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  • Oct 5, 2026

    Let's Play Hell's Rebels: Time for shopping!

    As I said in the previous post, it’s time to buy some new gear for our heroes. We have $38045 in our communal treasure for this purpose. I don’t want to spend it all, but some upgrades are still needed.

    Arcturus got a cool suit of armor, Urist got the same plus a better weapon, and Jade got out of that with a couple of fairly powerful utility items. So we’ll focus on Jania and Rosalia here for the most part.

    I’m also going to abstract things here. Weapons and armor are bought through this tengu weapons dealer Laria introduces, a guy named Chuko. He owns an above-board weapon shop but is also very interested in selling to resistance movements. Arcane and thiefy gear comes from Lady Docur’s school. The PCs pay list price for everything.

    Chuko is an important NPC in the later part of the campaign, but I think I actually missed his introduction in my original read-through.

    Some of this stuff will certainly consist of special orders, but we can say there’s, uh, three weeks between this adventure and the start of the next one. Nox was supposed to be one of Barzilai’s top lieutenants so I’m sure he’s going to spend some time reorganizing.

    Rosalia’s New Equipment

    I gave her Heroic Archer with XP, so now we need a proper bow. And since she’s a bard it’s gotta be a Bow-Harp.

    Let’s splurge a bit and make it a Balanced Elven Short Bow-Harp for a total of +25 CF. That’s $1300, 1.5kg. She’s gonna name it Allegretto and use it as her Power Item.

    We’ll also spend the money for a Cornucopia Quiver that produces Fine arrows. $6010, 0.25kg.

    Here’s a formatted list of her new stuff:

    • Allegretto: Balanced Elven Short Bow-Harp. thr imp, Acc 2, Range x10/x15. ST 10 but user fires as ST 12. 9 FP as a power item. |$1300, 1.5kg|.
    • Fine Cornucopia Quiver: Produces Fine arrows. $6010, 0.5kg .

    Jania’s new Equipment

    We’ll replace Jania’s cane with a real smallsword. It’s going to be Fine and Balanced for +7 CF, which means it’s going to be $3200, 0.75kg. This also makes it an excellent power item. Since Jania has Weapon Channeling, we can pay an extra $30 to add the Staff enchantment to this sword. We then also add a Penetrating Weapon enchantment to this one, for $5000.

    • The Needle: Fine, Balanced smallsword enchanted with Puissance 1. 14 FP as a Power Item. |$8200, 0.75kg|.

    Urist’s new Equipment

    Yes, Urist got plenty of new fighty gear, but let’s also get a High Holy Symbol for him to act as a Power Item.

    • High Holy Symbol: +2 to Exorcism, Turning, and other appropriate rolls. 8 FP as a Power Item. |$1000, 0.5kg|.

    Total Expenditure

    With this, we spent $16510 on new gear for our PCs, which I think it’s enough. That’s 41 gold coins, 5 silvers, and 10 coppers. It leaves us with $21535 left, or 53 gold, 16 silver, 15 copper. Our previous number of coins didn’t make this a clean subtraction, but we can assume the merchants gave some change back.

    And that’s it for our organizational bits between adventures 1 and 2.

  • Oct 1, 2026

    Let's Read DFRPG Adventurers: Cash and Weapons

    We already went through the basics in chapter 1, character creation in chapters 2 and 3, and a whirlwind tour of the advantages, disadvantages and skills in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Now it’s time for the chapter covering equipment and treasure. In this post we’ll cover the monetary system and talk a bit about weapons. In the next ones we’ll also cover armor, miscellaneous gear, and magic items.

    Being a GURPS variant that can change whatever they want, DFRPG didn’t have to go hard on the detail for encumbrance and gear. Yet they chose to do so anyway, because according to our introduction in this chapter resource management is a traditional part of the genre that many find fun. What corners will you cut in consumables like arrows, potions and food in order to get that nifty weapon or armor? What will you choose to leave behind to drag that sack of treasure back to town? How smug will you feel when you realize you packed everything you needed and nothing you didn’t to that expedition?

    If that sounds fun to you, you’re in the right game! If it didn’t, well, at least you’ve been warned. Our first section is about buying and selling gear, so we’re going in order of importance here.

