January 22, 2026: GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Is Getting Revised . . . But How?

Since October 2025, we've talked up the GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Revised in the GURPS News, my weekly roundups, and the forums. In anticipation of the upcoming release, here's all the information in one place.

• Merges Characters and Campaigns into a single 592-page volume. That's 16 pages longer!
• Eliminates redundancy (title pages, credits pages, tables of contents, introductions, indexes, etc.), and removes Combat Lite (because it includes the full combat rules!) and an ad, freeing another 15 pages.
• Adds a 4-page preface explaining everything discussed here in detail, and including an updated GURPS bibliography (formerly the Ludography).
• Adds 27 pages of rules that writers and gamers deem "core," in four sections. Having this means not needing to buy several supplements for a few key pages. Of course, everything added to newer printings (like Complementary Skills) is . . .

[more]

January 21, 2026: Welcome To The Bobiverse

I've recently gotten into a science fiction series that starts with the death of the protagonist. But that doesn't seem to faze him; pretty soon he's cropping up all over the place. At the same time.

We Are Legion (We Are Bob), by Dennis E. Taylor, is the story of Robert Johansson, a brilliant engineer who is run over and killed while attending a SF convention. He had made arrangements for cryonic preservation (as, in fact, have I), and in due course he awakens . . . to find that he is now just a computer memory, his assets and very self confiscated by a Christofascist state that is ruthlessly evaluating him as the controlling intelligence for an interstellar probe.

Uploaded Bob survives, gets the "job," and heads for the stars. His mission is not merely to explore, but to replicate himself – read up on "Von Neumann probes" if you like – and he sets out . . . [more]

January 20, 2026: Does The Building Manager Play GURPS?

I saw this evacuation route diagram on a wall near the elevators in an office building. I can't remember the last time I saw a hex map in the wild! So naturally I had to take a picture. The individual offices (at least the one I was in) didn't have hex-tiled floors; they were just carpeted.

-- Jean McGuire

January 19, 2026: A Pet For Your Pet For Your Pet For . . .

I've lately been posting a bit lately about the Roman Empire (not because it's particularly on my mind, but because I keep stumbling across cool articles about it).

In that same vein, I recently discovered that Roman elites had monkeys as pets . . . and some of those monkeys had kittens or piglets as pets of their own. Here's the article summarizing it, and here's the Cambridge University Press abstract it's basing this info off of.

So – RPG gamers – if you're now going to have wealthy people in your campaigns whose pets have pets, you'll be joining a noble tradition that includes a particularly fancy character I'm playing in my next game . . .

-- Steven Marsh

January 18, 2026: Throwing Toon Back To 1928

[more]