GURPS Low-Tech is a sourcebook for the GURPS roleplaying system that focuses on technologies from the Stone Age to the Age of Sail. It is available as a PDF for both the current Fourth Edition (2nd Edition of the book) and the Classic Third Edition . GURPS Low-Tech (4th Edition) This is the updated, 160-page version designed for modern GURPS campaigns. Scope: Covers Tech Levels (TL) 0 through 4 (roughly up to 1730 AD). Content: Detailed rules and statistics for primitive and pre-industrial equipment, including weapons, armor, medical herbs, shelter, and transportation. It revises some Basic Set stats for higher historical accuracy. Official Purchase: You can buy the PDF directly from the Steve Jackson Games Warehouse 23 or through DriveThruRPG . Companion Volumes: The core book is often paired with three PDF-only supplements: Companion 1: Philosophers and Kings (Social technologies, medicine, and arts). Companion 2: Weapons and Warriors (Expanded combat gear, siegecraft, and naval warfare). Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics (Manufacturing, resources, and labor). GURPS Classic: Low-Tech (3rd Edition) The original 128-page version for the older edition of the game. GURPS Low-Tech - Steve Jackson Games
In GURPS Low-Tech , the concept of "preparing" generally refers to specific mechanical actions or rules for readying equipment and survival tasks rather than a single feature titled "Prepare." 1. Equipment and Survival Preparation The supplement emphasizes the time and skill required to make low-tech tools and materials functional: Survival Tasks : Rules cover how to gather and prepare food, water, and resources using TL0-4 methods. Field Fortifications : Procedures for troops to "prepare" the battlefield by creating obstacles like ditches, sharpened stakes, and trenches. Herb and Medicine : The Pharmacy (Herbal) skill is used to prepare herbs properly; success can provide bonuses to resistance or recovery from disease. 2. Weapon and Combat Readiness Combat efficiency often depends on the state of "readiness" of a weapon: Ready Maneuver : Basic combat requires a Ready maneuver to make a weapon available for use if it was slung, sheathed, or dropped. Fast-Draw Skill : This specialized skill allows a character to bypass the standard "preparation" (the Ready maneuver) and draw a weapon as a free action. Shield Preparation : Specific rules (often expanded in Low-Tech Companion 2 ) detail the time needed to un-sling and "prepare" a shield or cloak for active defense. 3. Crafting and Maintenance Weapon Design : Rules for using the Armoury skill to build, modify, and "prepare" custom weapons or armor for use. Blade Tool Creation : At TL0, preparing a stone "core" is a critical first step in crafting blade tools, taking approximately 2 minutes per inch of edge. For more detailed tables on specific low-tech gear, you can refer to the official GURPS Low-Tech product page or authorized digital retailers like Warehouse 23 . GURPS - Low-Tech
Short Story: "The Last Codex of Low-Tech" A cold rain hammered the slate roofs of New Braintree as Wren Tolland ducked beneath an awning, the leather satchel at her hip slick with water. Inside the satchel, wrapped in oilcloth, was a relic that had become rare currency in the back alleys and campfires of the Wastes: a GURPS Low-Tech PDF, pirated and printed into a single battered codex. Its pages smelled of dust and iron, and its margins were scored with hastily scribbled notes in a dozen hands. Wren had not expected treasure when she left the coastal scavenger town that morning. She had expected work: a caravan needing a finder who could read old schematics and tell a smith how to recreate a wheel or a pulley. What she had found, inside a ruined storefront lined with brittle paperbacks, was the codex—part rulebook, part compendium of things people had forgotten: harnessing wind, tempering steel without modern controls, the mathematics of siege and bridging, recipes for herbal poultices and ways to test a blade’s temper when you had no forge instrument. “People forget,” Old Marek had said beside his brazier the night before, pointing at the codex. “Lose the words, lose the ways. Whoever holds the words can make the world again.” It was a dangerous thing to hold such knowledge. There were those who hoarded secrets—guilds of mechanics who traded monopoly for safety, and warlords who burned knowledge to keep people dependent. Wren kept the codex close because she believed in making things that worked for everyone; she also kept it because she was tired of watching good people die because some useful skill had vanished with the last power plant. A group of children ran past, laughing. One of them skidded to a stop and peered up at Wren. “Are you the gearwoman?” he asked. Word traveled fast in small towns. Wren smiled and nodded. The title fit, even if her own training