Knowing that I need to pull together something for the next school club session with some of the newbies, today I pulled down GURPS Fourth Edition Basic Set and began to work on converting “The Haunting of Langley Manor” (from GURPS Horror First Edition). This is a short Modern Day adventure published in 1987. I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the exploration of the adventure as I worked to improve it.

The first thing to say is that I experience extremely low self-confidence when it comes to prepping pre-written adventures. My usual modus operandi is to try and run it straight off the page, as-written. This works most of the time but I generally find that published adventures suck at the table. They are often written to be read, not run.

For Langley Manor I decided to follow The Alexandrian’s advice instead. This involved reading the whole thing in one sitting first – something I generally never did in the past – and then working up some rough notes to support my understanding. In this case, I found the mystery scenario of Langley Manor immediately required some work.

The first thing was to establish the timeline for the adventure. It’s a tightly programmed sequence of events with specific trigger points based on time. While that feels a little linear at first, the act of constructing the timeline in note form helped me to see the opportunities for flexibility and anticipate some player choices ahead of play.

The second thing was to construct the Revelation List for the mystery. This is a structure advised by The Alexandrian which allows the GM to track the key pieces conclusions you desire the players to figure out. As per the Three Clue Rule, each Revelation needs those three clues. This is where you begin to identify the common problem with published mysteries: they lack clues.

Having got the scenario structured, the next steps involve prepping conversion of the key NPCs from GURPS Third into Fourth Edition. It turns out that I’ll really only need a couple of those NPCs fully converted because the old stats are good enough for the majority of NPCs: unless you face combat, the old numbers are close enough to improvise from.

Finally, I will need to create some pre-generated Player Characters. I have some ideas but I know this will be the most time-consuming element of prep. Fortunately, I feel that once complete this will be a scenario I can run for more than one group of players. It’ll be a great one-shot adventure I can probably roll out a few times in coming months.

Best of all, the enjoyment I am discovering in starting to work more purposefully with GURPS Fourth Edition is a sign of two things: firstly, that I have begun to overcome my self-conscious fear of working with this most flexible of RPGs; secondly, that I am overcoming my discomfort around developing my prep process, inspired as I am by great advice. It’s hard to know what has caused this shift but I am deeply grateful for it.

Here’s hoping the students will like an old-fashioned mystery up at Langley Manor. If nothing else, I’ll have an interesting one-shot in the bag for the future.

Game on!