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