Month: Dec 2024

Holiday TTRPG Worldbuilding: Fantasy Dungeons Meet the Real World 3

The latest poll was a clear vote for IT / construction crew trying to restore internet access to a building. For me that’s a good indication for an urban adventure. Let’s go to Ireland’s second city for that: Cork, which has the added benefit that I’ve been there twice already. It’s a little hilly and not as flat as Dublin and has a pretty interesting countryside and wider environs – not a bad spot to site an adventure.

I’d imagine repairing the internet connection is very important for most businesses, but that’s kind of boring. We had no votes for the university option, so that’s out too. Sticking with what I know, I’d say the crew is trying to repair a big hostel’s internet connection that went down right with the rest of the neighbourhood’s. Stick it on the north side of the Lee not too far off from the centre and you can either pick a spot or make up your own neighbourhood. In order to not get side-tracked by excessive Google Earth surfing (GM’s tip, use that instead of Google Maps to get a 3D view of the environment you’re looking at, CTRL+drag is your friend), I’m making my own. The rather steep Sandy Hill Street complete with the blocky McCormick House Hostel, grey St. Bridget’s Church, Singhs’ Newsagents & Grocery and Crime, Romance and Cooking, a tiny bookshop owned by a little old lady. Since its two side-streets are cul-de sacs Sandy Hill forms more of an enclosed environment than usual, but except for pensioners and small kids folks spend most of their time somewhere else in town.

The construction workers have a workshop/storage building that’s a bit farther out, but live on Sandy Hill. One IT person is  from the same general area in Cork, the other is an immigrant who who moved into the Singhs’ spare room. The hostel cleaner and general handyperson has a small one-bedroom flat above the bookshop and the hostel’s owner sleeps on the premises.

What would be a good way to contrast and compare these? The generic fae creatures from a brugh under the hill can be fun if you play them a bit against expectations. These faeries would be of the house and garden variety (brownies, knockers, glaistig) and  mostly mortal if somewhat magical and need to make ends meet, struggle to keep fit, use make-up to cover up their acne and battle customers who are never happy with their faerie garments – a very working class experience. If instead we go for classical undead in an underground temple, we can also add a twist, namely these being good (if still light-averse) undead that don’t want you to shuffle off your mortal coil and instead offer healing magic – healers who can’t get sick are not to be sneezed at (and GURPS does make healing spells prerequisites for the cooler parts of necromancy). For something a bit more traditional we could look at an overcrowded goblin burrow, but instead of being dungeon cannon fodder these goblins are the nobility or at least an upper class that just never got around to building extensions to their caverns. Another option would be a band of power-hungry (in the magical sense) magic-users that have squatted in an underground grotto known for its magical resonance only to be transported, grotto and all, to another world. And for the last one (my Mastodon only has five poll options), we could have a look at one of the more legally dubious communities: a multi-ethnic thieves guild with a penchant for clever gadgets. Those should get on well with the IT crew – or not. Here’s the poll.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Holiday TTRPG Worldbuilding: Fantasy Dungeons Meet the Real World 2

A few votes did come in for the latest polls (I guess using hashtags instead of relying on steady interest from the earlier polls would have been better) and we’re doing Ireland and dungeons from a peaceful / nice fantasy world. That’s an… interesting combination I wouldn’t have picked myself, but that’s part of why one does these guided worldbuildings after all. (I’ll save Quebéc for another rainy day.)

Since the fantasy world is peaceful, the inhabitants have probably not stacked up on a lot of nasty / offensive spells, which is a something to keep in mind when picking a dungeon later on. What it means for magic in general is that I can easily use GURPS Magic (mostly as is) for the magic system. It does have some weird interactions with modern weaponry, but this will be a feature, not a bug. Since we don’t have to worry about them planning the conquest of the countryside, I’ll set the mana levels (area where magic works more or less reliably) rather generously. Everything inside the dungeon and a good-sized area around the entrance (couple of streets in an urban area, two or three kilometres out in the country) are normal mana with some low mana a bit further out – maybe some of the old mystical places in the area have been triggered to produce their own mana by the dungeon’s appearance.

Since things are peaceful and prosperous in fantasyland, the dungeon dwellers are unlikely to hide from an apocalypse, war or other big catastrophe. So the reason they’re underground is either cultural / biological (underground species and the like), social / commercial (biggest city in the area, a lucrative mine) or mystical / religious (place of power or burial site or maybe temple to cthonic deity). They could also be youngsters going exploring, but I’m thinking that will be better reserved for the human side of things – not quite sure yet.

