Tetsujin no Llama

My sometime co-conspirator and all-around righteous dude, the lovely and talented Peter Dell'orto, a personage whose opinions on dungeon delving in general and dungeon delving in GURPS in particular carry considerable weight, has posted a brief review of Cold Shard Mountains . Spoiler alert: he's in favor of it. "[T]he kind of [thing] I wish I'd come up with first" (like wasp flails for Peter or "the Crushroom King" for me) is about the best thing one can hope to hear. I note that I have a link here to Peter's review, which has a link to my notes on CSM, which links to the W23 page. GURPSception!

Yesterday saw the publication of my latest GURPS thing, a setting/location/framework for dungeon crawling campaigns ( buy it here early and often). The idea behind it is to ignore the dungeon fantasy mission statement. Do what, now? Well, let's review the introduction of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers , which sets out what DF is about: Fantasy is an engaging genre, bursting with wonder and mystery. It offers worlds full of fascinating lands, dotted with great cities and populated by exotic cultures. All of this has a powerful resonance with any gamer familiar with myth, fairytales, and the fantasy epics of literature and film. For that, get GURPS Fantasy . But something else resonates with nearly every gamer. That’s the thrill of taking a powerful, faux-medieval adventurer down into a cave – or a haunted forest, or a sinister stronghold – and seeing lots of monsters, killing them, and taking their treasure. For that, there’s GURPS Dungeon Fantasy . So what does Col...

In addition to the adventure see which I should have suggested Peter write (and which he eventually did), it crossed my mind that there's one I should have come up with: As-Sharak, Do Do Do-do Doo: Delvers encounter small demonic creatures with elemental powers, like vicious feral kittens. While as-Sharak are thought to be produced by curses on mortal wizards, they discover that some have figured out how to reproduce. The adventurers must fight off the hunting hordes of juvenile as-Sharak, defeat their parents, and seek out the lair of the formidable grandparent as-Sharak.

I was going to make a post compiling or at least giving links to the monster seeds Peter Dell'Orto and I wrote for the DFRPG Monsters 2 Kickstarter (which, if you haven't already, go and pledge now), but Peter already did that here . I'll only add something I mentioned over on the SJ Games forum: I can't believe I didn't think of this when we were reviewing one another's drafts, but Peter should have written an adventure seed about trying to reach a destination before some Draugr does and called it Draug Race .

As part of something I'm working on, I've run into the question of "how much can you sell a priceless item for?" If you come across, say, Excalibur or the Ark of the Covenant in the course of an adventure and you want to sell it, the question becomes less how much people are willing to pay for it and more how much people are capable of paying for it. This is different from selling a large hoard of loot. If you come back to town with a wagon full of potions and magic swords and the like, merchants can split it all up into smaller lots broker multiple small transactions. Here, you have to find one person or entity with a large sum of money. So here's something I'm toying with for DF: Any item designated as "priceless" has a base value of $1m for purposes of figuring resale value. All modifiers for the seller's Wealth and that sort of thing still apply. That's the maximum value one can get in a typical Town. If the seller chooses to do so, how...

What could improve the GM's screen for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game ? Not much. But that didn't stop me from building something to go with it. This is mostly just scaled-up OpenForge pieces, artfully connected to one another at a suitable scale to frame but not cover up too much of Brandon Moore's art, and of course painted to a nice stone look. The really nifty thing about it is that the crenelated wall forms a parapet where the GM can put dice, pens, and other small items, keeping them out of the way until needed.

The DFRPG Kickstarter update #88 addresses Against the Rat Men, so I'll add a note here of my own. This is one of those "how the sausage is made" things which doesn't actually help anybody's gaming. When I was offered the chance to write Dungeon 2 , aka Against the Rat Men , for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, it came with an additional consideration about components. It had been determined that Dungeon , aka I Smell a Rat , would require three maps. Two of them would occupy the sides of one large sheet in the boxed set, but the second map would have blank back. That side could be used for a map for Against the Rat Men . But there was a complicating factor. Unlike the electronic products I usually work on, which are rather flexible until quite late in the game, there were a physical product with its own serious deadline involved and a cartographer who wasn't me to work with. I had to finalize the map in a matter of weeks, well before the adventure ...

Now that I've got my hard copy of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game box (woot!), I can look at it as a physical product, and I'm quite happy with it. Consider, for a moment, the GM screen: Currently available images of the screen don't do justice to it as a physical object. We'll ignore the art and such for the moment (I'll be coming back to it). This is a substantial item, made of thick cardboard under those glossy covers. The four-panel display stays up quite nicely on its own and is unlikely to be collapsed by passing breezes. The cardboard heroes are made of the same sturdy material. These are designed to fit into the manufactured stands, a significant change from the original version made form sheets of thick paper/thin cardstock, designed to fold up into triangles. The fold-up-triangle approach was certainly viable, but they were still easily knocked over by drafts and inadvertent table collisions. These are heavier and less subject to the vagaries ...

