I started writing this post a few years ago when I was GMing the Iron Gods adventure path for Pathfinder using the Dungeon Fantasy RPG rules. My approach to that campaign was pretty slap-dash, and after I stopped I began thinking of a more structured way to do it. Since a recent comment here on the blog asked for specifics, I though I’d dust the post off and publish it.

Let’s say you have a Dungeon Fantasy game where you want your characters to get into contact with more advanced technology. How would you go about it?

Ultra-Tech Delving: A Survey

Steve Jackson games did a little foray into this area in Pyramid #3/60, in an article entitled “High-Tech Dungeon Crawl”, which focused on bringing modern-day characters with guns into fantasy dungeons to mow down orcs with autofire and take their stuff. This raises the inherent level of colonalism in the genre from “concerning” to “yikes!”1.

What I want to focus on here is in an older variation on the theme: fantasy characters exploring “dungeons” filled with elements you might be more used to seeing in science fiction stories. When I say “older”, I mean it’s older than D&D: Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign featured a whole ultra-tech city-state descended from the crew of a crashed spaceship, and it was played for several years before what became the OD&D rules were finalized and officially published. D&D proper would explore the same territory with its famous “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” module.

Pathfinder dedicates a whole kingdom in its setting to the idea: the land of Numeria is a barbarian kingdom where a giant spaceship crashed millenia ago, breaking up during atmospheric entry and scattering its many modules all over the region. And, of course, in Gamma World and other post-apocalyptic games all “dungeons” are ultra-tech because they’re the ruins of the futuristic civilization that preceded the apocalypse.

Ultra-Tech Delving in GURPS

GURPS is of course a uniquely well-suited system for this kind of thing. Its rules already support a wide range of genres and technology levels from the corebook onwards. We only need a few adjustments depending on the sort of campaign we want.

After The End already deals with the post-apocalyptic angle and offers a set of detailed rules. What I want, however, is something simpler and more suited to a Barrier Peaks/Numeria scenario. The ultra-tech stuff is alien, but characters can gain an understanding of it with some investment, and the gap between their usual medievalish milieu and the lofty heights of alien tech isn’t completely impossible to cross. How would I do it?

Tech Level, or the Lack Thereof.

So on one side we have the usual “medievalish” dungeon fantasy setting. In GURPS, that’s roughtly TL 4, but without gunpowder. On the other side we have a space-opera intrusion, which corresponds very roughly to a TL9-10 selection with a few outliers (personal shields are TL11-12, but they fit the flavor). With these vague numbers in mind, we can ditch the concept of Tech Levels completely for our treatment!

Default GURPS Tech Level rules are only useful for giving us a starting set of gadgets to work with. In actual play, the only thing that matters is if a given thing is “low-tech” and thus familiar to everyone, or “high-tech” and thus a mystery to the uninitiated. How to differentiate both? With the following advantage:

Tech Familiarity (10 points)

You have a layman’s knowledge of the basic principles behind the advanced technology scattered through your otherwise medieval fantasy world. You understand why it isn’t magic. You know about electricity and how it powers high-tech devices. You grasp enough of the high-tech design aesthetic to easily spot a device’s charging port or battery, its control surfaces (be they switches, triggers, or touchpads), its information displays, and its business end even if you don’t know what the thing actually does. You can identify the high-tech civilization’s writing even though you can’t read it, and you can identify its iconography for “danger”. You can also recognize hazards like exposed live wires, recognize which type of power cell goes into a device, and plug it in.

This is a form of Unusual Background that makes you immune to the sort of amusing accident which plagues other low-tech explorers confronted with high-tech devices.

More importantly, Tech Familiarity is a pre-requisite for learning high-tech skills, and the language of the high-tech civilization (if any). With this advantage, you can spend points on those things normally.

Yes, this is quite similar to High TL from the core book, but much cheaper. The reason is that paying 30-35 points in High TL to get the same benefits is way too expensive for a campaign in this mold. This advantage doesn’t give you any familiarity with deeper aspects of the high-tech civilization, just what’s in the first paragraph.

Tech Skills

Skills that would require a /TL specialization in standard GURPS rules have only two versions here: standard (no suffix) and “/Tech”. That way, you don’t need to change anything about how you write down a standard “medievalish” character.

The two specialties don’t overlap at all: they don’t default to each other, and can’t be used at all across the “tech divide”. If you only have standard Lockpicking, you can’t open a high-tech door with a magnetic lock. If you only have Lockpicking/Tech, you can’t open low-tech mechanical locks with old-fashioned picks, tough you might be able to operate a machine that does it for you.

High-tech weapons are usually firearms of beam weapons - the skills to operate them properly are always “/Tech” skills. High-Tech melee weapons are a possible exception to the “no defaults” rule above, though the GM would need to rule on each case:

Weapons that use the same skill as their low-tech counterparts can be used normally by anyone if the only difference is in their construction (such as a superfine or hyperdense blade). If they have some additional feature that requires power (such as a vibroblade or shock baton) then the character has a -2 penalty to use that feature unless they have Tech Familiarity. If they require an exclusive skill to operate (like a force sword or monowire whip) then that skill has the “/Tech” suffix. You might be able to get away with a default to a low-tech skill here, but the only way to improve on that is to buy Tech Familiarity and the high-tech skill.

