Steve Jackson's Blog, page 10

July 23, 2025: Help The Foglios Work Past The Bad Spot

It's definitely a sign of the times when established creators are asking for your help. In this case, Phil and Kaja Foglio – illustrators for many of our games and creators of the insouciant and paramagnetic webcomic Girl Genius – are being hurt by the same Diamond Comics bankruptcy that is plaguing Green Ronin. At the same time, they've been dealing with medical issues and a flooded basement. Can you help out? Their GoFund Me is right here. Contributions have already been very generous – thank you!! -–and all further support will be appreciated.

I've known these folks for several decades now. They are not just talented – they are lovely people who have given a lot to the community. I'm a fan of everything they do and an eager reader of each new Girl Genius installment. I really want them to be okay.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 22, 2025: Final Call For The Last Train To Bremen

Hi everyone, Last Train to Bremen is on its final legs – we've only got a couple of days left, and we've already cleared 400% of our funding goal! That's incredible work. I'm really proud of what we've been able to accomplish while working with Steve Jackson Games. One of the pleasures of working with the independent space and helping bring their games to the mainstream is being able to take a critically-acclaimed project like Last Train to Bremen and introduce it to a brand new audience and really explore what a TTRPG is and how it can impact play. I hope you all enjoy it, and that if you haven't had the chance to check it out, you go do so.

– Jay Dragon

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 21, 2025: Call For Playtesters: GURPS Ring Of Fire

Are you a fan of Eric Flint's 1632 series, also known as the Ring of Fire series? (Briefly, it's an alternate history that kicks off with a few thousand West Virginians from 2000 A.D. becoming "castaways in time" in Germany during the Thirty Years' War.)

Or are you a GURPS fan who just looked that up and found it intriguing, or who likes alternate histories in general? Regardless, we have a playtest for you!

We're recruiting playtesters for a forthcoming supplement called GURPS Ring of Fire . The playtest is currently scheduled to run from August 4 through September 8. More information – including how to apply – can be found in this forum post.

We look forward to hearing from you!

– Sean Punch (with Steven Marsh)

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 20, 2025: My Buda House

. . . is on the market. If you want a look at the OLD "Secret HQ," here it is. 

I miss a lot of things about this place, including all that acreage and wildlife. But Atlanta, and the Atlanta house, are wonderful, and there are more gamers, closer. So Wednesday night games are a real thing now!

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 19, 2025: Green Ronin GoFundMe

The good folks at Green Ronin Games find themselves greatly impacted by Diamond Comic Distributors' recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and are trying to explore their options by setting up a GoFundMe to afford the (not-inexpensive) legal representation necessary. Details are on the campaign page.

It's all just another reminder of how precarious the tabletop gaming world is of late, and how events entirely outside a company's control can throw them a catastrophic curveball . . .

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 18, 2025: Apparently My Boss Is A-Maze-Ing

I'm not too proud to admit that I have a standing Google search for my moniker (do you know how common "Steven Marsh" is?!). And I tend to keep my eyes open for any other names of interest that cross my path. So imagine my surprise when – as part of an update to the Lone Shark Games Puzzle Party! Backerkit (which I'm backing, and which only has 5 more days to go!), I came across a reference to . . . Steve Jackson.

The update goes into more details, but the most-relevant note is here: "The current known high score for the Maze Map is held by legendary game designer Steve Jackson, whose six-page solution beat even our puzzle designers' best."

As someone who owns the Maze Map and has not achieved a score anywhere near a record, I'm deeply intrigued . . . but I'd also bet a gold piece or two that the solution is delightfully munchkinly.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 17, 2025: Brewing Purrfect Potions With Naomi Lord

There are a number of behind-the-scenes things that happen during the development of a game. When it comes to artwork, we have our favorite artists we constantly work with – John Kovalic on Munchkin for example. For one of our upcoming games, Purrfect Potions , which comes out later this year, we had another artist in mind that we regularly work with but she was overcommitted and unavailable when we were ready to get the artwork rolling. So we pivoted to an artist we'd never worked with before – Naomi Lord. She was eager to sign on for the project and we are so incredibly happy with how it turned out. In my opinion, this by far is one of the cutest games we have released! I enjoyed being a part of the process from seeing the sketches to helping pick out the dice colors to coordinate with our pastel goth-vibe color palette. Be sure to look for this adorable dice-rolling cat game on store shelves later this year to play with your feline familiars of course! (Super secret note drop – we will be having a very limited number of copies of this at Gen Con, so pop by early to get a sneak peek at  Purrfect Potions before it premieres at stores in a few months!)

