I ran J.C. Connors' Hogwarts adventure The Warlock's Tunnel for two different groups recently. Using Foundry Virtual Tabletop, GURPS, and Nose and Nick's unofficial GURPS module for Foundry. Here's a review of all of the above.
First, the adventure. Without spoilers, in case you might want to play it. It's set at Hogwarts in 1987, a few years before the first Harry Potter book. A Hufflepuff prefect is missing, and the PCs should want to investigate. (But will they? You never know with players.) The adventure is for 4 150-point second-year student wizards. It comes with 7 pregenerated PCs, so the players can basically pick whichever 4 out of 7 they like, and go. Though it should still play fine, just a bit easier or harder, if you have 5 or 3 players. The pregenerated PCs are interesting, with various personalities, backstories, spells, skills, and Houses. One of them has a pet Niffler. One is an American who's recently moved to the UK and transferred to Hogwarts. One is a prankster. One is way too good a student. Etc. Very fun characters.
As an introductory GURPS adventure, it only needs the GURPS 4E Basic Set and GURPS Magic. The various GURPS spells used have been given Harry Potter-ish names, and a few new spells are included in the adventure. As an introductory GURPS adventure, it's a pretty good choice, as most people already know the Harry Potter background, so you don't have to explain too much backstory. And you can mostly avoid getting too bogged down in rules, just "roll 3d6 and try to roll under this attribute or skill" can cover most things. GURPS has a reputation for complexity, but the main rule to avoid problems is to not use all of it. Just use what you need. In this case, that's a few basic rules and a few spells. And the characters are already made for you, which is the hardest part. I don't want to go to deep into reviewing the adventure, because I don't want to spoil it, but it's your basic investigation / adventure story. The adventure says you can play it in a couple of hours; both of my groups took about 4 hours, but everything is a bit slower over the Internet. Overall, I think it's a good adventure, but suffers a bit from the "we're stuck so let's ask a professor for help" problem that's endemic to the Harry Potter universe. If the PCs have any sense, once they realize their out of their depth they'll run to Professor McGonagall or Professor Dumbledore for backup. If you're a real-life 12-year-old and you find out that horrible crimes are happening, yes, you should totally get an adult to deal with it. But if you're the hero in a Harry Potter book, letting the adults solve your problems is no fun. So the GM has to come up with reasons for the PCs not to do it that way.
(As an aside, J.C. Connors has a bunch of other free oneshot adventures available at 1shotadventures.com. They are surprisingly professionally put together for free adventures. Most of them are for GURPS, but some also have versions for other systems like D&D or Call of Cthulhu available. A couple are solo adventures in case you don't have a gaming group handy. Check them out.)
How does GURPS work for Harry Potter? Pretty well, I think. GURPS has a bunch of magic systems, but the most basic one, used here, is spells-as-skills. Each of the kid wizards has a dozen or so spells, not too overwhelming, and then a dozen or so other skills. If you want to cast a spell, you roll 3d6 and try to roll less than or equal to your spell skill. If you want to use another skill, same thing. If you want to try a skill you don't have on your sheet, you're free to try, but defaults are usually around IQ-5 or DX-5, so your odds of success are not great. Of course the GM can apply modifiers ("You want to try to use your Animal Handling [Nifflers] on an animal that's nothing at all like a Niffler? Fine, roll at -4."), but that's most of it.
How does FoundryVTT work? Well, there are a bunch of intro videos on YouTube. But basically it's a virtual tabletop, like Roll20 or MapTools or Fantasy Grounds or Owlbear Rodeo or... The good thing is that this adventure comes with tokens for the PCs and some major NPCs, so you don't have to make them. And it also comes with a bunch of picture handouts, which Foundry lets the GM show to the players. The bad thing is that it only comes with one map, so if you want maps, the GM has some work to do. I've run a lot of GURPS in Roll20, and a bit in MapTools, and so far, after only running one adventure in Foundry, I like Foundry better than either. Once you load up Nose and Nick's unofficial GURPS module, you have GURPS character sheets, including import from character generation tools like GCS or GCA. You can click on a skill or attribute on your character sheet to roll against it. Foundry supports maps with hexes, not just squares. It supports token facing, with a built-in facing arrow so you don't have to add one to your tokens. And token vision, lighting, etc. are built-in. As are a bunch of token status modifiers for GURPS, like Stunned, Prone, Nauseated, Shocked, Kneeling, etc.
The first group I ran the adventure for were experienced RPG players who hadn't tried GURPS before. They all grasped "click on the skill to roll against it" immediately, and that's as much GURPS as they needed to learn. We used Jitsi for voice and video with that group, and it worked great. The second group were mostly GURPS veterans who hadn't tried Foundry before. We used Discord for voice, no video, and it also worked great.
Minor issues: tokens don't have vision by default. You need to click "token vision" to let them see, which is annoying. I forgot to assign one PC token vision, so that player had problems seeing things until I fixed that. Then I only fixed it on one copy of their token, not on their "prototype token" that would be used forevermore, so the problem came back when the players moved to another map. Eventually I got it fixed right. Also, setting up lighting for each token can be a bit of work, so for the maps that were dark, I just turned on map-wide global illumination once a couple of PCs cast Continual Light spells, to make things simpler. (I would not do that in a more hardcore dungeon crawling game, but this is a light fluffy oneshot about young student wizards, so not annoying the players too much with limited light radius seemed like the right call.)
As far as Foundry modules go, Nose and Nick's GURPS support for Foundry is under rapid development, but already really solid. It doesn't support quite as much automation as some of the Foundry D&D modules do, because GURPS doesn't have a free System Reference Doc with rules that you are explicitly allowed to use like D&D does, and Nose and Nick want to keep Steve Jackson Games from getting mad at them for automating too much, but it supports the basics like "click on a number on the sheet to roll 3d6 and try to roll under that number" and "click on a weapon's damage to roll that much damage." And that's most of what you need. (If you want to add tables that they have deliberately left out to respect copyrights, like the critical hit table or reaction table, it's not that hard: Foundry makes it easy to add rollable tables.) Other modules we used include PDFoundry (PDF viewer built into Foundry, so you can click on a rules reference on your character sheet and bring up that page of the rules, if you own that rulebook in PDF form), Dice So Nice (animated dice flying all over your screen), and Turn Marker (put an animated marker under the token whose turn it is in combat so the player hopefully notices and goes before you have to remind them).
Overall, I enjoyed this adventure and will probably run it again in the future. It's a good simple short demonstration of GURPS. I was also pretty happy with my first experience using Foundry to run an RPG. Thanks to the authors of everything we used.
Next up: I'd like to run another J.C. Connors oneshot, Who Tracks the Steps of Glory, because it's Star Trek and I haven't run a Sci-Fi game in a while, so I need practice with stuff like high-tech ranged combat and starships. After that, I want to run a GURPS Traveller campaign.
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