Ultra-Tech Gear

With the character stuff out of the way, we can talk about the goodies! As I mentioned above, one advantage of GURPS is that it has entire books of high- and ultra-tech gadgets that can be plugged straight into your fantasy campaigns. Therefore, we don’t need to talk about how to stat this stuff up at all! What we do need is talk about the effects it’s going to have on your campaign, which in turn will aid you in selecting which items to include.

How much is this stuff worth?

A vital question in the dungeon fantasy genre! Going more or less by the book, high-tech items should be worth roughly 30 times their list price in a dungeon fantasy setting. That makes even a relatively innocuous gadget into a major piece of loot!

This might seem a bit too much for a dungeon fantasy setting where magic and magic items are relatively common, but I think it kinda makes sense. Ultra-tech items are going to be a lot rarer than magic items, particularly in settings where they come from that single crashed spaceship. They work regardless of the local mana and sanctitiy levels. And they can be enchanted! These are exactly the same reasons why a suit of fine plate armor costs more than a standard suit enchanted with Lighten 1.

Example: A superfine broadword would cost $3600 in its native ultra-tech society. Recovered from a crashed spaceship in a dungeon fantasy setting, it’s worth $108,000!

That sword gives a +2 bonus to damage and a (2) armor divisor. The closest “low-tech” equivalent would be a very fine sword with a Penetrating Weapon enchantment, worth $17,000, almost ten times cheaper. Even if all the bonuses were from magic, it would still cost only $25,600. However, the superfine blade will lose none of its functionality in a low- or no-mana zone, and it could be enchanted with the same magic as the low-tech sword to become even better.

If you do think that this is too much, you could say that the value of ultra-tech gear is capped by the value of magic items with similar properties. The sword from the example would be worth $17,000 then. Gear that has no magical equivalent might still use the “uncapped” price.

Timeworn Gear

One concept from Pathfinder that’s useful to borrow is that of timeworn items. In Barrier Peaks-style setups, most of the high-tech stuff the PCs come across has been sitting around in derelict ruins for a very long time; even if it was very well-built, it might not have withstood the passage of the ages intact. To model that, we introduce the following equipment modifier:

Timeworn: This can be applied to any high-tech armor, weapon, or device that requires power or ammunition to function. These items can’t be recharged. After whatever reserves they contain when found are used up, they’ll break down and become useless. They may also have other quirks arising from their almost-broken state at the GM’s discretion. Divide final price by 10.

Weapons and Armor

Weapons and armor deserve special mention because Dungeon Fantasy is a combat-heavy genre, and this combat has a very specific “feel” to it. Therefore, high-tech combat gear will have an outsize impact on it.

Baseline Dungeon Fantasy suggests that PCs should have a maximum total DR of about 15, as anything more than that will make them invulnerable to too many monster attacks.

PC damage also has some upper bounds. Spellcasters with missile spells and a spellcasting talent of 6 can do a maximum of 18d damage, though that requires enough setup to only be possible about once per fight, and not on all fights. The maximum amount of “at-will” melee and ranged damage a PC can do is equivalent to about 7d per attack23.

Introducing ultra-tech armor into the game almost certainly means you’re going to exceed the DR cap. Even non-combat safety gear at these tech levels has as much DR as low-tech plate, while being much lighter. Proper combat armor is much tougher. Most of the published DF enemies will have trouble getting past the DR of a PC in full ultra-tech armor with their physical attacks.

Similarly, high-tech weapons can change the shape of combat in your campaign. Dungeon Fantasy usually considers melee to be the main event and ranged combat to be a specialist niche, but if guns and beam weapons are common these two are going to swap places.

Ultra-tech melee and ranged weapons can also allow PCs to approach or exceed the upper damage bounds described above much more easily. Both “boundaries” are roughly equivalent to rolling 7d of damage per attack. A force sword does 8d; a laser rifle does 6d, and can can fire many more shots per turn than a bow with no penalty. Both of those have armor divisors too, which make enemy DR become much less of an obstacle.

The first step when addressing these issues is to carefully consider which items are available. What do you want your campaign’s new DR cap to be? What is the highest armor divisor you’re comfortable with? What sort of maximum damage do you want your PCs to do with a melee or ranged attack they can use every second? And, to quote Mister Torgue from Borderlands 2: EXPLOSIONS?

The second step is to consider the same thing from the side of the opposition: what’s the highest DR and damage you estimate they will be able to routunely bring to the table? The gear available to the PCs should give them a chance to match those figures.

You can then safely remove anything that exceeds your new planned limits. That will end up giving you a pretty good set of guidelines for what the ultra-tech culture and their ruins look like. A civilian medical lab infested with non-sapient monsters and low-tech looters might have plenty of medkits and wonder drugs, but no weapon heavier than a couple of timeworn electrolasers and some scalpels the thief can use as superfine daggers. For a military base filled with killer robots and with a tank at the end as a boss fight, the sky is the limit, though those anti-tank weapons might all be timeworn if you don’t want the PCs using them outside.

  1. The article itself includes a section titled “The Sociological Ramifications are Appalling”. ↩

  2. A ST 20 Knight with Weapon Master and a halberd can easily attack twice every turn and do 3d+13 per attack. This is theoretically possible right out of character creation if your knight is a half-ogre. ↩

  3. A ST 20 Scout with Weapon Master and Strongbow might be able to shoot once per turn and do about 4d+10 per shot. This particular boundary is hard to reach, so your highest “at-will” ranged damage will probably be less than that. ↩