First of all, I'm a GURPS fan and I absolutely love it. To me GURPS feels very intuitive, and plays fast. There are problems though. Chargen can take a lot of time, especially if you create characters with complex powers.

I heard that The Fantasy Trip, by Steve Jackson, is to GURPS what OD&D is to D&D3; rules-light and few prep time. So I would like to have a look at it.

The problem is, what to get? I see there is Melee, Wizard, Advance Melee, Advanced Wizard and In the Labyrinth. What's what? What are the corebooks? Are all of them corebooks? What information does every book contain?

Thank you

Melee covers combat. Wizard covers magic. ItL covers non-magical skills, monsters, experience/advancement and other campaign-level stuff.

The "advanced" versions of Melee/Wizard contain more extensive/elaborate material and may be slightly harder to get into if you're not already familiar with the basic versions. Note that the basic versions were published as self-contained micro-boardgames.

Dragons of Underearth is a stripped-down version of the complete system.

Note also that Legends of the Ancient World is a reverse-engineered update, a bit like the relationship between MRQ and RQ3. You can get it from the Dark City Games website.

Most of the TFT stuff is available for free on the web and/or file-sharing systems, and links have been posted here, so a search or two ought to point you in the right direction.

Melee and Wizard are useful as teaching texts, but you don't need them strictly speaking. Advanced M & W and TFT:ITL are the core here. TFT:ITL is where you get chargen though you won't know exactly what it means (and won't have the spell lists) without the other two books.

I remember really enjoying Treasure of the Silver Dragon and some of the other mini-adventures. They're like even more stirpped-down T&T solos but somehow you get a weird sense of the background, and there are some good fights.

Quote from: Elliot WilenDragons of Underearth is a stripped-down version of the complete system.

You may be able to actually get new (sealed) copies of this game at a reasonable price (~$12) if you look around (I found it listed at http://decisiongames.com/html/dragons_underearth.html for $12, though I don't know anything else about this store).