Posts
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GURPS is Brutalist, or Tweaking The Flow of Combat in GURPS
The Long Lines Building in New York A common complaint I hear about people who tried GURPS for the first time coming in from other systems is that the “flow” of combat feels odd. Mainly that those 1-second turns are too short and don’t let you do enough. Sometimes also that these short turns lead to fights that end too quickly to be dramatic1.
I think this comes from a mismatch between the player’s learned expectations and the way GURPS actually does things. In this post I’ll try to describe this difference, and give a few suggestions on how to reduce the friction.
Describing the Difference
Let’s start with an example. You’re in a typical dungeon fantasy combat against a bunch of zombies, playing an archer character. You make an attack, and describe it like this:
“I draw and nock an arrow, then I take aim at the closest zombie and shoot! As soon as the arrow flies, I’m already drawing another one from my quiver!”
How do other systems2 usually handle this, and what does GURPS do that’s so different?
Abstract Action Economies
Most tabletop RPG systems are fairly abstract when it comes to combat. To the rules, it doesn’t matter what motions your PC is actually going through when they perform an action, nor does it matter how long a turn lasts. It is enough to know what the action is, and that a turn is long enough for you to do it.
In systems that work this way, our archer’s narration is just a cool embellishment that adds some fun detail to a standard ranged attack roll. All the rules need to know is that it’s a ranged attack.
However, the choice of which actions perform in your turn matters a lot. You get a certain number of them, all of which have an immediate effect in the current turn but don’t influence future ones. Therefore the system’s incentives gently push you to be maximally efficient on a turn-by-turn basis3. Attacks are good because they bring the fight closer to an end. If you use your main action for something else, it better bring as much benefit to you as attacking would, or you have just “wasted” your turn. This set of mechanics and incentives is usually called an “action economy”.
The GURPS Way
Where other systems are abstract, GURPS is so concrete it’s practically brutalist. Turns last one second and its combat maneuvers are a lot more fine-grained than combat actions in other games.
In the Union of Generic Universal Republics our example description is not just a bit of flavor: it’s a five-turn plan. Ready (draw arrow), Ready (nock arrow), Aim, Attack, Ready (draw arrow)4.
Only the actual blow from your weapon, press of the trigger, or release of the bowstring counts as an Attack. The other stuff in the plan above are maneuvers that make your Attack possible and set it up for success. In GURPS, you want to increase the quality of your attacks, not necessarily their quantity.
For the same reason GURPS is a bit less amenable to “needless embellishment” than more abstract games. Combat goes much more smoothly when you keep your action declarations to short sentences that map to a single maneuver. The structure you build out of these simple blocks can end up looking every bit as beautiful as the freeform narrative, though. This too, is brutalism.
The Barbican Conservatory in London Proposed Solutions
“The GURPS way” is neither better nor worse than the action economies of other systems. It’s just different. But it’s different enough that it can trip up people coming in from other games.
If the description above helped you smooth the friction between the rules and your expectations, then great! But it’s likely that it didn’t, and you still having trouble with it. In that case, here are a couple of suggestions on how to make your experience smoother.
Solution 1: It’s a (Character) Skill Issue
One of the big reasons to use “setup” maneuvers like Evaluate, Feint, and Aim is that your character’s skill level might not be high enough to give you a decent chance of success. Without those maneuvers, you’ll end up missing more often, or will have trouble getting past your enemy’s defenses. This is common at the core books’ default 150 points.
One way to make attacking every turn more feasible and fun is to raise the power level of your characters. This is the approach taken by Dungeon Fantasy and Action: not only do they use 250 point templates, they optimize them a fair bit.
All the physical combatant templates in DF start with 16 in their main combat skill at the very least. Many have a 18, and a couple either start with a 20 or can get there with a bit of point shuffling.
This might sound excessive at first glance. Your base chance of success doesn’t increase past 16, and it’s unlikely anyone had more than a 18 in all of human history. Why allow PCs to start there, and possibly go even higher with earned points? Because this is what you need to be able to reliably attack every second without taking the time to perform setup maneuvers.
