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• Jul 19, 2026

  Let's Read Dungeon Fantasy: Professions!

  “Core GURPS” has entirely free-form, point-based character creation, but we do things a little differently in Dungeon Fantasy. The first step to creating a character is picking a profession, which is more or less the equivalent of a class in D&D.

  The chapter begins with a list of the available professions in this book:

  • Barbarians are strong “heavy” warriors skilled at outdoor survival.

  • Bards are the most “social” delvers, and complement their mundane social skills with mind-affecting songs and magic.

  • Clerics can use divine magic to heal and bless, and can exorcise spirits and curses.

  • Druids use nature magic to affect plants, animals, and the weather, and can also brew herbal concoctions.

  • Holy Warriors specialize in fighting Evil monsters with skill at arms and divine powers.

  • Knights are armored and exceptionally skilled “heavy” warriors trained in personal and group tactics.

  • Martial Artists cultivate inner power to fight and perform impossible feats.

  • Scouts are skilled survivalists and master archers.

  • Swashbucklers are daring skirmishers as fast as a Knight is strong.

  • Thieves open locks, disarm traps, stab backs, and get into places they shouldn’t.

  • Wizards are masters of weird lore, and have access to many many spells.

  A lot of these are familiar to people coming from D&D, and the individual articles about each will explain the differences.

  Anatomy of a Professional Template

  In this section we’ll go over how templates are described, and mention some things that are true for all of them.

  We always start with a general description of the profession, and then jump into the numbers.

  Basic Stats

  The starting stat line for the template. I’ll mention the values of the attributes and if any secondary characteristics are modified from that baseline.

  None of the templates have stats below 10, the human average. Adventuring is a dangerous profession and adventurers need to be very good at what they do. While you should still let the wizard decipher magic formulae and the barbarian lift heavy things, the wizard is not weak and the barbarian is not stupid. For the same reason, Perception and Will cannot be lowered by more than 4 levels (and you shouldn’t lower it at all if your IQ is 10 to begin with, in my opinion).

  Basic Speed is the stat that’s tweaked the most often, for min-maxing reasons. Professions that are meant to be particularly quick on the uptake have it at 7, others have it at 6, and if the natural calculation ends up at a fracional number it’s adjusted up or down to the appropriate level. Don’t lower it below 6, or you’ll have a hard time in combat.

  Characters of all professions can raise their stats up to 20, using either discretionary points at character creation or points earned in play. Will and Perception also have a maximum of 20, if raised separately from IQ.

  All professions can also raise HP and FP by an extra 1/3 above their base score. For example, a character with ST 15 could buy 5 extra HP for a total of 20.

  Each profession also has improved limits for the stats that make up their core competency, which we’ll see as we review each one.

  Advantages

  Every profession has a small set of advantages that are core to it and always present. They also have a set of discretionary advantages to choose from, with a budget limit detailed in the template.

  These discretionary advantages always include a set choices that amount to improved basic or secondary stats, and the first two levels of Luck. You can activate your Luck when you roll a test and don’t like the result. You then reroll it three times and pick the best result among those. The more levels you have, the more often you can do this in a session. As you might imagine, it’s important to every adventurer who wants to survive a long time!

  The other discretionary advantages are specific to your profession and can take you into one of several different directions within its definition. Kinda like D&D subclasses, but you end up assembling your starting class features.

  An advantage type that turns up quite often is the Talent. A Talent is a leveled advantage that adds its level to a specific set of skills, and usually gives another small boost related to its theme. This also includes what I call “Power Talents”, which enhance spells and rolls you use for certain powers, in addition to letting you learn those in the first place.

  Disadvantages

  The default scheme here is the same. Every profession has one or more stereotypical disadvantages that are always chosen, and then you pick more from a discretionary set until you hit the limit of -50 points. Reduced stats do count towards the limit, so if a professional template has those, it will have less miscellaneous problems.

  Discretionary disadvantages can also lead your character to a different kind of stereotype. Is your cleric an intolerant inquisitor, or a compassionate martyr? However, they’re also fuzzier. If you don’t like the stereotypical choices presented here, you are free to choose from any other disadvantage in the book as long as their total value doesn’t go over the limit. Want to have a chivalrous thief? Go right ahead!

