Imagine the following situation: you want to feature a certain gun in your campaign, but you want to do it “properly”. You’re not the kind of GM who would feel good about just tossing some random numbers in there.

The weapon in question is not in any of your books, and it’s different enough from the ones that are that you can’t just reskin an existing gun. That’d be the same as using random numbers.

If the story above resonated with you, then you’ll love GURPS Gun Stats. It gives you an official system to write up GURPS 4th Edition stats for guns starting from their real world data. If the lack of these rules stopped you before, you’ll love this book.

Sure, players who were really into statting up guns might already have been doing this for years by either building them using the rules from GURPS Vehicles for 3rd edition, or by using a very scary unofficial spreadsheet cooked up by Douglas Cole for his own use. Gun Stats is still useful for them, as it’s much simpler than the spreadsheet.

How It Looks

This is a typical Warehouse 23 PDF. All black and white, with the by now classical GURPS two-column layout combined with the usual excellent table of contents and index. Its written by David Pulver with additional material by S.A. Fisher Hans-Christian Vortisch, which is kind of a seal of quality in itself when it comes to gun-nut material in GURPS.

The interior art is mostly a mix of illustrations clearly based on photos or 3D models with a weird “acid etching” surface filter applied to them to unify the look. You also have a few hand-drawn illustrations. The art credits are fairly long, listing several photo repositories and 3D studios in addition to a couple of individual artists. I admit the “acid etching” filter made me take a closer look, but I believe all the art in this book is either drawn or edited by human hands.

The Totally-Not-From-Assassin’s Creed lady on page 9 has a bit of an awkward pose, but it’s organic awkwardness. The rest of the pieces are fine, and look good without getting in the way of the text.

How It Works

One thing I found nifty about the book is that it’s more than a collection of formulas. It has some instruction on how to actually do the research to get that real-life gun data, and a little checklist. You’ll need things like the empty weight, barrel length and overall length of the gun itself; the weight and dimensions of its projectile and of the whole cartridge; and how much propellant it uses per shot.

Some of those stats (like the weights and costs) can be written straight into the stat sheet, while others are used in relatively simple equations to derive stuff like damage, Accuracy, and range.

And that’s it. While those simple calculations can still be a little intense they’ll get you the results you want.

At the end of the book you have a printable checklist for your own research, and three example weapons: a French anti-material rifle, a 19th-century 6-pounder cannon, and the gun on the M1A2 Abrams tank.

Caveats and Annoyances

The book works best when dealing with historical or modern guns that have ample information available to the public, whether in Wikipedia, more specialized sites, or even sales brochures. The less information is available for a specific weapon, the more you’ll have to guesstimate when filling your checklist.

You can already see this with the Abrams tank gun here. Recent data about it and its ammunition is classified, so they either use Gulf War-era information or just make educated guesses about some of its measurements.

Fictional guns will often be harder, because they very often lack a lot of measurements entirely, as those weren’t necessary to tell the story. You’ll have to come up with those yourself, or maybe go looking for the work of other fans who have already spent a ton of time doing exactly that.

This is all perfectly doable, but presumably you wanted this book because you didn’t want to guess all the numbers. On the other hand, doing this will give you a pretty good ideas of the ways in which this or that fictional weapon is unrealistic.

A final annoyance for me specifically: like all other GURPS books, this one uses Imperial measurements exclusively for its calculations. Yes, even though modern gun data is often presented in metric. You gotta convert all of that to feet, pounds, and inches before doing the work, which is doubly annoying to me because I’m going to convert a lot of that right back for the final writeups.

Final Impressions

GURPS Gun Stats gives me the same impression as a classical UNIX or Linux command line tool. It’s designed to do one job, it does that job pretty well despite some usability issues, and it has a lot of options that can be difficult to remember without looking at the documentation.

If you need to do that job, this is the tool for you, and the learning curve is worth it. If you’re happy to just toss some eyeballed stats onto a table and call it a day, then you can skip it.