It is, at long last, out! Sort of! PDFs of the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game have been released to Kickstarter backers. I don't think it'll be generally available until next month, but since it's in the wild in at least a limited way, I feel I can talk about this a bit more like a customer than someone involved in the project. The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is a complete fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. It's based on GURPS 4th edition rules, but it's a stand-alone game, requiring no other books, or even prior knowledge of GURPS . I've already made some general comments elsewhere (I got an advanced peek for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I was called on to write some follow-up material coming out later). I'll expand on that here. For those unfamiliar with GURPS , it's a point-buy system rather than randomly rolled, class-and-level, or life path, and pretty much everything in play boils down to "try to roll a target numbe...

This is the sort of thing which happens when you write gaming material based on real-world sources. Back in Pyramid #38 , I had an adventure the goal of which was a geniza full of scattered but useful information. This was based on the Cairo geniza , essentially a massive waste paper basket which has turned out to be one of the most important source we've got on life and Jewish history in Medieval Egypt. And while it's already been immensely valuable to modern scholars, it's still incompletely investigated. It contains many scraps of documents which haven't even been categorized by language, let alone translated. But now there's a project on zooniverse where you can get involved in research. They're crowdsourcing the identification of fragments of texts based on some fairly simple criteria. This is pointing to a phase two where stuff actually gets translated. There's absolutely no telling what will come out of this (lost chapters of important commentarie...

6) A group of monsters have collected near the hidden doorway and antechamber leading into the crypt. Roll twice on the wandering monster table. As ugly as this might seem, if adventurers retreat a bit, the pursuing monsters will have to come after them through two separate doorways, making them relatively easy to isolate and overwhelm, and it's still fairly close to the cave shrine, so spellcasters can stay in an area where they can speak, if they need that in order to cast spells. 7) This niche is set off from the corridor by a set of sturdy iron bars. Treat as X-Heavy metalwork ( GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2, p. 18); the bars are permanently fixed in place and cannot be unlocked. The area beyond is blacked out with the Darkness spell. It's also difficult to use magic to pick out what's in the space; it's protected by a variant of the Pentegram spell (cast at level 20, if it becomes important). Breaking the bars breaks that spell. The space contains N/3 Demons From ...

Here's what's in areas 1-5 on the ground floor crypt map: 1) The room is partly filled with a dense grey mist from a few inches above the ground to a height of about three feet. Oddly, does not flow or expand outside of the approximately 12' by 12' room. Anyone peering under the mist sees a wooden chest in the southwest corner of the room. The mist is acidic, doing 1d corrosion damage per turn spent immersed in it. It's possible, though, to crawl under it. Crawling under the mist requires a roll against DX - (2 x SM) per turn (that is, a -2 penalty for SM +1, a +2 bonus for SM -1, and so on). Failing the DX roll incurs a single point of corrosion damage, or a full die for a critical failure. The chest itself weighs 40 lbs. is somehow resistant to the corrosion. It is locked (a straight roll against Lockpicking opens it), but there's a poisoned needle on the mechanism: Detect: Per-based Traps . Disarm: DX-based Traps . Circumvent: The chest can be sma...

The cave shrine is attached to a labyrinth-like crypt where various dead were laid to rest. Some had been noted holy men. Others were common people picked out for reasons lost to the depths of time. And some were very evil, stowed away in the supposedly safe confines of the crypt. But it's not so safe as one might hope. The crypt is full of magical power which has reanimated some of the dead, given an illusion of life to some objects, and let some things slip through the walls between worlds. Some time after the crypt was build and then sealed off by its makers, other monsters from the nearby natural caves broke in through a back entrance. Not long thereafter, they sealed it off again. The crypt can be reached thorough concealed doors to the south through the cave shrine and to the northwest through the ground floor caves. The entire paved area is covered by the Silence spell ( GURPS Magic, p. 171). It has somehow been applied to the entire volume on the crypt rather than on ...

The upper level of the shrine is mostly empty space. The corner towers of the external structure have a single floor at a second level. The stone staircases leading to them are intact, but the walls are crumbled and uneven above about ten feet; there used to be taller towers, but those have fallen into rubble. However, there's a ladder in the southwestern tower. Bandits occasionally use it to climb high enough to see over the ragged wall and keep a lookout for potential threats. The statue of the god in the cave shrine is a little over twenty feet tall, so it extends into the space of the upper level. The face used to have jeweled eyes, which have long since been removed. However, the top of the head has a hollow compartment (anyone who climbs up can roll against Search to see that it can be opened) containing a prayer wheel (see below). The remains of the shrine are occupied by a group of orcish bandits; see GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon for ...