    Money Money Money

    The symbol used for money here is the “$”. In standard GURPS they call this the “GURPS dollar”, and explain it means different things in each setting. In the DFRPG, it means “one copper coin”.

    Dungeon Fantasy coins are, not coincidentally, identical to the ones used by D&D and Pathfinder. There are 50 of these chonky disks to the pound no matter what they’re made of. Unlike D&D of PF coins however, their values here increase by a factor of 20 as you climb up the hierarchy. So if a copper coin is $1, a silver coin is $20, and a gold coin is $400. Gold coins are also valuable and soft enough that they’re commonly cut into halves, quarters or eights. Delvers love gold because it packs the most value into the least weight.

    There are coins made of weirder metals with in-between values, but those are not in this book. You might find them as treasure, though.

    Every PC starts with $1000 to buy their starting gear. This is modified by the PC’s Wealth. PCs who have that as an advantage get more, those who have it as a disadvantage get less. They can also exchange character points for extra money at $500 per point - a common use for those 5 points obtained from quirks.

    Buying

    Item prices assume the most typical conditions possible - a typical sale by an ordinary merchant at a time and place where there’s neither a surplus not a shortage. Everything costs list price at character creation, but world events might change that during play.

    This does mean we’re not assuming “Gold Rush” prices as the default like D&D does, but you’ll still find some items here are ridiculously expensive anyway. The Exploits book will describe some tricks you can try to get stuff cheaper.

    If you really like an item you can spend character points on the Signature Gear advantage to give it some narrative protection. That advantage costs 1 point per $500 of the item’s value.

    Delvers usually live out of inns and such, so it costs $150 a week to live in town. Again there are tricks to reduce this in Exploits.

    Selling

    You don’t need to sell coins, of course - they’re already money. Ingots or unshaped lumps of precious metal are also money, they just make the merchants and bankers reach for their scales.

    Everything else will sell in town for a percentage of its “true” value that’s proportional to the Wealth of the character doing the selling. That trait also represents the quality of the PC’s abstract business contacts, you see.

    Average-wealth PCs, the default, sell loot at 40% of its value. Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable for the party to ask their richest member to handle all the selling. Winning a Quick Contest of the Merchant skill versus a “generic” value of 15 will add 10% to that value (so from 40% to 50%, for example).

    Weapons

    Every single PC is going to need at least one weapon. Which one depends on what they can carry, wield, and afford. This section goes on to explain weapon stats, and then gives us the big weapon tables.

    This is where the character’s Damage stat comes into play. It’s derived from Strength and includes two different dice expressions, Thrust and Swing, which is also the name of what kind of attack they’re for. The two start out pretty close but Swing increases much faster as you get stronger, to represent the benefits of the lever effect. A weapon’s damage stat is expressed in terms of the wielder’s Thrust (thr) and Swing (sw) values, combined with a damage type.

    For example, a sword might do sw+1 cutting ot thr+1 impaling damage, and when wielded by a ST 13 character (sw 2d-1 / thr 1d+1) that would become 2d cut or 1d+2 imp. We’ll learn more about damage types when we talk about combat.

    Weapons also have a ST rating which tells you how strong someone must be to use the weapon. This will only be a problem for human delvers when it comes to the heaviest of weapons, but halflings likely have to be more watchful here.

    For bows and crossbows, you read their ST stat as their rated strength. The value on the table is the weakest possible rated strength for that weapon. They can be built “stronger” at no extra cost. A character still needs to be at least that strong to handle the weapon, but any ST they have above that score is “wasted” and doesn’t go into figuring damage or range. Being “stronger” than your bow doesn’t let you pull it back any further than its own physical limit.

    The Melee Weapons Table gives us everything you’d expect out of a dungeon fantasy game.

    • Axes and Maces are cheap and have decent damage but tend to be unbalanced - you can attack or parry with them in a given turn, but not both. The two-handed varieties have high damage but are more expensive, heavier, and so unbalanced you might need to spend a whole turn getting the weapon ready again after attacking with it.

    • Swords of all kinds are balanced and versatile, with both swinging and thrusting attacks. However, they are very expensive. If you don’t have the cash for a real sword, you can use the same skill with balanced clubs and staffs by holding them like swords.

