Posts
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Octopus Carnival now has a Projects page!
Octopus Carnival now has enough material in it that I thought it was time for a little organization. At the top of the site you should now see a “Projects” link, which will take to a page linking to all of the big thematic post collections I’m working on or have finished already. From there, you can go to individual project pages that discuss its overall goals and link to every individual post.
As of this post, I have pages for the Dragon’s Dogma adaptation, and my collection of GURPS stats for Pathfinder Iconics. If you haven’t followed either of those from the beginning, now would be an excellent time to get reacquainted with them.
In the future, I’ll add tag support to the blog to make it even easier to navigate between posts in a project.
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Dragon's Dogma Bestiary: The Undead
This is the sixth post of a series converting Dragon’s Dogma enemies to GURPS. Previous posts can be found below:
In Gransys, the word “undead” applies to those walking corpses more commonly known as zombies in other media, but here we use it in the more traditional Dungeon Fantasy sense to encompass all sorts of horrors from the grave. Undead make up a large enemy subtype that remains relevant all through the original game, so any discussion of them necessarily involves spoilers.
Undead in Gransys are generally similar to those found in countless other fantasy settings. They infest any place that has seen a great deal of death and not much in the way of ritual purification, or where dark forces are actively at work. Since many dungeons fall into both categories, they tend to have a lot of undead.
These creatures tend to be more active at night, and while it’s common to find large groups of undead they rarely cooperate with other types of monster, which they view as targets just like any other living creature. In large dungeons, undead and living monsters tend to have distinct territories and keep to them, with the occasional fight redefining their borders.
Zombies
There’s little to say about the zombies of Gransys that hasn’t been said a thousand times elsewhere. They’re slow, they moan a lot, they come in large numbers and they like holding you down and biting you to death. The Horde Zombies from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2 and the Servitor Zombie from DF 9 should do nicely to represent the bulk of them. Of note is that Gransys zombies are usually not infectious. They rise because of necromancy, ambient dark magic, or divine curse, not a plague. Of course, an industrious coven of necromancers could still get a zombie infestation going by doing all the animating themselves.
Interesting zombie variations include:
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Zombie Warrior: Increase ST and give them skill equal to DX with a weapon. Give them a suit of armor and a weapon covered by the skill.
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Giant zombie: Double ST, increase SM to +1, and add Resistant to Turning (+3).
Skeletons
Common skeletons are little more than faster, more fragile zombies, but they get interesting rather quickly. Like zombies, they don’t keep any of the original person’s memories or personality, but they do often retain their skills! Skeletons that rise from old battlefields tend to be skilled soldiers. Old temples and mage towers will often contain skeleton wizards. None of them can improve on these skills after death, but if a 400-point delver falls in the depths of a death-tainted dungeon, they’re likely to become terrible monsters.
Basic skeletons were commoners in life, and follow the Servitor Skeleton template from DF 9 without any weapons or other equipment. For more dangerous specimens, create a human opponent and apply the Servitor Skeleton modifiers as a racial template. Using some of the ready-made opposition here works, but unique high-point skeletons also exist.
Ghosts
Ghosts are incorporeal undead that resemble spheres of eerie light. They tend to appear at night over bodies of water, but some may also appear in drier settings if they died there. In either case, ghosts never stray too far from the site of their death. Ghosts attack by “entering” a victim and slowly draining their life. This is erroneously referred to as possession by the inhabitants of Gransys, but the victim is still in control of their actions while this goes on.
Physical attacks pass harmlessly through these creatures, but spells affect them normally. Properly fighting them requires a magician with the right spells - Affect Spirits or “pure energy” attack spells like Fireball or Sunbolt. A group that lacks any of this is reduced to running and hoping they get far enough away from the creature’s territory before they succumb to it
ST –; DX 12; IQ 6; HT 10
SM -1; Dodge 8; DR 0;
HP 10; Will 12; Per 10; FP 10
Basic Speed 5.5; Move 10 (flight with Hover).
- Drain Life (12 vs. Will): Causes injury equal to the margin of victory. Cosmic, ignores DR. If the ghost is wounded, it heals the same amount of HP. The ghost must touch the victim to use this attack.
Traits: Flight; Insubstantial (not vs. Magic); Immunity to Metabolic Hazards; Injury Tolerance (No Blood, No Brain, No Neck, No Vitals, Homogenous); Fragile (Unnatural); No Manipulators; Divine Curse (must stay within 20m of place of death), Supernatural Features (Glows).
