[37-0133] Gun Fu.pdf

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C ONTENTS

I NTRODUCTION

In the real world, gun battles are an excellent way to get

maimed, crippled, or dead. Veteran soldiers and cops – and all

butthemostderangedcareercriminals–gotogreatlengthsto

avoid shootouts. When they can’t, they stack the deck with

more men, heavier firepower, and better cover; they regard an

ambush as sensible, not dishonorable. Done right, there’s no

gunfight, because the other guys don’t get a chance to shoot;

they’re just shot. This is the reality that the GURPS Basic Set

and GURPS High-Tech tend to favor.

Action movies and comics work nothing like this, though!

There, gunmen with a beef will shoot up the scenery at the

drop of a hat, and a big enough dose of lead and cordite can

resolve almost any conflict. Gun-toting heroes prevail against

superior numbers and weapons by being better, frequently

more honorable, and inevitably cooler. The resulting gunfight

might be a bloody massacre – but just as often, it’s a ballet of

bullets – kung fu with guns . . . gun fu.

GURPS Gun Fu bridgesthegapbetweenthedeadlyrealism

of the Basic Set and the “reality” of shoot-’em-up fiction. It

delves into GURPS Martial Arts for rules that make movement

and style as potent as caution and tactics, adapts them for cine-

maticshootists,andaddsnumerous new options.Itis

primarily intended as support for cinematic TL4-9

campaigns involving the use of firearms.

between1995and2002.In2004,heproducedthe GURPS Basic

Set, Fourth Edition withDavidPulver.Sincethen,hehascreated

GURPS Powers (withPhilMasters), GURPS Martial Arts (with

Peter Dell’Orto), and the GURPS Action, GURPS Dungeon

Fantasy, and GURPS Power-Ups series . . . and the list keeps

growing. Sean has been a gamer since 1979. His nongaming

interests include cinema, cooking, and wine. He lives in

Montréal, Québec, with his wife, Bonnie. They have two cats,

Banshee and Zephyra, and a noisy parrot, Circe.

Hans-Christian “Grey Tiger” Vortisch, M.A., began writing

for GURPS as a freelancer in 2001. He was author or coauthor

of GURPS Covert Ops; GURPS High-Tech; GURPS Modern

Firepower; GURPS Special Ops, Third Edition; GURPS WWII:

Motor Pool; and several e23 publications on martial topics. He

wrote additional material for numerous other GURPS books;

authored, translated, edited, or contributed to several German

Call of Cthulhu products; and published many articles in

American, British, and German gaming magazines. Hans has

beenanavidgamersince1983.Hisnongaminginterestsinclude

science fiction, shooting, history, and punk rock. He’s watching

movies in Berlin.

About GURPS

Steve Jackson Games is committed to full support of GURPS

players. Our address is SJ Games, P.O. Box 18957, Austin, TX

78760. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE)

any time you write us! We can also be reached by e-mail:

info@sjgames.com . Resources include:

New supplements and adventures. GURPS continues to grow –

see what’s new at www.sjgames.com/gurps .

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aids, and support in PDF form . . . digital copies of our books, plus

exclusive material available only on e23! Just head over to

e23.sjgames.com .

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magazine includes new rules and articles for GURPS , systemless

locations,adventures,andmuchmore.Lookforeachthemedissue

from e23!

Internet. Visit us on the World Wide Web at

www.sjgames.com for errata, updates, Q&A, and much more. To

discuss GURPS with our staff and your fellow gamers, visit our

forums at forums.sjgames.com . The GURPS Gun Fu web page

can be found at www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/gunfu .

Bibliographies. Many of our books have extensive bibliogra-

phies, and we’re putting them online – with links to let you buy

the resources that interest you! Go to each book’s web page and

look for the “Bibliography” link.

Errata. Everyone makes mistakes, including us – but we do our

besttofixourerrors.Up-to-dateerratapagesforall GURPS releases,

including this book, are available on our website – see above.

Rules and statistics in this book are specifically for the GURPS

Basic Set, Fourth Edition. Page references that begin with B refer

to that book, not this one.

P UBLICATION H ISTORY

Some rules for weapon handling, and several

perks and techniques, were adapted and expanded

from GURPS High-Tech (2007), by Shawn Fisher

and Hans-Christian Vortisch. Other material origi-

nally appeared in a different context in GURPS

Martial Arts (2007), by Peter Dell’Orto and Sean

Punch. Still other rules were introduced in Hans-

Christian Vortisch’s GURPS Martial Arts:

Fairbairn Close Combat Systems (2008). Further

concepts originated in Sean Punch’s GURPS

Action 1: Heroes (2008) and GURPS Action 2:

Exploits (2008).