    • Knives are cheap, but their short blades give them relatively poor damage and a defense penalty. When wielded with fencing skills, their damage remains poor but their defensive ability increases by a lot.

    • Fencing skills can also be used with several types of specialized sword like rapiers or smallswords. These tend to have slightly worse damage than other swords and be more expensive, but give fantastic defensive bonuses when used with the right skills.

    • Spears and polearms have excellent damage-to-price ratios, though most of them require two hands to use. Polearms are unbalanced on swinging attacks, though those can be devastating. Spears are always balanced, because they only have thrusting attacks.

    • Staffs can be wielded like swords or spears, and also with their own skill that gives a better defensive bonus.

    • Flails and nunchakus are hard to use and unbalanced, but they’re also hard to defend against.

    • Funnily enough, Unarmed Attacks also appear on the weapon tables. Bare-handed punches and bare-footed kicks are free and accessible to every humanoid delver, of course, but you also learn how wearing brass knuckles, metal gauntlets, or boots affects their damage.

    The Ranged Weapon Table has everything you expect and some things you don’t.

    • Bows of all sizes have excellent range, with damage ranging from middling to great as their size increases. Price also increases accordingly.

    • Crossbows are heavier and take longer to reload, but do more damage. You can use a crossbow that’s stronger than you at no penalty, but it will take a lot longer to reload.

    • Slings are hard to use but they do damage based on the character’s Swing instead of Thrust. Their ammo is pretty cheap.

    • We have many types of thrown weapon: spears, axes, knives, shuriken, darts, even boomerangs. Some of these can also be used in melee and appear on those tables as well. They tend to have shorter ranges than the dedicated ranged stuff, and their “ammo” is really expensive since each “shot” is a whole new weapon. But their damage can be pretty good, since some of them use Swing to determine damage.

    • Spear-throwers are devices that extend the range of thrown darts and spears and let their damage use the PC’s Swing value instead of their Thrust.

    • And you also have some oddballs: lassos, nets, and blowpipes.

    There’s a box-out ammunition table here too, containing blowpipe darts, arrows, crossbow bolts, and several options for slings: unshaped rocks (free, crappy), shaped rocks, and lead pellets (more expensive, better). There’s a type of crossbow called a Prodd that fires lead pellets instead of bolts.

    Weapon Modifiers

    Any weapon that’s not an uncovered natural appendage can have Modifiers, which improve its inherent traits and make it cost more. These aren’t magic bonuses, but facts about a weapon’s construction. They can live alongside and stack with more traditional enchantments. Not all modifiers can apply to all weapons.

    The modifier categories here are pretty intuitive, but just in case there’s a few paragraphs listing which weapons fall into each one.

    Each modifier has a “Cost Factor”. To figure out the final price of a modified weapon, you add all the Cost Factors together + 1 , and then multiply that by the weapon’s base price.

    • Balanced weapons are more accurate, generally giving a +1 to skill for melee weapons and a +1 to Accuracy for ranged ones.

    • Bow-Harps are heavier than mormal bows but can be used as either bows or harps in any given turn (but not both at the same time!). The perfect gift for your ranged bard.

    • Climber’s weapons have a design that let you climb with the weapon ready, and give +1 to climbing rolls. Applies to hatchets and other similar weapons. I never used this, but Lara Croft swears by them.

    • Dwarven: Remember those unbalanced weapons that don’t let you attack and parry on the same turn? That’s shoddy human engineering. Good dwarven work solves this problem and makes them just as nimble as a sword. Big weapons that become unready after an attack still do that, though.

    • Elven: Applies to bows (not crossbows, those ugly things). Lets you treat the bow’s rated ST as 2 points higher for calculating damage and range. This means a ST 11 character could use a ST 13 elven bow normally. Expensive, but your scouts will love it.

    • Fine: The weapon is sturdier and generally better at its job. Bladed melee and thrown weapons, as well as pointy ammunition, do more damage. Bows and crossbows shoot farther. All are more resistant to breakage.

    • Meteoric: One of the game’s special materials. Meteoric Iron is immune to magic. The weapon ignores any magic meant to stop it and can’t be targeted by spells, but can’t be enchanted either.

    • Orichalcum: This bronze-colored alloy is indestructible! Weapons made from it never break, and have a higher chance of breaking other weapons when those rules come into effect.

