Tag Archives: GURPS

Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 2/14/2026

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Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 2/14/2026

  1. Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
  2. ICRPG Power Tools: Game Mastery Book
  3. Halls of Arden Vul: The Thicket
  4. Proteus Sector: A Gazetteer for Stars Without Number
  5. Delta Green: The New Age

Top News Stories

WotC Continues D&D’s Advance To Digital First Brand: We talked about the Hasbro earnings release quite a bit this week, but other investor materials and presentations continue to add more context. In the earnings call, CEO Chris Cocks confirmed the growth was part of a strategy to move to a digital-first company, compounding the growth from earlier calls where it was stated that 60% of D&D’s revenue was digital. When taking these most recent results with WotC’s decision to add digital-only content earlier this year, it’s becoming clear that the company intends to migrate more D&D activity to their exclusive digital platform.

From the Archives

There are few game mechanics which have gone from popular to cringeworthy as quickly as parallel Merits and Flaws. While many modern games have embraced some nuance about how to dole out discrete character merits, GURPS is still rocking Advantages/Disadvantages from 2004, when 4e was released and when the mechanic hadn’t fallen from grace. From the archives we have a System Hack look at GURPS Disadvantages to provide a few ideas to modernize the system.

Discussion of the Week

A disaster is presently unfolding vis-à-vis the official Neopets tabletop RPG: Licensed games are interesting; they can both provide more engagement to existing fans of the property while opening the gate to the TTRPG hobby as well. This requires that the licensed game not only be decent, but also provide an experience aligned to what fans are looking for. In order to provide that experience, a game designer has to, among other things, pay the freelancers he’s working with. The licensed Neopets RPG has apparently failed on all of these counts, looking to be such a disaster that it both induces schadenfreude and could even get me to say that the Fallout TTRPG wasn’t all that bad.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Five Tiers of RPG Publishing

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Hasbro’s annual earnings came out this week, so I took a look. It is truly staggering how much Wizards of the Coast has changed the company since they were acquired; when looking at unadjusted earnings the Wizards of the Coast and Digital Games division was the only one that turned a profit in the entire company. Not only that, but Wizards is responsible for roughly 47% of the entire company’s revenue and over 90% of all revenue growth over the last year. That’s over 2 billion dollars in revenue; roughly $1.7 billion is attributable to Magic: The Gathering and the rest is attributable to Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons is obviously the largest, most popular roleplaying game, but $400 million in revenue is staggering. If this was all books, it would be eight million copies. It’s not all books of course; one of the reasons D&D is growing (though perhaps not as fast as Magic is) is the continued expansion of digital services like D&D Beyond, products with high margins and minimal variable costs. This is the future, not because it makes for a better gaming experience, but because it makes for a better balance sheet.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: GURPS Disadvantages

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Welcome back to System Hack! For our second installment of hacking GURPS, we’re going to take a look at the banes of the system’s existence; they’re listed in a separate chapter from the boons. That’s right, we’re looking at disadvantages. GURPS character creation has each player build their character from a set number of character points, which are used to buy attributes, skills, and advantages. There’s also the ability to get points back by reducing attribute values or taking disadvantages. In the case of GURPS, where the quantity and scope of disadvantages is so broad, it takes an eagle eyed GM to make sure that each disadvantage is ‘worth’ the point cost (for advantages players tend to do that themselves, isn’t that weird?). This is generally done by enforcing the disadvantage at the table, making disadvantages in play a lesson in negative reinforcement. To make things even more complicated, some disadvantages aren’t really disadvantages at all. Things like dark secrets and enemies swing the spotlight directly at a character, producing a positive value to the player that isn’t reflected by the negative point value.

While limiting the number and point value of disadvantages in your GURPS game is always prudent, there are other methods out there to make them work without giving any players unfair advantages or feeling like you’re punishing them every time they need to make a self-control roll. After talking a bit about one of the inherent flaws of advantage/disadvantage type systems, I’m going to discuss little hacks to improve the utilization of two common disadvantage mechanics in GURPS: frequency of appearance and self-control rolls.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Advancement for GURPS

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As longtime readers of this site may be aware, I have a long history with GURPS. GURPS was the first game I GMed for what is still my primary gaming group, and I GMed GURPS for the majority of all games that I ran from 2006 until 2014. In the intervening decade I moved away from the system because my own interests changed; I began seeking out specific experiences and different approaches to game design. Some of my favorite games and game systems from the last decade, systems as diverse as Twilight:2000, Electric Bastionland, and Apocalypse World, all share the common property of being designed for a specific circumstance. In other words, all of these games could be considered the antithesis of GURPS at least as far as design goals are concerned.

That said, my affection for GURPS and generic game systems in general has never completely waned. Beyond that, when it comes to a more simulative approach to gaming, to times when you want to know how to make a very wide range of situations relevant, GURPS is still king. I cannot think of a better game for bringing verisimilitude and consistency to a very wide set of characters and circumstances. However, as much as I hold a lot of affection for GURPS, there are still some things I’d want to change if I were to return to the system. For this System Hack or two (or three?) I’m going to look at GURPS and look at things which haven’t gotten as much revision and research as the tech level system, or the frightening number of weapons, or the comprehensive and extremely math-heavy solar creation templates of GURPS Space. No, I’m going to be talking about things that have received a lot of attention since GURPS Fourth Edition was released in 2005. Spotlight management. Player-driven goals. And today, advancement.

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Articles, Editorial, Level One Wonk

Generic RPGs: What’s Out There

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There’s a world of games out there, but they still just scratch the surface. Maybe your favorite book series or movie hasn’t caught the eye of anyone making RPG adaptations. Maybe you have your own spin on a popular genre that you just can’t pull off with an existing game. Or maybe you just want to run something wild and straight from your own head. No matter the reason, if a game off the shelf doesn’t quite do it for you, you’re looking for a generic RPG.

We’ve talked a bit about generic RPGs before, reviewing Cortex Prime and Everywhen, discussing Fate, and even using GURPS as an example text for looking at how to use generic games. This article is less about what to do with generic games, though, and more about how to find the right one for you. We’re going to discuss three broad types of generic games: Engines which are designed to model as many situations with as few rules as possible, Codexes which use a simple base ruleset and then expand it with a wide library of additional mechanics, and Chassis which take more traditional setting-driven RPGs, strip out the specific parts, and then (hopefully) build back up to something useful. The ‘Chassis’ generic RPG is the most common and popular, but the other two design modes may very well have more to offer the prospective game master.

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Audio/Video, Cannibal Halfling Radio

Cannibal Halfling Radio Episode 4: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Lunar Exalt

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If you’re looking for a holiday tabletop roleplaying one-shot we have some ideas for you in the latest round of Pitch Me, from Jewish knights to Christmas changelings to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Lunar Exalt! Then we get a little more serious, talking about corporate commercialization making its way into the hobby, in this episode of Cannibal Halfling Radio!

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Articles, Level One Wonk

How To Be A GURPS GM Review

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Ah, GURPS. One of the most comprehensive toolkits on the RPG market, GURPS and its plethora of supplements offer the ability to play in almost any genre at almost any complexity level. The tradeoff here is that when you open the GURPS Basic Set for the first time, you are dazzled and overwhelmed by a vast range of options to select, dials to adjust, and levers to pull. Coming from a game like D&D, a GM starting with GURPS isn’t going to know where to, ahem, start. Steve Jackson Games realized that, and recruited two GURPS veterans to write How To Be A GURPS GM. While this slim volume is thin on generalizable GMing advice (with admittedly good reason), it does exactly what it says on the tin, and provides some guidance on how to actually make GURPS do what you want it to do.

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