As for the world at large, I’m not sure yet whether the dungeons are coming in all over the globe, but for this stage it doesn’t really need to be settled. I assume dungeons will slip in rather quietly with only subtle signs and portents (and heavily camouflaged or out of the way entrances). All the initial interactions could be quite low-key.

For the next poll, I’m asking who the dungeon denizens make first contact with. That could be the aforementioned youngsters with nothing to do (or too much of a penchant for mischief), a team of wastewater specialists from Irish Water (dungeons and sewers mix well) or the inhabitants of a remote farm. A mixed crew of IT and construction workers looking for the reason their web connection went poof would be another funny option as would be a university interfaith group stumbling over dungeon magic by accident (though it seems these are even more limited than in the UK).

The nature of the dungeon itself will be decided in the next part.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Holiday TTRPG Worldbuilding: Fantasy Dungeons Meet the Real World 1

During the Christmas season we often like to do some RPG worldbuilding. This time we let the mastodon hive-mind decide and even if it was technically a tie we settled on the above topic due to perceived interest in the comments. Victorian ET Investigators might be in the running again next year, as might be Fantasy World on a Bishop Ring / Banks Orbital.

At first I thought Fantasy Dungeons Meet the Real World would be more about real-world folks exploring dungeons that had suddenly appeared, but someone mentioned it being a popular reverse isekai trope and I think it might be interesting to focus on the dungeon perspective in the first place. How do we do that? Time for another poll? Not quite – first I’d like to set out a couple of constraints to the topic.

Most importantly, I want to focus on relationships and communities. Yes, you can do a “fun” romp of dungeon denizens terrorising the countryside or slaughtering low-lives who want to kill them and take their stuff, but that’s not the kind of game I want to tell (and neither do my players). I’m more interested in semi-comedic stuff about cultural / dimensional misunderstandings and weird physical interactions. I’d like to have a good helping of narrative realism (as opposed to bean-counting realism) in my roleplaying, but that comes second place after making the game fun. An extra portion of surrealism will be added to taste.

Not sure where on Earth to set it yet and not sure what to focus on fantasy-world-wise, but I’m thinking there are some neat options for both:

Germany for kafkaesque bureaucracy and dungeons hidden in weird locations, Quebéc for surreal dungeon-cooking and a mix of remote wilderness and city dungeons, Ireland for a faerie twist and mythical dungeons, the Baltic states for pagan roots and a nervous eye towards Russia, Egypt for a good long look at the ethics of plundering ancient treasures and two very different landscapes for dungeons.

The fantasy world could be undergoing an apocalypse of some kind (dungeons are good shelter against some of those), it could be beginning its own age of exploration (maybe sending ancient underground places of power to other dimensions  or using some sort of gate technology), it could also be in a peaceful state (at least compared to us) and has to improvise to defend its dimensionally unmoored homes / grave sites from those violent humans or they could be just here to trade (after having miscalculated rather severely).

All of these could conceivably change the physics side of the equation, so I’m going to wait for the poll results before I settle on how magic and other supernatural powers work. Same goes for technology in the dungeon and possible real-world correspondences.

Where we need a lot in the way of a game engine, I’m going to use my default option GURPS, but I’m also reading Robin D. Laws’ Hillfolk RPG and might incorporate bits and pieces as I go along.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.

Bite-sized Review: Pyramid 3/01 – Tools of the Trade – Wizards

Getting an eBook reader means I finally have some more time to read through my extensive (and mostly unread) collection of GURPS PDFs. Since it’s mainly snatches in public transport and before bed, Pyramid proves to be better for this with its semi-short articles. Let’s see how long I can keep it up

Cover of Pyramid 3.01 - Tools of the Trade - Wizards. The Illustration shows a wizard with a staff riding a magic carpet.

Facts

Authors: Matt Riggsby, Sean Punch, Steven Marsh, Andy Vetromile, Stefan Jones, Matthew Pook
Date of Publication: 21/11/2008
Format: PDF-only (Warehouse 23-only)
Page Count:  48 (1 title page, 1 content page, 2 pages ads)
Price: $9 (PDF), $ 0.2 per page of content; Score of 8/10 ($500 Pyramid 3 Bundle: $4.10, $ 0.091 per page, Score 10/10)
Preview: https://warehouse23.com/products/pyramid-number-3-slash-01-tools-of-the-trade-wizards

Review

As all my other reviews this one will be rated according to meat (rules, stats, game mechanics), cheese (setting, characters, story), sauce (form, writing, style, art) and generic nutritional substance (universal nature, adaptability). At the end you find a weighted average of those components and a value score that also takes into account price per page.