    • Ornate weapons are blinged out, and can improve reactions from buyers and other people who are impressed by ostentation.

    • Silver weapons are useful for exploiting certain monster vulnerabilities. Solid silver is best for that, but also results in a fragile weapon. A silver coating doesn’t affect breakage chances and is far cheaper, but is a little less effective at the supernatural side.

    • Very Fine is like Fine, but has double the bonuses and only applies to swords and fencing weapons. Super expensive, of course.

    In addition to the type restrictions the Fine, Very Fine, and Solid Silver modifiers are mutually exclusive. The material modifiers of Meteoric, Orichalcum, and Solid Silver are also mutually exclusive. Meteoric and orichalcum weapons can still be silver-coated however, so those players who immediately went to “electroplating” when they read the material descriptions still have something to be happy about.

    With these modifiers you can have yourself a Fine, Balanced, Dwarven, Silver-Coated werewolf-hunting axe for $1000, the same price the swashbuckler pays for a standard-issue edged rapier.

    Coming Up Next

    Shields and Armor!

  • Sep 23, 2026

    Let's Read DFRPG Adventurers: Chapter 3, Races

    Yes, this book still uses the term “Races”, having been written a few years before other games finally started getting rid of it. That brings a symptom of the main problem I have with this chapter: the options presented here mostly follow the cliches presented in older editions of D&D. I imagine they chose this because it provided a good and familiar baseline in 2016-2017, but it does mean we have to deal with some of the annoying fantasy racism that later games made an effort to remove. The text actually does acknowledge some of that racism, though that acknoledgment is a bit impaired by the general tongue-in-cheek tone in which the super generic implied setting is presented.

    You see, many social traits in GURPS like Appearance and Social Stigma are relative. Who thinks the bard is hot, and who looks down on the barbarian’s foreign ways? When a GURPS GM builds a campaign setting from scratch, they’re asked to answer that question by providing a reference culture. That’s the dominant culture in the areas where the vast majority of the campaign takes place.

    This chapter does not describe this concept, but it does introduce us to a reference culture by repeatedly mentioning it in the text and template descriptions: that of Ordinary Townsfolk(TM).

    Ordinary Townsfolk are those people who live in Town under the rule of the King. They’re human, they very rarely leave Town, and they don’t have good opinions about things outside of their daily experience. In other words, they’re the opposite of “open-minded” and “cosmopolitan”. Ordinary Townsfolk recognize adventuring as a profession, but not a very respectable one. I guess that’s in part because delvers will accept “just about anyone”, since Social Stigmas don’t apply between PCs. Still, they’re happy to sell stuff to adventurers, who always have plenty of money to spend.

    The very first sentence in the actual text of the chapter does state that “race” means “species”, so let’s use that term from now on in this post. It goes on to say that many nonhuman intelligent species can be found in the world. A lot of them show up as the opposition, inhabiting dungeons and other dangerous places: orcs, ogres, trolls, and so on. Ordinary Townsfolk consider those monsters. There are other species they consider “people”, and whom monsters consider enemies. These you can find living in Town, and available as options for delver PCs.

    Next, the chapter introduces the concept of racial templates (henceforth species templates), which work a bit differently than the professional ones.

    Each template has a fixed cost, which must be paid using the discretionary points from your delver’s professional template. Every professional template, as we already saw, has a listed point amount for buying advantages and powers. They also have 7 points for optional secondary skills, and can gain an extra 5 from quirks. You can use these to pay for a species template, which does mean you’ll be spending less points on stuff related to your profession. Someone without a species template is assumed to be (mostly) human.

    The cost of a template is the total cost of all of its components.

    Template Components

    Every species template has stat modifiers, advantages, disadvantages, and might have features. The stat modifiers apply after you’ve adjusted your PC’s stats from their professional template, and modify both the current score and the usual maximums. For example, if you have ST+2, you can also buy your ST up to 22 and not just 20.

    Advantages and disadvantages are shared by all members of that species, whether because they’re part of its biology, because they’re part of its dominant culture or because they model the prejudices of Ordinary Townsfolk. Features are cosmetic details that don’t cost any points.

