We already went through the basics in chapter 1, character creation in chapters 2 and 3, and a whirlwind tour of the advantages, disadvantages and skills in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Now it’s time for the chapter covering equipment and treasure. In this post we’ll cover the monetary system and talk a bit about weapons. In the next ones we’ll also cover armor, miscellaneous gear, and magic items.

Being a GURPS variant that can change whatever they want, DFRPG didn’t have to go hard on the detail for encumbrance and gear. Yet they chose to do so anyway, because according to our introduction in this chapter resource management is a traditional part of the genre that many find fun. What corners will you cut in consumables like arrows, potions and food in order to get that nifty weapon or armor? What will you choose to leave behind to drag that sack of treasure back to town? How smug will you feel when you realize you packed everything you needed and nothing you didn’t to that expedition?

If that sounds fun to you, you’re in the right game! If it didn’t, well, at least you’ve been warned. Our first section is about buying and selling gear, so we’re going in order of importance here.

Money Money Money

The symbol used for money here is the “$”. In standard GURPS they call this the “GURPS dollar”, and explain it means different things in each setting. In the DFRPG, it means “one copper coin”.

Dungeon Fantasy coins are, not coincidentally, identical to the ones used by D&D and Pathfinder. There are 50 of these chonky disks to the pound no matter what they’re made of. Unlike D&D of PF coins however, their values here increase by a factor of 20 as you climb up the hierarchy. So if a copper coin is $1, a silver coin is $20, and a gold coin is $400. Gold coins are also valuable and soft enough that they’re commonly cut into halves, quarters or eights. Delvers love gold because it packs the most value into the least weight.

There are coins made of weirder metals with in-between values, but those are not in this book. You might find them as treasure, though.

Every PC starts with $1000 to buy their starting gear. This is modified by the PC’s Wealth. PCs who have that as an advantage get more, those who have it as a disadvantage get less. They can also exchange character points for extra money at $500 per point - a common use for those 5 points obtained from quirks.

Buying

Item prices assume the most typical conditions possible - a typical sale by an ordinary merchant at a time and place where there’s neither a surplus not a shortage. Everything costs list price at character creation, but world events might change that during play.

This does mean we’re not assuming “Gold Rush” prices as the default like D&D does, but you’ll still find some items here are ridiculously expensive anyway. The Exploits book will describe some tricks you can try to get stuff cheaper.

If you really like an item you can spend character points on the Signature Gear advantage to give it some narrative protection. That advantage costs 1 point per $500 of the item’s value.

Delvers usually live out of inns and such, so it costs $150 a week to live in town. Again there are tricks to reduce this in Exploits.

Selling

You don’t need to sell coins, of course - they’re already money. Ingots or unshaped lumps of precious metal are also money, they just make the merchants and bankers reach for their scales.

Everything else will sell in town for a percentage of its “true” value that’s proportional to the Wealth of the character doing the selling. That trait also represents the quality of the PC’s abstract business contacts, you see.

Average-wealth PCs, the default, sell loot at 40% of its value. Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable for the party to ask their richest member to handle all the selling. Winning a Quick Contest of the Merchant skill versus a “generic” value of 15 will add 10% to that value (so from 40% to 50%, for example).

Weapons

Every single PC is going to need at least one weapon. Which one depends on what they can carry, wield, and afford. This section goes on to explain weapon stats, and then gives us the big weapon tables.

This is where the character’s Damage stat comes into play. It’s derived from Strength and includes two different dice expressions, Thrust and Swing, which is also the name of what kind of attack they’re for. The two start out pretty close but Swing increases much faster as you get stronger, to represent the benefits of the lever effect. A weapon’s damage stat is expressed in terms of the wielder’s Thrust (thr) and Swing (sw) values, combined with a damage type.

For example, a sword might do sw+1 cutting ot thr+1 impaling damage, and when wielded by a ST 13 character (sw 2d-1 / thr 1d+1) that would become 2d cut or 1d+2 imp. We’ll learn more about damage types when we talk about combat.

Weapons also have a ST rating which tells you how strong someone must be to use the weapon. This will only be a problem for human delvers when it comes to the heaviest of weapons, but halflings likely have to be more watchful here.

For bows and crossbows, you read their ST stat as their rated strength. The value on the table is the weakest possible rated strength for that weapon. They can be built “stronger” at no extra cost. A character still needs to be at least that strong to handle the weapon, but any ST they have above that score is “wasted” and doesn’t go into figuring damage or range. Being “stronger” than your bow doesn’t let you pull it back any further than its own physical limit.

The Melee Weapons Table gives us everything you’d expect out of a dungeon fantasy game.

