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A Brief History of my GURPS Experience
I discovered GURPS completely by accident when I received a bonus in my paycheck and decided to by some gaming stuff. My local hobby shop didn't have anything new that I wanted, so I gambled on something called "GURPS". It looked kind of neat: a blue-black cover with pictures of characters enclosed in bubbles. I took it home, read through it, played the introductory solo adventure...and was hooked.
It wasn't long before my collection of GURPS supplements was second only to my collection of AD&D stuff. (I used to think that my GURPS collection would never be able to surpass my quantity of AD&D stuff, but it's catching up fast...) I couldn't find a local group that played it on a regular basis, but I spent many happy hours by myself creating characters and adventures in a variety of genres.
When I moved to California, I managed to locate and join in on a couple of regular GURPS games. One was "IST Chicago", a Supers campaign where I played a powerful psionic named Jetstream; another was "Return to the Isle of Dread", a Fantasy campaign (based loosely upon the GM's old D&D campaign) where I played an archer named Barrett Blackfeather.
My favorite game, however, was a Riverworld campaign run by a History professor from a local collage. Our group of adventurers was composed of Theodore Roosevelt (me), Judge Roy Bean, Elvis, and a young lady who had been hung for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials. Most of our time was spent simply traveling up and down the River, interacting with the communities that had arisen and working to overthrow local tyrants. Along the way we had many adventures:
- We sided with Catherine the Great, John Paul Jones, and Rasputin against a pirate fleet led by Blackbeard and Baba Yaga (who turned out to be a renegade Ethical).
- We found ourself fighting our way through a battle between Robert E Lee (commanding a mixed force that included French Foreign Legionaires from Dien Bien Phu and American Marines from Iwo Jima) and Genghis Khan (leading a horde of assorted Goths, Picts, and Greeks).
- We spent some time in a kingdom ruled by a guy who could have been the historical King Arthur, complete with a magician named Merlin. We suspected nearly immediately that Merlin was another Ethical, but he wasn't; he was actually Harry Houdini making the best of his situation.
Among the other famous people we met included Edgar Allen Poe, Erwin Rommel, George Custer, Benjamin Franklin, Spartacus, Harriet Tubman, and Leif Erikson. The campaign eventually ended after nearly two years of regular play, not long before I moved to North Dakota.
Once I was in North Dakota, I joined a local gaming group and had the opportunity to start a game of my own. My GURPS Fantasy campaign started with four players, including my fiancée Julie. By the time Julie and I got married a year later, the game was still going strong and, the group having nearly doubled in size, was meeting every other weekend in a conference room at the local library.
About six months after Julie and I married, my gaming group dissolved. However, the AD&D campaign run by one of my friends had also just ended; he and most of his players migrated to my campaign, which we then played in the large basement recreation room of one of the gaming couples in the group. Since pretty much everyone in the group was a professional of one sort or another (most of us involving computers), we scheduled games once or twice a month, with big games (complete with childcare) held 3-4 times a year. The game ran for about four more years, until I moved my family to Oregon.
I still did some GMing for other, smaller groups as well, mostly one-shot adventures and mini-campaigns in genres and worldbooks ranging from Ice Age to Camelot to Terradyne.
I had to reduce my GMing time for a while after moving to Oregon, but did manage to run a couple of rather short-lived campaigns. My groups were limited to five players, since that was the maximum number that would fit around my dining room table. The first campaign was an Alternate Earths campaign based (very) loosely on television programs such as Stargate, Time Tunnel, and Voyagers. The second campaign was a GURPS adaptation of Chaosium's old "Hawkmoon" RPG.
My Spellgate Campaign
My most recent game, which went on hiatus for about a year before being picked up again, is a modern conspiracy/secret-magic setting with some psionics and weird science. (Click here for the current set of adventure logs.) It was originally called "The Secret Lives of Grad Students", but the name was changed following several trips by the party through various magical gates.
There are currently eight regular players; their characters pretty much cover the gamut of needed skills, although they are hoping to eventually acquire a computer hacker and a mechanical genius. The characters, in order that they joined the group, are:
- Lt. Jordan Westbrook: Medical doctor, US Army Reserve infantry officer, and motorcycle enthusiast
- Mark Smith: An ex-Army intelligence officer; dabbler in magic and alchemy
- Devon Vincent: A perpetual college student, professional artist, and Weirdness Magnet
- Master Sergeant Geoff Poole: A genetically-engineered soldier from the future now stranded in the past
- Kylie Delaney: An impulsive tomboy with a photographic memory, a knack for languages, and deadly accuracy with thrown objects. Commonly referred to in the party as "Buffy the Girl Scout"
- Big Bob: A gigantic (7'5") American-born actor who has starred in several Hong Kong-produced action/adventure movies and wants to be taken seriously as a martial artist
- Mauna Loa: A former masked Mexican wrestler with a split personality -- one a shy physicist, the other a bombastic would-be superhero
- Blackcat: A professional cat burgler and part-time exotic dancer
The characters have recently been converted from 3rd to 4th Edition. We try to play once a month, on the last Saturday of the month.
Some of my Favorite Characters
I have created dozens of characters over the years, not just for games in which I was playing but also just to see what I could create for a specific setting. Among my favorites (all currently 3rd Edition) have been:
- Major Zachary Drake (GURPS Autoduel): An ex-military autoduellist who owns a small garage near the local arena. He drives a modified Copperhead RL.
- Silverglove (GURPS Cyberworld): A former cyberprep "korpbaby" from Quebec. As "White Lightning", he is acclaimed as a champion ICF savate gladiator; as "Silverglove, he is one of the hottest deckers in San Francisco.
- Hu'Li (GURPS Cyberworld): A human/fox hybrid created in a secret Chinese genetic engineering laboratory. He managed to escape his creators, and was last known to be lurking in the shadows of San Francisco.
- Barrett Blackfeather (GURPS Fantasy): An archer who takes his name from the distinctive black fletching that he uses on his arrows.
- Jetstream (GURPS Supers/IST): A powerful PK/EK psionic who can, among other things, fly at Mach 1+, turn himself invisible, and fire bolts of plasma.
- Dalton Rockwell (GURPS Cabal): A Cabal theorist based upon a Mage character I once played for a short-lived World of Darkness campaign.
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