The GURPS roleplaying system can potentially be used to roleplay in any setting, but you'll probably have an easier time of it if someone else has done the work of deciding how to apply the GURPS rules to simulate the various facets of the setting. This is the domain of one type of sourcebook; the setting book.
Steve Jackson Games has itself published more than 200 GURPS sourcebooks. Most of these are for the outdated third edition rules; you can find them here
. It's possible to use many of these sourcebooks in the fourth edition with only minor modifications. Major new sourcebooks (High-Tech, Magic, etc.) likely have new versions of the material in the old books; to adapt the old sourcebooks' advice on making characters, refer to GURPS Update. The following lists are not comprehensive, and the company may publish new books for the line whenever they choose.
Popular original worldbooks for the third edition include:
- GURPS Alternate Earths 1 and 2
- GURPS Illuminati University
- GURPS Reign of Steel
- GURPS Space Atlas (actually a sub-line of four books, each describing one or two regions of space for interstellar SF games)
- GURPS Supers
- GURPS Technomancer
- Transhuman Space
3rd edition GURPS licensed adaptation worldbooks include:
- Book of the New Sun
- Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
- Conan the Barbarian
- Discworld
- Hellboy
- Horseclans
- Humanx Commonwealth
- Lensman
- Myth
- Planet of Adventure
- Planet Krishna
- The Prisoner (1967)
- Riverworld
- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
- Star Trek (In the form of GURPS Prime Directive, from Amarillo Design Bureau, which was based on the Star Fleet Battles universe)
- Uplift
- The War Against the Chtorr
- Wild Cards
- Witch World
There were also a large number of historical or semi-historical setting books, covering topics from Dinosaurs to World War II.
Licensed 3rd edition GURPS adaptations of other roleplaying games include:
- Blue Planet
- Bunnies & Burrows
- Deadlands
- Castle Falkenstein
- Conspiracy X
- In Nomine
- OGRE (based on the Steve Jackson boardgame)
- Traveller
- The World of Darkness (Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage)
The 4th edition of GURPS has a number of worldbooks, some of them relatively short PDF publications, including but by no means limited to the following:
- Age of Gold (Pulp-era superheroes empowered by returned magic)
- Alchemical Baroque (A Fairy Tale fantasy world with a dash of Clockpunk)
- Banestorm
- Britannica-6, an alternate history setting (actually designed as part of the Infinite Worlds set-up — see below); the 19th-century with runaway technology and no Queen Victoria.
- The Broken Clockwork World, a Portal Fantasy setting with our world colliding with a post-apocalyptic steampunk world where reality is falling apart.
- Collegio Januari: Essentially, Homeline's fully-mystical opposite number. This titular College of Janus is a monastic institution operating sometime between 600 and 1700 AD, utilizing crossworld magicks as a means of harvesting mana. They are, apparently, guided by the twin-faced god, himself. They occasionally bump heads with the, also crossworld, Order Of St. Eustace.
- Casey and Andy
- A second edition of the Discworld Roleplaying Game, which appeared in 2016, bringing things into line with the 4th edition GURPS rules (and making it more of a fully standalone game) as well as updating the background data to match more recent novels in the series.
- Girl Genius
- Hot Spots: Renaissance Florence, Constantinople, 527-1204 AD, and Renaissance Venice (Historical settings)
- Infinite Worlds (A GURPS-exclusive multiverse, with something of a Fantasy Kitchen Sink flavor in places; the direct successor to and update of GURPS Time Travel, and also to the GURPS Alternate Earths books, as the worlds covered there are all part of said multiverse. The other GURPS Third Edition world books (most notably Technomancer, Supers, and Reign of Steel) were later integrated into the multiverse as well, becoming part of the larger meta-setting)
- Lands Out of Time (Cinematic adventuring with dinosaurs)
- The Madness Dossier (A modern-day horror setting of unreliable perceptions, memetic warfare, hideous monsters, and moral ambiguity)
- Prime Directive, by Amarillo Design Bureau (A Star Trek/Star Fleet Battles worldbook)
- Reign of Steel: Will to Live (A conversion guide for the 3rd edition supplement, with enough detail to serve as a sourcebook in its own right)
- SEALs in Vietnam (Another historical setting)
- Tales of the Solar Patrol (An SF setting in classic Space Opera mode)
- Transhuman Space: Changing Times (A conversion guide like Will to Live and also a "GM's Guide" to the setting)
- Traveller: Interstellar Wars. The Interstellar Wars are one of the most important periods in Traveller history, but had not previously been covered in detail.note
- Vorkosigan Saga
However, with the Fourth Edition, Steve Jackson Games chose to focus more on "genre books" than on worldbooks, especially when it came to print volumes. (Actually, many of these topics were also covered by Third Edition supplements, but those were heavily outnumbered by the setting books.) The advice and rules in these books can be applied to any setting in its genre, and each book comes with advice on applying its rules to various sub-genres; many also have at least one or two sample settings or campaign frameworks. Hence, they often function as "broad" setting books.
- Action
- Bio-Tech (Organic Technology)
- Creatures of the Night (Weird creatures)
- Dragons (Our Dragons Are Different... This is actually a 3rd edition supplement, but with conversion notes for the new edition in an appendix)
- Dungeon Fantasy (A series of books with rules and advice for games à la Dungeons & Dragons; this later became the basis for the standalone Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game game, which appeared in 2017 using a cut-down version of the GURPS rules.)
- Fantasy
- Furries
- Gun Fu
- Horror
- High-Tech ("The gun book")
- Low-Tech (Gear from the Stone Age to the Age of Sail)
- Magic (An expansion on the magic system from Basic Set, with many many spells
- Martial Arts (Expands the tactical combat system to allow for more tactical depth and action)
- Monster Hunters
- Mysteries
- Powers (Replaces the very short Psionics chapter from the Basic Set with a more detailed way of constructing superpowers; adds six new crazy-powerful advantages appropriate for superheroes; adds tons of new modifiers for advantages and disadvantages; and gives usage advice on all of the above)
- Psionic Powers
- Space
- Spaceships
- Steampunk (a line of books, building off the 3rd edition supplement on the same topic)
- Supers (As in superheroes — a completely different treatment of the subject to the previous edition version mentioned above)
- Thaumatology (Covering magic systems of all sorts)
- Ultra-Tech (Futuristic SF technology)