Class: Undead.
Wights and Liches
The prime example of sapient undead in Gransys, these are powerful spellcasters who used forbidden magic to turn themselves into immortal undead. They retain their memories and personality and can keep on improving in their craft after the transformation. The difference between a wight and a lich is one of degree, not of kind - a wight is simply a lich who’s still relatively new to the business.
For both, use the Lich from Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1 as a starting point. Wights generally have less of everything that makes a Lich dangerous: spells, Magery, IQ, resources and minions. Proper liches use the published stats.
A note on the Unkillable trait: this is a big feature of the published Lich, but the video game doesn’t seem to ascribe anything like this to its version of them aside from the tendency all monsters there have of respawning after a while. The easiest way to translate this would be to split the difference and say Wights don’t possess the Trait, as they’ve yet to master the trick to it. As variant mana levels are very rare in Gransys, it could make sense to have liches use the more traditional philactery instead.
A lich that has a philactery as its weakness still has Unkillable 3: to kill such a creature, both the philactery and its current body must be destroyed. If the PCs somehow manage to deal with the philactery first, they must still contend with the Lich, and do so before it has time to make another philactery to kill it for good.
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Elemental Weapon Spells on Hard Maths
I’m still working on the next post in the Dragon’s Dogma Bestiary, but I saw something neat today and thought I had to share it and make a few comments of my own.
The Hard Maths blog has an interesting article on Elemental Melee Spells up. These create weapons of pure energy from nothing, and might be an interesting addition to the arsenal of a Mystic Knight!
Such a character would probably value mystical power more than physical might, as the spells don’t add to the users ST for damage and a final skill level of 15+ is vital for maintaining them for any appreciable length of time. They also need Force Sword, a skill which would have no other use in a fantasy setting… which means there’s a secretive order of elementalists that teaches it along with the spells somewhere out there.
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Mooks & Minions in GURPS: Octopus Carnival Edition
Octopus Carnival is back from is hiatus! I’ll resume my writing here with an article that’s not directly related to any of my ongoing projects. One goes where inspiration strikes, after all.
Inspiration in this case came from this post from Peter V. Dell’Orto over at Dungeon Fantastic, about how the mook rules he uses on his Dungeon Fantasy campaign. That got me thinking about the several different iteration of these rules present both in GURPS itself and on other systems. In this article I’ll talk a bit about those and introduce a variation on them that I’ll likely use for my own games.
Minions With Many Names
Mooks, Minions, Extras… by now the concept of them is probably well-known to most roleplayers, as a bunch of RPG systems has been codifying the concept for decades now. Since every game has a different name for this rule and I don’t want to keep listing them all, I’ll use the name “Minions” in this article.
Simply put, minions are weak enemies that pose little threat to player characters individually, and who are present in the game mostly to show case how competent said PCs are. They have simplified statistics and usually go down with one good hit from a PC. They take inspiration from a long line of action and adventure movies, where it’s common for the badass protagonists to mow through a large group of minions over the course of an action scene, or on the way to fighting a tough, named foe. They also tend to feature heavily in chase scenes, where their narrative purpose is to crash and burn with every maneuver the hero pulls off to confound them.
The concept of minions has been around since the early days of D&D and its hordes of low-HD enemies pitted against mid- or high-level parties. The first time I saw it explicitly named and codified was with Exalted and its rules for Extras, though it almost certainly wasn’t the first system to do so. Many others tried their hand at it, including D&D 4th Edition with its Minion rules.
GURPS itself has multiple sets of minion rules. In the core book, each minion is an individual opponent: they always go down in one hit, and they never use Active Defenses (but also never All-Out-Attack either). GURPS Action and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy toughen them up a bit by allowing active defenses and allowing for several different grades of opposition. Swarms are large groups of “minions” treated like a single, abstract creature, and again we have a version in the Basic Set and a couple more elaborate ones in Dungeon Fantasy and other sources. I’m sure people have come up with their own variations as well. So here’s mine! It’s focused on distinct individuals rather than on swarms. For now, I’ll use the standard published rules for those.
Octopus Opposition
This is how I intend to grade my opposition from now on, from weakest to strongest. The system takes inspiration from the existing GURPS rules, and also from the several different grades of opposition presented by D&D 4th Edition and early Shadowrun (with its Professional Levels).
Please note that this system is most appropriate for cinematic games that follow at least some “action movie” conventions regardless of their point level. Grimly realistic games should stick to the Basic Set rules (which are the equivalent of making all enemies Elite under this system). Campaigns that sit somewhere in the middle could ellide the lower opposition grades and make everyone at least a Worthy.
While higher-grade opposition is usually more skilled at fighting than lower-grade foes, its final grade is as much a matter of narrative importance as of pure power. In a campaign following action-movie narrative rules, you are more likely to find higher-grade enemies the closer you are to the story’s climax, or to your mission objective. Named NPCs are also more likely to be of a higher grade than the troops they command even if they are equally skilled, because the GM usually wants the NPC to stick around for a bit longer and be memorable.
This also means that it’s perfectly possible for a given individual to move between these grades depending on the circumstances of the story. That one lucky goblin minion that managed to inflict significant damage on the party and escape without a scratch might return as a worthy or better at a latter date if the players become obsessed with defeating it. In the case of Horde Ninjas, this progression could happen over the course of a single fight!
Belonging to a specific grade is always a “campaign feature” and as such never costs or gives points.
Minions
Minions are the equivalent of fodder in Dungeon Fantasy or Action. They fight and defend themselves normally, but it only takes a single point of damage getting past their DR to bring them down. This doesn’t necessarily represent killing. A “downed” minion might be unconscious, wounded, or even actively fleeing! Whatever happens, though, they are 100% out of the fight at that point. Obviously, it’s still possible to interact with a defeated minion who is still alive after the fight.
While minions can theoretically have very high skill levels and fight with fancy techniques, they usually don’t. They tend to come in large numbers and their tactics leverage that. This grade is appropriate for those goblin and dinoman hordes, cheap hired thugs, or the regular forces of the evil Star Empire. Any monster called out as fodder in official materials would be a minion under this system.
Tough Minions
Also known as “purple” minions for entirely jocular reasons. They’re like regular minions, but a little more ornery. A tough minion has an HP total like a normal character, but always fails combat-related HT rolls. This means that any hit that forces a “Knockdown and Stunning” roll will take them out, as will reaching 0 HP or less. They can take a few scratches and keep going, but a solid hit still breaks them. These are basically Petter V. Dell’Orto’s fodder monsters, though they never recover from stunning before the fight ends. They do recover in time afterwards, of course.
This grade is appropriate for pretty much the same types of foe as normal minions in those cases where the GM wants to make things a bit more challenging, or when the group in question has a reputation for strength but the GM doesn’t want them to steal the scene. They’re your goblin veterans, experienced mobsters, or those Imperial soldiers with the black armor that talk in sinister coded radio transmissions.
Worthies
Worthies are the “standard” level of opposition. They defend themselves normally, including making HT rolls to avoid and recover from knockdown and stunning, but go down once they reach 0 HP or less. They’re a significant obstacle, but you still don’t want them to stick around too long. The same examples listed for Tough Minions also make suitable worthies, as does any monster from the books not specifically listed as fodder.
Worthies still tend to come in groups, though these will be smaller than groups of minions. A movie fight against five or six opponents who keep getting back up after being hit is employing worthies instead of minions! Note that this doesn’t mean worthies are necessarily low-skill opponents. At this level, there is no inconsistency whathosever in making them as skilled as the PCs themselves.
Elites
Elite enemies are treated just like PCs. They make full use of all of the campaign’s combat rules. When they reach 0 HP or less, they’ll keep making HT rolls to stay conscious and alive, and might fight to the death if they think it’s warranted. When they don’t, retreating is always their own decision rather than something the rules force them to do. Elites are almost always named NPCs with their own personalities and motivations. They are rarely less skilled than the PCs themselves, and are often better. A fight against such an opponent usually marks an important plot milestone in adventures following movie logic.
Any enemy from the books who is supposed to still pose a threat when under 0 HP is probably an Elite. Boss Monsters from Dungeon Fantasy also fit here - they are usually more powerful in terms of statistics, but they receive the same level of plot protection as the PCs.
Special
Every category system needs a catch-all! Special opposition has something that gives it even more narrative protection than the PCs, or that makes it not quite fit in the ranking system above. Colossi with multiple parts that must be destroyed in order? Multi-stage bosses that switch character sheets entirely when defeated? Anything goes!
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The Octopus Has (Temporarily) Left the Carnival
I’m going to be away from home for the next two weeks or so. There won’t be many posts on Octopus Carnival until I’m back, as I’m unlikely to have time to write anything of substance.
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