  Skills

  This is divided into three subsections. The first one is for your character’s main weapon skills, and lets you chose between two or three “packages” representing the most iconic equipment for the profession.

  Next you have a list of primary skills related to your character’s core competency. Barbarians and scouts are good at outdoor survival, for example, thieves are sneaky, and clerics have to know all about their religion and its enemies. New characters always have all the skills from this list.

  And next you have a list of optional secondary skills. All templates have 7 points to spend here, 1 per skill. These are usually the sort of thing every delver learns to do at least a bit, like stealth, first aid, communicating via gestures, tying good knots, and so on. They also include things related to the template’s profession, but which are a bit more niche.

  Spells

  This last section is a bit fuzzier, as spells get a whole book all to themselves. Instead of having a definite list, this usually defines which spells you can learn, how many of them you start with, and what’s your starting skill level when you spent a single point on a spell. This closes out the template proper.

  Special Professional Traits

  This is where those increased stat limits are listed, and also where you find advantages and powers exclusive to that profession. These are also listed in the template under Advantages or Skills - here is where you find their detailed descriptions.

  Stuff that’s available to everyone is described in other chapters.

  Customization Notes

  This is where you get some tips as to what you pick depending on how you imagine your character. For spellcasters, this is also where you find example spell loadouts.

  This is also more or less where you’d start picking your Quirks. They’re not listed on the templates, but each character can choose up to five. These are little foibles and personality traits that don’t have any mechanical impact, but can help fleshing out your character’s personality. Each gives you an extra point to spend on stuff from your template, too!

  Many characters might want to instead spend their quirk points on extra starting money - each point spent this way gives you extra money equal to half your starting amount (which varies depending on your Wealth). This helps you start out with decent armor and other bits of expensive but important gear.

  Text Box: Team-Building

  This is some useful advice for making a Dungeon Fantasy adventuring party. Players should consult both with each other and with the GM when picking their templates. The typical campaign throws diverse challenges at the players, and these demand a diverse party. A group needs enough fighty types to survive combat, with a mix of ranged and melee attacks. They also need enough specialized problem-solvers like thieves and spellcasters to handle any weirder challenges that might pop up.

  That being said, the GM should advise the players about what types of challenge they can expect in the campaign, and which professions are more or less likely to be useful. A campaign that’s all about trekking through the wilderness will benefit more from barbarians, scouts and druids than from bards, thieves and knights. A campaign that takes place mostly in cities and underground ruins will be the reverse.

  Text Box: Membership Hath Privileges

  This box discusses why Dungeon Fantasy uses templates. It guarantees that each character has something unique to offer, makes essential adventuring capabilities harder to overlook, and lets each player focus on one “niche” and get good enough at it to tackle the game’s challenges.

  That’s also why every template has some built-in niche protection. For example, only clerics can cast healing spells, and while everyone can fight in melee the Knight is the best at it.

  That said, every trait does have a point cost, and the GM can allow any PC to buy it if it suits the campaign. While that might make the niches a bit fuzzier, it can also be a good way to cover for a “missing” template. At the most extreme end, you could just hand a point budget to your players and let them make whatever they want. In that case, the only thing you need to keep in mind are the pre-requisite traits for the various spell types.

  Any character can raise their basic stats to a maximum of 20 with earned points, and buy extra HP or Fatigue up to 1/3 of their ST or HT stat respectively. Each template has better limits for certain traits, and we’ll look at those in the template descriptions.

  I’ll add that the templates make character creation much faster than the free-form method, so even if you’re not using them as written it might be a good idea to start from a template and then change it to suit your tastes.

  Coming up Next

  A look at our first professional template: The Barbarian.

• Jul 11, 2026

  Let's Read Dungeon Fantasy Adventurers: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills

  I’m going to do something non-standard for me and read things out of order here. We just covered Chapter 1 of the book, but I’m going to skip Chapters 2 and 3 for now to talk about the three chapters that come after them: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills.

  I’m doing this because I feel knowing a bit about how these traits work will help understand the contents of Chapter 2 and 3, which are the real “meat” of the book as far as this Let’s Read is concerned. What I’m not doing is describing every trait in these chapters in detail. I’ll describe their general workings here, and talk about specific examples when they become relevant in the templates.

