Back to GURPS: Project Mayhem

GURPS: Project Mayhem started out with the idea that making characters for GURPS WWII shouldn't take so long, especially when some of the players don't create characters until the last minute, as well as the high mortality rate of WWII combatants. Plus, quick-creation is always a handy GM tool.

The idea of making a 75 point character for WWII in under a minute is addictive. Filling in 650 points for a Black Ops template with lightning speed is just shaolin-monk crazy. It's like playing god in your little gaming world.

And thus was born this project, but as of yet unnamed. My gaming group loved the idea of using this - including one of the main GMs in the group, Sasha, who is to be my supervisor at the call center we work at (and is cool with me working on this during down-time). He was the first one drafted into doing data entry for the project.

I made a deal with them - if they wanted equipment in the datafiles, they've have to type it up themselves. They wholeheartedly agreed. I started calling them "space monkeys", from the movie Fight Club. That's how the name "GURPS: Project Mayhem" came about.

Since then some others have stepped up and fitted Excel sheets full of information for me. They also serve to keep everything straight - make sure that the projects are usable and debug when needed. Quality control is paramount, mainly because we're using this ourselves for our games, and they know how to get ahold of the programmer (at any time of night...) when there's problems.

The idea to release these publicly came from Sasha and his wife. Sasha thought it would be cool, and his wife thought that I should put it with the HMFY project. In many ways, this is what turned HMFY around from the the previous atrophy and molded it to being a project site.

G:PM is still going strong. We're getting better and faster at getting datafiles out - some books take only a week to finish up. We're going plenty of generic books so that we have access to all that information, but we're also working on world books as we're playing those games (or plan to play them someday). And as always, these files are free. We didn't make GCB, we're not Steve Jackson Games, so why the fuck would we charge for datafiles? It's a gaming community - we're just groovy being a part of it.

Our goal with this project: code every GURPS book we own (including more as we buy them) for GCB, completely and accurately. So far we're off to a good start.

- Ryan Macklin, Founder/Lead Programmer/etc., HMFY and GURPS: Project Mayhem.