A BOUT THE A UTHORS

S.A. Fisher is currently pursuing a doctorate in

history. A former teacher and infantryman, he has

overadecadeofexperienceinprivatesecurityandis

a certified law-enforcement firearms and defensive-

tactics instructor. His previous works include

GURPS High-Tech, GURPS WWII: Dogfaces, and

GURPS WWII: Hand of Steel. Shawn has been an

avid gamer for nearly 25 years; he devotes his spare

time to camping and recreational shooting. He lives

inSearcy,Arkansas,withhiswife,Jennifer,andtheir

two daughters, Elizabeth and Rachel.

Sean“Dr.Kromm”Punchsetouttobecomeapar-

ticle physicist in 1985, ended up the GURPS Line

Editor in 1995, and has engineered rules for almost

every GURPS productsince.Hedeveloped,edited,or

wrote dozens of GURPS Third Edition projects

I NTRODUCTION

L IGHTS ,

C AMERA . . .

AND A CTION !

To me, Chow Yun Fat holding a gun is just like Wang Yu hold-

ing a sword. All I intend to glorify is the hero.

– John Woo, Ten Thousand Bullets

This chapter discusses the development of gunplay in

movies and other fiction media, and how the various genres

influenced each other.

W HAT I S G UN F U ?

The term gun fu is a play on kung fu, and it specifically

refers to those Asian – especially Hong Kong Chinese – genre

films that feature extensive gunplay in painstak-

ingly choreographed scenes. In these movies,

sometimes also known as blood operas, guns

take the place of martial-arts moves: The shoo-

tists brandish handguns in both fists, firing and

dodging while in motion, and moving around

almost as if dancing.

Inawidersense,gunfuisamoderntermfor

any cinematic shooting – it stands for impossi-

ble shots and impossible guns. Gun fu is about

drawing faster than your shadow, shooting

farther than you can see, and hitting targets that are smaller

thanabullet.Gunfuisn’tconfinedtocinema,either.Themovie’s

little brother, television, is also

a great inspiration, as are

books, comics, and computer

games – some literary gun fu

shootists pre-date the inven-

tion of film by a great deal!

Gun Fu presents all the

rules you require to recreate

your favorite gun fu tricks in

your games – and to invent

entirely new ones!

akimbo: Having a gun in both hands, all the time. Realis-

tically, this makes it difficult or impossible to open a

door, reload (especially both guns simultaneously!),

etc., but “movie magic” makes it possible. See the

Akimbo perk (p. 17) and some of the gadgets on p. 43.

fanning: Increasing the RoF of a single-action revolver by

holding down the trigger and hitting the hammer with

the off-hand (p. 11).

gun fu: Any cinematic shooting with firearms – but by

extension, also with Gauss needlers, rocket launchers,

tank guns, beam weapons, etc.

Mexican standoff: Asituationinwhichtwoormoreoppo-

nents have the drop on each other, so that neither can

win – typically by being in close combat, with guns lev-

eledateachothersheads.Mexicanstandoffsareusually

resolved by everybody slowing retreating . . . to fight

another day. Otherwise, they end messily.

New York reload: “Reloading” by simply dropping an

empty gun and replacing it with a loaded one from a

holster, waistband, convenient stashing place in the

area of the firefight – or even thin air! The Fast-Draw

skill (p. 24) helps a lot.

thumbing: increasing the RoF of a single-action revolver

byquicklyrecockingthehammerwiththethumbofthe

shooting hand (p. 11).

wondernine: A flamboyant term from the 1980s describ-

ing any high-capacity semiautomatic pistol in 9¥19mm

Parabellum caliber.

L IGHTS , C AMERA . . . AND A CTION !

C HAPTER O NE

Gun Fu Terms

H ISTORY OF G UN F U

Gun fu as a concept is actually at least two centuries old,

even though the term describing it is much more recent.

Literary treatments and shooting shows can be rightfully con-

sidered as the forerunners of cinema in this regard. The devel-

opment is traced below. See Inspirational Fiction (pp. 44-48)

for extensive but far from exhaustive lists of exemplary films,

books, and comics.

