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Let's Read DFRPG Adventurers: Introduction
Some of the covers fit together! 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:
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An medieval-ish world filled with anachronistic social developments like full gender equality, social mobility, and a cash economy.
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A technological mish-mash whose only rules are “preindustrial” and “no gunpowder”.
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Casual acceptance of magic and holy miracles.
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Trade guilds for wizards, thieves, and even assassins.
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“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.
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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:
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Adventurers, which is your Player’s Handbook with nearly everything you need to make a character.
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Spells contains the magic system and all the spells used in the game. You need this if you’re playing a caster.
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Exploits, which is your Game Master’s Guide with everything you need to run the game.
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Monsters, which is your Monster Manual. We’ll certainly be in familiar territory when we get here!
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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.
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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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Let's Play Hell's Rebels: The Many Steps Monastery, Session 2
Intro
This post is part of my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign, and will probably be mostly GM-focused. Now that I’ve decided to break the “1 scene, 1 post” rule, I thought maybe I could do one where I just post the planning for the stuff I intend to play through next.
In our last post covering this delve, our heroes managed to progress through roughly half of the Monastery dungeon level. This is mostly because they’re using what they learned about the layout of the place and disposition of enemy forces to make a beeline towards where those forces are. They’re also just marking loot caches for later retrieval instead of stopping to count coins, which speeds up the proceedings by a lot.
Their progress, and the fact that the alarm is raised, means we have two encounters left in the delve. There’s a possibility they will merge to become a single one, but we’ll see how that shakes out in actual play.
[GM] Preparation: The Common Room (F6)
The original adventure places five more Asmodean Redactors here along with the Lout, an enslaved half-ogre whose brain has more or less turned into tapioca from many years of torture, brainwashing and mind control magic. The redactors attack at once. The Lout interprets his orders in a very literal manner so he does nothing until the PCs actually try to cross the door to the gardens that he’s been told to guard.
I don’t like this. As I had the opportunity to see during this delve, Asmodean Redactors are kinda boring opponents for our PCs on their own. And for a variety of reasons I’m not going to get into here Pathfinder 1e ogres are icky, half-ogres are super icky, and the Lout is super-duper-icky.
So let’s change things up a bit, shall we?
We’ll leave three of the redactors in place. The other two will be replaced with Asmodean Dark Adepts, which as we already saw make perfect stand-ins for more senior redactors. And instead of the Lout, we’ll have two hastily summoned Tar Devil Guards, because we know that adepts are good at summoning tar devils. Unlike the ones we faced back in Scene 02, these do have access to their tar net attacks.
I can also say that this is an activation of Jade’s Monster of the Week disadvantage that she gets from being The Sixth Raven. The adepts worked together to summon one devil, but got two because one of them is the same guy our heroes fought back in Scene 02. After being defeated and therefore banished back to Hell, he started spreading the news that the “Raven brat” was back in town. So when he got summoned again he pulled in a buddy to show him it was true.
So here is our new encounter: 3 Asmodean Redactors, 2 Dark Adepts, 2 Tar Devil Guards. Both the adepts and the devils are very “grabby” opponents, so we’ll likely use plenty of Fantastic Dungeon Grappling attacks. This will let the plain redactors do some backstabbing too. And there are enough opponents here that the party starts out slightly outnumbered and might have some trouble shutting down the grabbiness before it can start.
No loot conversions yet. There will be an entire session just for that.
[GM] Preparation: Meditation Gardens (F7)
This is easy. It’s just Nox and her pet hell-hound. Nox is pretty menacing by herself and that regeneration can make her a tough nut to crack, but our delvers do have access to some Holy damage and as the original book notes there’s a stream right there that can be used to drown her. She also lacks much in the way of mental defenses, so there’s a chance our PCs will be able to shut her down with “control” abilities.
So let’s add a little emergency measure to her. A “contingency scroll” affixed to her armor with a wax seal that activates when she gets stunned and summons a pair of Lemures to act as a distraction. Not the most spectacular trap in the world, but it’s what they could do on short notice.
Nox will pay attention to what happens in Room F6. She and Mephiry will move from their spot to join the fight there if it seems the PCs are having too easy a time dealing with the guard detail on the other room. Otherwise they’ll stay here and wait for the wounded and weakened party to make their way to her, to better savor their despair when they see who’s waiting at the end (she doesn’t know they know).
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Hell's Rebels Bestiary: Scrivenite
These monsters were detailed in the mini-bestiary that comes with Hell’s Rebels Adventure 01. A single one of them, Yiliv, appears in the entire campaign, in the first dungeon room of Scene 14.