  Advantages

  Advantages have fairly straightforward basic mechanics. You pay character points equal to an advantage’s cost and you get the capabilities described in its text. Some advantages have levels, and those will list a cost per level and provide increasing benefits.

  Generally speaking, most advantages give you bonuses in certain narrow situations (on tests against fear, for example), or give you capabilities you can’t get in other ways (like a photographic memory, a danger sense, or good luck). Many of them also give bonuses to Reaction Rolls, and take the place of the generic Charisma attribute from D&D.

  Dungeon Fantasy is by default pretty strict about niche protection in templates, much more so than core GURPS. When spending earned character points to improve your character, you can buy any advantage listed on their template directly, even if it’s not yet on your sheet. If you want to get something that’s not listed there, you and the GM need to make sure you won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes.

  The list in this chapter is mainly for stuff that could be acquired by any character. The templates themselves also have mini-lists of exclusive advantages that cannot be acquired by delvers of other professions.

  Disadvantages

  Disadvantages have negative point costs, so they give you more points to spend elsewhere. For Dungeon Fantasy, the default disadvantage limit is -50. That’s the maximum amount of problems your PC can start with. Attributes lower than 10, and secondary characteristics lowered from their default calculated value both count against this limit.

  Many disadvantages can be “bought off” in play with earned character points. They can also be acquired in play, usually due to the kind of misfortune that can befall dungeon delvers. In this case, the disadvantage merely reduces your point total instead of giving you more points to spend.

  I like disadvantages because they’re great for defining a character’s personality. Some of them are even considered positive traits in real life, like Honesty and Selflessness, but are classed as disadvantages because they constrain the PC’s behavior.

  Many disadvantages are personality traits that have an attached Self-Control Number, which you choose when you acquire the trait. They’re usually the kind of trait that compels you to behave in a certain way that can be detrimental to you, like being Curious, Greedy, or Gullible. When you want to resist their pull, you can make a success roll against that self control number.

  The default is self-control number is 12. You can choose 15 instead and only get half the listed points for the disadvantage (since it’s less severe), or you can choose 9 or 6 to get more (and then you have to live with the consequences). Nothing else modifies this number. It doesn’t matter what your Will score is, or how many other mental defenses you have. And of course, you can always choose to succumb to your disadvantage without rolling, if you think it’d be fun or make for a good roleplaying scene.

  The book offers a neat solution for those cases where it isn’t clear or desirable to engage in the behavior implied by the disadvantage: when it comes into play, it gives you a -1 penalty per -5 points of its cost for whatever it is you’re trying to do. So the player of your typical horny bard isn’t forced to make a sleazy pass at every attractive person they meet, but they might occasionally need to weather a -3 penalty to their actions because they got distracted by that attractiveness.

  Finally, we have some disadvantages here that aren’t recommended for any starting character, but were included because they might be acquired in play. These are things like missing limbs, missing eyes, hearing impairment, and so on. There are ways to fix them with magic, but you will suffer their effects until that happens.

  Skills

  Advantages and disadvantages get a lot of attention, but skills are just as important a part of the system’s core. Most actions you perform regularly in an adventure are covered by skills.

  Skills have an associated level, which has no upper limit but is usually between 8 and 13 for your typical civilian. A skill level of 8 or 9 represents a hobby or a sideline, and a level of 12 or 13 probably applies to the skills a person uses to earn a living. As we mentioned in the introduction to Adventurers, that +4 modifier for routine tasks ensures a professional with a skill level of 12 will rarely fail to do their job.

  Delvers (and some monsters!) tend to have lots of skills at high levels. Our templates are usually calibrated to have their main skills at around a level of 16-20, several secondary ones at the 13-14 mark, and a few minor background skills at 9-10.

  A skill of 16 means you almost never fail under pressure, though any extra penalties that might apply for difficult tasks will reduce your chances. After 16 your basic chance of success stops increasing, since rolls of 17 or 18 are always failures - but you get better and better at absorbing those extra penalties.

  Each skill has a controlling attribute, which is either DX or IQ for 95% of them, and might be HT, Perception, or Will for the remainder. The skill’s level is always relative to that controlling attribute. If an attribute goes up, so does every skill associated with it.