Toincreasethedrawingspeed,actorssometimesusedlight-

weight props rather than real guns, and new types of holsters

were developed that made it easier to draw the weapon than

from an ordinary, utilitarian holster. Most early Westerns fea-

tured gunslingers that were one-trick ponies – they displayed

only a couple gun moves here and there – and while shootouts

were important, they never dominated the film. Despite its

advanced date, Henry Hathway’s True Grit (1969), a classic

with the late John Wayne as Marshal Reuben “Rooster”

Cogburn, is a good example for this style.

S IX -S HOOTERS :

T HE O LD W EST L EGACY

There have always existed gunfighters whose skill with

firearms so overshadowed that of the common gun user that

they became the center of (often wildly exaggerated) stories

and legends. In 19th-century America, however, the superior

skill of some shooters became known to a wider audience

through newspaper articles and books. This started what

would later become known as gun fu.

Traveling shooting shows featured stars like Seth Clover,

William “Buffalo Bill” Cody ( GURPS Old West, p. 101), Annie

“Little Sure Shot” Oakley, and Lillian Smith. These shows dif-

fered from the legendary feats of famous real gunslingers in

that, for the first time, their feats with the gun could be wit-

nessed by a large audience and were replicated every day.

Annie Oakley’s shooting was even captured on film by Thomas

Edison as early as 1894! These early showmen displayed fast-

drawing;shotoffcigarettesheldinthemouthsofassistants;or

blew small targets out of the air.

Of course, some feats weren’t real – that is, applicable in a

realgunfight.Forexample,unnoticedbyonlookers,sometrick

shooters used dustshot shells in their weapons to shoot down

glass balls from the air, increasing their chances to hit them

compared to a single bullet.

Romanticizing novels like James Fenimore Cooper’s The

Last of the Mohicans (1826) or Karl May’s Winnetou (1893)

often portrayed shootists that can easily be seen as gun fu

stylists. When cinema and the entirely action-driven pulp fic-

tion novel were born in the final days of the Old West, writ-

ers and directors quickly introduced the old showmen’s

tricks. In both literature and early cinema, shooters often

possessed unerring accuracy with any weapon and at any

range. The media also established many important motifs,

such as the two-gun pistolero and the noontime face-to-face

duel. These feats were made easy by the fact that the actors

didn’t actually need to be able to hit – range, skill, lighting,

psychologicaldisposition,andother“details”thatoftenmake

shooting difficult in real life don’t matter in a film as long as

the script says the hero hits.

In addition, the realities of moviemaking had their impact.

With the ability to cut and edit scenes together, film shootists

could fire their guns as often as necessary, unlimited by the

actual ammunition capacities of their weapons. Once they

started shooting, the action didn’t need to stop for reloading,

and the heroes could deal with scores of enemies. To this day,

this is probably one of the most important fictional licenses

appropriated by creators of gun fu.

The Western genre is one of

the oldest in cinema – Edwin

Porter’s The Great Train

Robbery dates from 1903.

Other important influences on the gun fu genre were the

“spaghetti Westerns” pioneered by Italian director Sergio

Leone. Films such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few

Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966),

and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) sharpened or

invented many modern views about the Western shooter. The

gunfights in Leone’s movies (and their many imitations) were

carefully choreographed and filmed, with distinctive sound

andvisualeffects.What’smore, A Fistful of Dollars isanalmost

blatant remake of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movie Yojimbo

(1961).Itshowshoweasyitistoconvertconventionalmartial-

arts combat to gunplay – and vice-versa, since Yojimbo in turn

was based in broad strokes on Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled

.45-shooting detective novel Red Harvest (1929), set during the

American Prohibition era.

With new life breathed into the Western genre in the late

1960s, many directors started to make more gritty movies

beginning in the 1970s – but often kept the cinematic gun-

play. Such films include Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey

Wales (1976) about Rebel gunslinger Josey “Mr. Lightning”

Wales, and the more allegorical Pale Rider (1980), in which a

lone gunfighter appears as though one of the Four Horsemen

of the Apocalypse.

The more recent revisionist Westerns followed in the foot-

stepsoftheseearlierarchetypes,eveniftheirthemesandtop-

ics subtly changed. While there may be more emphasis on

showingthe“real”OldWest,whichisdepictedasbeingmuch

more complicated (and often, more interesting!) than the leg-

ends of old, shooters like Matthew Quigley in Quigley Down

Under (1990), Charley Waite in Open Range (2003), or Seth

Bullock in Deadwood (2004-2006) are still fast and deadly. Of

course, flamboyant modern Westerns that use a more openly

cinematic approach also exist. A prime example is The Quick

and the Dead (1995) – a film that is literally only about shoot-

ing it out.

L IGHTS , C AMERA . . . AND A CTION !

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