The Lore
Scrivenites are chronicler spirits that, in Pathfinder, hail from the outer planes of absolute law. They have perfect memories and an obsession with chronicling and preserving history. When they appear on the physical world, they’re usually performing some sort of field research or hunting down an obscure text. They can also be summoned and bound by people with the knowledge of the appropriate rituals.
A scrivenite looks like a book! Its cover has a pattern that kinda looks like a face or helmet in it, and they can open up to project a diffuse “body” made out of swirling pages and long, undulating bookmark ribbons. They fight by slashing at people with those pages and ribbons. The paper cuts aren’t that bad by themselves, but they also deliver a magical curse that extracts some of the target’s memories and creates a magic book out of them. This is known as a “soul tome”. Subsequent cuts steal more memories and make the soul tome more elaborate and complete.
Soul Tomes: How do they work?
Each hit from a Scrivenite inflicts a cumulative -1 penalty to all IQ-based tests for the victim (Per and Will are unaffected). Someone who accumulates a penalty equal to their IQ has all of their memories drained goes into a coma. The penalty persists until the memories are restored. Any level of Magic Resistance prevents the effect.
Victims can restore their memories by reading their own soul tomes (which takes 30 minutes per point), or via the Dispel Magic, Remove Curse, or Restore Memory spells, which are resisted with skill 15. Either of these methods cause the book to crumble to dust if successful.
Soul tomes aren’t any tougher than mundane books and can be destroyed in the same ways. If a book is destroyed before the victim regains their memories, magic can still restore them. If it’s the victim who dies first, the book remains, and becomes entirely mundane. The original adventure makes sure to emphasize that the soul of the departed regains its memories and goes on to its usual destination.
Fighting A Scrivenite
When fighting a scrivenite, the most important thing is to not get cut. The Diffuse nature of their bodies makes them nearly impervious to physical weapons. Their book-cover heads are still solid, though, despite being armored, and might be better targets. If you don’t have the skill to consistently hit their Skull or Face hit locations, though, you should use fire.
Restoring memories lost to their curse is not particularly hard, but it’s kind of annoying and time-consuming unless you have ready access to one of the three spells mentioned above in the field. So you might end up having to endure that penalty for a while until you can spare a few hours for reading your biography.
The Numbers
ST 10; DX 14; IQ 14; HT 10;
HP 10: Will 14; Per 14; FP 10;
SM 0 (-5 in book form); Speed 6; Move 6 (flight with Hovering);
DR 5 (head); 0 (elsewhere);
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Bookmark Slash (15): 1d-2 (2) cut plus linked Soul Tome.
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Soul Tome: See above for how this works.
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Turtle Up: The scrivenite retracts its “body” into its head, becoming a sturdy SM -5 book with DR 5, and gaining a +2 to Camouflage to pass as a mundane tome.
Relevant Traits: Fragile (Unnatural), Injury Tolerance (Diffuse, not vs. fire, not against head hits), Photographic Memory, Vulnerable (x2, Fire).
Relevant Skills: History-18, Camouflage-14, Stealth-14.
Tweaking The Numbers
Scrivenite are relatively weak melee combatants compared to most delvers, which is why I decided to make their Soul Tome curse take effect automatically on any hit. The greatest danger here isn’t that it will kill you, but that it will saddle you with a long-term mental penalty that will get in the way as you delve the rest of the dungeon.
If you want to make them stronger, you can increase the skill level and damage of their attacks, perhaps even to Sword Spirit (Monsters, p. 55) levels. To make the curse weaker, you can make it resistable (15 vs. Will). Combining both makes it a primarily physical combat threat despite its brainy lore.
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Let's Play Hell's Rebels: The Many Steps Monastery, Session 1
Intro
If you’re reading this, it means we’re officially caught up with my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign. This means future updates will be spaced further apart, but they will still happen.
Anyway, in the previous scene, our heroes completed the first level of Adventure 01’s capstone dungeon. In this one, we’ll begin to tackle the second level.
The entire level will be Scene 14 by the standard of Mythic, though I’ll break it apart into multiple posts so as to not keep y’all waiting for new updates. I’ll play my “sessions” as time and whim permit, and post an update once I have a good chunk of text.
