campaign I had ever GMed, by about 70 sessions. While I have picked up a number of the fourth Edition GURPS books over the years, I’ve never used them. That’s about to change.

I am planning to start a new campaign around the start of October. This campaign will reunite some of the players from previous campaigns — one played in some of my Arn campaigns in the early 1980s! As the six people involved are scattered over the world (four in the US, one in Mexico, and one in France) this will be a fully online campaign–my first. We will be using Foundry VTT and Discord. I bought a Foundry VTT license during the pandemic. I never really used it as my group of the time hated it. They preferred just using Zoom. Fortunately, four of the six have played in at least one GURPS campaign before. Two played in the above-mentioned Witch World campaign. This will be the first GURPS 4e campaign for everyone.

I had wanted to run a monster hunter campaign set in a steampunk urban fantasy version of Victorian London — a setting I developed over the past couple of years with the (foolish, as I can’t write fiction) idea of writing steampunk Holmes fiction set therein. The idea of playing our first GURPS game in many years with 400+ point starting point GURPS characters was not something the group was up for, however. I vetoed the idea of resuming the Witch World campaign as all the material I had on it was ruined in a flood years ago and no one wanted to just start a new Witch World campaign unrelated to the 2000-era campaign.

We finally decided on a campaign set on Yrth from GURPS Banestorm. This setting has much lower suggested starting character point totals and is relatively familiar fantasy. This should make play less complex. Not only will this make getting back into GURPS easier for everyone, it should help with the Foundry VTT learning curve. Of course, I can’t help but modify any published game system or setting I use, so players who have read the Banestorm book will discover that not everything therein is accurate.

We will not be using the new GURPS 4e Revised Basic Set. I’m the only person who has it — and very little has changed in the 4e rules. As neither the GM nor the players wish a game focused on detailed tactical combat, which combat rules we use will be carefully selected to provide options without too much complexity or allowing combat to take too much for our limited play time. As we plan to use the unoffical but excellent GURPS Game Aid for Foundry VTT, which automates some of the combat math, we may use more of the combat system than I have used in the past.

I’ll call this campaign “Out of the Storm”. That should be a major hint as to how this campaign will start.