It can be tough being a fan of GURPS.

Once, long ago, on /r/rpg, I complained that while GURPS is very simple at its core, it’s got so much cruft and minutiae and spiderwebbed corners in it that it puts most people off.

The second problem with GURPS is that far too often SJ Games doesn’t treat it like an RPG. They treat it like a “make your own RPG system”. Thus, ferreting out the rules that you need to run your high fantasy campaign from the ones that explain how futuristic medicine works can be a pain in the butt, and there’s very little to help you.

The third problem is that while there is a Lite version of GURPS, it tries too hard to be regular GURPS instead of being a simple way to introduce new players into the game. And Ultra-Lite is even worse – it doesn’t provide a path back to “real” GURPS at all!

So I did it my damn self. Presenting GURPS Simple Fantasy, an eight-page handout. The first four pages include all the rules necessary to make real GURPS characters and run a simple fantasy campaign, while the last four pages are an adventure specifically designed to work with the simplified rules. As I designed this handout, I made certain that every rule I presented either came from GURPS Lite Third Edition, GURPS Lite Fourth Edition, or GURPS Ultra-Lite. This handout does not “give away” any rules. The characters made with GURPS Simple Fantasy are full GURPS characters and can be brought over into “real” GURPS without changing anything.

While I feel like I’m mostly done with this, feedback on both the rules and the adventure is still welcome. There is no perfect thing, everything can be improved.

(I have since learned of the existence of the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and Dungeon Fantasy RPG products, both of which seem to try to fix the same problem…but I didn’t know about them when I was writing my version.)