Unique Racial Skills in GURPS

Unique Racial Skills in GURPS

GURPS is very customizable, and you probably know that. You can build almost any ability that you can imagine by using the framework of advantages and modifiers. However, there is a part of the system that GMs seem to be more reluctant to touch – the skills. The long skill list intimidates many players, but excites some of them, including yours truly. But even with such an exhaustive list, sometimes you find that something is missing. There are no guidelines for creating a new skill, and that’s understandable. I mean, how would you even write such a guideline? I guess you could turn a heavily limited advantage into a skill, but that wouldn’t always work. Aside from the commonly available skills, GURPS also has power skills that are tied to certain abilities. However, there is something that I’ve never seen mentioned – racial skills.

What is a racial skill? It is a skill that is available only to a specific race or a class of similar creatures. If you look through GURPS Basic Set, you won’t really find anything like that. I guess Aerobatics, Flight, and Mount could sort of count, but they still are quite broad in terms of accessibility.

When I was writing up the thri-kreen entry for my Monstrous Compendium project, I was reading through the Thri-Kreen of Athas book for Dark Sun. It’s a wonderful book, I highly recommend it, even though I can understand why some people would be put off by such huge amounts of lore. The book describes a thri-kreen art form – painting and scarring the chitin. This probably counts as a familiarity of the Artist (Body Art) skill.

The book also describes how the thri-kreen create crystalline weapons and other items from dasl – a substance that is a mixture of thri-kreen venom, sand, and special herbs. However, the item variety is quite limited and would not fit for any specialty of Armoury. It is too broad to belong to any one existing specialty and too specialized to be considered optional specializations of different specialties of the skill, if that makes any sense. Specifically for the thri-kreen race, I had to create a new specialty – Armoury (Thri-Kreen). This really is something special that sets them apart from others, and is something that no other race can do. However, this is still only a racial specialty, but not an entirely new racial skill.

This is when I remembered something obscure – the fact that racial skills have existed in GURPS for a long time. GURPS Lensman, a third-edition sourcebook, describes Palainians, a race of 4D beings. The skills chapter has two new skills exclusive to Palainians – Emmfozing and Dexitroboping. The former is a four-dimensional version of Erotic Art. The latter, however, is something entirely new – a skill that uses the metabolic hyper-extension to allow temporary survival in vacuum and extreme temperatures. Sure, this is very situational, but it is just so cool. I feel that such racial skills really can make races unique, and races feeling the same is something many people like to complain about.

If you use your imagination, you can come up with some interesting stuff. I suggest taking a look at advantages that cost up to 10 points to get some ideas. For example, Detect could be turned into a skill for a race that can sense auras or something like that. A small lizardman may have a skill that would let it run across the surface of water for a short time. Some other race could have a skill that lets it voluntarily enter a berserk rage but also exit it or define the “severity” of the frenzy.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out some cool stuff that you can do with the system, even though it may require some emmfozing to do properly. But all this effort may be worth it!