GURPS Cyberpunk
High-Tech Low-Life Roleplaying
by Loyd Blankenship · first published 1995
10mentions
2recommended by
8HN commenters
2014–2025first – last mentioned
25% recommend63% neutral13% critical
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Wow, it's really Loyd Blankenship! Forgive the gushing fan reply, but I'll take any chance I can to tell you how grateful I am for the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook. Definitely one of my main inspirations (along with Gibson's books) for taking up a career in coding.
on “The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons” ↗…memory. The foreword is a nice bonus that adds nicely to the theme. The GURPS ruleset is interesting - but I much prefer variants on White Wolf's Storyteller system. But the sourcebooks were great. Next to GURPS Cyberpunk, there's the wildly dark and entertaining "Cthulupunk" that merges one part of a mix of Gibson, Sterling and Vinge with one part Lovecraft. It can be challenging to keep players alive (or at least animate)…
on “I Am Fully Capable of Entertaining Myself in Prison for Decades If Need Be” ↗Oh it was really stupid actually: Blankenship was hired by Steve Jackson Games in 1989.[3] He authored the cyberpunk role-playing sourcebook GURPS Cyberpunk, the manuscript of which was seized in a 1990 raid of Steve Jackson Games headquarters by the U.S. Secret Service.[4][5] The raid resulted in the subsequent legal case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United…
on “The Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)” ↗…SS raid on SJG, and I was pissed off. So, I decided to spend a lot of money and go out and buy one copy of every GURPS book that I could find at my friendly local gaming store (FLGS). I had a copy of GURPS CyberPunk, and didn’t think very much of it. I was already in a CyberPunk game, and the GURPS version was a pale imitation. But there was another book that drew my attention. It was oriented towards espionage,…
on “SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)” ↗> The raid couldn’t have come at a worse time for Steve Jackson Games. Already in debt, the company depended heavily on new releases for cash flow, and the confiscation of the GURPS Cyberpunk manuscript would significantly delay the book’s release. On March 9, the company let go eight people from its staff of seventeen. Since the Secret Service did not immediately return the manuscript, the…
on “Your cyberpunk games are dangerous” ↗For those not familiar, Steve Jackson Games makes RPGs and were nearly driven out of business due to a secret service raid[1] done in response to the "GURPS Cyberpunk" book (described by the secret service as "a manual for computer crime") they were working on. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
on “I am not planning any nuclear attacks” ↗As the guy they're talking about, I did keep an offsite backup. The GURPS Cyberpunk manuscript existed in three places -- my computer at home, my computer at work, and the Illuminati BBS. They took all three. They also got my wife's in-progress Master's Thesis, and she had to restart…
on “Your cyberpunk games are dangerous” ↗In 1990, the US Secret Service seized a book I was writing called GURPS Cyberpunk. One of the agents repeatedly insisted to my publisher that "THIS STUFF IS REAL!" to which we always replied "Well, yes, but step one is to plug a jack into your forehead..." The more things change....
on “Glenn Beck thinks Watch Dogs teaches you how to hack the real world” ↗…Shadowrun has a rather heavy, complex system, because it does absolutely everything. But I like it a lot. Generic systems like GURPS and Savage Worlds can do cyberpunk of course, although I don't think GURPS Cyberpunk has been updated to the 4th edition. No doubt something exists for Savage Worlds, but I have no idea what. There are other cyberpunk systems that I know very little about, but others are enthusiastic…
on “The unlikely resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons” ↗…contained a valid, live, classified code word, and it was used in the context of explaining what a classified code word was used for. I checked, and this book had a publication date only a month or two after GURPS CyberPunk. In violation of the rules, I took that book to work a few days later, because I knew I had to report this to the Security Officers in the Defense Communications Agency, and I knew that I would be unable…
on “EFF Origin Story: SJ Games vs. the Secret Service” ↗