With these “overpowered” skill levels you can absorb more penalties without having to Evaluate or Aim to offset them, and you can use Deceptive Attacks instead of Feints without affecting your chances of success. If you still have enough spare skill levels left, you can even thrown in a Rapid Strike to make two attacks in that second.
Solution 2: Mandatory Dramatic Pauses
Fighters in real-world combat sports and action movies don’t spend every second of their fights furiously attacking each other. They’ll circle while looking for openings, stop to catch their breaths, and only go in for an exchange of actual blows every once in a while.
The use of setup maneuvers helps stretch fights out to be more similar to these examples, but if you’re reading this it’s because you don’t think they’re a good solution. And even if you do, you might want to go further.
One way to do this is to crib from the rules for tournament fights in GURPS Martial Arts. Under those rules, fights are composed of lulls and flurries. Combatants can only use the Attack maneuver5 during a flurry. During a lull, they cannot attack but can still use maneuvers like Change Posture, Evaluate, Move, Ready, Aim, or even just Do Nothing while waiting for an opening. In fantasy settings it would be a good time to cast those healing spells.
GURPS Martial Arts has flurries last for 2d seconds and lulls for 4d seconds, rolled at the start of the corresponding period. You can tweak these durations to best suit your campaign. If the combatants’ actions look like they’re going to force an early change, you can end the current “period” early.
The main purpose of introducing lulls is to extend a fight’s in-character duration to something like that of a real-world boxing or MMA round. They can also help change the mental “efficiency” calculation of someone who’s used to action economies. If there’s a part of the fight where you can’t attack, performing setup actions for when you can becomes the most efficient thing to do.
Lulls work both in melee and ranged combat (when everyone might hunker down behind cover for a while), but they might get a bit hard to manage or look a bit silly when you have a large number of combatants in a fight.
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10 minutes to beat the bad guy and disarm the bomb is not a problem at all if you beat the bad guy in 5 seconds. ↩
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“Other Systems” here means the last three editions of D&D, Pathfinder 2E, most editions of Shadowrun, and any others that might be similar in outlook but which I’m not too familiar with. ↩
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And if there are any obsessive optimizers in your group, they’ll push you much less gently. ↩
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I admit I tacked that extra Ready at the end to make the “five-second plan” joke work. ↩
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And its cousin All-Out-Attack. ↩
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Abandoning Weapon Master
A while back I made a post about combining Weapon Master and Trained by a Master into a single advantage. After thinking about it for a while, I think I might have changed my mind about it. I not sure the two traits are really meant to coexist in the same campaign, despite what Dungeon Fantasy tries to do.
Dungeon Fantasy character creation rules are all about replicating a lot of D&D’s conventions in GURPS. And one of the D&D-isms it tries to replicate is that a combat centric character can be either strong or fast, but not both.
D&D Combat Conventions
In recent editions of D&D, that happens because characters have a very limited number of points to distribute at creation, and every class is meant to have only 1 or 2 attributes that are important to its abilities. Physical combatants end up having either STR or DEX as their main attribute, and the rules are usually set up so that the other member of the pair can be safely dumped.
STR-based combatants use the heaviest armor and weapons they can get. The vast majority are melee specialists. Some buy a single thrown weapon at creation and then promptly forget about it. All of these options are designed to make Dexterity not matter to them.
DEX-based combatants are the opposite: they wear light or no armor, and are evenly split between archers and melee skirmishers who rely on “finesse weapons” that use DEX instead of STR. Therefore Strength doesn’t matter to them.
Every physical combatant1 in the last three editions of D&D is going to lean heavily towards one of these archetypes. A few classes incentivise players to try and be a bit of both, but for most of them that’s going to lead to a weaker character.
What about GURPS?
Dungeon Fantasy gives you templates to emulate the classes from recent D&D, so it ends up bringing this particular trope wholesale into GURPS. You have your Strong Delvers, and your Fast Delvers2. But we run into some issues because GURPS is much less abstract than D&D.
