Introduction to Universe for GURPS
The second RPG I ever bought (after only Basic D&D), was SPI's Science-Fiction RPG Universe. That was 1981. It was very much SPI's answer to Traveller, and featured a similar character generation system where you progressed your character through his career, picking up skills & goodies along the way. Unlike Traveller, you didn't have to roll to see if your character actually died before even completing character generation though!
Universe, in true SPI fashion, came with a plethora of charts & tables, and after Basic D&D seemed hugely complex and convoluted. But what grabbed my imagination was its setting; a future three centuries hence where FTL interstellar space travel is possible but still limited, difficult and dangerous. The game came with a wallchart-sized map of all the stars within 30 light-years of Earth, that being the limit of Human exploration in the 24th century.
Sadly, Universe's life was cut short when TSR took over SPI and canned it in favour of their own SF RPG Star Frontiers (and where is that now?). The promised supplements, world-books and expansion packs never materialised. All that ever saw the light of day (that I know of at least) was the introductory scenario Lost on Laidley which came with the basic game, a GM's screen, the spin-off starship combat game Delta-vee, a monopoly-style board game using the Universe background which came as an insert in SPI's house magazine Ares, and also in Ares another scenario, Mongoose & Cobra, some Delta-vee expansion rules and a Universe-derived cartoon strip.
When GURPS Space first appeared I decided to adapt the background from Universe for GURPS. I started with planet generation, in part because this was easiest and because I'd already done some work on this using Universe's own planet generation system, but also because their character defined the background for the game, and the "history" of the next three centuries evolved around them. Despite its name, the "universe" of Universe covers only a very small part indeed of the Universe; the hundred or so stars which lie within 30ly of Earth. In some ways I had a completely blank canvas to work on; only four worlds were described in the published Universe material and only one of them could be remotely described as a major colony. One thing that was clear from the basic game background was that all of human-colonised space was controlled by an Earth-based Federation of Planets, which possessed a powerful military arm. However the Federation's rule was sufficiently loose that wars between rival colonies were not unheard of. One of the Delta-vee supplements in Ares implied the existence of a rival political entity, the Peoples Socialist Alliance, able to field a starfleet capable of challenging that of the Federation, but this seems to be an aberration brought on by a desire to write scenarios involving mighty battlefleets clashing with each other, and I disregarded it.
Also, it was clear that humanity had made no contact with sentient extraterrestrials, although heavy hints were dropped that they were out there (indeed, according to Ares the first Universe supplement would have featured two alien races for intrepid players to contact).
I then had to make some conversions of Universe technology to GURPS. I wanted to retain a "low-tech" feel to the background; more like Aliens than Star Wars. For example, Universe featured no artificial gravity, although there was an equivalent of contragravity in the magnetorepulsion technology described as "direct lift". So I went with a general technology level of TL9, but with variants to allow for such things as direct lift technology and the sentient robots described in the Universe material (GURPS Robots had at that time not been published). Even this doesn't truly reflect Universe's apparent obsession with game-balancing high-tech weaponry against low-tech weaponry; for example in Universe a man in powered combat armour armed with a laser rifle needs to be very careful about taking on an opponent dressed in animal skins and carrying a longbow. The high-tech trooper's laser does more damage, but it has the same RoF and at ranges over 70m has the same base chance to hit as the longbow, and his super-dooper armour is not remotely arrow-proof! Under GURPS the high-tech trooper could scythe down an army of longbowmen with near impunity.
My biggest headache was spaceship design. Universe used a rather abstract modular ship design system where ships consisted of a generic hull to which were attached one or more "pods", each of which conferred a specific function to the ship. Ships were propelled by a reaction drive, which required large quantities of "radioactives" as fuel, but no reaction mass. All pods were considered equal and interchangable. Armour added price, but not weight. I would have loved to have retained this system, but could find no way to reconcile it with the GURPS component-by-component system. To be interchangable, pods would have to be not only the same size but approximately the same mass, and under the GURPS system this was difficult to achieve. Plus, a ship built as a series of modules, each with a separate hull, would weigh significantly more than a ship of the same volume built within a single hull (especially if armoured). Worst of all to my GM's sensibilities, I couldn't conceive what the modular ships looked like. How could I describe a boarding action on an abstract ship?
So I could either redesign the entire GURPS starship design system over from the top (using very dodgy justifications), or I could abandon the modular concept, and I went for the latter. Finally I replaced the "radioactive" drive with a more technologically satisfactory (to me at least) fusion drive.
Much of the character generation material developed in-play as I GMed a series of one-off scenarios over the years. Finally in 1993 I sat down and pulled all my notes together into the sourcebook which follows. Because it is now some years since I wrote it, the observant among you may note a number of anachronisms. Most obviously, real history has caught up with the lower reaches of the history timeline. Less obviously, astronomy has caught up with my cosmology. When I wrote it, extra-solar planets were entirely conjecture. Today they are an established reality, with over eighty identified. One of these is around Epsilon Eridani, one of the closest stars to Earth, and a star around which I placed one of the major worlds of the Federation. Unfortunately the real Epsilon Eridani system looks nothing like the one I described.
Some of the material is also out-of-date with respect to recently published GURPS material. My final rewrite incorporated material from GURPS Psionics and GURPS Ultra-tech, but GURPS Vehicles and GURPS Robots were published after this sourcebook was written.
I must also acknowledge some of my other sources of inspiration. GDW's SF RPG 2300 was at its height at the time that I was developing this background. As the setting for 2300 was very like that of Universe, and much of the technology similar, I have frequently used 2300 scenario modules for GURPS Universe, and those of you familiar with 2300 may recognise some of the worlds of the Federation as 2300 worlds with the serial number filed off. Of the numerous authors who gave me ideas C J Cherryh, Julian May and Brian Stableford deserve particular mention. I also feel compelled to mention something which was not a source of inspiration for this sourcebook, despite the huge similarities between its plotline and certain events in the sourcebook timeline. I can say with complete sincerity that this sourcebook was entirely complete before I ever heard of, far less saw an episode of, Babylon 5. I can only think that maybe J Michael Straczynski once owned a copy of Universe as well.
Finally, I have more material relating to this sourcebook on file: designs for several classes of starship, brief overviews of all the major worlds of the Federation and detailed descriptions of some of the more interesting ones, and GURPS descriptions of some of the Universe technology. If I get an indication that anyone would be remotely interested in seeing it I might write some of it up to go on the web as well. Also, I've recently been GMing GURPS Universe for the first time since I wrote the sourcebook, and if my players remain interested it might yet develop into a sustained campaign. So if you live in Oxfordshire, and you're interested, let me know. In general, if you have any comments or feedback you would like to make, I would be delighted to hear from you.