Mmm, do I smell cinnamon? Someone must be getting into GURPS!
I've been gathering thoughts on this for quite a while. The broad strokes for me are...
GURPS Lite. Iamtim's right, GURPS Lite will give you a great introduction to the system without costing anything except the time to read about 30 pages, so no reason not to be sure GURPS appeals to you before spending anything (really, this is just a formality -- I'm sure you'll love it
). From the linked page, choose "Add to Crate," choose "Check Out," and throw any kind of email-looking address in the "Email" field to reach the download link (though see below for another item of interest).
Caravan to Ein Arris. This is a free Fantasy adventure, helpful for seeing how NPCs get statted out, how encounters are set up, that sort of thing. Makes a great second read after GURPS Lite!
That's honestly enough to get started right there, using GURPS Lite to either run "Caravan to Ein Arris" or your own adventure. Boom! You're playing GURPS.
Assuming you have a good time and want to move beyond Lite at some point, the next logical step is...
GURPS Basic Set. The two volumes of "Characters" (slanted towards players) and "Campaigns" (slanted towards GMs) will give you the full core of GURPS 4th Edition: skills, advantages and disadvantages, weapons and equipment, combat, healing and much more, it's
all in here. Note that the linked page has, on the left under "Excerpts," PDF samples of both books showing the entire Table of Contents, Introduction, and Index to show what you're getting yourself into.
Again, that right there is everything you need to play a multitude of varied GURPS campaigns for years to come! If you did want a bit more in the way of explanation...
How to Be a GURPS GM. So, yeah, it's a little tough to recommend this without seeming self-serving, but I'm gonna assume most anyone reading this knows me enough to know better. The reason I mention it is because it specifically addresses all of your original questions: how to start off with GURPS, which books are helpful for which genres, an overview of all the major supplements (well, as of last year), and actual examples of how all that might be put together.
Then come...
The Supplements! Oh, the glory that is GURPS supplements. One of my favorite things about GURPS is how easy it is to find rules supplements that expand whatever your favorite parts of the game happen to be.
New rules are rarely published in supplements; instead, they take the basic rules and expand the living hell out of them.
So, for a few examples, if you find the rules for melee combat in the Basic Set, even including all of the tactical options,
still aren't crunchy enough for you,
Martial Arts is a whole book of even
more options and variables to bring into play;
Tactical Shooting and
Gun-Fu do the same for ranged combat, for realistic or cinematic games, respectively; if the generic weapons and armor listed in the Basic Set are insufficient, the holy triumvirate of
Low-Tech,
High-Tech, and
Ultra-Tech expand those lists a LOT; if you want even more options for non-combat character interplay beyond the Basic Set,
Social Engineering expands the core system a multitude of ways.
If we knew what kind of game you'd be interested in first, we could probably give more focused recommendations.
One of my personal favorite releases is
Power-Ups 5: Impulse Buys, detailing a variety of ways to use Character Points (or other meta-points) for in-game effects (in the vein of Fate Points/"bennies"/that sort of thing, though it's actually an expansion of rules first incorporated in the original 4th Edition Basic Set).
And that doesn't even scratch the surface of all the great GURPS resources out there on the net!
Most importantly, the
offical GURPS forum is an amazing resource, and the community is super friendly. The
combat examples at my site seem pretty helpful to a lot of folks new to GURPS.
This post also seemed like a great intro to getting started with GURPS.
I think that's it for now! Until I think of 10 more things...
I'm sure a lot of us would love to hear how your initial GURPS forays go, what was helpful and not, etc. Good luck!
Mook's book, How to be a GURPS GM, is a fantastic tool.
Thanks, Lowkeyoh, I appreciate that!