GURPS Time Travel Adventures

GURPS Time Travel Adventures was published in 1993 – I have an adventure in it called Titanic! set, yes, aboard the Titanic, the doomed transatlantic liner.

It’s been out of print for years, but in 2020, Steven Marsh at SJ Games tracked me down. It seemed they’d lost the contract and wanted to know if I had a copy as they wanted to publish GURPS Time Travel Adventures as a pdf through Warehouse 23.

Unsurprisingly, I also couldn’t put my hands on the contract, but I clearly remember it being a work-for-hire (ie, they hold all the rights), and told him.

The quitclaim

However, SJG needed me to sign a “quitclaim,” (which basically says they have the rights to it). I was happy to renounce everything (after all, I’d been paid back in 1993) but, because it was another contract, we needed an actual physical consideration of $1. So, at some point in 2022 or 2023, I received a dollar bill from Steve Jackson Games.

(I tried to get them to give it to charity. But no, that wasn’t an option.)

I have no idea what I did with the dollar bill. I guess it’s around somewhere, but it’s effectively worthless as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, I mention all this for two reasons.

First, at the end of December 2024, I received my complimentary pdf of GURPS Time Travel Adventures. So it’s now available on Warehouse 23.

And second, glancing through Titanic! again, I remember how much I hated creating the NPC stats. 

NPCs, why did it have to be NPCs…

The idea behind the adventure is that the PCs are time agents sent back to the Titanic to ensure that some people (passengers and crew) are saved, while others are not. This is to secure their future. Meanwhile, a rival set of time agents want to save a different bunch of people to secure their future.

So what with the passengers and crew and enemy time agents, Titanic! features 30+ NPCs, most of which are fully statted out. Dear god, what was I thinking?

(There is absolutely no need for most of the NPCs to be statted out. But that was the house style, and so that’s what I did.)

Moving on

It was also, if I remember right, the end of my interest in GURPS. The early 90s was when I started playing and writing freeform larps, and my gaming was heading in a very different direction…

(Trivia note: Lynne Hardy, now Chaosium’s Associate Editor for Call of Cthulhu, helped proofread Titanic!)