had been more patchwork than professional. She had learned to jury-rig water pumps from diagrams in the back of a shipping manual and to coax a forge into life with a bellows of stitched canvas. The codex promised more than tricks—it promised structure: stat blocks for the tools of the trade, standardized materials, and a way to argue for better methods around a skeptical chief or an impatient lord. She reached the caravan before dusk. The traders had spread tarps over piles of scavenged metal and worked leathery faces into smiles of barter. The caravan master, Hessa Varr, was a woman whose laugh could be heard two tents over. She looked Wren up and down and clasped her hands. “We need a bridge built,” Hessa said. “The river took the ford in the last spring thaw. We can’t wait two months.” Wren unrolled a page. The codex had a section on temporary bridging—truss principles translated into plain words, tables that mapped local timbers to load capacities, and a simple formula for calculating beam spacing by hand. Wren pointed and spoke, using the codex like a sermon. “Use paired spars here, lash them with hemp at six-foot intervals, cross-brace with lighter poles, add a rocker to each end so it settles under load,” she said. “Bind the decking with iron straps—if you can’t get iron, use double planking pegged through with hardwood pins.” The traders murmured. Hessa squinted. “You make it sound easy.” Wren shrugged. “It’s not hard. It’s just rules that used to be common sense. We lost the book; now we can learn it again.” They worked through night. The codex guided measurements while Wren’s hands taught the men how to sight a straight line, test a joint with a hammer, and judge a rope’s strength by strands and stretch. When dawn bled pink, a herd of goats cautious on the new span was proof enough. Word spread. People came with problems that could be solved by what the codex contained: a waterwheel rebuilt to power a millstone, a prosthetic limb lashed from hoop iron and leather, a method for preserving barley without modern refrigeration. Each success built trust. Each lesson was annotated in the margins in hurried script—new adaptations to local timber, notes on herb mixtures that worked in clay soils, sketches of improvised tools. The codex grew fatter in practice even as its pages wore thin. But the codex also attracted attention. A cluster of men in patched uniforms arrived one evening beneath the pretence of trade. Their leader, a narrow-eyed man called Sorn, watched too carefully and asked too many questions. He had once been part of a guild that trafficked in technical knowledge—until his hunger for control had driven him out. He recognized the signs: bindings, marginalia, the careful use of standardized terms. “You carry a dangerous thing,” Sorn said that night, when the brazier sent sparks into the rafters. “Information makes people strong. Strong people don’t obey.” Wren folded her hands on her knees. “It makes people survive,” she said. Sorn smiled without humor. “Survival is a threat to order.” He offered coin. He offered protection. He offered nothing but thin promises. Wren refused. So Sorn took more direct measures. That night, the caravan was raided. Tarps were slashed, wagons were burned, and the codex was ripped from Wren’s satchel. They fled with half the caravan’s goods and left the book behind, smoldering in the mud. Wren watched the flames take the oilcloth and licked wind and iron that smelled of human cruelty. For a long time she stood motionless as rain pooled in the tracks of the burned pages. She could have left it, let the words go to ash. There were reasons to be small in the world—safety, the slow accrual of allies, staying out of a war between bosses of men who measured power in guns and stolen engines. But survival, she knew, needed more than running. It needed to be shared. At dawn she went back. The codex lay ashen and curled, but amid the black were pages that had only browned at the edges. She dug through mud and embers, careful not to burn herself, and pried loose fragments—rules on rope-and-pulley ratios, a half-page on smithing quenchants, a diagram of a simple lathe. It was a small haul, but it was something. They started a school in the open field where the caravan had camped. The first class was three children, two old women who had been spinners for years, and a young smith whose hands were all callus and promise. Wren taught them what she could salvage: how to take measurements by eye when you lacked a square, how to temper a blade using only sand and flame, how to make a water trap that could catch run-off and keep seeds alive through a dry month. As the weeks passed the school became a network. Villages sent apprentices. Someone carved blocks of wood with the most important rules so that they could be read without touching a brittle page; others set up a circulating