To recap, this is the former hideout of the Secret Order of Archivists, which used the abandoned Hocum’s Fantasmagorium on the surface as a cover for the underground Many Steps Monastery. The whole place has been raided by Thrune’s forces in the Night of Ashes several weeks ago, and is currently being occupied by a force of Asmodean redactor-priests who are mopping up the last vestiges of the raid before abandoning the site. Nox is also here, and our PCs will hopefully get to deal with her in this scene.
[GM] Procedure Review
As in the previous scene, I’m preparing each room as the PCs get into it. You can also refer to this link for an overview of the walls and doors in this level, and of the procedure I’m using to conduct the delve.
This is a single delve, so we start counting our turns from where we left off in the previous scene.
There is a minor update here that I forgot to note in the previous scene: Jania got stabbed by one of the redactors in the final fight of the level, and was healed back to full by the expenditure of the healing gem Rosalia was carrying.
[Player] Delving the Many-Steps Monastery
Turn 12
The party descends the spiral staircase that links the levels. It’s quite long! Urist fondly reminisces that this is the reason why they named their hideout the “Many-Steps Monastery”. Most of the party silently groans at the pun, while Rosalia spends the rest of the descent quietly chuckling to herself.
Turns 13-15
The heroes descend from the stairs into a huge, well-lit library that sadly lies mostly ruined (F1 on the map). The floor is decorated with a rune Urist says is sacred to the god Irori, but it’s also marred by dried bloodstains. Most of the shelves have been cleaned out, with the few remaining tomes piled carelessly in a corner.
Before they can further explore this place, one of the books in the pile opens on its own and rises to the air, letting out a noisy cloud of fluttering pages that begins swarming in the rough shape of a humanoid body, with the book covers as the head.
The group begins to ready their weapons, but the creature raises its arms in a conciliatory gesture.
“Greetings, intruders. I am Yiliv,” it says. “I am bound against my will to stop any intruders such as yourselves from getting through that door,” and then it points to the closed door in the west map-west wall. “However, the one who commands me has neglected to provide any instructions on what to do to those who remain on this room. Would you like to talk for a while?”
They catch on to the spirit’s meaning almost immediately, and then fill Arcturus in. The next little while is spent interrogating Yiliv about his history and what he knows of the complex.
Yiliv is a type of spirit known as a scrivenite. They’re all about gathering and preserving knowledge. They also are not averse to sharing that knowledge (“unlike certain other entities”). He was summoned and bound for a limited time by someone whose identity he is forbidden from disclosing. This person bribed him into accepting the binding with the opportunity to read a rare tome, but his tasks up until now have been mostly contrary to his own nature and disposition.
The spirit aided in the raid against the Monastery (“a ghastly affair”), and used his abilities to produce soul tomes on several captives as a form of interrogation. With the main portion of that work done, he is now tasked with guarding the passage into the next room until his binding expires in a a little under two months.
He can tell the complex currently houses four Asmodean redactors in the artifact recovery room, “playing with a defective dimensional gate”. Five more plus a summoned devil are in the common room, redacting documents. Nox and her pet hellhound are also somewhere in the complex, probably at the meditation garden. Yiliv is bound to raise a telepathic alarm as soon as anyone tries to cross the forbidden threshold, but the PCs have free rein of the room until they try to do so. Should he be destroyed in the material world, he will reform in his home dimension, free of the contract.
Most of the party listen pretty closely to what he has to say, though Rosalia wanders off to look around and spots what seems to be a still-locked secret panel. She makes a note of it for future looting, seeing as they’re kinda busy with an upcoming raid at the moment.
Turn 16
When it seems like the heroes and Yyiliv have exhausted all the possible topics of friendly conversation, the spirit again warns that he will have to fight them should they move to cross the threshold, and that his orders force him to telepathically warn the Asmodeans in the rest of the complex about the party’s coming.
With nothing else to say, the party draws their weapons, Jade makes a dueling salute, and the fight is on.
It’s not much of a fight, really. Jade immediately steps forward and slashes at Yiliv’s book-cover “face”, damaging the spirit. He fails the ensuing stunning and knockdown roll, and then Jania runs in with a somewhat uncharacteristic Heroic Charge and whacks the pile of pages with her stick, which was still charged with that Deathtouch scroll from the previous floor. The direct injury from that is enough to destroy Yiliv’s material form and banish him back home.
The spirit did fully intend to fight to the best of his ability, but the dice were not with him this time. Even if he had survived turn 1, he wouldn’t have much chance by himself against the whole party, though he might have inflicted some difficult-to-remove penalties on them.
Jania is glad to be rid of the active spell. That thing was unsafe! She’s also itching to check out that hidden panel which is surely full of goodies, but that will have to wait. Despite not lasting even a second against the party, Yiliv did raise the alarm, so everyone in this level knows they’re coming. Time to go loud.