    This is my second problem with this chapter, flowing right from the first: I’m not really a fan of having “cultural” or personality traits be a mandatory part of a species template. As I mentioned in this old post of mine, I don’t want a bigoted asshole who says “all dwarves are greedy, stubborn bastards” to be right. Plus players just love playing exceptional or rebellious members of a species that don’t conform to the cliche, and I’d like that to be easy. The templates I tend to write for my own campaigns tend to be far more minimalist than these, without most attribute adjustments and with no mandatory mental traits.

    You write the components of your species template down in the appropriate sections, together with the ones from your profession, which I think it’s a big improvement over the way core GURPS does it (“just write the template and its total cost with your Advantages and remember its components with your brain”).

    PC Species

    These are our species templates. All of them cost 20 points except for Cat-Folk, which cost 40. As mentioned above, most of their descriptions are well-trod and sometimes unfortunate cliches, so please note that I’m paraphrasing the book here and not stating my own opinion (which you can find way up there in the introductory paragraphs).

    Anyway, here are the species:

    Cat-Folk refer to themselves as cat-boys or cat-girls depending on gender. They have human-shaped bodies covered in short fur, feline facial features, and prominent cat ears and tail. That gives us a look closer to that of the Khajit from Elder Scrolls than to the Mi’quote from Final Fantasy 14.

    Their claws and teeth are natural weapons, they can see really well in the dark, they have Catfall, and a bit of Temperature Tolerance from fur. Their disadvantages are also cliche cat traits: impulsive, lazy, and with a mild phobia of entering water.

    They’re compatible with human armor (the tail can be safely tucked in), and they can buy gauntlets and boots that expose their claws but still protect their hands and feet at no extra cost.

    Dwarves are pretty much what you’d expect. Short, sturdy, excellent night vision, really good at mining and at killing people with axes. Also greedy and stubborn.

    Elves represent “green” or “wood” elves with a hands-on approach to defending nature. They’re far more approachable than Those Other Elves, which are haughty, isolationist, and not statted up for PC use. Elves are a bit taller than humans, have the classical pointy ears, and these wood elves have bright green hair. Nothing unexpected in their traits here: they’re graceful, pretty, have innate Magery, are good at sneaking and shooting bows, and have a sense of duty to Nature.

    Half-Elves inherit elven grace, magical aptitude, and bright hair colors, but are a bit more robust thanks to their human parents. They have no duty to Nature, but suffer under the cliche where neither humans nor elves like them very much.

    Gnomes tend to follow the “tinker gnome” archetype in that they’re very good at mechanical skills in addition to being almost as sturdy and cave-adapted as dwarves. They’re also extremely curious, and are our first “small” species at SM -1.

    A bit of lore: there are rumors of “Hell Gnomes”, a tribe that went bad. Other Gnomes claim this term refers to actual demons, but don’t seem comfortable with the topic. I had something similar back when I GMed, a gnome cult who went around doing evil stuff and saying “Rawr, I’m a monster!”.

    Half-Ogre: The progeny of an ogre and an orc or human, half-ogres are smaller than their ogre parents and are just on this side of what Ordinary Townsfolk consider “people”. They’re very strong, tough, and fearless, but have an IQ penalty, are considered ugly, and bear a social stigma as “savages” due to their parentage.

    Half-Orcs: You can’t talk about half-orcs without talking about orcs, and the orcs in this game are subject to all of the old cliches. There’s a group of related species known as “Goblin-kin” whom Ordinary Townsfolk view as “borderline-civilized” brutes, and who discriminate among themselves on the basis of size and blood purity. Orcs are a part of this group: the medium-sized, “not-too-stupid” ones who bully the others.

    Half-orcs are “the product of generations of inbreeding among the offspring of orc rapine”. Yikes! This is about as bad as it was back in AD&D or D&D 3e, and it’s why it’s a good idea to modify or discard the implied setting.

    Anyway, half-orcs are as smart as humans but tougher, with better hearing and night vision. Some half-orcs are accepted by orcs and can be found among them. The ones who are rejected drift towards human settlements, where they suffer the same prejudices as half-ogres and often can only make a living as delvers.

    Halflings are so called because they have half the height of a human. This makes them tiny (SM -2) and weak compared to a human, but they’re very agile and very sneaky, in addition to being crack shots with a bow or sling. They’re also gluttonous and kleptomaniac. Unlike kender from Dragonlance, though, these halflings know what they’re naturally adept at thievery. The cliche halfling community here is not an idyllic pastoral village, but an organized crime family.

    Personal Impressions

    I don’t use most of this chapter in my games at all. I tend to go with versions of the species presented here that are free of mandatory psychological advantages and IQ penalties. My reference culture is also usually more cosmopolitan than the one here, which also removes Social Stigmas and the like.

    This does tend to increase template cost. I counteract that by also eliminating “small” attribute adjustments like a +1 to ST or DX. You can still say that the average member of this species is stronger or more agile than a human, of course, but PC delvers are the furthest thing from average. A starting barbarian is going to have ST 17 or a wizard IQ 15 no matter what species they are. If some of that is from a nonhuman physiology, the final effect and point cost is still the same.

  • Sep 21, 2026

    Let's Read DFRPG Adventurers: Wizard

    The descriptive text on the book paints a picture of the wizard as someone who’s very smug about being smart and about wielding magic that doesn’t rely on fickle supernatural entities. So at least on the fiction front, it’s business as usual.

    They do have plenty to be smug about. Their spell list includes everything that’s not specifically part of the cleric’s or druid’s central niches, and there are many situations that can only be solved with the help of a wizard. However, “an entire fight” usually isn’t one of them, as we’ll see below.

    Wizards become delvers more to find buried arcane secrets than to find money (though the later always helps). Because of this, they’re often the delvers with the best training to identify and handle those secrets.

    Basic Stats

    Wizards start with ST 10, DX 12, IQ 15, and HT 11. Their Perception is lowered to 12 and their Speed bumped to 6.

    This is the highest starting IQ of all professions, and the most specialized “caster” stat block we’ll see here.

    Advantages

    Wizards start with three points of Energy Reserve (Magical) and Magery 3. Magery is their “power talent”, and unlike most of the others doesn’t have a separate pre-requisite advantage because it has a “level 0” that acts in that function as well. Magery 0 is enough to learn most spells and lets you detect nearby sources of magic, but doesn’t add any bonuses to spells like subsequent levels do.

    Energy Reserve acts as a “parallel” pool of Fatigue Points that can only be used to power spells and arcane powers. It costs the same as Fatigue, and the main advantage is that it recovers concurrently with Fatigue. The other casters all have their own variants of ER as part of their optional advantages, but it’s factory-standard for wizards. It fits their theme to have vast reserves of magical power but to get winded easily from physical exertion…

    Discretionary advantages include mental stat boosts, more Magery or ER, stuff that makes you smarter than your IQ indicates (like Intuition and Language Talent) and stuff that makes you more magical (like Spirit Empathy or some custom traits we’ll see below).

    Disadvantages

    That Per reduction takes up some of our disadvantage budget, so we only need to pick -35 points of further problems. Part of these make you less physically strong, a few others make your nerve break easily in combat, and a bunch make you into different flavors of eccentric genius. Are you an absent-minded professor with a heart of gold, or a fantasy mad scientist?

    Of note here is Weirdness Magnet, which gives the GM carte blanche to come up with extra weird things during adventures that feel inexplicably drawn to you and generally make your life harder. If you need -15 points to reach your limit, take that and let your GM have some fun!

    Skills

    Wizard melee weapon packages are the classic “staff” and the somewhat novel “wand and shield”, which is such a good idea I have to wonder about the quality of the curricula of magic schools in other games. Wands in this game are a little heftier too, and can be used as light sticks with the Smallsword skill.

    For ranged combat, they can choose to go old-school and throw darts, wield a sling, or learn Innate Attack, which is what you use to attack with missile spells. Most wizards who have those spells will want the latter.

    Their primary skills are all about lore. They can teach, compose well-written texts, speed read, make proper use of research libraries, work with alchemy, dispose of magical hazardous material and recall all sorts of knowledge about a variety of magic-related subjects. Their optional secondary skills include the usual delver basics and also further intellectual pursuits, including Cartography for drawing those dungeon maps on the go.

    Spells

    You get to choose 30 different spells here, with a point spent in each.

