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  • Oct 7, 2026

    Let's Read DFRPG Adventurers: Armor and Shields

    Continuing our read through of Chapter 7, we now go through shields and armor.

    Shields

    D&D shields are just an extra bit of armor you can tack onto the one you’re wearing, but DFRPG shields are weapons that have a few extra defensive rules specific to them.

    With the Shield skill you can use a shield to feint, bash people’s faces in, and block incoming melee or ranged attacks. Just holding a shield also makes it easier to defend yourself in other ways, too. Shield bashes are back on the weapon tables, so this section focuses on the rest of their stats.

    The most important stat here is the Defense Bonus, which goes from 1 to 3 depending on the size of the shield. This gets added directly to all of your active defense scores, including Block. Then come the usual price and weight. Compared to the stuff on the melee weapons table, shields are pretty cheap but extremely heavy.

    The table starts with cloaks, which are popular with fencers. To use a cloak in combat, you hold it in your hand instead of wearing it around your neck. You can feint and block with it, and even grapple by entangling foes since it’s flexible. For the same reason, though, you can’t bash people with a cloak and a failed block endangers your arm. A light cloak reaches your waist when worn, a heavy one reaches your ankles. Even the heavy cloak is lighter than a small shield.

    Proper shields come in Small, Medium, and Large varieties. All of them are made from wood with a few metal bits and possibly a leather covering on the outside. They let you block and bash as described above, make shield rushes, and are of course a lot sturdier than a piece of cloth with delusions of grandeur. DFRPG doesn’t really deal with shield breakage, so the biggest game effect of this sturdiness is that shields can take all of the modifiers we’ll list below, while cloaks can only take Ornate.

    Light and Medium shields are available as either traditional shields or bucklers. A buckler is held by a handle instead of strapped to your arm, so you can’t use that hand to hold anything else but can drop the buckler as a free action if you need it. DFRPG makes you use different skills for shields and bucklers, but I tend to collapse them into a single skill instead.

    Large shields offer excellent DB but get in the way of your attacks unless you have the Shield-Wall Training advantage (available only to Knights).

    Shield Modifiers

    Like with weapons, these relate to how the shield is constructed and are independent from magic enchantments.

    • Balanced gives +1 to Shield skill.

    • Dwarven shields are 100% metal! They do more damage with bashes and rushes, are fireproof, and have double the weight.

    • Fine shields do more with less material, and weight only 3/4 the usual amount.

    • Meteoric shields are also 100% metal, so they have the same bonuses as Dwarven ones and are impervious to magic like meteoric weapons. Super expensive, though.

    • Mirrored shields can reflect gaze attacks to someone else on a successful block. Perseus loves them, Mumm-Ra hates them. It’s cheaper to apply the treatment to a shield that’s already made of metal.

    • Orichalcum shields are 100% made of that metal. They’re only 2/3 the weight, fireproof, and have an easier time breaking other weapons, though they don’t do increased damage.

    • Ornate lets you impress the gullible as per the weapon modifier, and is the only one on the list that can also be applied to cloaks.

    The three “material” modifiers (Dwarven, Meteoric, Orichalcum) are mutually exclusive, but they do stack with Fine, and the weight modifiers multiply together. A Fine Dwarven or Meteoric shield is only 1.5 times as heavy, and a Fine Orichalcum one is half the weight of the standard wooden version.

    Armor

    In DFRPG, armor provides you with Damage Resistance, which directly subtracts from rolled damage. This means it enters into play after you’ve failed your active defense rolls, as the last line of defense before your HP. There are no such things as armor skills or armor proficiencies here. PCs of any profession can wear any armor. The barriers here are cost and weight: armor is both heavy and expensive.

    Money will be much less of a problem once your delver has a few adventures under their belt, but the weight requires either a lot of ST or magic to mitigate. I have seen a wizard who went around in full plate and used constant levitation for locomotion, though, so even that is not an insurmountable obstacle.

    The armor list on the DFRPG is the final step on a long evolutionary road. You see, core GURPS had a low-tech armor list that was simple but kind of unrealistic. Stuff like leather and cloth was too light and too expensive, mail was way too cheap, and plate armor was both too cheap and too heavy.

    Then came GURPS Low-Tech, which had an extremely detailed armor system that added more hit locations than there were in core GURPS and restrictions of the “you can’t put rigid armor on your waist because it needs to bend” kind.

    DFRPG takes that and re-simplifies it a bit. The combat rules still have the same hit locations as core GURPS, but you don’t have to buy a separate piece of armor for every one, and the list of different materials has been pared down considerably. Every line on the table is a different material with a specific DR, and the columns have the price and weight for a full suit of that material and also for smaller pieces covering the head, arms, legs, hands, feet, and body (everything from groin to neck).