  Skills also have a difficulty, which determines what their starting level is when you spend your first point in them. It can be one of Easy, Average, Hard, and Very Hard. The costs are always the same: 1 point for the starting level, 2 for the next one, and 4 points for every level thereafter. The different “starting positions” for the various difficulties ensure that a harder skill ends up costing more for the same skill level.

  Skills also have defaults, which are the numbers you roll against when you have no training in a skill. It’s always a much worse number than the one you’d get with even a point in the skill, and the harder the skill is, the worse its default. Really complicated skills might not have a default at all, and cannot be attempted without training.

  Some skills might have additional pre-requisites. The most common of those are spells, which can only be learned and used by someone with the appropriate magical aptitude advantages.

  Active Defenses

  These get their own entry because they’re a little special. They’re a big part of a character’s ability to survive combat, and might be more important than HP. We’ll likely get into more detail about combat rules when we look at them in the Exploits book, but here’s a preview so you can understand how defenses work.

  When someone attacks in combat, they make a success roll against the relevant weapon skill (plus modifiers). If they succeed, they threaten a hit, and the target must do something to avoid that. A target who is completely unaware of the attack or otherwise helpless has no choice but to get hit and take damage. Everyone else gets the chance to make an active defense roll.

  There are three possible defenses: you can Parry with your melee weapon or hands, you can Block with a shield, or you can Dodge. Parries are based on your skill with the parried weapon, and can handle most melee attacks. Blocks are based on the Shield skill and can stop ranged attacks as well, but obviously require a shield. These defenses have scores equal to (Skill/2) + 3. Dodging is good against everything and can be done multiple times in a turn without penalty, but it’s going to have a smaller score than the others because it’s equal to your Basic Speed + 3 and penalized by your encumbrance.

  Succeeding at your defense roll means you completely avoid the attack! This is not a contest - simple success is enough to protect you. This means anyone with defenses of 11 or higher due to high skill or specialized advantages is very annoying to fight. There are also several strategies attackers can adopt to try to reduce or nullify an opponent’s defense score, but we’ll get to them when we get to them.

  Differences from GURPS

  If you’re familiar with GURPS, then you’ll notice several differences in this more specialized version of it. It’s not trying to be fully generic, for starters: this means that every advantage, disadvantage, and skill that didn’t apply directly to the dungeon fantasy genre was removed.

  For skills, that mostly means anything that was too “high-tech” or out of genre. Your typical fantasy delver will never drive a truck or do a scientifically-accurate spacewalk.

  Advantages and disadvantages got the same treatment. Also gone are those traits you only see in monsters (like extra limbs and eyes) and all the social traits that could mess too much with the basic Dungeon/Town mechanic or otherwise interfere with your delving. You and your GM probably aren’t interested in all the mechanic and story complications that Rank and Status and Allies and Patrons and Enemies and Dependents can bring to a game.

  You can still have those things in the story, but the specific structure enforced by those traits doesn’t bind you. If you find that you really need that structure in your games, or that you really want to run the full Iron Gods adventure path, then GURPS might be of help.

• Jul 7, 2026

  Let's Read DF Adventurers, Chapter 1: Basics

  This chapter talks about the basics of character creation, and explains what the game’s most fundamental stats mean.

  The basic process of creating a character in DFRPG is simple: you go to chapter 2, pick a professional template, and select your final traits from several shopping lists presented in that template. This tends to be a lot faster than creating a character from scratch in core GURPS, particularly for people who are new to the system. We’ll talk more about the templates when we cover chapter 2.

  Character Points

  Each ability listed in those templates has a cost in Character Points, and each professional template has a total of 300 points worth of abilities. Their point total adds up to only 250, however, since they also have 50 points worth of “problems” that have negative costs and inconvenience the character in various ways. We’ll see later that you gain more character points as you play, and those can be used to either improve your abilities or get rid of those problems. There’s no special “XP” here like you might find in other games - the points you gain from adventuring and use to advance are the same kind as the ones you spent during character creation, and all trait costs remain the same.

  The concept of “zero to hero” does not apply here: templates are tuned to be seriously good at their main jobs from the start. I’d say they have roughly the same power as level 7 or 8 D&D 3.x characters, though there are some important differences in how they play that I’ll get into when we discuss chapter 2.

  Experienced GURPS players can try their hand at making freeform characters starting with the same 250/-50 total, though even in this case I’d recommend starting from a template and changing to taste - they’re just that useful.

