If DFRPG: Adventurers was our “Player’s Handbook” with everything you need to create a character, then Expoits is our “Dungeon Master’s Guide” with everything you need to actually play the game, and everything your GM needs to challenge and reward you. Or, well, almost. There’s a separate book for spells and another one for monsters, and we’ll get to them in due time.

Cover

Its cover is the image to the right, above. I’m putting both of them here again because I like the effect they have when put side by side.

Quick Rules Reference

This sheet here can probably be printed to become a second panel in your GM’s screen. It has stuff that’s handy for GMs this time around. We start with a reference on Light and Vision, listing what penalties you get to see in various levels of illumination. Daylight is a 0, total darkness is a -10, and every number in-between is possible.

Next is a list of light sources PCs are likely to carry into a dungeon, along with their areas of effect, which can either be a circular radius or a tight beam. They elimiate darkness penalties in this area, and reduce the penalty to -3 up to 3x that distance.

Then you get quick tables to figure out falling damage based on how far you fall, how far you can throw heavy stuff based on your Basic Lift, and a complete table listing the damage modifiers for every damage type, hit location, and enemy “constitution” (Living, Unliving, or Homogenous). This will all make sense when we get to the combat chapters.

The Actual Introduction

Despite the comparison above, players are encouraged to read some of Exploits too, mainly the parts containing the basic rules of the game that explain how they can do stuff. The rest of the book is more useful to the GM when planning campaigns and adventures, but there’s no iron-clad Gygaxian prohibition against players reading that too.

The page finishes with recommendations on where to get more material. There are several supplements for DFRPG specifically that came out after the core box, but even at the time of its release you could choose to branch out to “mainline GURPS” if you wished, and to the “sister line” of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy supplements.

Impressions

Not a lot to have impressions about, though I do like that the illumination rules get a bit of spotlight here. Those tend to be very important for any game that features lots of dungeon delving.

We’ll, er, delve deeper into damage types in the Combat chapter, but I’ll say that having them here for several types of enemy physiology is a great help as well. Few genres feature more enemies with bizarre anatomies than dungeon fantasy.