There have been many attempts by the GURPS community to create a satisfying experience for the more exotic and over the top martial arts in GURPS. This can be challenging because GURPS’ baseline assumption is “Cinematic Realism”, and WUSHU is typically very much style over substance. This might push many towards using narrative systems to run WUSHU, which is entirely appropriate for many groups with this goal, however there is potential for GURPS to fill this niche and do so exceptionally for some varieties of WUSHU.

For Naruto and similar titles GURPS may even be the ideal option. It has recently occurred to me that one of the best ways of representing this, which has been explored before but to my knowledge not in quite this way, is to use GURPS Magic to represent quick abilities such as showcased in Shonen of this variety. What hasn’t to my knowledge been done before is what I think is essential: go ‘Scorched Earth’ on the spell list and start over. GURPS Magic spells are largely a collection of legacy spells intended to portray wizards. This leaves them with a lot of built in assumptions and baggage. We will need to create new spells to put in new colleges appropriate to the setting. The idea is to use this to represent only the low level and not the powerful slow magics of the settings, but both are possible if desired. The details of this process are outlined in Thaumatology but boil down to fiat. Next we need to modify the Power Source to match our setting. Then we use Thaumatology to switch the spells to magic as techniques (Optional, but recommended).

Now that we have a spellcasting system built using GURPS Magic as Techniques we have what we need to mix the spells into Martial Arts Styles we will generate for the setting using the GURPS Martial Arts genre book. What should result is a bunch of styles with iconic/appropriate magical abilities that are techniques of the school skills. When paired with mandatory styles this can be used for a Dojo/School style campaign, to police niche protection, or to just provide flavor and obstacles for new abilities.

I have many further ideas regarding this topic and may expand upon this idea at a later date. I have several more posts that are related and intended to cover different takes and options for other aspects of said settings.