Axes and Maces are cheap and have decent damage but tend to be unbalanced - you can attack or parry with them in a given turn, but not both. The two-handed varieties have high damage but are more expensive, heavier, and so unbalanced you might need to spend a whole turn getting the weapon ready again after attacking with it.
Swords of all kinds are balanced and versatile, with both swinging and thrusting attacks. However, they are very expensive. If you don’t have the cash for a real sword, you can use the same skill with balanced clubs and staffs by holding them like swords.
Knives are cheap, but their short blades give them relatively poor damage and a defense penalty. When wielded with fencing skills, their damage remains poor but their defensive ability increases by a lot.
Fencing skills can also be used with several types of specialized sword like rapiers or smallswords. These tend to have slightly worse damage than other swords and be more expensive, but give fantastic defensive bonuses when used with the right skills.
Spears and polearms have excellent damage-to-price ratios, though most of them require two hands to use. Polearms are unbalanced on swinging attacks, though those can be devastating. Spears are always balanced, because they only have thrusting attacks.
Staffs can be wielded like swords or spears, and also with their own skill that gives a better defensive bonus.
Flails and nunchakus are hard to use and unbalanced, but they’re also hard to defend against.
Funnily enough, Unarmed Attacks also appear on the weapon tables. Bare-handed punches and bare-footed kicks are free and accessible to every humanoid delver, of course, but you also learn how wearing brass knuckles, metal gauntlets, or boots affects their damage.

The Ranged Weapon Table has everything you expect and some things you don’t.

Bows of all sizes have excellent range, with damage ranging from middling to great as their size increases. Price also increases accordingly.
Crossbows are heavier and take longer to reload, but do more damage. You can use a crossbow that’s stronger than you at no penalty, but it will take a lot longer to reload.
Slings are hard to use but they do damage based on the character’s Swing instead of Thrust. Their ammo is pretty cheap.
We have many types of thrown weapon: spears, axes, knives, shuriken, darts, even boomerangs. Some of these can also be used in melee and appear on those tables as well. They tend to have shorter ranges than the dedicated ranged stuff, and their “ammo” is really expensive since each “shot” is a whole new weapon. But their damage can be pretty good, since some of them use Swing to determine damage.
Spear-throwers are devices that extend the range of thrown darts and spears and let their damage use the PC’s Swing value instead of their Thrust.
And you also have some oddballs: lassos, nets, and blowpipes.

There’s a box-out ammunition table here too, containing blowpipe darts, arrows, crossbow bolts, and several options for slings: unshaped rocks (free, crappy), shaped rocks, and lead pellets (more expensive, better). There’s a type of crossbow called a Prodd that fires lead pellets instead of bolts.

Weapon Modifiers

Any weapon that’s not an uncovered natural appendage can have Modifiers, which improve its inherent traits and make it cost more. These aren’t magic bonuses, but facts about a weapon’s construction. They can live alongside and stack with more traditional enchantments. Not all modifiers can apply to all weapons.

The modifier categories here are pretty intuitive, but just in case there’s a few paragraphs listing which weapons fall into each one.

Each modifier has a “Cost Factor”. To figure out the final price of a modified weapon, you add all the Cost Factors together + 1 , and then multiply that by the weapon’s base price.

Balanced weapons are more accurate, generally giving a +1 to skill for melee weapons and a +1 to Accuracy for ranged ones.
Bow-Harps are heavier than mormal bows but can be used as either bows or harps in any given turn (but not both at the same time!). The perfect gift for your ranged bard.
Climber’s weapons have a design that let you climb with the weapon ready, and give +1 to climbing rolls. Applies to hatchets and other similar weapons. I never used this, but Lara Croft swears by them.
Dwarven: Remember those unbalanced weapons that don’t let you attack and parry on the same turn? That’s shoddy human engineering. Good dwarven work solves this problem and makes them just as nimble as a sword. Big weapons that become unready after an attack still do that, though.
Elven: Applies to bows (not crossbows, those ugly things). Lets you treat the bow’s rated ST as 2 points higher for calculating damage and range. This means a ST 11 character could use a ST 13 elven bow normally. Expensive, but your scouts will love it.
Fine: The weapon is sturdier and generally better at its job. Bladed melee and thrown weapons, as well as pointy ammunition, do more damage. Bows and crossbows shoot farther. All are more resistant to breakage.
Meteoric: One of the game’s special materials. Meteoric Iron is immune to magic. The weapon ignores any magic meant to stop it and can’t be targeted by spells, but can’t be enchanted either.
Orichalcum: This bronze-colored alloy is indestructible! Weapons made from it never break, and have a higher chance of breaking other weapons when those rules come into effect.
Ornate weapons are blinged out, and can improve reactions from buyers and other people who are impressed by ostentation.
Silver weapons are useful for exploiting certain monster vulnerabilities. Solid silver is best for that, but also results in a fragile weapon. A silver coating doesn’t affect breakage chances and is far cheaper, but is a little less effective at the supernatural side.
Very Fine is like Fine, but has double the bonuses and only applies to swords and fencing weapons. Super expensive, of course.

In addition to the type restrictions the Fine, Very Fine, and Solid Silver modifiers are mutually exclusive. The material modifiers of Meteoric, Orichalcum, and Solid Silver are also mutually exclusive. Meteoric and orichalcum weapons can still be silver-coated however, so those players who immediately went to “electroplating” when they read the material descriptions still have something to be happy about.

With these modifiers you can have yourself a Fine, Balanced, Dwarven, Silver-Coated werewolf-hunting axe for $1000, the same price the swashbuckler pays for a standard-issue edged rapier.

Coming Up Next

Shields and Armor!