Both in real life and in GURPS, combatants want to be both strong and fast. You need speed and precision to hit, and you need to put some force behind your blows for them to be effective. Sure, an individual character might have ST or DX that’s a bit higher than the other, but they’ll never be 10+ points apart like they are in their D&D equivalents.
Still, DF tries, and Weapon Master is a significant component of this attempt. It’s a mandatory trait for Swashbucklers, and an optional one for the other fast delvers. It more or less takes the place of D&D’s Weapon Finesse, since it allows these characters to do improved melee damage without investing many points into ST.
But it’s also an optional Knight trait. And it’s quite easy to take a starting Knight and give them ST 18, Weapon Master (Dueling Halberd), and a starting weapon skill of 20. Such a character literally combines the best of both worlds. They can do all the same fancy tricks as the ST 11 Swashbuckler, and their strikes to a massive amount of damage when they land, due to the higher base number of damage dice and the per-die damage bonus.
As a player, this damage bonus seems so good to me that I’d feel bad about “leaving it on the table” and not taking Weapon Master. As a GM, I worry that any enemy that can withstand a hit from the Knight will be impervious to attacks from the other PCs.
What to do about it?
The first option is of course to do nothing. This is admitedly a very niche concern and you might be okay with it in your game. But if you are having Weapon Master Problems at your table you might try one of these other possible solutions.
Solution 1: Flat Damage Bonus
A “minimally invasive” solution is to change the damage bonus from +1 or +2 per die to a flat +1 or +2. All advantage costs remain the same, as do all templates.
This means that the skinny swashbuckler who rolls a single die for damage still gets the same bonus. Meanwhile Mister Halberd with his three dice of swing damage gets a much smaller relative benefit.
Solution 2: No More Weapon Master!
Weapon Master no longer exists and Trained By a Master comes in categories similar to the removed advantage:
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20 points makes you trained in One Weapon. This gives you improved parries, improved Rapid Strikes, and access to the same limited set of Chi Skills as Weapon Master did. No damage bonus, though!
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25 points gives you the same benefits for Two Related Weapons or all weapons covered by One Skill.
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30 points works as printed, giving you the full set of Trained By a Master benefits for all muscle-powered weapons and unarmed attacks.
“All knives” counts as a single weapon for these purposes, like in the books. So do “all unarmed attacks”.
Everyone who had Weapon Master as an optional advantage gets the corresponding version of Trained by a Master instead, and has the option to upgrade to the full version.
This is a more drastic and slightly more complicated solution. No one gets a damage bonus any more, but no one overpays for the full Weapon Master package either.
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Let's Play Hell's Rebels: Player Character Origins
Hell’s Rebels includes some traits in its Player’s Guide that can be assigned to PCs to tie them to the campaign either by providing a motivation or by giving them additional ways to contribute. A PC could be a minor worker in the opera, or a fed-up citizen, or interested in the city’s history, and so on.
I don’t think those quite fit what I have in mind for my solo campaign. They are suitable as backgrounds for level 1 starting characters and their mechanics can be useful at the start, but pretty much cease to be a factor in the story once the “main plot” kicks in.
Despite being released six years earlier than Hell’s Rebels, the Neverwinter Campaign Setting for D&D 4e does a much better job at allowing players to create characters who are deeply involved with the campaign at hand. More than starting motivations, its character themes provide entire story arcs that will remain relevant throughout the entire campaign.
I want the same thing for my game, so I’m going to replace the relatively generic reasons given in the Hell’s Rebels player guide with something that’s narratively on par with Neverwinter’s themes. I want them to not only be more exciting, but also to reflect the increased starting power of Dungeon Fantasy characters. They’re going to be key players in the rebellion from minute one of the campaign. Why just be a random history buff when you can be The Last Archivist instead? This status might be reflected in some of their traits, but the story consequences are the main thing here.