roll of diagrams drawn on oilskin. The margins of Wren’s surviving pages filled with ink from dozens of pens. Sorn returned once more with an armed band. He demanded the remaining fragments and threatened to burn the settlement to the ground. Wren stepped forward, not with steel but with a ledger of alliances: the miller, the bridge-tender, the smith, the healer. They were no soldiers, but they had kinship and skills and a way to make the world function without Sorn’s engines of control. “We won’t let you have a monopoly on what keeps us alive,” Hessa told him. The smith cracked his knuckles in a motion that said he knew the worth of a good blade. Sorn realized, too late, that his threat carried risk; if these people refused and he pressed, the small clusters that relied on shared skills would adapt in a thousand directions—hide, disperse, or fight. Better, Sorn calculated, to take nothing and leave. He left. Years later, the codex still existed—no longer a single precious book, but a hundred copies: pages transcribed into cloths, diagrams carved into wood, rules taught aloud and tested. The GURPS Low-Tech PDF that had once been a secret hoarded in a satchel had become a commons of practice. People learned to keep critical knowledge decentralized: copies hidden in wells, instructions woven into quilts, formulas hummed as songs. The rules lived in hands and mouths, not only in ink. Wren sat under a repaired bridge one autumn evening, watching children run with a cart on plain wheels. A boy waved a wooden plane above his head and called her “gearwoman” with pride. She smiled, thinking of the margin notes that had begun as her scribble and had become a thousand-fold map of survival. Old Marek’s words came back: lose the words, lose the ways. They had taken a book from her, and in trying to stop knowledge they had only made it spread. The codex, she realized, had never been about hoarding an advantage; it had been a scaffold—a temporary structure that people could climb, adapt, and then dismantle to build something of their own. The last codex would not be a single book kept by one hand. It would be a habit shared by many: to repair, record, teach, and pass on. Knowledge was not a scarce thing to be seized; it was the steady thing that let a world keep turning after the engines died. The rain returned, gentle now, and Wren rose to go. She had plans—a syllabus of simple machines to teach the next week, and a set of diagrams to carve into plywood for the traveling merchants. As she left the bridge and crossed the stream, she felt the lightness of someone who had lost treasure and found a path instead. At the far bank, a child sat whittling a small wheeled toy, eyes serious with concentration. Wren paused and handed him a scrap of oilskin with a crude truss sketch. The child’s grin could have rebuilt the world. End.
Yes, the GURPS Low-Tech (4th Edition) PDF is exceptionally helpful, especially if you’re running any pre-gunpowder, low-tech fantasy, historical, or post-apocalyptic campaign. Its content goes far beyond simple weapon tables. Here’s a breakdown of the most helpful content you’ll find inside: 1. In-Depth Gear for All Tech Levels (TL0–TL4) Instead of just a list of items, it explains why and how things work. gurps low-tech pdf
Weapons: Detailed stats for everything from basic clubs to advanced composite bows, plus special weapon materials (bone, bronze, iron, steel). Armor & Shields: Layered armor rules (e.g., padding under mail over a gambeson). Realistic coverage for specific hit locations. Clothing & Shelter: Rules for environmental protection (heat, cold, rain), sleeping gear, and temporary shelters.
2. Realistic and Cinematic Options
Armor as Dice (Optional Rule): Instead of flat DR, armor subtracts dice of damage. E.g., heavy mail turns a 2d cut into 1d cut. This speeds play and feels more realistic. Weapon Modifiers: Cheap, fine, very fine, or ornamental weapons. Also balanced vs. unbalanced for realistic fighting. The “Edge Protection” Rule: Cutting weapons are less effective against rigid armor (plate, cuirass) unless they have high enough damage. GURPS Low-Tech is a sourcebook for the GURPS
3. Food, Drink, and Survival – Incredibly useful
Preservation methods: Smoking, salting, pickling, drying. How long each lasts. Rations: From iron rations to hardtack to fresh bread. Hunting & Foraging: Simple tables for what you can find in different terrains. Water & Alcohol: Effects of stale water, beer vs. wine as safer drinks, and even basic brewing/distilling.
4. Tools, Trades, and Crafting
Professional gear: Smithing, carpentry, leatherworking, alchemy, medicine (humoral theory, herbs, surgery at low TL). Crafting times & costs: Rules to make your own gear (great for downtime or survival scenarios). Repair rules: How to fix damaged armor/weapons without magic.
5. Transport, Trade, and Logistics