“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.