    If you’re looking for simplicity you can just look at the “Full Suit” column and call it a day. Min-maxers can shop for piecewise armor and cut some corners for the parts they don’t think will be hit often. One-sleeved jackets and backless breastplates are all the rage these days! And who needs helmets anyway, amirite?

    The detailed items on the armor table can be divided into these general types:

    • Cloth or Leather armor comes in both Light and Heavy varieties (DR 1 or 2). It’s the only type of armor that doesn’t count as being made of metal, which is important for certain environmental hazards.

    • Mail armor comes in Light, “standard” and Heavy varieties (DR 3/1, 4/2 or 5/3). Since it’s flexible, it uses the lower value against crushing attacks.

    • Scale is cheaper and less vulnerable to crushing attacks than mail, but considerably heavier. It also comes in Light, Standard, and Heavy (DR 3/2, 4/3, and 5). The lighter varieties use the lower number against crushing attacks, but I guess the heavy one is too sturdy for that.

    • Segmented Plate (DR 3, 4, or 5) includes “lamellar” armor and sits between mail and scale in terms of cost and weight, and doesn’t have the vulnerability to crushing damage.

    • Brigandine (DR 5) is the thing that confused Gygax into inventing studded leather, because it’s metal plates sandwiched between two leather or cloth layers, with the rivets that keep them in place peeking out. About the same price of heavy mail, at half the weight. It counts as plate for modifier purposes.

    • Plate armor is the high-end stuff, very expensive and surprisingly light for the amount of protection it provides. Comes in Standard, Heavy, Extra-Heavy and Epic (DR 6 to 9).

    You probably won’t be affording anything heavier than light mail or scale out of character creation, and even then you can’t afford a full suit of it without expending some character points on starting money.

    You can layer armor, with some restrictions on type. Their DR more or less adds together, but layered armor anywhere other than your head imposes a -1 penalty to DX.

    Whether you decide to go for the fiddly rules or not, you have pretty much total freedom to describe your armor as anything you can imagine, as long as it has the right stats.

    Armor Modifiers

    These have the same base rules as weapon modifiers, adding a Cost Factor to the item’s final price and not counting as magic enchantments. Since the price of armor is so high, a lot of the modifiers that increase DR or reduce weight often end up more expensive than an enchantment that does the same. But the modifier works even without mana, and it stacks with the enchantment, so there’s that.

    • Dragonhide is for heavy leather, and can add from +1 to +4 DR depending on the dragon “donor”. This bonus is doubled against fire, and the larger it is the heavier the armor becomes. Even sturdier dragonhide suits exist, as well as ones that resist different elements, but those aren’t for sale and aren’t detailed here.

    • Dwarven material science lets DR 6-9 plate armor become sturdier (+1 DR) at no increase in weight.

    • Elven mail doesn’t reduce its DR against crushing attacks!

    • Fine armor has 3/4 the usual weight, but only fit wearers with the same height and weight as the original owner.

    • Giant Spider Silk improves light cloth armor to DR 2 without a weight increase, and can be layered under other armor without a DX penalty.

    • Meteoric metal armor resists magic as per the rules for shields and weapons.

    • Orichalcum plate armor gives its usual DR at only 1/3 the weight!

    • Ornate is the same as for weapons and shields, but you’ll be paying a lot more to bedazzle your armor.

    • Spiked plate armor makes people who grapple you regret it.

    • Thieves’ mail is blackened and woven for maximum flexibility and minimum noise. Its weight doesn’t count as encumbrance for “thiefy” and parkour skills.

    Thieves’ armor cannot also be Ornate, of course, and the two material modifiers are mutually exclusive. They do stack with everything else, though, and the weights are multiplied together as with shields.

    Impressions

    These armor rules fall right into my “Goldilocks” zone. The Basic Set ones are too simple, the Low-Tech ones too complicated, these are Just Right.

  • Oct 6, 2026

    Some error fixes for past posts

    It has come to my attention that I’ve been less than fastidious about proper linking and formatting of my posts. Or, in other words, I’ve been mostly moving them from my “drafts” folder to the “public posts” one and then forgetting all about them without checking for bugs.

    This post here is a notice that a bunch of these bugs have been fixed.

    Every post in both my Let’s Read and Let’s Play of Hell’s Rebels that contained a broken link to their respective project page now has the correct link.

    The very long loot ledger from Adventure 01, Scene 15 contained some characters that Markdown interpreted as a table, and as a result looked all wonky. These characters have been removed.

    The post for Adventure 01, Scene 16 wasn’t showing up at all because its filename was incorrect. This has been fixed.

  • 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.

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