Turn 17
The party proceeds through the door Yiliv was guarding, going down a long flight of stairs and turning to the left. They keep going down a wide hallway and stop when it branches to their left. The branch is a narrow corridor with three doors, which Urist knows that leads to a couple of closets and one of the sleeping chambers for the higher-ranking archivists (F3a), and he goes down and opens the doors to confirm that the corresponding rooms are empty.
Rosalia does the same with another door on the main corridor (F2), which leads to a smaller bedroom that shows signs of recent use but is currently empty.
Turn 18
The party proceeds down the wide hallway, and turns left again to what Urist tells them is an artifact vault where the Order kept dangerous and cursed items (F4). The scene here is quite grisly. Most of the shelves are empty and smashed, and the room is dominated by a massive web of chains and shadows that emerges from a metal cube at the center of the room. Impaled on some of the chains is a corpse wearing redactor robes, and which is smelling quite ripe.
It looks as though the chains exploded outwards from the artifact, and that this happened quite some time ago given the victim’s advanced state of decomposition.
Jania believes the artifact is a cubic gate, which opened to some chain-themed area of the outer planes - there are several of those. The thing is probably broken now, but even in this state it would be quite valuable to the right collector. Urist confirms it’s a gate.
Carefully, Jania approaches the cube at the center of this mess and by twiddling with the runes on its surface manages to deactivate it. The chains disappear with a poof, causing both the body and the gate to fall to the floor, the artifact’s magic now completley burned out.
And then, suddenly, ninjas!
[GM] Preparing the ninjas
The original adventure places four asmodean redactors hiding around this room, despite their stat blocks having no stealth skills. They wanted to see what the PCs would do with the gate, and they attack once it’s disabled.
I want to spice things up a bit, since standard redactors don’t feel like they’d be a challenge to this group. Let’s replace one of them with an Asmodean Dark Adept that I first used back in Scene 2.
[Player] Back to the Delve
Turn 19
The heroes hear a loud finger snap and suddenly find themselves surrounded by redactor monks! One of them has more elaborate robes, and is the one who snapped his fingers to dispel the invisibility that concealed the enemies. “Get them!” he shouts, and battle is joined!
This lot manages to make a better showing than the ones from the upper level, mostly because they start out surrounding our heroes. The Dark Adept ensnares Urist with his Dark Tendrils spell early on, and most of the other PCs have to turn to engage the redactor closest to them. Art is free, however, and since he has the Move for hit he decides to run all the way across the room and slam into the adept, disrupting his concentration and his spell as well as injuring him.
The rest of the fight is marked by a series of backstab maneuvers of varying effectiveness. A redactor tries it on Art but fails to penetrate his armor. Rosalia stuns a redactor and then Jania kills him with a knock to the skull from behind. Rosalia then runs down and backstabs the Dark Adept, who as a final act of defiance runs to flank her and then backstabs the bard. Urist kills the adept with a Sunbolt spell, and then Jade, having dealt with her initial opponent, approaches the grappled redactor and backstabs him.
This happened over the course of about four rounds in total, and it really underscores the importance of positioning, particularly when we’re doing Lancer-style initiative. If someone walks up behind a character, and then manages to activate again before that character, they’re going to get that free attack from starting their turn behind the opponent. Everyone here was pretty mobile, and the redactors got to use that for once instead of getting bogged down against a solid defense formation.
Urist heals Rosalia back to full health with a Major Healing spell. There’s probably loot to be had here (the ruined gate is still very valuable), but the party presses onward for now.
[GM] Intermission
Our group went through rooms F1 through F4 in this post, and it took me about 8 hours to do everything from drawing the dungeon map to statting up Yiliv to running the combats on Foundry, with a good hour or so of that being dealing with Foundry updates. There’s an incompatibility between the Lancer Initiative module and GURPS Game Aid that forces me to dive into the later’s code and make some hacky edits whenever it’s updated.
We have a couple more big fights coming up on F6 and F7. The F6 fight was against yet more redactors and an ogre, but I thik I’ll spice it up a bit with variant stat blocks. F7 is Nox and her hell hound, and there’s a big chance both fights might blur together as the F6 folks retreat into F7 or Nox comes out to help. I’ll need to “compile” both before I run them.
Our PCs are in raid mode right now so they’re just marking found loot for later retrieval. After we deal with Nox we’ll have a whole scene about collecting and tallying the loot.
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