    Wizards have access to nearly all of the full glory of the classic GURPS magic system. If you compare their spell list with the one present in the Magic supplement for core GURPS, you’ll see a few omissions. These are mostly stuff that the authors of Dungeon Fantasy thought didn’t fit with their intended flavor: Enchantment spells because magic items should be found as loot, and most teleportation because having casual access to that lets you skip too much of the game. And obviously, anything that’s part of the cleric’s and druid’s core niches is exclusive to those professions.

    We’re also back to dealing with prerequisite spells here. Spells are divided into Colleges, and each College has a prerequisite tree that’s a cross between a college curriculum and a skill tree from a game like Path of Exile or Diablo. If you want to learn Fireball, for example, you must know Create Fire and Shape Fire. The more complex and powerful a spell is, the more prerequisites it has.

    Bards have to deal with this too, but they only have access to a limited set of colleges. Wizards obviously have access to all of wizardly magic.

    Special Wizard Traits

    This is where you get the official description of Magery, which I gave you above. Magery is the whole reason to even play a wizard in the first place, but they do have a few other special tricks available to them.

    • Gizmos (5 points/level): Like the thief version, but for wizard-themed minor gadgets instead of thief-themed ones.

    • Improved Magic Resistance (5 points/level): Like the base Magic Resistance advantage available to everyone, this penalizes any spell cast on you. Unlike the base version, though, it doesn’t interfere with your own spells.

    • Wild Magic (21 points/level): Once per session per level of this trait, you can cast any wizardly spell as if you knew it at a level equal to IQ + Magery. If you succeed, have a point to spare, and already know the spell prerequisites, you can also permanently learn it then and there, though you’ll get a small penalty to cast it for the next month as you get used to it.

    Customization

    It’s all about spell selection! There are so many to choose from the sample builds mention whole colleges instead of individual spells. Examples given are artillery mages with area damaging spells, controllers with a large collection of save-or-suck effects, or thaumathologists that specialize in meta-spells and magic knowledge skills.

    Every mage wants extra Energy Reserves, and those quirk points can be used either for an expensive and high-capacity Power Item, or for more spells.

    The “This Ain’t D&D Section”

    As said above, wizards have plenty to be smug about, but this isn’t the same set of things that makes D&D wizards feel smug. The hardest thing for habitual D&D players to get used to here is the fact that they won’t be able to win an entire battle by snapping their fingers.

    Yes, DFRPG wizards have access to plenty of strong damage-dealing spells. And yes, they also have access to plenty of control spells that can stop a monster on its tracks. But casting spells takes time and energy.

    To cast that classic explosive fireball, a wizard needs to spend one turn casting the spell and from 0 to 3 additional turns growing it to the desired size and aiming it before they can attack. If the party is readying for an ambush, that big firebal is a great opening move. But if you start casting it during a fight, it’s likely the Knight and the Barbarian will have killed all enemies by the time you’re ready to throw it. Big area-effect control spells take a similar amount of time and even more energy to cast.

    DFRPG wizards really shine in the “utility magic” department. That’s where you’ll find most spells that are both relatively cheap and quick to cast, and do stuff that no other profession can replicate. The wise wizard keeps an open mind regarding their spell selection, and plans explosions in advance.

    The upside here is that you don’t have to worry about “spell slots” or any of that nonsense. You always have access to all the spells you know, and recovering your energy when it runs out results in “fifteen-minute rests” instead of “fifteen-minute workdays”.

  • Sep 15, 2026

    Let's Read DFRPG Adventurers: Thief

    Contrary to popular belief, Dungeon Fantasy isn’t all about fighting monsters: there’s also exploring the dungeon, looting the dungeon, and selling the loot back in town (sorry, couldn’t resist). The Bard takes care of the last of these very important activities, but for the others you want a Thief.

    Stats

    Thieves start out with ST 11, DX 15, IQ 13, HT 11. They bump their Perception to 14, decrease their Speed from 6.5 to 6, and increase their Move to 7.

    The four stats are pretty similar to the Martial Artist’s and the Swashbuckler’s, but emphasize IQ more since this is our official skill monkey.

    Advantages

    All thieves start out with Flexibility, High Manual Dexterity, and Perfect Balance, all of which are excellent boosts to anything involving tricky movement and most physically-oriented “thief skills”.

