My private GURPS search engine reports 17,669 pages for fourth edition. This includes the Dungeon Fantasy RPG and Discworld Second Edition, and many of those pages are A5 or equivalent; but itās still quite a lot. However, my quibble was purely with the size of the core book.
Interestingly, Hero System now has e.g. Champions Complete, which is effectively a one-book superhero game ā for people who only want the system for superhero games, it strips out the stuff thatās not relevant, and comes in at 242 pages. While the canonical approach to universal systems has usually been ācore book plus genre expansions, because players donāt want to buy the core rules again and againā, this does offer the advantage of the single physical book.
I think that conspiracies were more fun in the GURPS Illuminati days (RIP Nigel Findley who died three years later ā coincidence?) because they were more obscure. I mean, we all knew there were people who actually believed in that stuff, but we also knew that nobody took those people seriously.
Then came Wakefield in 1998, and then came social media. The great thing about USENET was that if you were interested in something obscure, you could meet the few other people who were also interested, out of the relatively small number of people who were on USENET at all. The terrible thing about social media is that this now applies to everyone, and where someone might have been embarrassed about being a horrible person they can now see that theyāre not alone, there are lots of other horrible people like them, so they should be proud about it. (Of course this also applies to non-horrible but societally un-accepted peopleā¦)
I have run conspiracy-based games since then, but much of the fun has gone out of the genre for me.