  So what do these points get you? A character sheet is made up of several different types of traits. This chapter describes the two most basic types in detail, and mentions the others (which get their own chapters).

  Basic Attributes and Secondary Characteristics

  Basic Attributes, henceforth known as simply “attributes”, measure how strong, quick, and smart your character is and influence everything they do. Each one also helps determine one or more Secondary Characteristics, derived values that are just as important to your character. These characteristics can also be “fine tuned” and increased or decreased directly, again costing points or giving them back depending on the direction of change.

  Strength (ST) determines your capacity for dealing physical damage, your Basic Lift that measures how much you can lift and carry, and your hit points. GURPS HP does not have the abstract fuzziness of its D&D counterpart - its hit points are “meat points”. The meatier you are, the more HP you have. You can increase HP separately with points, but there are limits to this, so it remains fundamentally anchored to your beefiness.

  The sole mental attribute, Intelligence (IQ) is the basis for every mental skill in the game. It also determines your Perception and Will, which as you would expect are used for noticing things and resisting mental Bad Stuff.

  Dexterity (DX) is your overall agility and coordination. It’s the basis for nearly every physical skill in the game.

  Health (HT) is a measure of your stamina and your resistance to Bad Stuff of a physical nature, including unconsciousness and death when your HP goes below zero. A few physical skills that are more dependent on stamina than coordination are tied to HT. It also determines your Fatigue Points, which you spend in order to perform exhausting tasks or fuel special powers, including spells. Wizards need good cardio in this game!

  DX and HT together determine your Basic Speed, a number that can be fractional. This is how fast you can react, particularly in combat. Rounded down, this score becomes your Basic Move, which is how far you run in a combat turn. Both can be tuned separately, with Basic Move being much cheaper.

  Your Basic Move can be reduced if you’re carrying too much weight. How much is too much depends on your Basic Lift.

  You might notice that the functions of each attribute are a little… unbalanced. ST and HT have a few things they do, and are useful to characters who want to do those things well. DX and IQ are the basis for 95% of the game’s skills and everyone wants to have good levels in those. And this is why they cost 20 points per level to raise, while ST and HT cost 10.

  Finally, Size Modifier is a number representing how big you are in relation to a typical human. The vast majority of delvers are more or less human-sized and -shaped, and so have a 0 here and don’t need to think about it any further. Monsters, of course, have much more varied scores.

  Other Traits

  Each of these gets their own chapter later on, mainly because there are huge lists of them.

  • Advantages are special abilities or social edges your character possesses. Their chapter lists the stuff anybody might get, but each professional template also has access to a few exclusive ones.

  • Disadvantages are the “problems” mentioned earlier. They inconvenience you in several ways but give you more points to spend.

  • Skills let you do stuff in the game. They have levels relative to their associated attribute. As mentioned above, most are based on DX or IQ, though some use HT, Perception, or Will. Spells are also skills, available to characters with the proper advantages.

  • Quirks are small foibles or personality traits that are too “light” to cause a mechanical impact, but can help flesh out your character. Anyone can pick up to 5 quirks, each of which gives you a single extra character point to spend. These can be spent on extra traits, or to get extra starting cash to buy better equipment.

  Language, Please!

  Language gets a bit of boxed text here. While language is an acquired skill in real life, it’s treated as a “binary” advantage here. You either know a language or you don’t.

  As is usual in the dungeon fantasy genre, most sapient beings can speak and write a language called by the very original name of Common. All PCs get this one for free. Being illiterate in Common is a disadvantage worth -3 points.

  Other languages also exist. Most of them feature in ancient grimoires, magical scrolls, and enigmatic dungeon writings. Certain isolated cultures might also have their own languages, and their members might be unable or unwilling to speak Common. Spoken proficiency and literacy in a language cost 3 points each (i.e, it costs 6 points to know how to speak and write in a language).

  Cosmetic Details

  There are some traits that have less mechanical impact and mostly serve to flesh out your character. Age, ethnicity, handedness, gender, hair and eye color, height and weight, all of these things are purely cosmetic and do not affect your stats in any way.

  Age being entirely cosmetic is a big departure from core GURPS, which had a series of advantages and disadvantages about being young or old, as well as long- or short-lived. None of that costs anything here. As the joke goes, the lifespan of a delver is measured in months regardless of their biology.