Here are the “character themes” I intend to use. There are five, one for each of my intended PCs, but presenting them separately will help provide some inspiration to other GMs who want to do the same thing whether in GURPS or another system. I’m using Dungeon Fantasy archetype and ancestry names instead of those from Pathfinder, but the correlations should be pretty easy to deduce. Each of them also has plot ties to some of the game’s possible allied factions.
Each theme bellow includes a short background description, and paragraphs listing prerequisites, benefits, and drawbacks. These are mostly story-related, but they might also add optional mechanical traits to your character’s template. You can buy these right away with your starting points, or buy them later with earned points like any other template trait.
The Sixth Raven
Most surviving historical documents about the Silver Ravens say they were five in number: Jackdaw the elf swashbuckler, Amyreid the half-elf cleric, Ba the halfling wizard, Kyda the human bard, and Brakisi the human scout.
These documents were wrong. There was one other: you.
You were a small orphan child then, adopted by the group as a kind of mascot somewhere along their career. You shared their love for Kintargo and its freedom, but you were too young to go on any actual adventures, so you mostly helped by running small errands, and heard from their big battles when they returned to tell the tale.
This lasted until the last battle, the one against the massed armies of House Thrune. Jackdaw sent you away with many of her other non-combatant friends the day before that one, promising she’d call you back when the danger was past. She never did, because the Ravens lost. Jackdaw surrendered so that the demonic army would spare the city, and the others were either killed by Thrune agents over in subsequent years or disappeared forever.
Over the following decades you would finally reach adulthood and set out on your own, becoming an adventurer of some skill and renown elsewhere in the Inner Sea region. Now, you’re ready to return home and finish the work of your old friends. Your name has been struck from the history books, but your passion burns as brightly as it ever did.
Prerequisites: You must belong to a species long-lived enough that you could have been a child 70 years ago and still be of adventuring age in the present. Being a dwarf or some kind of elf is enough, but the Half-Spirit ancestries from DF 3 might also fit. Another alternative is to play a Warforged who was an active member of the Ravens and spent some of the intervening decades disabled and unconscious, but was recently repaired. You can belong to any profession.
Benefits: You remember things. The GM might occasionally give you hints and clues about old Silver Raven safehouses and stashes. You also knew the Ravens personally and they knew you - should any of them still be around, you will be able to recognize each other.
You can add the Serendipity {15} trait to your template if it’s not already present. This represents your memories of old Kintargo and Raven hangouts, and might let you find useful shortcuts, items, and passages that are not pre-written into the campaign.
Drawbacks: Things remember you. Demons, vampires, and other similarly long-lived monsters who faced the original Ravens back in the day will recognize you just as readily, and will be extra-mean to you as a result. Once word spreads that you’re back, some of them might even travel to Kintargo for the sole purpose of killing you.
This can be represented by the Enemy (Monster of the Week, 9 or less) {-15} trait, which gets added as an optional disadvantage to your template.
If you only have the DFRPG, the disadvantage works like this: the GM rolls 3d6 in secret at the beginning of each adventure or each session of an extended adventure. If the result is a 9 or less, a significantly powerful monster will appear somewhere along the coming adventure or session, inserting itself into one of the upcoming situations and making things more complicated and dangerous for you and your group. It’s usually something complicated to fight, and not necessarily the same monster every time. This is in addition to any pre-existing monsters in the adventure who recognize you and want you dead.
The Last Archivist
You were a member of the Sacred Order of Archivists, a secret society made up of worshipers of various deities of knowledge and wisdom. The Order was dedicated to preserving the true history of Kintargo and other such “forbidden” knowledge from Thrune redactors.
The Order is no more: its hideout was raided and ransacked by Thrune forces during the Night of Ashes. You were away when it happened, on a mission to retrieve an important document in another city. That’s why you survived. When you returned, you reached out to a few contacts and learned that some of your colleagues have surviving family. They were nobles and their family estate was razed during the Night of Ashes, but one of their sons is still at large. You are now trying to find this son, help him stay safe, and then get revenge on House Thrune.
Prerequisites: None! While the Order is an excellent origin for Clerics, Wizards, and other big brains, it could easily have employed fightier or sneakier types as security or retrieval specialists.