    They get 30 extra points for discretionary advantages, and their selection is actually a bit low on stat boosts: just DX and IQ instead of all four, and just Per, Basic Speed, and Basic Move instead of all secondaries. The rest of the choices are all stuff that offers further specialized bonuses to the same areas enhanced by the standard advantages. Thieves are one of the only professions that can start out with above-average Wealth, which gives them extra starting money and helps with selling loot in town. And they can pick Weapon Master (Knives) if they want to go in a fightier direction.

    Yes, “all knives” count as a single weapon here because their base stats are worse. If you take this, you probably want to wield them with the Main-Gauche skill instead of Knife.

    Disadvantages

    The thief’s mandatory disadvantage is one of Greed, Kleptomania or Trickster, explaining why they chose the profession in the first place. Discretionary choices can make them either someone who needs money fast and constantly to fuel a gambling or partying addiction, or someone whose anti-social personality and criminal record has locked out of getting legitimate jobs.

    Skills

    A thief’s melee weapon skill choices are the same as the swashbuckler’s plus Knife, though their skill level will be “only” 15 or 14 and they lack most melee support abilities. The most recommended option here seems to be “weapon and shield”, instead of the swashbuckler’s single blade. You’re not a god of parrying, so having a shield or cloak in your off hand is a big help.

    You do get a lot of mundane non-combat skills. All that sneaking and exploration stuff that’s secondary and optional for everyone else is part of your starting spread, at much better levels. You’re particularly good at the stuff that maps to D&D’s traditional thief skills: stealth, climbing, lockpicking, trap detection and disarming, etc. Also acrobatics and escaping from bonds.

    Your secondary skill choices are mostly more “niche” areas of spying and crime like forgery, poisons and lip-reading, and also include a selection of social skills.

    Special Thief Traits

    You get no enhanced advancement limits, but you do get a lot of exclusive mundane skills in your template and a few special traits:

    • Catfall (10 points): you suffer much less damage from falls.

    • Expert Backstabbing (2 points/level): Adds its level (which has no cap) to your ST for melee attacks that allow no active defense. That means they can’t see you coming: they’re unconscious, or you start your turn behind them, or you’re invisible, or you’re in a social situation where they didn’t expect you to attack. You need to put in the work to get into one of these situations maybe once per fight, but the extra damage will be worth it.

    • Gizmos (5 points/each): Each Gizmo lets you pull one small item out of thin air per session. This can be either something you have on your sheet but didn’t specify you were carrying, or an item you didn’t have subject to certain price limits (which are more generous if the thing is thief-themed). This isn’t magic, it’s advance planning combined with a little bit of cinematic trickery.

    • High Manual Dexterity (5 points/level): This is a Talent that gives bonuses to a bunch of common DX-based thief tasks.

    • Sensitive Touch (10 points): Gives a large bonus to perception rolls involving mainly your sense of touch, and to rolls where being good at “working by feel” is an advantage, like searching bodies, lockpicking and disarming some traps.

    • Silence (5 points/level): Like the Scout ability.

    Customization

    The book recommends three example skill and advantage selections that can take a generic thief and turn them into a sneaky burglar, a stabby assassin, or a smart and silver-tongued mastermind.

    Generally speaking, it’s all about your mundane skills here. Unlike in D&D, thieves never stop being relevant, even when there are utility spellcasters in the party. Utility spells usually don’t let you skip skill rolls entirely. Therefore, those casters won’t be casting spells on themselves to make the thief obsolete - they will casting spells on the thief to make them even better at their job.

    Your thief’s quirk points should be spent on more skills! There’s some sweet high-tier thief gear out there but it’s outside a starting character’s price range. But it with your ill-gotten gains after you start adventuring.

    The “This Ain’t D&D” section

    The DFRPG Thief is equivalent to the old school Thief class in terms of intended function and combat ability. The difference here is that their starting success chance in those traditional thief duties is much higher.

    You can take them in a fightier direction if you want, with access to Weapon Master (Knives) and to something that works a lot like the classic AD&D Backstab ability. But if your main desire is to have a cool sword and deftly weave through a fight while stabbing enemies in sensitive spots more or less at will, you want a Swashbuckler.

    That said, in games that allow “multiclassing” the Thief does have an easier time becoming a Swashbuckler than almost everyone else.

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