  Handedness matters in that you get a penalty for wielding weapons and doing certain other tasks with your off-hand, but being right- or left-handed is a purely cosmetic choice. And you can buy the Ambidexterity advantage to ignore it altogether.

  Impressions

  GURPS is one of my favorite systems so I think it’s not surprise that I’m pretty fond of these basics. The use of templates is the big change over core GURPS here, and as I mentioned above I like them so much I wouldn’t try to start a game without them.

  While I don’t have a problem with the concept of disadvantages and the way GURPS handles them, you might! Several criticisms of it have popped up over the years, after all. In that case, you can easily ignore them by discarding that section of the templates and giving your characters 300 points to play with from the start.

  Next up: A deeper look into advantages, disadvantages, and skills.

• Jul 3, 2026

  Let's Read DFRPG Adventurers: Introduction

  

  Dungeon Fantasy: Adventurers is the first book in the boxed set, and is likely to be the most perused one since it contains all the information on how to create characters. It’s 128 pages long, and in its physical edition it’s a hardcover. I’m going to be reading from the PDF, and in this post we’ll cover everything that appears before Chapter One.

  Cover

  The cover which can be seen to the left above, is drawn by Brandon Moore, as are all the interior illustrations in the book. One neat thing about this particular illustration is that it’s one of a matched pair: the cover for Exploits can be seen on the right and shows what’s on the other side of the door.

  Quick Rules Reference

  The very first thing I see when going past the cover is a single page quick rules reference. If you’re completely new to GURPS, this isn’t going to make much sense yet, but it will be a good place to check mid-game.

  First it lists which of the game’s skills are associated with which of its attributes. Next we get a very short summary of how success rolls and difficulty modifiers work. There’s a basic rules summary later on in the introduction, so I’ll combine their descriptions below.

  Front Matter

  We then get the front matter page with the credits and copyright notices. The book was written by Sean Punch, with additional material contributed by most of the regular GURPS writers and freelancers.

  The Actual Introduction

  We begin with a basic explanation of what a role playing game is, with the usual definitions of the Game Master (GM), Player Characters and Non-Player Characters (PCs and NPCs), adventures, campaigns and so on. GURPS is a very traditional game, so there are no surprises here, but it’s a well-written and friendly introduction.

  Then we get to an good explanation of that Dungeon Fantasy is. They’re not legally allowed to say this is the specific genre of fantasy D&D belongs to, but I can.

  According to the book, some of the main assumptions of the Dungeon Fantasy genre are:

  • An medieval-ish world filled with anachronistic social developments like full gender equality, social mobility, and a cash economy.

  • A technological mish-mash whose only rules are “preindustrial” and “no gunpowder”.

  • Casual acceptance of magic and holy miracles.

  • Trade guilds for wizards, thieves, and even assassins.

  • “Adventurer” as a socially-recognized career choice.

  The intro proceeds to list the books in the boxed set and what they contain (which we already covered in the previous post).

  Basic Rules and Glossary

  Next comes a high-level description of the basic rules of the game, along with a glossary. I’ll go into a little more detail here because this will also serve as a handy reference for us.

  GURPS uses six-sided dice exclusively, and so it omits the number of sides from the traditional notation you might be familiar with. So “three six-sided dice” is written as “3d”, “four six-sided dice plus two” is 4d+2, and so on.

  There are a few types of rolls here, described in the glossary:

  A success roll is made on 3d. You want to roll a total that’s equal to or lower than your “effective skill level”, which is your skill level after situational modifiers. Modifiers apply directly to your skill level, which means positive modifiers are bonuses and negative ones are penalties. The difference between your roll and your effective skill level is your margin of success (or failure). Lower rolls are better. The reference sheet has a table with the probabilities of success for each skill level. It’s the expected bell curve, with 10 being 50% and changing quickly for every point higher or lower than that.

  A roll of 3 or 4 is a critical success, and a roll of 5 or 6 might be too if your skill level is high enough. A roll of 18 is a critical failure, and a roll of 17 can be either a critical or normal failure depending on your skill level. This means that skill levels over 16 don’t increase your chances of success, but they do make you better able to ignore penalties.

  A Quick Contest is when two people in opposition make a success roll and the one with the largest margin of success wins.