Benefits: It’s impossible to be a member of the Archivists and not learn something. In addition to being familiar with the Order’s hideout and its procedures, you also know a bit of the region’s unredacted history and a few other tidbits of unrelated but potentially useful knowledge. You can recognize the Sixth Raven if run into them.
You can add the History and Research skills as an option to your template, and also all specialties of Hidden Lore if they aren’t there already. You also add Wild Talent {20} as an optional advantage, representing a large trove of random knowledge. If you’re using the Basic Set, add Intelligence Analysis to your template as well.
Drawbacks: You’re riven by grief and driven by revenge against Barzilai Thrune and his minions. This might manifest as Intolerance (Diabolists) {-5}, an Obsession (depose Thrune)(12) {-10}, or both! The Obsession might seem redundant since it’s also the overall campaign goal, but it also compels you to take potentially risky and unwise courses of action if they seem like they will yield quicker results. It could also prevent you from retreating from a fight against Thrune’s minions.
Knight of the Deep
You come from one of the subaquatic communities off the coast of Ravounel, where you enjoy an heroic reputation. You recently went to visit your friend Aava in the coastal village of Acisazi, only to find her missing and the village suffering under a strange malaise. The village’s elder told you Aava had led a small party of scouts into Kintargo to ask seek help breaking the curse, but she never reported back. She begged you to find Aava, and you accepted.
You arrive at this land-lubber town to find it embroiled in a lot more trouble than you thought possible. Aava is nowhere to be found and neither is her contact, the singer Shensen. You suspect both of them vanished into the prisons of the despotic Barzilai Thrune, and your queries have led you to the Aria Park protest. You suspect you might need to bloody this human despot’s nose to fulfill your mission, and that’s just fine with you.
Prerequisites: You must belong to a species capable of breathing underwater! Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level contains two possible choices here: the Sea Elf and the Water-Infused. From this blog, you might also pick the Argonian or perhaps a Warforged who has been modified to be hydrodynamic and Amphibious. And of course we also have a whole article about the Denizens of the Sea that also contains a few usable ancestries.
This theme is open to any profession, but martial types should probably keep in mind the rules for underwater combat for fish-people.
Benefits: The people of Acisazi know and trust you, and Aava is your good friend (or even a relative if you’re also a sea elf).
You can add Swimming, Aquabatics and Survival (Undersea) to your template as optional skills, and should probably put some points in them during character creation.
Drawbacks: Add Obsession (find Aava and her scouts) (12) {-5} to your template as an optional disadvantage. It’s what you already want to do anyway, but like the Last Archivist’s Obsession it might drive you to unwise actions.
Phantom Thief
You are one of Lady Docur’s School for Girls’ most distinguished graduates. You had parted ways with your alma mater and set up shop in nearby Vyre, but a recent letter from Lady Docur herself brought you back to Kintargo. The city’s political climate is getting rather inhospitable to the school, and she hopes you will be able to help them survive these turbulent times.
In other words: the school is currently the closest thing Kintargo has to a thieves’ guild. They specialize in training secret couriers and the nicer sort of thief. Thrune prefers the nasty sort of thief, so things might get difficult for the school and its students. That’s where you come in.
Of course, you’re not here just to help your old school. You’re also, er, taking a breather from some rather complex entanglements you left behind in the good city of Vyre. Hopefully it will be a long while before you have to set foot there again.
Prerequisites: It’s a school for girls, which means you either are a woman or only discovered you weren’t after graduation. You must also be some manner of Thief, either the base template or one of the variants from the corresponding Dungeon Fantasy Denizens book.
Benefits: You know Lady Docur and other characters associated with your alma mater, and have their trust. You also know Vyre’s customs, which might come in handy if you ever need to go back there.
Add Area Knowledge and Current Affairs for both Kintargo and Vyre to your template, as well as Connoisseur, Savoir-Faire and the Fashion Sense advantage. The School does give one a proper high society education.
Drawbacks: Those Vyre entanglements will come back to haunt you if you ever return there during the campaign.
No extra disadvantages here: everything which could make a thief’s life harder is already part of the relevant templates.
Mysterious Satirist
Even before Barzilai Thrune rolled in like he owned the place, you were already well-known among Kintargo’s rebels, malcontents, and antifascists. Whether you make poems, plays, essays, or songs, your work criticizing House Thrune was on everybody’s minds and the pseudonym you chose for yourself was spoken in the same tones as that of The Poison Pen and other such figures. Thrune’s opponents speak it with admiration; his supporters, with disgust. That’s how you like it.
While no one has figured who you are yet, Barzilai’s arrival and the Night of Ashes have made your life very difficult already. Most of your contacts among Kintargo’s several resistance organizations have vanished, left town, or gone to ground. While you still value your art, you also feel it’s time to engage in more direct action against this dictator.
Prerequisites: None! While Bards obviously have a head start in terms of the artistic skills implied by this theme, the Mysterious Satirist could be anyone.
Benefits: Choose one of the Bellflower Network, the Cult of Sarenrae, the Rose of Kintargo, or the Poison Pen. You’re indirectly acquainted with that group or individual. Though you have never met, you have corresponded and set up pre-arranged signs that will let you recognize each other when the meeting does happen.
Add the artistic or performance skills of your choice to your template, as well as an appropriate Talent covering them to your optional advantages. Writing, Poetry, and Musical Composition are appropriate if you share your work through in written form. Public Speaking, Singing, Acting and Musical Instrument are also good if you actually perform it. If you have the GURPS Basic Set, you can also add Artist to the list of possible artistic skills, and you also add Propaganda no matter what your medium is.
Drawbacks: Add a 10-point Secret (Mysterious Satirist), Selfless, and Trickster to your optional disadvantage list if they are not already there. The first represents the risk of bad things happening when the authorities discover who you are, above and beyond what being a Silver Raven would bring. The other two represent possible reasons for you to have chosen this path in the first place.
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Let's Play Hell's Rebels: Adjusting Setting Assumptions
It’s time for me to put on my GM hat and begin preparing my solo Hell’s Rebels campaign. As mentioned in the previous post, I want to play this using the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy rule set instead of the campaign’s native Pathfinder 1e. Let’s take a look at what this means.
But wait a minute! Wasn’t that previous most published more than a year ago? Well, turns out I started writing this one shortly after publishing it, but one thing and another got in the way and I’m only getting around to publishing it now. I’m actually a fair bit along in campaign preparation and even started playing, I’m just behind on documenting the process. Anyway, let’s keep going.
The Setting
As we all know by now, Hell’s Rebels takes place in Golarion, Pathfinder’s setting. Golarion was built from the ground up to support dungeon fantasy campaigns so we don’t have any fundamental friction between it and the Dungeon Fantasy rules. Despite the many D&D-isms of Pathfinder’s first edition we already know the setting can easily be used with other systems, since it has an official Savage Worlds port and Paizo itself is in the process of removing those D&D-isms from the latest iteration of their house system.
That being said, I do want to make a few changes to the version I’m going to use. The most obvious one is I’m going to drop the many different fiend classifications from D&D and Pathfinder in favor of Dungeon Fantasy’s simplified “it’s all demons from Hell”. Any of the demons from DF will be fair game as opposition here.
And since I’m talking about setting changes, any mention I find of Cheliax’s fascists and diabolists being in any way “disciplined” or “organized” despite their evil will be altered because incompetence, corruption, and a disregard for any rules lies at the heart of fascism. These fucks do not make the trains run on time and never have. You do not, at any point, gotta hand it to them.
I also want to lean on the similarities between this campaign and Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, so we’ll be at a Renaissance tech level with early guns widely available to guards and rebels. Make ready your blessed bullets, o devil hunters.
The Mechanics
I think this will mostly be pretty simple, because this won’t be the first time I’m converting between Pathfinder and DF. I did already run the first two volumes of Hell’s Rebels and the first three volumes of Iron Gods to different player groups. During those times two issues jumped at me as being the most difficult to handle.
The first one was treasure conversions, but I think I’ve arrived at a satisfying process for that in this post. Our delvers will eventually end up very wealthy, but I imagine the rebellion will prove to be a great money sink.
The other difficulty concerns the only somewhat common part of the dungeon delving experience that’s harder to do in Dungeon Fantasy than in D&D: underwater adventures. There’s a couple of extended underwater segments in the middle of the adventure path, and Pathfinder’s default items and spells for it are a lot more accessible than Dungeon Fantasy’s.
But hey, it turns out I already solved that too! This post collects the underwater rules I’ll be using, and this one has a nice set of more accessible items to let our PCs go for a swim and live to tell the tale. The truth is that I started writing this post before I wrote the underwater ones, so they were actually part of my effort to figure this campaign out.
Monster conversions used to be a big problem back when I started the Let’s Read, but now I have enough DF monster books that I can swipe appropriate stat blocks for nearly every one of them. If I need to create new ones for specific foes, you can be sure I’ll post them here.
Coming up Next
Character themes! Everybody loves character themes!
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Denizens of the Sea
I’ve published an article about underwater adventuring in the past, in which I mentioned that “fish-people” had several advantages over “land-lubbers” when it came to mobility and fighting in an underwater environment. A later post included a few items that could help those land-lubbers close the gap… so how about we take a look at those fish-people now? As a bonus, you get a nice little bundle of setting info you can drop on your campaign if you want.
The Fate of Atlantis
The name “Atlantis” figures in the myths and legends of many more places than it should. Cultures that have never heard of each other have stories about an empire that ruled the waves in ancient times but no longer exists. The stories might differ but the name is always the same.
That’s because ancient Atlantis was the largest and most powerful underwater civilization to ever exist. They discovered a means of traveling to other worlds and exploited it with gusto.
Despite its power Atlantis eventually fell, as all empires do. The exact sequence of events is more or less impossible to piece together, and mostly irrelevant in the present day. The important bit is that their inter-world travel network was the first thing to go, instantly fragmenting the empire. That’s why each of them has a different story about how Atlantis fell - those stories talk only about the bits of it they knew about. In some, it happened overnight due to a cataclysm. In others, they eventually morphed into successor cultures that might still be extant in the present day.
Aside from giving rise to a whole bunch of legends and to fueling the occasional would-be despot’s ambitions, the most enduring legacy of Atlantis was its underwater engineering. They pioneered a lot of the techniques that used to make sturdy weapons and tools out of implausible aquatic materials like bone, shell, coral, and mother-of-pearl. They were also the first civilization to successfully make and work orichalcum.
But we’re not here to talk about stuff, we’re here to talk about people.
So Let’s Talk About People
Opinions differ on whether Atlantis was a Golden Age utopia or a despotic empire whose downfall was a blessing to the world, but everyone agrees it was pretty diverse. Unlike most typical dungeon fantasy kingdoms, its citizens belonged to many different species with none of them making up an overwhelming majority of the population.
Many of Atlantis’ citizens can be described using already-published stats. Sea Elves and Water-Infused from GURPS DF 3: The Next Level fit very well, as do the Argonians from this post. The octopus- and shark-folk from GURPS Banestorm are also good fits, though they’re a bit more complex and costly than the standard for DF racial templates.
Below are a few new templates, with the overall goal of allowing a diverse all-underwater party if the group wants to play that type of campaign. A couple of the new ancestries I present here might have equivalent official templates already, but since I don’t have those I’m writing new ones for my own use.
These templates assume that being Amphibious also makes you able to see and hear unimpeded while submerged, and the ability to breathe underwater also makes you able to speak there. I feel this is in line with the simpler feel of Dungeon Fantasy. If you want to follow Banestorm’s assumptions instead, give all templates here one level of Nictitating Membrane {1} and Speak Underwater {5}, increasing their costs by 6 points each.
Atlantean (20 points)
This template describes people who are a product of successive generations of intermarriage between the other species that made up the population of Atlantis, and possibly some surfacers too. They are known as “Atlanteans” because their general look became associated with that empire. Surprisingly, they look a lot like humans even when they have no humans among their ancestors.
Atlanteans are warm-blooded, have legs, and can breathe both water and air. Their human-looking bits exhibit the same ethnic variety as humans. Individuals can also have a variable number of “fishy” traits like visible gills, fins, blue or gray skin, and so on. These might be visually striking but are never significant enough to count as more than 0-point features.
Atlanteans can appear in worlds that had an Atlantis, or those whose underwater peoples are generally friendly with each other. The base stats could also be used as they are or modified a bit to represent any species of underwater humanoid.
Advantages: Amphibious {10}, Gills {10}.
Other Traits: Those fishy bits might count as varying levels of Unnatural Features in a setting where almost everyone is human and the character is the only known Atlantean, but in all other situations they’re 0-point traits. If the character has something like rigid fins or a prominent tail growing out of their lower back, they might need adapted body armor. This doesn’t cost extra, but might restrict their usage of looted armor.
Crab-Folk (40 points)
Crab-folk are sapient humanoid crustaceans easily distinguished by their heavy segmented carapaces. Like crabs, they lack distinct heads and their eyes are located at the end of a pair of flexible, retractable stalks. Unlike crabs, they only have the usual complement of humanoid limbs, though these are still armored.
Crab-folk can operate normally on the surface, but their gills begin to dry out if they go more than a day without being immersed in sea water. This means they tend to stick close to the coast. Their voices sound strange and “bubbly” outside the water, which most surfacers find off-putting.
Advantages: 360-degree Vision {25}; Amphibious {10}; Gills {10}; Damage Resistance 5 (Cannot Wear Armor) {15}; No Neck {5};
Disadvantages: Cold-Blooded {-5}; Disturbing Voice (In Air, -50%) {-5}, Dependency (Sea water, Daily) {-15}.
Optional Traits: If your campaign takes place far from a coastal area, the Dependency disadvantage is worth -30 points, and the template therefore costs only 25. Your local alchemist can prepare a solution close enough to seawater to satisfy the requirement, but it’s still not free.
Deep Ones (50 points)
These humanoids are much more obviously “fishy” than Atlanteans, with an anatomy closer to that of an abyssal fish than a human’s. They’re adapted to the lightless depths of the ocean and that’s where they prefer to make their homes. Deep Ones can swim up to the shallows without suffering ill effects, but can’t breathe air.
After Atlantis fell, it was not uncommon for its Deep One settlements to become more isolated and break contact with shallower or surface communities. This some times gave rise to sinister legends and rumors about what they got up to down there. These are mostly bunk: they are no more prone to worshiping Elder Things than any other species.
Advantages: Amphibious {10}, Dark Vision {25}, Fangs {2}, Gills {0}, Pressure Support 3 {15}, Tough Skin 1 {3}.
Disadvantages: Cold-Blooded {-5}.
Optional Traits: A variant that can operate on the surface would be closer to several classic D&D fish-people. They have the 10-point version of Gills and so cost that much more.
Merfolk (20 points)
Merfolk are humanoid from the waist up and have fish bodies from the waist down. They can breathe both air and water and have naturally melodious voices in both mediums, but they require magic or assistive devices like wheelchairs to operate on land. Their human halves display the same variance as Atlanteans, and their fish halves can resemble a variety of species of fish, shark, or cetacean.
Advantages: Gills {10}, Voice {10}.
Disadvantages: No Legs (Aquatic) {0}.
Features: The “Leg” and “Foot” hit locations on merfolk refer to their tail and lower fins instead. Armor for those locations must be specially constructed. As usual this doesn’t cost extra but limits which looted armor they can use.
Optional Traits: If your character’s fish half mimics a particularly speedy species, they might have Enhanced Move 1 (Water) for an extra 20 points. At the GM’s option, this might be a matter of training instead of biology, which means any merfolk character can buy this with earned points as a power-up.
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