If Naomi's illustrations look familiar to you, she also recently illustrated a game with Smirk and Dagger called A Place For All My Books . You can also find more dazzling artwork on her Instagram.

– Sabrina Gonzalez

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 16, 2025: Does That Make The Pancakes At Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast Award-Winning, Too?

One item of note has recently crossed our desks and made us puff up with pride. ICV2 (among other places) has reported the winners of the 2025 Origins Awards . . . and we're tickled pink that the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design has seen fit to honor Possum Creek's Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast with the Best RPG Core Product award.

Although this book came out before Possum Creek joined the Steve Jackson Games family, we're delighted to help them brag about it on our Awards page. Even better for fans, Jay Dragon, Ruby Lavin, and other Possum Creek friends haven't been satisified with one big splash as they continue to make more awesome games.

If you've been intrigued by reports of Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast 's innovative gameplay, lavish layouts, and chapter-based found-family slice-of-life fantasy, now's a great time to check it out. The warmth of the rugs by the fireplace beckons, as does the aroma of simmering soup and a comfort-calling bed. All that's missing is you.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 15, 2025: 30 Years At The Helm Of GURPS

The exact date on which I was engaged as the GURPS Line Editor is lost in time. I usually say, "Sometime in July 1995." But the earliest official correspondence I can find is dated July 5, which is the date I mark as my work anniversary. That means I've been the main editor of and rules nerd behind GURPS for 30 years this summer.

As a nerd, I feel compelled to point out that's over half of my entire life, 3/4 of my adult life, and slightly more than 3/4 of the run of GURPS to date, encompassing GURPS Third Edition Revised, GURPS Fourth Edition, the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, and much more. Hundreds of manuscripts and dozens of Pyramid articles have crossed my desk.

I suspect know (thanks, Irene!) that there are gamers who've been alive for less time than I've been working on GURPS. Which makes me officially Old. At any rate, things have certainly changed since I walked up the virtual hill both ways every day.

Back then, we called it "telecommuting" more often than "remote work." I had a second landline hooked up for the dedicated dial-up connection that required. This wasn't exactly fast (first 9,600 bit/s and then all the way up to 56 kbit/s, until ADSL showed up), so for anything big, we used paper – I had so many huge printouts arrive on my doorstep, and marked up a lot of GURPS manuscripts with a pen.

Talking meant either an expensive long-distance phone call or getting on a plane from Montréal to Austin – or more often, to Gen Con. Everyday communication was by email, with all the misunderstandings that come with a text-only medium. Video chats weren't practical, but real-time text chats (like the Pyramid MOO) were a life-saver, because I could clarify the unclear right away.

The line, the connection, the hardware, the heavy packages, the long-distance calls, the travel . . . it all cost a significant fraction of what I was being paid at the time. It's a wonder we did it! It felt like the future at the time, but from a 2025 perspective, it seems so low-tech and quaint.

So, the next time you play GURPS, take a moment to marvel at how we casually shoot hundreds of pages around in seconds; create products with authors, editors, playtesters, production staff, etc. in different cities; fix errata and update PDFs with a few clicks; and talk about it all with voice and images on any number of Discord servers, VTTs, and so on. Also take a moment to think about how, despite the occasional glitch (blame me!), this old guy managed to arrange something resembling internal consistency for so many years and so many titles.

– Sean Punch

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 14, 2025: A Tribute To Alarums And Excursions

For 49 years, Lee Gold has published Alarums and Excursions, an APA about the world of gaming. I have found it both fun and professionally useful . . . it was in A&E, for instance, that I saw the work of a fan named Robin Laws and said "This guy can write!" One thing led to another, and we are all the richer for it.

Lee has ended Alarums & Excursions with its 593rd issue because her eyesight no longer allows her to edit the zine. Lisa Padol is organizing a one-time tribute issue, and Spike Jones has reached out to former A&E contributors, silent subscribers, and A&E-adjacent folks to solicit one-sentence/one-paragraph memories and thank-you messages. (People who'd like to write longer contributions, even full-length zines, should contact Lisa at drcpunk [at] labcats [dot] org).

A&E will be missed, and it cannot be replaced. We shall not, as the new saying goes, see its like again.

I have donated my thick, though nowhere near complete, file of A&E to the Museum of Games Ireland, because it is a unique and contemporaneous record of gaming as it was at the time . . . for a very long time. Thank you, Lee, for doing this for so long and for the love of it. Turns out you were doing it for history too.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!