BERNALTURADO'S PROFILE

I'm pretty interested in GURPS, though I have no experience with the system itself. However, the example magic system provided seems rather DnD-like, having specific spells, something I'm not keen on. I was hoping I could develop my own magic system from it with the rules, but I would like to avoid homebrewing if possible. To use programmer speak, is the magic system in GURPS just "Syntactic Sugar" for a batch of powers built as per the rules, or are they a separate add-on?