  A reaction roll is also 3d, and is used to find out what an NPC’s opinion of a PC is when that hasn’t been previously determined by the story. Here, higher is better, and modifiers apply to the total you roll on the dice.

  And finally damage rolls use a varied number of dice, depending on the specific attack. Just add them all up. Higher is better! There are more rules around damage in the combat chapters.

  You can also have other random rolls, for stuff like a pile of treasure containing 2d x 1000 coins and guarded by 4d skeletons.

  The reference sheet in the very first page has a preview of the difficulty modifiers that can apply to a success roll. There is usually a detailed way to figure them out, but you can also use the reference sheet to assess difficulties on the fly.

  A trivial non-adventuring task is a +6 or more. Why are you even rolling? A typical task performed outside of an adventuring context gets a +4 or +5, which explains how your typical NPC civilian can get through a workday with a skill of 9 or 10 without running into daily disasters. This goes all the way down to -6 for “memorably difficult adventuring tasks”.

  If you don’t want to slap a blanket negative modifier on a task, the reference sheet suggests assessing a -1 penalty for each negative adjective that applies to the task, or a -2 if that word also has an intensifier. Climbing a slimy wall is a -1. Climbing a horribly slimy wall is a -2. If you want to climb a perfectly smooth, horribly slimy wall with a steep negative incline, that’s going to be a -6. Memorably difficult indeed!

  Other terms in the glossary should be very familiar to us already, like “adventure”, “campaign”, “GM”, and so on. There are some hidden jokes here already, since one of the meanings given for the term “munchkin” is “An award-winning dungeon fantasy card game by Steve Jackson Games.”

  Rounding and Units

  In this game, you round costs and weights up, and everything else down. Character point costs are rounded up to the next integer, and if they’re negative that means rounding towards the positives. So 2.1 points becomes 3, and -2.9 becomes -2. In the DFRPG this rarely comes up.

  Weights and monetary costs are also rounded up, but you keep the first two decimal places. As for measuring units, the game uses the Imperial system, and this is actually the biggest pet peeve I have with GURPS since I grew up with Metric. The approximate on-the-fly conversions I use are: 1 yard is 1 meter; 1 pound is 0.5kg; 1 pint is 0.5l; 1 mile is 1.6km. This is usually enough for most games.

  There are two special units here, the hex (from a battle map) and the turn (an interval of action in combat time). Hexes are 1 yard wide from edge to edge, and are also used as units of area. Turns are 1 second long, and I had something to say about that a while ago.

  The Implied Setting

  The Dungeon Fantasy RPG has an implied setting, which is used to make certain concepts easier to explain and to be a minimally viable framework for a dungeon-crawling campaign. It’s not a very serious setting, being made of tongue-in-cheek cliches, but it follows all the basic assumptions of the genre that I outlined above, and adds a dusting of detail to make it act as a minimal backdrop to your dungeons.

  The medieval-ish world of our implied setting is more specifically “Western European-ish”, though this doesn’t get explicitly mentioned by the book. In better news, it doesn’t equate “European” with “white”, since there is noticeable ethnic diversity among the characters depicted throughout the book.

  At its most basic, the world of the PCs consists of their current dungeon and the town they’re in.

  The Dungeon is where adventure awaits. It can be literally the same megadungeon for the whole campaign, or might be a new one every adventure.

  Town has guilds and temples for the PCs to spend their treasure at, and a Town Watch to keep the peace. Guilds include the Merchant’s Guild who controls the shops, the Thieves’ Guild which is a crime syndicate, and the Wizard’s Guild who deals in magic items and “forbidden” spells. Temples worship “The Gods”, and will bless and heal you if you pay their fees-disguised-as-donations. The overall ruler of all towns is “The King”, and he has the “King’s Men” to intervene in situations where the Town Watch isn’t enough. Despite containing all this, town is fundamentally safe. Adventure happens out there, not in here.

  There’s no alignment but you do have opposing forces of supernatural, capital-letter Good and Evil. The latter are ruled by a being known as “The Devil”, who wants your soul. Not every monster you find will be capital-E Evil, but beings such as demons and “undead by choice” tend to be.

  You also have Elder Things who exist outside time, space, Good, or Evil, and which tend to cause madness in mortals.