The most obvious entrance to the dungeon (though it's really not obvious at all) is through the shrine. The remains of an earthen wall are still detectable around the precincts of the ancient temple, though it is nowhere more than a foot high and in places isn't there at all. Nevertheless, it delineates a region of high sanctity including the former courtyard, the exterior structure, and the cave, though not the catacombs beyond. The shrine proper consists of a two-story-tall structure built against the hillside which enlarges the enclosed area of the cave beyond. The walls are three foot thick stone (DR 468, DR 135). The floor is made of heavy stone tiles, still in quite good shape after many years. There are no windows and a single door. When it was in use, the shade was pleasantly cool, but the roof is all but gone now, so apart from a few crumbling rafters, there's little shade. However, there are vaults supporting a second floor for four tower-like structures p...

I'll probably change my mind about things once it's far enough along to be really confusing, but I'm starting out with some conventions. The space between level floors is about 15 feet. Floor-to-ceiling distance on any given level, then, is typically in the 8-12 foot range, though see below for exceptions. Most of the dungeon is completely enclosed underground, so it's pitch dark unless delvers bring light with them unless otherwise noted. Some cartographic conventions are represented here: The dark hatching represents the solid interior of the cave. It's rock.  No background indicates a space with no floor at that level, or possibly no floor and no ceiling; see explanatory text for the level for details. This may be a space like a long vertical mine shaft or the upper or middle parts of very large underground chambers. Lightly stippled areas are sandy unfinished floors, which predominate both inside and outside the dungeon. There is rock underneath a hand...

In order to get some more GURPS out there and play with some maps, I started toying with something. I've worked up a large map ("ground level" is below; I may need to poke around with image hosting to keep enough maps at the proper scales) of a dungeon complex. From time to time, I'll post magnified excerpts from the map with details in GURPS terms, with specific reference to Dungeon Fantasy (that is, mostly stocked with things from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables and the Dungeon Fantasy Monsters volumes, but occasional pointers elsewhere). They may prove useful to somebody somewhere under some odd set of circumstances. This dungeon is set in a fairly steep, rocky hill. The natural caves underneath it have long been home to a variety of creatures, natural and otherwise, but pretty much all horrible. There's also a large natural cavern accessible through a very large opening at the top of the hill where the surface caved in. It has been home to a n...

There's nothing particularly mechanically innovative in my article in this issue of Pyramid . It is, though, chock full of historical inaccuracies! But they were put there on purpose. Given my work on other projects , I thought it might be worth issuing a disclaimer. This was not written with my Very Serious Historian Indeed hat on. Consequently, as the introduction indicates, considerable liberties have been taken, specifically to make units fit into size classes of about a squad and a few hundred troops. The faux-Bronze Age Mesopotamian chariot units, for example, are essentially made up. There are records of garrisons or other smallish units combining a body of infantry with a handful of chariots. That handful allowed me to rationalize a nine-person unit. The chariot kirsu is far from a standardized unit, and the one presented here is very much on the small side when it comes to real ones. While one might find historical examples of the Greco-Roman and Medieval units as lis...

I've been the beneficiary of a recent wave of GURPS-related reviews, notably for the new book . The common thread is about how it nudges the Dungeon Fantasy line in the direction of social complexity, world-building detail, and more non-combat interactions. This leaves me thinking that I wasn't clear enough about the book's intent. I mean, yes, it does point in that direction for those who want it, but the objective I had was, basically, weaponizing social connections. Rank is a power-up. ARs allow adventurers to get their hands on some extra gear or other benefits at the beginning of an adventure, and guilds can send them on adventures where they get to keep all the loot. Apparently, the postmodernists were right about the author's intention and interpretation not being definitive. Anyway, I have some additional thoughts about Guilds and it's relationship to Boardroom and Curia. I'll try to get those out there in the next few days.

A new book of mine came out today: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 1: Glittering Prizes . The genesis of this one is...well, not unusual. After DF8 came out, I'd had some ideas about things which it might have lacked, items I'd want to expand on, and the like, but I didn't have a format for it. I pitched one of those ideas, an extended treatment of money, as an article for Pyramid . My editor countered with the suggestion of turning it into a short PDF. After a bit of back and forth, I settled on a short PDF (shorter than DF8, anyway) about adding detail to treasures: more about money to make it more than just discrete bits of precious metal, more decorative motifs, more implausible materials, and so on, incorporating many, though not all, of the treasure-related ideas I'd had since DF8 was published. And now, the theme song for the book: