Review

Bite-sized Review: GURPS Power-ups 10 – Skill Trees

Looks like it’s been way longer since I read this than I had thought, but since I’m using it for an actual project now, it’s high time to get back writing a review, especially since the Power-ups line has been exceptionally useful for rules-hackers so far. This one had me stumped. At first, I was thinking of things like Diablo’s supernatural skill system (Kromm has used this good old game as an inspiration when doing Dungeon Fantasy, after all). Instead it’s about restructuring, streamlining and increasing the accessibility of regular GURPS skills.

Cover of GURPS Power-ups 10 - Skill Trees

Facts

Author: Sean Punch (“Dr. Kromm”)
Date of Publication: 25/10/2024? (couldn’t find the announcement, but that’s my timestamp)
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count:  25 (1 title page, 1 content page, 1 introduction page, 1 index page, 1 page ad)
Price: $7.00 (PDF), $0.35 per page of content; Score of 6/10 (Attention: I have adjusted my price score for inflation here, resulting in a score of 6 instead of 3. I’m guessing ten years is a long time. No promises about when I’ll get around to retroactively correction prices and scores.)
Preview: https://warehouse23.com/products/gurps-power-ups-10-skill-trees

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

This is a very meaty subject, so I’ll discuss the structure under the next heading.

Meat (Score: 8.5)

The book starts off with talking about the new hierarchical tree structure that is imposed on the skills: trunks, branches, twigs and leaves. I thought it a little silly at first, but the metaphor is well-chosen. You don’t need to buy a trunk if you don’t want to, you can have leaves or branches sprouting out of the ground (or trunks or whatever as long as it goes from large to small).

Then it goes on explaining the trunks – over-arching skill categories like Plant or Scholar that are similar, but not the same as Talents or Wildcard skills. Rather these are closer to the good old skill categories of GURPS 3rd Edition and their advantage ist that they are easily recognisable and allow for overlap. This is followed by a long list of example trunks that fit the generic GURPS vibe quite well. Sean Punch goes on to explain branches (those are the “actual” skills), twigs (specialisations and some easier skills) and leaves (hyperspecialised knowledge like how to fly an F16). These mostly make a lot of sense, though I do take exception as denying Cooking its place as a full skill (no argument with Sports in most campaigns).

The second chapter starts off with costs: As you could have guessed trunks, branches, twigs and leaves also have different point costs per level with trunks coming in between small and medium Talents, branches being a little cheaper than skills and the other two just counting down. That makes leaves comparatively expensive, but if you always use the same vehicle that should still be worth it.

What’s radically different from normal GURPS is that levels are no longer a fixed stat to roll against. Instead they are a modifier. Let that sink in for a moment. What it does is to heavily encourage floating skills to other attributes. That is a good thing in the standard attribute system already, especially if you consider PER and WILL as attributes, but once you designed your own attribute system with GURPS Power-ups 9 – Alternate Attributes, it becomes a real game-changer. WillowVine and I have done something similar for the total conversion GURPS The Owl House using Wildcard Skills Lite, but this is a more organic and certainly a more GURPSy way of doing things.

Sean Punch then goes on to show his math and it checks out. Skills will become more expensive, but characters gain (narratively realistic) broad competence. You may know that the standard attribute setup is not my cup of tea and I’d like to give at the very least parity in mental and physical attributes, but… that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Suffice it to say I would have liked to see a bit more interaction between the Power-ups 9 and 10. There is a useful box on page 13, but in general Skill Trees is treated as an alternative to Alternate Attributes, which, to be fair, it partly is. There are detailed discussions of the costs of each part of the tree, so you can make your own mind.

The tight spacing of the costs on the branch/twig/leaf axis and the still relatively close branch cost, make it inefficient to raise more than two branches/skills before you maxed out the trunk and always inefficient to have more than one twig and leaf per branch. That’s where the nice metaphor breaks down. The problem (if you see it as such) can be solved by slightly increasing trunk, branch and twig costs and decreasing the in-built -5 penalty to all rolls. This penalty incidentally is only introduced in chapter 2 and elaborated in chapter 3, which I consider a rather bad placement. Best reading order is probably Chapter 1, 3 and 2.

Chapter 3 is mostly, but not completely about how to do skill rolls under the new system. Sean Punch introduces a clearer distinction of untrained and trained tasks, the former including those where training helps, even if it it not required. Skills with A lot of the rest deals with the many edge cases that always crop up in GURPS and a certain tediousness creeps in at times. Fancy Forestry rounds up the tree puns with a couple of optional switches that are generally very good.

A cheat-sheet with the generic trunks from chapter one and all controlling attributes rounds off the the book.

Cheese (Score 7.5)

What does all that mean for character-building and background creation? It does get vastly easier and newbie (or let’s face it, veteran) mistakes of missing one or more semi-crucial skills are greatly reduced. The trunks do act as a sort of archetype, though more in a “this is possible in this style of campaign” as in a direct character type. Gone are specific defaults and especially cross-defaults from other specialties, one of the system’s really unpopular topics. Likewise required specialties are no longer lock-outs unless you want them to be.

Skill Trees – once set up (or copied from chapter 2) – do make the skill system vastly more accessible with the only weird detail being that -5 on every roll, something that probably will come up again and again in play. Might be easier to throw an extra d6 in there and do away with the penalty (to borrow a concept from The Fantasy Trip), though that raises its own share of problems. Floating skills to other attributes makes skill matter, even for less obvious uses like perception-based weapon skills for checking quality. The system of adding modifiers is also more familiar to players of other games.

The only thing that could have been more detailed is how to tailor trunks to a setting. Having said that, a lot of settings probably don’t need that much tailoring. The default list is pretty decent and – unlike with Talents and Wildcard Skills – you can just drop all the skills that are inappropriate due to tech-level or setting background with no considerations other than maybe merging trunks that have got too small.

Sauce (Score 8)

While I am not quite sure what the cover image is trying to tell us, it is at least quite unified and does show off some skills and also trees. Form and function rarely come together that well for GURPS outside of very special titles. There are no fewer than ten new pieces of art inside the book and they are placed in good spots conceptually and help to break up the text. The editing is – as always – top-notch and the writing is very fluent and at time absolutely hilarious – if you like (mostly) plant-based puns that is. Would have gone even higher, but again the placement of that -5 penalty…

Generic Nutritional Substance (Score 9)

Skill bloat is often a problem in GURPS campaigns and Skill Trees solves it quite nicely. Not only that, but it also makes the whole system less opaque for newbies and allows for some degree of comparatively easy customisation. It’s hard to find a scenario where you could not use it, except when teaching standard GURPS. Still, it is a meta-layer that not every GM will want to engage with – even if it is compatible with pretty much all existing material (except for Talents and Wildcard Skills). You could even use it for revamping GURPS standard Magic.

Summary

Certainly not a book for people who break out in hives, whenever rule-modding comes up, but well worth the 2 hours it takes to read and grok. I’d use this setup if I ever wanted to run a pretty generic con game. Should simplify things greatly.

Total score: 8.275  (very good, verging on awesome)
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (45%), Cheese (20%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a meat-oriented book. A “cheesy” setting- or drama-orientied book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 7.1375 (shorter books cost more)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: Pyramid 3/01 – Tools of the Trade – Wizards

Getting an eBook reader means I finally have some more time to read through my extensive (and mostly unread) collection of GURPS PDFs. Since it’s mainly snatches in public transport and before bed, Pyramid proves to be better for this with its semi-short articles. Let’s see how long I can keep it up

Cover of Pyramid 3.01 - Tools of the Trade - Wizards. The Illustration shows a wizard with a staff riding a magic carpet.

Facts

Authors: Matt Riggsby, Sean Punch, Steven Marsh, Andy Vetromile, Stefan Jones, Matthew Pook
Date of Publication: 21/11/2008
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count:  48 (1 title page, 1 content page, 2 pages ads)
Price: $9 (PDF), $ 0.2 per page of content; Score of 8/10 ($500 Pyramid 3 Bundle: $4.10, $ 0.091 per page, Score 10/10)
Preview: https://warehouse23.com/products/pyramid-number-3-slash-01-tools-of-the-trade-wizards

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

The first issue of Pyramid 3 starts off with only two GURPS features (and “‘.’ Is For Full-Stop Drum” only has a two “monster” stat blocks that tie it to GURPS), which is way less than in later issues, where often only the Recommended Reading and Random Thought Table weren’t explicitly for GURPS. Most of the articles have a GURPS-y slant though in that the authors did think of the way magic would impact the world or stories. In my definition that makes it more “cheesy” (fluffy) than “meaty” (crunchy).

Theme-wise it’s solid, even though you could argue that neither a guildhall, nor being mysterious is a physical tool of the trade – but that’s splitting hairs. The only odd one out is the Full-Stop Drum, which still ties into GURPS Alphabet Arcane, which sort of ties it back to the tools motif.

Meat

The main meat article actually deals with flesh – more specifically undead flesh. “Necromantic Tools” by Sean Punch (5 pages) shows aspiring death mages how to graft undead arms to their bodies, how to make skull-tipped wands and a better way to deal with the usual zombie horde as an ally group (incidentally providing a considerable upgrade to the lackluster zombie template from GURPS Magic). The staffs are a little on the boring side, but the rest has a lot of meaty detail.

Apart from that, there are just the monster stats from the “Full-Stop Drum” and a couple of hints scattered through the other articles. The living zombies and the giant badger are nice, with the former being more generally useful.

All in all, nothing bad, some really good stuff, but not a whole lot.

Meat score: 7

Cheese

This is where the issue really shines. Matt Riggsby’s “The Guildhall of the Hermetic Brotherhood” (10 pages) shows what a magical disputation society come regulatory body / research fellowship might look like in a quasi-medieval fantasy setting. Despite the title, the focus is evenly split between the organisation and the building itself with the organisation being quite a bit more interesting. Disregarding the fact that guilds were normally not kingdom-wide organisations, Matt’s take on the whole thing is quite realistic and interestingly written. The guildhall fits the quite mundane nature of the society. Alongside the six pages of text we get four pages of battlemaps with hexes for the guildhall (more about those under sauce). The only thing that’s missing for me are the cellars, but depending on the town that’s not unrealistic either.

Steven Marsh’s “Tooling with Curses” (5 pages) veers into the more immaterial toolbox of wizards and more on the GM’s side too. We get three interesting, non-debilitating and somewhat abusable curses and three boxes and a lead-in on the more general topic of when and why to use curses. A very nice and tight selection, even though I’d have preferred one more curse maybe.

Next we get an (uncredited) instruction of how to fold a “Wizard’s Letter” (5 pages) with steps simple enough for me to follow. The example letter ties things back to the Hermetic Brotherhood again, which is nice. The letter is a neat prop, but nothing extraordinary. I’m a bit mystified as to why they provided the blank back of the letter too, but maybe they thought it was a nice parchment-y colour for printing out. I think there are better options for that, but let’s not quibble about a first issue.

Andy Ventromile’s “Out of the Rough – Magic Gems in RPGs” (6 pages) is a short, but thorough system-neutral treatment of the use of gemstones in fantasy magic. It covers many aspects and, of course, the use of powerstones in GURPS makes this especially interesting to GMs and players in SJG’s house system, but everything is kept generic. Andy gets a little side-tracked in politics in the middle, but it’s still interesting stuff. Just would have liked to see such in a longer treatment. There are only six types of gems (and one of them is pearls) treated individually, so don’t come looking here for correspondences (you can find those in GURPS Thaumatology).

Stefan Jones’ “‘.’ Is For Full-Stop Drum” (3 pages and really awkward to quote something with so many apostrophes / quotation marks in a row) is the odd one out in this issue. It describes a clan-based swamp fisher society that while it uses magic and has some ancient magical history can really only claim a link to theme by way of being part of GURPS Alphabet Arcane. Spoiler: The eponymous drum is very much not a tool for wizards except in the sense of bringing about the apocalypse.

So how does it fare as a description of a society and its past? It’s a decidedly mixed bag. There is some interesting colour, but descriptors such as “savages”, a tradition of contests to gain more women and rigid separate gender roles weren’t en vogue in 2008 and certainly aren’t today. I’d charitably call it a homage to Lovecraftian and leave it at that. What can you do with the whole thing? Not much unless you really want to bring about or prevent an apocalypse, and not a very interesting one at that (but see the meat section).

“Random Thought Table – Seriously Mysterious” (2 pages) by Steven Marsh is thankfully quite a bit fresher and talks about why and how to make wizards look mysterious with a lot of useful tips on how to pull it off in game. Again, this is a generic article, but it’s quite easy to tie it in to GURPS and most systems that have skills. It’s more tricks of the trade actually, but it plays around with some common tropes, showing ways to subvert them. A very fun read.

The humour section was quite mixed again. Murphy’s Rules was fun (at the time) and it was nice seeing Frederick Brackin’s name in print again – a big GURPS fan and supporter, may he rest in peace. “Items Found in a Dead Wizard’s Satchel” made me chuckle, but the “Fnordplay” left me stumped – and I wasn’t the only one (title was fun at least).

For a second article Andy Vetromile gives us “Recommended Reading – Tools of the Trade” (2 pages), which at a first glance is more about wizardly boardgames, but the author does include some nice ways to use board-game materials in your RPGs as well as pointing out some interesting ways of working magic in Deadlands and Unknown Armies. Not an absolute must-read, but a nice little addition.

The second recommended reading “Wizards and Gaming” (2 pages) by Matthew Pook is about a (2008) review of wizardly TTRPGs (and a good helping of how wizards work in D&D, 4th edition). It hasn’t aged too well (e.g. even GURPS had a supplement about a magic school by now), but still has some interesting bits if you like older games.

“Last Words” (1 page) features an interview with Chad Underkoffler, which again gives some helpful characterisation tips – a nice way to close the issue.

All in all, there is some pretty good stuff in there with only five pages falling below average.

Cheese score: 8

Sauce

While the writing is above average to pretty good, the same cannot be said of the art. The cover is nice but was already seen in GURPS Fantasy. The humour page had one decent and new image and a tired old one and there are three more reused third edition illustrations that serve little purpose other than providing visual way-points. What else? There are the folding instructions for the wizard’s letter and while these are not especially inspiring they do serve their purpose better than many online tutorials I’ve seen. Then there’s the map of the Guildhall by Matt Riggsby. I’ve never been a big fan of his maps and this one looks straight out of a Campaign Cartographer 3 tutorial, but it does help with visualising the place. Also it can be used as a battle map. Minus points for not providing battle maps as an image file, though. Virtual tabletops were a thing back then too (and so were printers).

In the end this comes in slightly above average, which is still pretty good for GURPS standards, unfortunately.

Sauce score: 6

Generic Nutritional Substance

As far as roleplaying supplements about magic go, this one is pretty generic. It favours traditional fantasy, but not completely. Several articles can be used in many kinds of settings. It does pretty much require some sort of fantasy, though, being about magic after all.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 7

Summary

I remember not liking this issue much, when I first read it, but that might have been due to the fact that I loved the online Pyramid with its weekly offerings and disliked the map a lot. I might not have read it from cover to cover, because my time for that was rapidly diminishing. Re-reading it now, I’d say it’s a  roughly average issue of Pyramid 3. Certainly not the best entry point in the series, but not bad either and a fine zine in its own right. It’s more generically useful than many of the later issues too – even outside of GURPS.

If you are planning on buying the Pyramid/3 Bundle for $500 you get an even better deal, but maybe grab some issues from the middle of its run first (or read them over a friend’s shoulder) to see whether it’s your cup of tea. Back in the day all of us online subscribers got this even cheaper as part of half-a-year subscription deal, meaning we paid less than $20 for $54 in product. I want to say that I still think this was extremely generous on the part of SJGames.

Total score: 7.3
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (40%), Cheese (25%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a meat-oriented book. A “cheesy” setting- or drama-orientied book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 7.65 (8.65 as Pyramid/3 Bundle)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting – Cold Shard Mountains

Thanks to an unfortunate lull in our real-life roleplaying I actually got to read another GURPS book and now I actually have the time to write up the review since our next session is cancelled due to the Corona Virus. Without further ado I present Matt Riggsby’s latest GURPS offering.

Cover GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting - Cold Shard Mountains

In the tradition of Kromm’s pretty dang  good GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting – Caverntown Riggsby gives us another DF setting: Cold Shard Mountains. Both detail locales with a rich history that can serve as a home base (“Town” in DF-speak), but the similarities pretty much end there.

Facts

Author: Sean Matt Riggsby
Date of Publication: 20/03/20
Format: currently PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 59 (1 cover page, 1 content page, 2 index pages, 1 page ad, 8 map pages)
Price: $10.00 (PDF), $ 0.22 per page of content; Score of 7/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0353_preview.pdf

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

As a Dungeon Fantasy book that is mainly setting, this will be classed as both cheesy and meaty. And indeed there are even more meaty bits than in the Caverntown book. The present volume is structured a little more traditionally starting off with a chapter on geography and some geology (6 pages), then delves into history a lot more expansive than what Kromm does for C-Town (4 pages). After that there’s a gazetteer that goes into considerable detail as to factions, religion, settlements, some NPCs and sites of interest (20 pages), Treasures & Monsters (10 pages) and finally campaigns (5 pages). The rest are mainly differently zoomed and labelled versions of the campaign map.

Meat

There’s relatively little in the way of meat in the first three chapters. Three NPCs are statted out in detail, but they’re not quite so extensive as in Cavertown, though two have been given (relatively banal) gear lists. Do we really need to know a dwarven general carries a blanket and a – yawn – fine dwarven axe? Not that it would have saved much space, but still.

“Treasures & Monsters” on the other hand is mostly – but not all – meat. We get clear stats for a couple of Yangite sacred relics. Yangite is the local flavour you can apply to your campaign religions and the way their relics work is simply a great way of giving a temporary boon to your group without having to forcibly take it away later. They just tend vanish on their own – The-One-Ring-style.

Then there are some other legendary artefacts tied to the region’s history and a couple of cheaper knock-offs as well as some new concoctions and the ever-popular set items you know from MMORPGs – here called additive sets.

A bestiary with 13 entries makes up the rest of this chapter. Most of the entries have complete stat blocks and one is a racial template for a Wise Raptor – if you ever lacked a bird-man for dungeon-crawling (hint: that’s not their strength, but they’re great for wilderness adventures.

The monsters range from mundane Mountain Wolves, over exotics like Ice Scorpions and Hive Lizards to clearly supernatural demons – who have played a big part in the history of the setting. There’s also a box on which monsters from other books are common in the Cold Shard Mountains.

The last chapter also has a couple of meaty bits in it with very basic rules for “living dungeons” and “Hex Crawls”. These are not your usual encounter tables as you know them from Caverntown and other places, since there’s only one entry for all sorts of monster together. The living dungeon bits are useful for making sure the cleared sections of the underground don’t just stay the same forever – especially after being cleared by the delvers. The rules for hex crawls aren’t really what they say they are. There are combined tables for interesting places, people and events one might encounter. They’re not bad for a story-telling purpose, but they are not anywhere near to what people think when they hear the words hex crawl. The accompanying maps are, however, split into hexes.

What’s missing compared to Cavertown? There’s less in the way of NPC stats and much less about economy – though it’s noted which settlements count as Town and some places have special services. There are also no urban dangers and fines or punishments, random encounters or more elaborate random events (the ones on the hex crawl table are mostly one-word descriptions). So, the focus is quite different. It is, however – with  the exception of the Hex Crawl bit – an extremely satisfying mix that meshes extraordinarily well with the cheesier parts of the setting.

Meat score: 9.5

Cheese

The story bits are where it all comes together like a charm. While the intro is a bit weak, the geography chapter takes us right into the middle of a locale perfect for dungeon-delving. This section and the history chapter explain perfectly how the dungeon-friendly features came about and how they interact with underground and surface societies. One can certainly tell that Matt Riggsby has a classical education from how he gives tips on making the tunnels, artefacts and dwellings of the different races (dwarves, coleopterans, demons and humans) that shaped the mountains distinctive from each other.

Also the local flavour of religion is a stroke of genius for a generic setting like this one. The battle between a polytheist strain and one that sees all gods as faces of one god, is at the same time very interesting and very easily adapted to whatever pantheons the GM has in their campaign.

The history is multi-layered with some interesting characters and some more typical fantasy tropes. The author manages to strike just the right balance between too much and too little detail. There’s not too much focus on when exactly and who exactly, but broad strokes that convert well to most campaigns.

The gazetteer makes it all come alive in the present moment. Again the level of detail is pretty much on point, maybe a tiny little more about the bigger towns could have been included, but it’s very hard to argue with the level of interest and zaniness that is already in there. For example the town of Dry Triangle is ultimately ruled by a talking stone, there are ancient alchemical waste-dumps that can be tapped for potentially useful if unstable potions, a mountain range made that is really a dead dragon and an underground “river” whose banks rotate around it.

The campaigns chapter spells out some very solid hooks that have been developed earlier on. With the factions given factions, it’s easy to find employment for different kinds of missions. And even the “Hex Crawl” rules mentioned above are not a complete loss story-wise.

There are interesting titbits everywhere from crops to historical NPCs (who might still be around sleeping) to quirky details on governance or geography. The only thing that’s a bit weird are the naming conventions, which seem a bit all over the place. And is Ardo Yang a joke on kitchen appliances? Didn’t quite get that.

Apart for the zanier elements this feels a lot like Douglas H. Cole’s Powered by DFRPG offerings, except that it is just a little tighter and more concise and easier to use in an unspecific fantasy setting.

It’s hard to convey how exactly ‘right’ this feels when reading. It just is. Basically an old-school approach if old-school had had more people who knew what they were doing instead of slinging random encounter tables.

Cheese score: 9.5

Sauce

Aye, there’s the rub. It’s almost traditional for me to bemoan GURPS products under this heading and this is not much different. Apart from the map bits, there are seven illustrations in the book (and I’m being very generous by counting Demon Hornets). Apart from the hornets they are among the better black-and-white art pieces I’ve seen in GURPS. And then there’s the map…

While I appreciate that Campaign Cartographer has quite a steep learning curve. This is an ugly jumble of the same half-dozen cut-outs repeated ad nauseam and the overview map makes me faintly dizzy just by looking at it. The best you can say of them is that they do manage to give you a rough overview and that you hand-drawn hex crawl maps will look neat in comparison. If you have Hot-Spots: The Silk Road you get the general idea, though the larger scale makes it a good bit uglier.

But while Riggsby might apply to join the club of visually-challenged cartographers, his writing is of a high standard – clean, concise, funny – sometimes to the laughing-out-loud level. I still prefer Kromm at his best, but it’s a close-run fight between the So I’m glad he doesn’t get to review my writing. Editing’s a little choppy in this one with me personally stumbling over four typos & mistakes, but the good two-page index makes up for it. Now if it just weren’t for the map…

Sauce score: 5.5

Generic Nutritional Substance

A setting is by nature not very generic, but Cold Shard Mountains is pretty dang easy to drop into any old corner of a vaguely Tolkienesque fantasy world. Yeah, without Coleopterans and Dwarves it’s a bit hard to make it work, but the former could be unique to the area nowadays while the latter are ubiquitous in fantasy campaigns. The way the Yangite religion has been designed, it’s easy to supplant the few mentioned godheads with whatever a GM has in their main pantheons.

The only things that might be tricky to fit into your own personal world are the two full-scale demon incursion, but then those are a staple for most worlds too. The monsters, gear and even some of the sites can be easily dropped someplace else.

It’s not exactly easy to use it in a non-supernatural setting, but some things could be readjusted for SF. That would necessitate rejiggering most of the stats so. Generic Nutritional Substance is still high for DF.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 7.5

Aftertaste (Summary)

If you want a setting to go adventuring in, then the Cold Shard Mountains are probably a better choice than Caverntown. If you want a unique and weird home base with its own economy and politics to start adventuring from, then it’s probably the other way around. Both are excellent, but Matt Riggsby’s latest offering did strike a special chord with me. It just felt like coming home…

Total score: 8.4
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (32.5%), Cheese (32.5%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a balanced book. A “cheesy” setting- or a meaty rulebook would change the percentages for cheese and meat.

Value score: 7.7
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-Sized Review: Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2 – Powered by GURPS

I am a bit late to the party, since the newest Dungeon Fantasy RPG offering has come out almost almost two months ago. But since that has only been the PDF and the print version is still to be shipped out, I think this still qualifies as hot off the press.

Cover Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2

If you haven’t heard about it yet, Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 2 (Powered by GURPS) was the latest official GURPS kickstarter that ran through March and raised over $50,000 from over 1000 backers. The turnaround on the pdf was just a bit more than two months and now let’s see whether the final (electronic) product delivers.

Facts

Author: Sean M. Punch (a.k.a. Dr. Kromm)
Date of Publication: 04/06/19
Format: currently PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 55 (2 cover pages, 1 title page, 1 content page, 1 index page, 1 page ad)
Price: $15.00 (PDF), $ 0.30 per page of content; Score of 5/10 (+1 for full-colour)
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/dungeon-fantasy-monsters-2

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

The biggest surprise is probably that I class this book as both meaty and cheesy as it contains a lot of story ideas, probably more than any non-adventure Dungeon Fantasy title so far. This is such a big change from the otherwise excellent GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1 (DFM 1) that it bears repeating: You don’t only get 24 new monsters, but also 48 adventure seeds to use them in your games. That’s a huge help, especially for the newbie DFRPG game masters that this is geared towards.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The book is structured really simple. The short introduction tells you what you need to play (the DFRP, especially the Monsters book, but DF 1-2 and DFM 1 along with GURPS Basic work just as well) and a couple of important things about the stat blocks. Then you’re knee-deep in monsters. Each of those gets a two-page spread (unfortunately not aligned for pdf use) with a full-colour illustration, stats and explanations, an atmospheric lead-in (sometimes quite extensive and with lots of historical, social, occult or ecological information) and the mentioned adventure seeds. Extras vary between variants, companion monsters, using the monster as a PC, meta-game hints or looting the body parts. The whole thing is rounded off by a table of contents and an index.

Meat

That’s what folks are coming for when buying a Monster Manual and the book delivers a wide range of foes with detailed stats – although don’t expect character point notations in a monster book. The power level is mid-to-high. There are few pushovers, but most of the challenges don’t require a ST 20 Barbarian or a Magery 5 wizard to overcome – some however do. Quite a few rely on horde tactics, but some can hold their own against a whole party. The mix tends towards the weird of  the spectrum, but doesn’t really discriminate by type: undead, demons, animals, humanoids, constructs and what that-other-game-tm calls outsiders are all there. Angels, giants, nagas, succubi/incubi (guess which gender the illustration depicts) and Trétold (basically ents) are plugging holes in the DFRPG. Most others are strange new additions that will be new for even the most jaded players.

What’s new and extra-useful are the detailed notes at the end of the stat block that explain the weirder abilities or things that are not explained in standard DFRPG and cribbed from regular GURPS. There are quite a few new ideas among these, even if most replicate stuff that standard GURPS has been doing for some time.

Tactics are represented for all monsters, though more detailed for some and less for others. About the only thing that’s missing is some sort of danger scale. In some cases, there are explicit statements on how dangerous the monsters are for weaker or stronger delvers, but most often than that we are left with just an impression through the descriptions. Par for the course in GURPS and I am not sure other systems really do better with their difficulties and challenge ratings, but a simple five-skull system wouldn’t have been a bad idea.

Apart from that, the meat is pretty much perfect.

Meat score: 9.5

Cheese

As I said, there’s a surprising amount of story-relevant stuff in there. Instead of a single descriptive paragraph like in DFRPG: Monsters or DFM 1, we get at least four longish paragraphs and occasionally much more. The less complicated the monsters are and the less space the boxes with variants, loot, minions etc. take up, the more lore we get. This flexibility makes each entry unique and ensure we don’t have to read the same boring headings for each monster.

The backstories of the mosters are fun to read and at times extremely imaginative. Most of the situations the monsters will be encountered in are combat-oriented, but every other monster seems to have a purpose – or at least a way to pull dirty tricks – that means it is not purely sword-fodder.

The ecological, historical and otherwise relevant details make the monsters come truly alive and give them a place in the – deliberately generic – game world. We still get a sense of which factions are going to care about which monsters and why, but of course the details are malleable enough to be dropped into your own campaign.

There are no harsh incompatibilities between the monsters, but there is also no real unifying theme, even though the monsters presented tend towards the weird and horrifying from Tomb Bugs who entomb you to breed there young, over the crazed Ramex who reach inside you thinking they can regain their humanoid bodies that way, to undead Bleeders who collect the spray of your blood from the smallest wounds and Redthorn plants who are looking to turn you into fertiliser. This collection is certainly not PG-rated.

The book doesn’t lend itself to just rifling through it and plomping down a monster without reading through its entry thoroughly. For that the older DF titles are better. Most of the monsters here, especially the stronger ones are its own mini-story. While this is not so great for beer-and-pretzels games, it does make for a much better story.

Speaking of story, some of the adventure seeds are more like encounter seeds, while some might form the basis for a multi-session adventure. What especially caught my fancy is that often they don’t treat the monster in question in a vacuum, but also examine who might want to make it the delvers’ business to get rid (or capture or butcher or transport) the monster. While they are not always original, they all offer some hooks to place the monsters in a dungeon or a quest.

There is a certain Dungeons-and-Dragonesque zaniness inherent in some of the monsters like the Fly-Dragon or the Redthorn. The book is certainly surprising to the reader and the encounters with its inhabitants will likely be unexpected by your players too.

All in all, the fluffy cheese side gets served very well indeed. One might miss a larger framework tying some of the monsters together, but then this is a monster manual and not an adventure or campaign builder. The fact that the collection of monster illustrations was probably licensed together and half of the monsters written just to fit the artwork might have something to do with that too.

Cheese score: 8.5

Sauce

The biggest departure from regular GURPS books (and also DFRPG: Monsters and the DFM  series) is the full-colour artwork. And the monsters are almost all from the same artist too: Rick Hershey. While he is never going to be my absolute favourite, the monsters are mostly appropriately alien and scary looking and the unity of art gives the book a nice and coherent look. The more alien monsters generally look better than the old fantasy standbys like Angels, Succubi, Nagas and Chimeras.

You can get a good overview on the cover and the preview shows one of the, in my opinion, less stellar examples, the Chimera. The only really atrocious image is the Manaplasm. Yes, I get it’s a slime, but I can see the border pixels even at page-view size! Likewise, the text alignment following the artwork is sometimes a bit weird and out of whack. I wouldn’t have minded smaller images in some cases to get a better text flow. You can see a less annoying example of that on the preview of the Strix. Generally, I wouldn’t mind getting the art separate in the PDF version to do quick printouts for the players. The text alignment makes it a bit easier to copy and paste, but the readability suffers.

That cannot be said about the writing as such, though. Dr. Kromm was in super-charged mode when he was writing this. Not only is it an extremely enjoyable read, the information is presented in easily accessible format, there are also puns galore. True, I didn’t laugh out loud, but I did chuckle quite a few times. The adventure seed titles are a motherlode of jokes that will surely find their way to many tables.

Editing and indexing are top-notch as usual, though there isn’t that much to index anyway. The PDF is fully bookmarked and the table of contents is hyperlinked.

The following section was updated  with new information 06/08/19 (thanks to T-Bone of Games Diner fame for pushing me to find a solution instead of whining):

A tiny defect is, however, that the two-page monster spreads are misaligned if you go for a two-page view in the PDF in many readers, because the backcover is included before the title page. You can easily rectify this with a PDF editor – or by changing settings on your reader (for my Adobe Reader it was done by menu>View>Page Display>Show Cover Page in Two-Page View). I still don’t get why the back cover has to go before the title page, but this way it’s no big deal any more.

This is probably the most unified GURPS supplement in a whole while and it does set a high standard for all that follows. Let’s hope the same will be said of Magic Items 2.

Sauce score: 7,5

Generic Nutritional Substance

As a Dungeon Fantasy supplement, there is usually not a high bar to clear in terms of generic usefulness. Yes, all these monsters can be used in standard Tolkienesque fantasies. Some of them will probably look out of place in Narnia and some will be a bit too weird for some tastes. But a surprising number of them will also fit right into some modern-day horror, dark urban fantasy or even dark faerie tales.

It’s not an extremely generic supplement, but certainly caters to more than just hack & slash fans.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 7,5

Summary

A more than solid effort that leaves very little to be desired, except maybe being four times as long and a nice hardcover with stitched binding. If Steve Jackson Games is going to run two kickstarters like this every year and maybe finds a way to the page count up to a hundred, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a GURPS revival in the future.

This book is pretty much a must-have for Dungeon Fantasy aficionados and a very good investment for anybody who likes their fantasy monsters a bit weirder than usual. Have a look at the preview yourself if you are unsure. You get two complete monsters for free that way. Even if you decide not to buy that’s pretty much worth taking the time to have a look.

Price is still high, which comes with the limited page-count, but without considering that we have a new high-score, edging out some recent very high-quality stuff like The Hall of Judgment by a not too tiny margin. The Hall gets its own back in the value score, though.

All in all, think twice before you’re passing on this tasty morsel!

Total score: 8.475
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (32.5%), Cheese (32.5%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a balanced book. A “cheesy” setting- or a meaty rulebook would change the percentages for cheese and meat.

Value score: 6.7375
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-Sized Review: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 3 – Artifacts of Felltower

And it’s time for another bite-sized review for one of the new five-bucks GURPS morsels. The title is a bit of a mouthful and could have easily been shortened to DFT 3 – More Artifacts.

Cover of Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 3 - Artifacts of Felltower

Facts

Author: Peter V. Dell’Orto
Date of Publication: 20/06/2019
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 17 (1 title page, 1 content page, 1/2 index page, 1/2 page ad)
Price: $7.99 (PDF), $ 0.22 per page of content; Score of 5/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0351_preview.pdf

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

Instead of adding more detail to all sorts of treasures like the first volume or going for the extremely epic like the second one, this third volume in is just a list of unique or near unique artifacts that is most akin to GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 6 – 40 Artifacts, which is explicitly referenced as necessary for play. That is a bit of an overstatement though, as is needing GURPS Magic for the spell descriptions. Yes, there’s no handy guide to reading the entries as in DF 6, but most of it is self-explanatory enough. And the only two spells you need to know are Accuracy and Puissance, which are also present in GURPS Basic – hint: together they make a +1 weapon like in That Other Game ™.

It’s a bit of a shame that this information wasn’t included to make the book even more accessible to DFRPG players. The origins can be easily gleaned from DFRPG Exploits p. 77. Not that DFRPG 6 is a bad book to have for DFRPG players.

The book is split in three chapters, aptly titled Weapons (6 pages), Armor (2 pages) and Other Treasures (5 pages).

Meat

Like in DF 6 every item has an origin, a FP value as a power item, a description, a list of properties with game-relevant stats and often a number of possible variations listed. There are 31 items on the whole (just missing the mark for calling this For Another 40 Artifacts More), running the whole gamut from the powerful, but simple like axe  Shieldslayer to the intriguing like the Potion Ring to the plain weird like the Gorilla Gloves.

The items are diverse enough that you don’t get bored after the sixth weapon, but the variety can’t quite reach the sheer numbers of the old GURPS Magic Items series (which incidentally can found for just $7.99 on Warehouse 23). However, these are tried and true DF items and fully Fourth-Editon-compatible without any conversion wonkiness attached.

Also there are some specials that are generically useful. A box on Magical Set Items takes you back to your favourite MMORPG (even though there is only one set in this book), Bad Influences is more something for the old-school players that miss weapons with a corrupting influence. Expired potions also hearkens back to classic That Other Game ™ days. The book also includes a few gems like Hero’s Brew, Mana Gout and dehydrated elixirs that plug holes in the Dungeon Fantasy catalogue and add extra options for more traditional items.

All in all, this might not be the most focused treasure book yet, but it certainly delivers more than a couple of useful tools and rewards for the enterprising DF game-master.

Meat score: 8

Cheese

Yeah, it’s Dungeon Fantasy, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be anything setting-related. Indeed the book starts out with two paragraphs on Dell’Orto’s Felltower mega-dungeon that make one hope it’ll see the light of day in some form or other. More relevant are the back-stories of the items in question that are on the whole longer and more detailed than in 40 Artifacts without quite reaching the level of the Magic Item series. Most of the cheese fluff in this comes from Felltower itself, but there are also plenty of ancient items mostly unrelated to the mega-dungeon.

There are also hints on what to do with the items and how to use them as plot hooks or integrate them into the campaign. Especially the section on set items is useful for campaign building. More stuff than you’d expect from Dungeon Fantasy.

Cheese score: 7

Sauce

The good news is that this volume actually has unique art pieces, the bad is that there are only two of them (the third being generic rings) and one of them shows a sabre, when it’s supposed to be a short sword). Well, it’s baby steps for GURPS 4th Edition. The editing was generally good, except for annoying typo on the first page (‘treasure hordes [sic]’). Dell’Orto’s style is generally more no-nonsense than Kromm’s, but it is very readable and there are still a couple of tongue-in-cheek jokes in there.

All-in-all par of the course for GURPS – a bit sad compared to most other RPGs, but not unexpected.

Sauce score: 5.5

Generic Nutritional Substance

Most of the gear inside the book is meant for generic-fantasy if not necessarily Dungeon Fantasy. That still covers a wide enough base and some of the pieces can be repurposed for modern urban fantasy or horror games. Some seem a little out of place for polytheistic Dungeon Fantasy (like the Bishop’s Cross), but in these cases there are always variants to make them fit.

As artifacts without a price tag, the items are more generic than the lower-priced off-the-shelf items in other DF publications.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 6.5

Summary

Artifacts of Felltower is a solid book for GM’s looking for a 4th-Edition-compliant collection of special magic items. It can be used with minimal adjustments for any GURPS Dungeon Fantasy or Dungeon Fantasy RPG campaign and also the more epic fantasy campaigns. As MacGuffins or special prizes the gear also fits a variety of other campaigns. For the price of a fancy cup of coffee you get some good stuff. However, the shortness of the offering means you pay more than usual per page, hence the low Value Score (below).

Total score: 7.125
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (40%), Cheese (15%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a meat-oriented book. A “cheesy” setting- or drama-orientied book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 5,0625
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

After-Taste

One thing I am starting to get a bit annoyed at is the the weird naming of products and the haphazard placement in established series. Artifacts of Felltower is a nice enough name on its own, but with DF 6, DF 8 and the Treasure series, not to mention the relevant DFRPG books, it’s getting hard to keep all your treasure supplements straight. By now I would have appreciated a re-naming á la Backdrops: Tower of Octavius to Locations: Tower of Octavius.

Now that’s a bit harder to pull off with such a large series, but modelling the title a bit more on 40 Artifacts would have been nice. As it is, new players might look towards the Treasure series first, when they would be better advised to get the older volumes first.

Also, I was really hoping for more art, but for that we have to look at Gaming Ballistic, I guess.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 20 – Slayers

At long last, there’s a new Dungeon Fantasy supplement and this time it’s a main line item. We haven’t had any of those since… apparently September 2016 when Christopher R. Rice produced No. 19 – the excellent Incantation Magic volume. The current offering is a little smaller, but it’s also a Splatbook and it’s by the master himself: Let’s have a look at DF 20: Slayers!

Cover of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 20 - Slayers

Facts

Author: Sean M. Punch (a.k.a. Dr. Kromm)
Date of Publication: 18/04/2019
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 24 (1 title page, 1 content page, 1 index pages, 1 page ad)
Price: $6.00 (PDF), $ 0.27 per page of content; Score of 4/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0350_preview.pdf

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

DF – Slayers is a close cousin to the previous splatbooks Sage, Summoners and Ninja, though it is more focused than the others. The lion’s share of the books 20 content pages is taken up by three new professions, one 5-page chapter for each the Demon-Slayer, the Mage-Slayer and the Undead-Slayer. A one-page intro and four pages on gear and assorted loot items rounds off the mix.

Meat

New abilities, perks, pseudo-magical skills and the templates themselves take centre stage in the as far as the crunchy meat is concerned. The templates are just what you’d expect from DF and though the abilities show some doubling (each slayer has a Detect and a Gizmo version) the abilities are different enough to give each of them a slightly different feel.

The slayers all share the lack of power modifiers and a special set of non-magical skills that duplicate appropriate spells and cost FPs as well. Especially interesting, even outside of DF and heroic fantasy are the many variations of Blessed and the appropriate perks, some of which have already appeared in other sources. Many of these could be ported whole-sale to a Buffy-esque Monster Hunters campaign as could the templates themselves. Each template comes with the usual customisation options, though lenses to add slayer-cross-training for other professions are not available. Slayers are born, not made.

For those of you who have access to Pyramid 109: Thaumatology V, the presented write-ups are very similar to the Mage-Hunter presented there (also by Kromm) – although there is no sample character. The Undead-Hunter from Pyramid 122: All Good Things is quite a different beast with a decidedly clerical bent and far less in the power-up department.

The equipment section is partly lists of useful gear, partly genuinely new stuff like Holy Weapons (not enchanted so Secret-Order-of-the-Mage-Slayers-approved), Heroic Power Items to give Slayers extra FP to use on Heroic Feats or their “spell” skills, blunt arrows and stake spears, couple of new (holy hand) grenade potions.

There are also rules for making up your own slayer variants, for varying monster flaws, having slayers research them and a box on Demon Talismans that is an interesting way to have demons that can be permanently destroyed – or safely spirited away before they’re defeated. All in all, there are a lot of useful titbits in there along with all the basics.

Meat score: 9

Cheese

Dungeon Fantasy is traditionally shy on flavour and setting, but slayers are not a generic profession. They come with some background already attached. The customisations and the choice of advantages can make a lot of difference in character. There are hints on how to make slayers useful in the campaign, behind-the-hood infos on why the the templates are built as they are. The last section – Secret Weapons – has ideas on how to mix things up and maybe take Dungeon Fantasy a bit more into a Buffy-esque direction with an obligatory research session before the dungeon. Demonic Talismans provide probably the most detailed description of how demons are summoned in DF.

The fact that slayers are explicitly self-powered, Buffy-style without blessings from supernatural entities does make quite a difference too. They’re in the same category as Barbarian, Knight and Swashbuckler and yet they are quite capable when dealing with their chosen supernatural foe. This will greatly appeal to a certain kind of player – and since a lot of us have grown up with Buffy, it won’t be such a small part of the player pool.

On the whole, there’s quite a bit of story built in this, at least for Dungeon Fantasy.

Cheese score: 6.5

Sauce

Dr. Kromm’s writing is precise and eminently readable. There are some tongue-in-cheek asides as usual, but the style is mostly concerned with clarity. As usual I had no complaints with the editing.

In GURPS the art is usually a problem, especially in short books. This one has a cover that actually looks kind of decent and the interior illustrations (that re-use the cover art) are mostly fitting too (yes, even Dan Smith has a good and fitting picture).  They are still black-and-white and aren’t quite the high quality we’ve seen in the DFRPG or DF Monsters 1.

Sauce score: 6

Generic Nutritional Substance

There are limits as to where Dungeon Fantasy templates can be applied, but as mentioned the templates can be used for a lower-powered Monster Hunters campaign or as a basis for a regular one. The abilities – especially the Blessed variants – can be useful in a variety of campaigns. So some overarching usefulness is certainly there.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 6

Digesting Everything

Slayers is definitely a useful little volume that’ll scratch the itch of many a player and game master alike. If you don’t feel strongly about concept of self-powered (or universally-powered) slayers it isn’t a must-buy, but GMs should note that it is certainly possible to set the party against a Mage-Slayer (or more if players are making full use of Dungeon Fantasy 9 – Summoners). In short, a good, if somewhat specialised book.

Total score: 7.325 (still very good)
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (50%), Cheese (15%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a meat-oriented book. A “cheesy” setting- or drama-orientied book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 5.6625 (short books are more expensive)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review Hall of Judgment – Powered by DFRPG

last updated 07/10/2018: forgot to say something about the sample characters

It’s been a while since the release of the first licensed DFRPG product and I know this review is late to the crowd, but I just couldn’t pass up the chance to give you a look at this. Full disclosure: I backed this on Kickstarter at the “A Thegn of Your Own!” level – which is why you have the Blind Mapmaker in there as a sample character. So, yes, I might be a little biased.

 

Cover of Hall of Judgment

 

Facts

Author: Douglas H. Cole
Date of Publication: 09/08/2018
Format: PDF and full-colour softcover (available on W32 and Gaming Ballistic)
Page Count: 120 (1 title page, 2 content pages, 1 backer list , 1 index pages)
Price:
$12.50 (PDF), $0.11 per page of content; Score of 10/10 (best score yet!)
$24.99 (Softcover), $0.22 per page of content; Score of 8/10 (adjusted by +1 for full-colour softcover)
$30.00 (PDF & Softcover Bundle, only at Gaming Ballistic), $0.26 per doubled page of content; Score of 7/10 (adjusted by +2)
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/GBL0005P_preview.pdf (17 pages, go check it out!)

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page. This being a Dungeon Fantasy adventure, the meat and the cheese will be equally important.

The book is divided into three broad sections comprising of setting, adventure and rules stuff. Before the adventure proper we have a one-page glossary with (sometimes very tongue-in-cheek) definitions and a one-page foreword by Sean M. Punch (Dr. Kromm) that lets us hope for more licensed products. The two-page introduction by Doug H. Cole is itself already giving setting and adventure information, but 17 pages of setting information make the Norðland and the town on Isfjall come alive. Then it’s right into the adventure with 1 page still in town and the other 44 on the trail and in the Hall itself. This is followed by 4 pages on dungeon grappling (simplified Technical Grappling for DF), a 35-page bestiary and 22 pages covering 16 sample characters. The rest is index.

Spoilers start here!  Scroll to the bottom if you want to play the adventure as a player!

Meat

Appropriate for a Viking-flavoured book, there’s lot of meat here. The town section is not quite as detailed as in DF Setting – Caverntown, but more than enough to send your players on a shopping trip and make them not fall afoul of local customs. Especially useful is the pack animal table.

The journey section has encounter matrices that include include especially prominent weather and extremely detailed tables for temperature and precipitation that are useful in a number of northern environments. Would be neat to see this expanded into a comprehensive global weather table (pity it’s only in Fahrenheit, but even so it’s easy to use). The encounters are generally handled in one paragraph and use the monsters in the bestiary, when it comes to combat. The players are guided by an overland map.

The first big encounter site are the ruins of the temple complex and village at Logiheiml. In this locale overrun by undead each site is divided into a description of the obvious, the present challenge, concealed contents and alternatives/reward (if any). Again all the creatures are in the bestiary. Rewards are given with all the necessary stats. There are maps of the village and the funerary temple complex, including a cutaway of the fortification. Battle maps are not provided though. Make sure to mention the ruins beforehand, because they can be easily missed depending on which path the players choose.

Once the characters get to the valley of the Lost Hall itself, there’s another overview map supported by many encounter level maps. The general layout of each site is the same, but they are sometimes very detailed with many, often magical options explored in detail (e.g. the rope bridge, climb/sacrifice gate). Enemies in the valley are mostly fae of various kinds, but getting lost on the way to the hall is not very easy if the GM hands out the player map of the area (included in the PDF version). The entrance to the Dómstóllin (the Hall itself) is clearly visible there, so this might not be the best idea since it makes this section very linear, even more so than the rest of the adventure.

The Hall itself is also represented by battle maps, but again it is a very simple matter and was a little disappointing after all the build-up. So, unless you’re pressed for time I would make sure to let your players explore the valley extensively. The demon boss for the adventure is something of a rarity in GURPS as it is a singular creature, albeit one with an extra attack, extreme Regeneration, multiple free abilities and powerful grappling. Also this Krabbari (love the name!) sits in a no-mana zone (fortunately one that allows magic weapons to function). If your PCs are weak grapplers and rely on spells for everything, they’ll be in for a fight. You should make sure your group is ready for this encounter.

Almost more challenging than the boss fight are the two bonus areas in the form of Norðalf warrens that teem with enemies. Only overview maps are given for these two elaborate sites and the combination of many enemies and little time to rest and (possibly) no escape route can make these quite deadly.

After the adventure comes what is no doubt even more interesting to many players: a detailed Norse bestiary. There are lots of fae and animals (though why we’d need both mountain goats and mountain sheep is beyond me), some undead and human adversaries and a few others (the crushing worm and the awakened trees are especially nice). Each entry has at least one illustration. The stats come complete with control thresholds for Dungeon Grappling and are all that you need. Point totals are not given, though that might have been nice for the companion-able animals at least.

The sixteen sample characters are a varied lot, but as most of them were made by backers they are not all made for the adventure. The druid is the only one with Survival (Mountain) for example. Still, all the templates from the DFRPG are present. Although this is probably the only character gallery this size that has a two non-human wizards lacking an eye. Well, that’s an accepted symbol of wisdom, at least.

All in all, there’s lots to like and not much to miss here.

Meat score: 9

Cheese

As mentioned before the adventure is quite linear and GMs whose groups are less beer and pretzel might need to expend a little effort to make it palatable. Most of that can come in at the beginning. Maybe Logiheiml has to be located for a vital clue first and the whole twistakn (token of Tyr) thing might be explored some more. It’s a bit of a pity that the backstory that was in the OGL version has been left out. Even if the players won’t ever hear all of it, it certainly helps the GM to get into the right mindset.

What’s great is the large section about Isfjall. There’s more than enough material to make Isfjall the home base for a larger campaign. The overview map also helps with that. Not only do we get a general sense of the town, there are also some rivalries set up and long list of festivals that will help players to get into the mood for more Norðland adventures. I’m in two minds about cutting out the name Tyr and all that implies. Sure it makes things more generic, but it’s always easy to cut something as the GM and the tips in the OGL version were more than enough to make this a bit more accessible.

The encounters at Logiheiml are in a way the high-point of the adventure since the ruins show the players what could happen all over the Norðland and the whole area breathes atmosphere down to the last commuting undead.

The random encounters are all well thought out too, but take a little preparation to pull off. Some are a bit deadly, but it helps to have players who do not simply attack everything and everyone. It might be useful to predetermine some of the most atmospheric bits like (the starving Jarl’s ghost, circling ravens, drinking companion of Thor etc.)

Exploring the valley can be lots of fun, but except for the bridge and a couple of ambushes there’s not much that absolutely has to be done there. A bit more preparatory questing would have been nice, but it’s not exactly hard to include with a little prep work.

The fact that the real reward here is the knowledge recorded in the hall is nice, but it’s spoiled by the Lady of the Harvest appearing and handing out magic weapons and golden hairs that turn into artefacts. If you want to end this in a monty haul, at least make it Tyr appearing himself and use his golden beard hairs or something!

All in all,  a very good effort that fits in well with Dungeon Fantasy expectations

Cheese score: 8

Sauce

Art is where the book really shines. Most of the illustrations are at least on the level of the better DFRPG boxed set ones. Don’t judge the book by its cover art! That is, unfortunately, one of the weaker pieces. Additionally, there are two gorgeous overview maps, three very nice site maps and seven more workman-like, Campaign Cartographer style battle maps. The Kickstarter had all these available as high-resolution graphics files for use with virtual tabletop software and I assume they are included in the PDF version too.

The editing is pretty good without any glaring mistakes. The writing style is mostly okay, but the jokes are a bit blunt and not as subtle and hard-hitting as in the best of Kromm (a high bar, but that is what characterises DF for me). Still, it fits in with the beer and pretzel theme.

Layout is somewhere between regular GURPS and DFRPG. The bestiary stat blocks are nice and easy to read with colour helping a lot. Bold print indicates traits and capitalisation indicates book sections. The font size is generally a bit larger than regular GURPS (more akin to Pathfinder, especially with the columns), but goes down to something smaller than usual in the bestiary and sample characters section. That’s also where the nice layout breaks down in parts with stat blocks going up to the decorative frame and boxes spilling over it, but than stems from the author’s understandable desire to cram as much information in as possible.

Sauce score: 8.5

Generic Nutritional Substance

As an adventure based in a specific culture there’s only so far Hall of Judgment can go in terms of genericity. The Norðland is generic enough to be dropped in most DF settings, but some aspects like the powerful, evil fae might not fit in well with a specific world. Also not every Vikingesque culture might have a strongly law-aspected god. Thinking of my own campaign it wouldn’t be an easy fit, especially as there’s already a Norse culture. But well, it’s an adventure/setting and they’re not meant to be completely generic anyway.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 5.5

Summary (No Spoilers!)

Douglas H. Cole delivers an outstanding product that is proud addition to the Dungeon Fantasy line and makes one hope for more from this licensee. The adventure is pretty linear, but atmospheric and puts the characters against foes supernatural and natural without neglecting the realities of mountain travel.

It is a satisfying read and a good way to introduce new players and GMs to GURPS without having them lament the quality or the lack of the illustrations. Thanks to both the author and SJGames for making this possible!

Total score: 8.05 (third place of all time)
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (32.5%), Cheese (32.5%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a balanced meaty-cheesy book.

Value score: 9.025 (PDF, best value ever!), 8.025 (softcover), 7.525 (bundle); getting the bundle is advised if you want to run the game online and offline!
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS and DFRPG are registered trademarks of Steve Jackson Games. The art here is copyrighted by Gaming Ballistic. All rights are reserved by SJ Games and/or Gaming Ballistic. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 2 – Tomb of the Dragon King

last changed 2018/08/28: Correctly attributed DFM3 to Peter Dell’Orto

Interestingly 2018 seems to be a better year for Dungeon Fantasy adventures than 2017. Not saying the ones released with the Dungeon Fantasy RPG were bad, but Matt Riggsby’s new offering Tomb of the Dragon King and Douglas Cole’s Hall of Judgment, which I hope to review soon, are on a different level content-wise.

Cover of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 2: Tomb of the Dragon King

Facts

Author: Matt Riggsby
Date of Publication: 16/08/2018
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 37 (1 title page, 1 content page, 1 index page, 1 page ad)
Price: $8.00 (PDF), $0.24 per page of content; Score of 5/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0345_preview.pdf

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page. This being a Dungeon Fantasy adventure, the meat and the cheese will be equally important.

Before I start, let me confess that though I own Mr. Riggsby’s first DF adventure: Mirror of the Fire Demon, I haven’t read it yet. I still entertain notions that one day one of my players will step up and lead me through a GURPS adventure provided they don’t have to do any conversion work. So, please bear with me if I comment on stuff that’s well-known from that no doubt excellent product.

So, what do we need to go raiding the tomb of the Dragon King? As always you can look at the recommended reading in the preview – in short, you need everything monster-related that has been published in the DF line and a lot of other stuff is useful. Nothing is said about the DFRPG, but the only thing that is really needed is apart from the boxed set is Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3: Born of Myth & Magic (by the lovely and talented Peter Dell’Orto). There are some undead Dinomen too, but you don’t need Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1 for the Undead lense alone.

Indeed, the generous three-page introduction does give the GM hints how to adapt the adventure to groups with modern weapons teleportation, mind-reading abilities etc. In short, the adventure is quite adaptable as long as you own some DF books for further reading.

Spoilers start here!  Scroll to the bottom if you want to play the adventure as a player!

 

 

After the intro the book is divided into four chapters on town (3 pages), the dragon king’s court (11 pages), the dragon queen’s court (8 pages) and conflicts (also 8 pages). Town actually has a name in this adventure and it’s Broken Fang Point, a small trading town in the forested foothills of a mountain chain. The basics are there, but don’t expect 5% of the content of Caverntown. The two courts contain the layout of the respecting locales and the basis of the storyline, while the last chapter gives stats, character traits and background info on the antagonists. A slightly too elaborate index rounds things off.

Meat

The most important meaty bit in this volume is the concept of N (introduced in the previous volume as far as I know). N is the number of combat-capable characters of 250 points or less and the number of opponents is adjusted according to this number. N is also increased for higher point averages. As far as metrics for judging encounters go, this is a both a bit more flexible and a bit less granular than The-Other-Game(tm). It is, however, more than good enough given GURPS’ generic nature (heck, there are tips on how to play this module with high-TL heroes – let’s see the D&D clones deal with that).

Tables for wandering monsters and treasure are included in the two court sections. There are detailed rules for attracting attention and patrols and looking for treasure. The two courts pose very different challenges with the dragon cultists in the king’s court for the most part representing an organised, lived-in dungeon and the queen’s court containing “squatter” monsters that guard secrets still unearthed.

The monsters are varied and present interesting challenges that almost always offer a pay-off if the characters manage neutralise their opposition. The dragon-blooded magicians and priests come only with one set of spells each, a bit more variety wouldn’t have hurt, especially since they lack damage-dealing spells. The dragons themselves are made with a simple toolkit for choosing size/age, breath weapon and spells. The king and the queen get a special treatment and are unique characters, which are essentially unbeatable without expending a lot of resources. Defeating either one of them is a major undertaking, though I would have preferred a couple more varied spells for the king.

In the whole there are four types of cultists, three sizes of dragons (except for the spells and the hatchling size they are very similar to the ones from DFRPG), three lurking monsters and the two royals. A good selection that can be reused for other lizardfolk-centric adventures.

All in all, a really solid effort that does its best to help the GM to tailor the adventure to their specific group of adventurers.

Meat score: 8.5

Cheese

Each part of the tomb is described in the likely sequence the characters are going to encounter their adversaries and each is accompagnied by detailed hex maps of the locales.

For each of the chapters there are hooks and holes. While hooks are an old-standby to get characters into the action, holes are exactly the opposite: ways the characters can miss the adventure or vital parts of it. Here the GM is gently reminded of how things can go wrong and how to avoid or remedy this.

While the adventure is a classic, old-school dungeon crawl, it is not a stupid one. Indeed the PCs can interrogate the cultists and use their wits to free the dragon queen to decimate the opposition surrounding the MacGuffin and save themselves a world of hurt. On the whole, the adventure represents a very believable dungeon crawl, with patrols acting intelligently and challenging players who live by the “kill everything” doctrine.

And that’s the one of two caveats I have about this. You shouldn’t play it with groups that are used to kill without stopping to think. It is easy to be overwhelmed if the group insists on fighting without any recourse to stealth and there are at least three encounters where retreat is the most sensible option.

The other caveat is that this is an old-school dungeon crawl. While that shouldn’t be a problem for the typical DF group, the adventure is not really restricted to Dungeon Fantasy. For other modes of play it might be too combat focused. A GM could emphasize the tensions within the cult that are outlined in the third chapter, but as it is, this is no intrigue or puzzle adventure.

In short, a good dungeon-crawling adventure with epic adversaries and a couple of twists, but not a whole lot of interaction or a very involved story.

Cheese score: 7

Sauce

Compared to the general GURPS fare, the extras are pretty good. The style is workman-like with few frills and whistles, but you don’t generally want that for a crawl. The dragon pictures are mostly old retreads, but they aren’t bad. The maps are neat and have a real old-school vibe to them, but it would have been nice to have extra copies as image files – though the pdf resolution is generally good enough to print at a useful scale. The only thing that’s missing from the maps is a couple of debris piles or other cover.

Sauce score: 6.5

Generic Nutritional Substance

It’s a fantasy dungeon crawl, but Mr. Riggsby does his best to give the GM everything they need to customise the hell out of it. Want to set it somewhere else? Want high-tech weapons? Want special adversaries? Don’t like dragons? He’s got you covered. Doesn’t mean you’ll play this in every sort of setting, but it still covers a lot of fantasy.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 6.5

Summary (no spoilers)

Matt Riggsby has delivered another fine supplement for the dungeon-delving crowd. Mileage may vary for less combat-oriented folks, but it certainly does what it says on the package. The old-school maps are a nice touch, but would be even better in png format.

All in all, a worthy addition to the Dungeon Fantasy line, hampered only by the relatively high per-page price – as usual for shorter GURPS offerings. Also be advised that due to the maps, there is considerably less text than usual.

Total score: 7.3125
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (32.5%), Cheese (32.5%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a balanced book.

Value score: 6.15625
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells

It’s been only a six weeks since the last GURPS offering from Sean Punch and while I would still like to see a more tightly packed release schedule, I am more than content to wait if everything we get is the same quality as GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting – Caverntown and GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells, both of which plug some big holes in heroic fantasy line-up of GURPS.

GURPS Magic - Artillery Spells

Facts

Author: Sean Punch (a.k.a. Dr. Kromm)
Date of Publication: 17/05/2018
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 31 (1 title page, 1 content page, 1 index page, 1 page ad)
Price: $8.00 (PDF), $ 0.30 per page of content; Score of 4/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/media/SJG37-0154_preview.pdf

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

 

The GURPS Magic – XYZ Spells series are mini-grimoires. They always contain a large list of spells (50 in this case) and an introduction that helps the reader to put them into perspective. Unlike Plant Spells (a favourite of mine since I helped playtest it), Artillery Spells  doesn’t focus on a single college, but on a type of spell – namely those that allow a mage to damage and kill multiple low- to mid-threat foes. It is the counterpart to Death Spells which have a good chance of killing one worthy opponent in one fell swoop.

The spells cover most of the colleges with only Food and Knowledge being left-out, which is probably a good thing. Every college having a death spell was a bit weird already and I don’t think we needed more of that. GMs do get a lot of information about building their own artillery spells, so readers don’t need to worry that they’ll never see their favourite food fight spells.

The chapter on spell-building is five pages long and discusses both the types of spells that can be used as artillery and how to balance their stats. It’s deliberately not

The spells themselves form the majority of the volume (21 pages) and are unevenly distributed over the colleges with the elemental colleges usually getting more and the ones less commonly associated with damage-dealing less. A couple of helpful boxes on larger topics are distributed throughout this chapter.

Meat

There’s a lot of meaty rules goodness in this book, beginning with dramatically expanded ways for dealing damage to multiple opponents. Cones, emanations, bombardment, ricocheting shots, swarms, contagious damage, portals, damage that moves the targets around – it’s all in there. Indeed, the book goes a long way towards making damage-dealing spells less generic. There are some common themes like cones and repeating area damage, but many spells have unique and mostly entertaining mechanics.

The spells range from merely efficient, workmanlike spells like Improved Explosive Fireballs and Cloud of Doom to fast but unpredictable damage-dealers like Twisting Terror and Mana Storm to atmospheric spells like Vengeful Staff (think Gandalf on the bridge of Khazad-dûm), Doom Wish and Spirit Incursion.

There are mass mind-control spells that induce everybody to stab each other, psychic screams, magically-animated weapons that attack everybody in an area, huge fists that pummel targets from the sky, sun-light lasers, mine-fields, the whole shebang. A couple of spells are slightly edited versions of older spells that had been introduced after GURPS Magic, but most are completely new. As there are far more ways to deal damage over an area,  the spells feel much more unique than the ones in Death Spells. The spread also feels appropriate and there are a no obvious gaps.

A few of the spells are a little complicated (Collision, Sun’s Arc, Ironweed), but most of them are not much more complicated than what we’re used from former publications. Magery requirements are handled flexibly as is availability. The spells are almost all very hard (except for Self-Destruct) and Legality Class 1 or 0.

Especially interesting are the spell-building guidelines (the good doctor deliberately didn’t call them a system), which give the GM good ideas for balancing their own spells and making sure the spells in the grimoire don’t upset their campaign. GMs also get hint on fitting damage effects by college. There are also boxes on defence and the ever-popular topic of spell maintenance. Kromm takes especial care to show the reader how to differentiate artillery spells from boss killers. You don’t want your goblin horde eradicator to take out the dark lord or the archmage by accident.

All in all, there’s not much missing here. Even the page-count is half a dozen pages higher than the previous volumes in the series, despite Death Spells having a similar number of spells.

 

Meat score: 8.5

Cheese

As this is a spell catalogue there’s not that much in the way of world-building information present. There are, however, boxes on how to introduce artillery spells to existing campaigns and how to fit them into a fantasy legal framework, how to frame a heroic self-sacrifice by dangerous spells and how to fit the new spells into divinely-granted spell-casting tied to Power Investiture. There are hints as to which spells fit which genres best, but the vast majorities are slanted towards generic fantasy with a good dash of dungeon-delving.

For a generic spell collection there is not much more you could ask for.

Cheese score: 6.5

Sauce

The writing here is less tongue-in-cheek than most of Kromm’s Dungeon Fantasy titles, but there are the odd joke or two. It’s mostly enjoyable, though it does get a bit technical in some of the spell descriptions.

The art is, while not great, at least appropriate to the spells mentioned, sometimes more than I would have thought possible with reused generic art from Dan Smith & Co. We get a whopping five black and white illustrations and the cover isn’t actually doing them justice. Still, it’s a far cry from what other companies or even enterprising freelancers like Douglas Cole and his Lost Hall of Tyr.

Still, it’s a good effort for our favourite system.

Sauce score: 6

Generic Nutritional Substance

There are probably few campaigns outside of traditional fantasy and Technomancer that will use all the spells presented here. There are, however, a fair number of spells that work in secret magic, illuminati and horror games. Whether a dozen spells are worth the price of admission, everybody must decide for themselves.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 6

Summary

GURPS Magic – Artillery Spells plugs a hole in the GURPS Magic system by presenting interesting damage-dealing spells that don’t all work in the same way and merely exchange damage types. Together with Death Spells it goes a long way of remedying one of the criticisms that are frequently levelled against the system, namely that its spells are boring and generic. It’s a good buy for everyone who likes the versatility of the system, but wants a little more flavour.

Total score: 7.7 (very good)
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (50%), Cheese (15%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a cheese-oriented book. A “cheesy” story- or world-building-oriented book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 5.85 (above average)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

 

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting – Caverntown

And here is it the first traditional GURPS release of the year (not counting Pyramid and Dungeon Fantasy Role-Playing Game releases. And it’s part of a new series – sort of. I’ll explain what that means in a second.

Cover of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting - Caverntown

Facts

Author: Sean Punch (a.k.a. Dr. Kromm)
Date of Publication: 05/04/2018
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count: 49 (1 title page, 1 content page, 2 index pages, 1 page ad)
Price: $10.00 (PDF), $ 0.23 per page of content; Score of 6/10
Preview: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-dungeon-fantasy-setting-caverntown

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

Caverntown is a town located underground next to tons of dungeons – something most players will find interesting. But what sets the Setting series apart from similar GURPS products like Encounters and Locations? Encounters are places to explore or visit – simply put adventures happen there. Locations are a bit more ambivalent, but most often they are imposing structures where adventures could happen, most often with a map, sometimes even a hex map attached. Worminghall is the odd one out and would have frankly been better as a Setting – had the series been there at the time. The main difference to Hot Spots (apart from being fictitious) is that DF Setting – Caverntown contains a whole lot of meaty rules in addition to all the story hooks and characters.

After a one-page intro that discusses the meaning of ‘Town’  in a dungeon-delving campaign the book is divided into four chapters: A Most Unusual City State (9 pages) tells us about Caverntown’s history, layout and inhabitants, Those Who Pull Strings (11 pages) is all about NPCs, guilds and other influential groups, Welcome to Caverntown! (13 pages) is all about things to do, dangers to encounter and mysteries to explore, Taking Care of Business (11 pages) is all about buying, selling and contracting. As usual there’s and index, which comes in a bit heavier since there are many lemmas to take care off.

Meat

The meaty bits are feature most in the fourth chapter (Taking Care of Business), but bits and pieces are distributed through the whole book. It’s definitely meatier than most specific settings we’ve seen so far in fourth edition. Some of it reads a bit dry, but the point here is that the GM does not need to improvise anything. Chapter 4 lists everything about buying, selling, contracting, custom-fitting, hiring any Dungeon Fantasy players could possibly want – often with die rolls and certainly with price modifiers.

Caverntown’s defences, tolls and law-enforcement are described in equal detail, so that the GM can quickly set up a chase with the town watch or a break-in in  the mages guild without much trouble. Five important NPCs (mayor, grand mistress of the holy warrior order, great druid, head of the chamber of commerce and the androgynous master bard with the enigmatic name Sivel). Sometimes this is quite reminiscent of That-Other-Game™, but be advised that you often need other DF supplements to make use of this information. Especially DF 15 Henchmen is important, but DF 1-3, DF 8 Treasure Tables, DF 14 Psi and DF 17 Guilds are almost required reading. The more likely your players are to cause mischief in town or want special orders, the more likely you are to need those.

Which raises an important point: This is a Dungeon Fantasy product, not a Dungeon Fantasy RPG product. It’s meant to work in the regular GURPS framework and if you only own the DFRPG you’ll be mystified by some things mentioned here. I suggest you just ignore anything that a quick full-text search in DFRPG doesn’t turn up. 90% of the supplement will still be useable and it’s good practice not to obsess about rules minutiae in GURPS anyway.

What else is new? We get an encounter table for town, which ranges from monster incursions (Caverntown is an outpost next to monster-infested territory after all) to petty crime to major capers and supernatural events. An actual wandering monster table is provided for the tunnels leading to the dungeons. There are rules for buying a building and hiring permanent servants (both of which are be a bit on the cheap side), training considerations, notes of credit, crime and punishment (mostly swift and capital), social traits, finding quests and the supernatural properties of the environment.

In short this is pretty dang complete setting from a rules-point of view.

Meat score: 9

Cheese

Caverntown’s history is interesting with multiple gods, a devil-worshipper and an elder thing featuring prominently, but it’s a bit on the cheesy side (in the original sense of the word). The characters though are wonderfully quirky and not easily sorted into good and evil, making complicated city plots possible if the GM wishes for a change of pace.

As a constructed town with a grid layout Caverntown is a bit bland when it comes to geographic diversity, but the individual features from the Shaft (an elevator tower that connects it to the surface), the Eight Titans (statues that keep the cavern stable), the druidic gardens, gates to the tunnels and the many establishments in town make up for it. The detail level is greater than say an average 3rd Edition Forgotten Realms city, but doesn’t quite reach GURPS Tredroy levels. The town does come alive for the reader though and interesting hooks are dangling everywhere, though these are for the GM to work out.

Chapter 3 is most interesting from an actual campaign point of view and outlines how to make everybody useful in a longer-term (or permanent) Caverntown campaign, notably what to do with those more outdoorsy professions and how to deal with the more uncommon races. It also contains a few locations outside of Caverntown proper, though these are more like teasers, not even real scenario ideas.

In short, the supplement contains an unusual amount of social stuff for Dungeon Fantasy and makes for an interesting if not absolutely breath-taking setting.

Cheese score: 8

Sauce

Again the lack of actually fitting illustrations is a big downer. One or two illustrations of buildings or persons that actually feature in the book would have made a big difference. There are more illustrations than usual, but they are often cropped to the point where you think it would have been better to have a blank space or another pull-quote. I could also think of quite a few DFRPG illustrations that would have been more apt. Not even the smith is a dwarf.

The lack of a map is easier to justify given the unique location and shape of the town and the fact why there is none is actually addressed in the book.

Sean Punch is at his more Dungeon-Fantasy-esque writing here and most of the time the tongue-in-cheek tone works nicely. There are a few lead-in sentences that are bit annoyingly retro, but these are rare. Pull quotes are from characters mentioned like in DFRPG and the index is sorely needed in this case. We also get a summary table of guild-masters and -mistresses, which is also nice, but the art still hurts.

Sauce score: 5.5

Generic Nutritional Substance

You won’t drop Caverntown into a modern-day horror campaign and setting it in a Science Fiction, Steampunk or Cliffhangers universe will make most of the information useless, but the cheesy bits are generic enough that you can use them this way if you don’t mind changing races and supernatural stuff. The meaty bits are generic enough to use in normal fantasy campaigns if you own the DF books mentioned and don’t mind a little professional lenses in your game.

Still, this is not GURPS at its most generic and it doesn’t mesh perfectly with the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, which does lower the score.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 6

Summary

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Setting – Caverntown goes a long way towards the plug-and-play GURPS campaign that people are always clamouring for. The GM still needs to supply the adventures, but with the full power of the Dungeon Fantasy line behind it the GM does have to think much about all the bits between the dungeons.

Total score: 7.525 (almost very good)
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (32.5%), Cheese (32.5%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a balanced (meaty-cheesy) book where both story and rules matter.

Value score: 6.7625 (well worth its price)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.