  While not very inspired, all of this can very easily be replaced with more detailed stuff, either of your own creation or from a third party. Any setting that keeps to the list of genre assumptions from the introduction can be slotted into DFRPG almost without effort, and there are a ton of those (included, but not limited to, every D&D setting ever released plus Pathfinder’s Golarion).

  I think the game kinda expects you to replace its setting when you run a longer and more elaborate campaign, but if you’re only planning a one-shot dungeon romp, the default one is enough.

  Next: Chapter 1, with the Basics of character creation.

• Jul 2, 2026

  Let's Read the Dugeon Fantasy RPG!

  I began writing this article shortly after finishing my reading of the Neverwinter Campaign Setting, so it’s been in storage for a long, long time. But now that my blog posts about that solo Hell’s Rebels campaign have caught up to “real time”, I started thinking I needed someone else to post during the longer lulls in play. So why not this?

  This new series of Let’s Read posts is going both here in the blog and on the RPG.net forums, as usual, and one of the reasons I’m doing it is because I feel lots of people over at RPG.net would benefit from knowing more about this game. It’s also nice to get another regular GURPS-focused series in here.

  What is Dungeon Fantasy?

  “Dungeon Fantasy” is the name Steve Jackson Games invented for the genre of fantasy arguably pioneered by D&D: fantasy stories that are about a bunch of player characters going into dungeons, killing monsters, and looting treasure. Most of the works that fall within this genre are games, either tabletop or electronic games. D&D is the most famous but by no means the only one. Most of the fiction entries in the genre are based on games as well, with Amazon’s Vox Machina being a particularly famous entry based on an actual tabletop campaign.

  Among gamers the genre is often referred to as just “fantasy” or “medieval fantasy”, because the “dungeon” aspect is so ubiquitous that it ends up becoming invisible¹.

  And sure, you can use dungeon fantasy games to tell varied stories of intrigue, drama, and wonder, but their core gameplay loop remains dungeons, monsters, treasure. If you are using your dungeon fantasy game in its intended manner at all, these things will feature in your campaign at some point, and they’re likely to be important.

  What is the Dungeon Fantasy RPG?

  The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is part of Steve Jackson Games’ “Powered By GURPS” initiative, and was released in 2017 after a successful Kickstarter campaign. Powered by GURPS titles are fully standalone games that use the GURPS rule set as a base, and modify it to suit their purposes.

  I can confidently say it’s the chunkiest Powered By GURPS game, because the ones that came before were single-book affairs, and this one is a large boxed set. It removes everything from GURPS that’s not immediately relevant to the dungeon fantasy genre, but what remains is both plentiful and very close to the level of detail in base GURPS. It’s about as crunchy as either edition of Pathfinder, if you want a d20-based benchmark.

  Part of the reason for this wealth of material is that the DFRPG is a second edition of sorts. Much of it had been released as a line of supplements for GURPS, named “GURPS Dungeon Fantasy”. There’s dozens of them, and it’s possible we might get more. The boxed set takes a good chunk of that material, revises it, and packages it with the GURPS core rules you need. The two lines remain mostly compatible, but there are some important differences between them.

  If you’re interested in buying the game and are wondering which version to get, my recommendation in most cases is to get the DFRPG boxed set. The digital version is cheaper than a single D&D core book. The physical box is about double that, which still makes it half the price of a D&D core set. I reviewed it here when it came out, and in this series we’ll be taking a closer look at its contents.

  How will we do this?

  The boxed set contains five books:

  • Adventurers, which is your Player’s Handbook with nearly everything you need to make a character.

  • Spells contains the magic system and all the spells used in the game. You need this if you’re playing a caster.

  • Exploits, which is your Game Master’s Guide with everything you need to run the game.

  • Monsters, which is your Monster Manual. We’ll certainly be in familiar territory when we get here!

  • I Smell A Rat is an introductory adventure for starting delvers, with some twists since “starting delvers” means something quite different here than it does in D&D.

  My reading here will assume you know what RPGs are, but know nothing about GURPS or these books, but will necessarily be less detailed than those for the D&D Monster Manuals since there’s so much stuff to cover. Still, I hope it serves to give you a good idea of what this game is all about.

  1. There are “non-dungeon” fantasy games out there, of course, but we won’t be talking about them in this particular series. ↩

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