The first issue of Pyramid 3 starts off with only two GURPS features (and “‘.’ Is For Full-Stop Drum” only has a two “monster” stat blocks that tie it to GURPS), which is way less than in later issues, where often only the Recommended Reading and Random Thought Table weren’t explicitly for GURPS. Most of the articles have a GURPS-y slant though in that the authors did think of the way magic would impact the world or stories. In my definition that makes it more “cheesy” (fluffy) than “meaty” (crunchy).

Theme-wise it’s solid, even though you could argue that neither a guildhall, nor being mysterious is a physical tool of the trade – but that’s splitting hairs. The only odd one out is the Full-Stop Drum, which still ties into GURPS Alphabet Arcane, which sort of ties it back to the tools motif.

Meat

The main meat article actually deals with flesh – more specifically undead flesh. “Necromantic Tools” by Sean Punch (5 pages) shows aspiring death mages how to graft undead arms to their bodies, how to make skull-tipped wands and a better way to deal with the usual zombie horde as an ally group (incidentally providing a considerable upgrade to the lackluster zombie template from GURPS Magic). The staffs are a little on the boring side, but the rest has a lot of meaty detail.

Apart from that, there are just the monster stats from the “Full-Stop Drum” and a couple of hints scattered through the other articles. The living zombies and the giant badger are nice, with the former being more generally useful.

All in all, nothing bad, some really good stuff, but not a whole lot.

Meat score: 7

Cheese

This is where the issue really shines. Matt Riggsby’s “The Guildhall of the Hermetic Brotherhood” (10 pages) shows what a magical disputation society come regulatory body / research fellowship might look like in a quasi-medieval fantasy setting. Despite the title, the focus is evenly split between the organisation and the building itself with the organisation being quite a bit more interesting. Disregarding the fact that guilds were normally not kingdom-wide organisations, Matt’s take on the whole thing is quite realistic and interestingly written. The guildhall fits the quite mundane nature of the society. Alongside the six pages of text we get four pages of battlemaps with hexes for the guildhall (more about those under sauce). The only thing that’s missing for me are the cellars, but depending on the town that’s not unrealistic either.

Steven Marsh’s “Tooling with Curses” (5 pages) veers into the more immaterial toolbox of wizards and more on the GM’s side too. We get three interesting, non-debilitating and somewhat abusable curses and three boxes and a lead-in on the more general topic of when and why to use curses. A very nice and tight selection, even though I’d have preferred one more curse maybe.

Next we get an (uncredited) instruction of how to fold a “Wizard’s Letter” (5 pages) with steps simple enough for me to follow. The example letter ties things back to the Hermetic Brotherhood again, which is nice. The letter is a neat prop, but nothing extraordinary. I’m a bit mystified as to why they provided the blank back of the letter too, but maybe they thought it was a nice parchment-y colour for printing out. I think there are better options for that, but let’s not quibble about a first issue.

Andy Ventromile’s “Out of the Rough – Magic Gems in RPGs” (6 pages) is a short, but thorough system-neutral treatment of the use of gemstones in fantasy magic. It covers many aspects and, of course, the use of powerstones in GURPS makes this especially interesting to GMs and players in SJG’s house system, but everything is kept generic. Andy gets a little side-tracked in politics in the middle, but it’s still interesting stuff. Just would have liked to see such in a longer treatment. There are only six types of gems (and one of them is pearls) treated individually, so don’t come looking here for correspondences (you can find those in GURPS Thaumatology).

Stefan Jones’ “‘.’ Is For Full-Stop Drum” (3 pages and really awkward to quote something with so many apostrophes / quotation marks in a row) is the odd one out in this issue. It describes a clan-based swamp fisher society that while it uses magic and has some ancient magical history can really only claim a link to theme by way of being part of GURPS Alphabet Arcane. Spoiler: The eponymous drum is very much not a tool for wizards except in the sense of bringing about the apocalypse.

So how does it fare as a description of a society and its past? It’s a decidedly mixed bag. There is some interesting colour, but descriptors such as “savages”, a tradition of contests to gain more women and rigid separate gender roles weren’t en vogue in 2008 and certainly aren’t today. I’d charitably call it a homage to Lovecraftian and leave it at that. What can you do with the whole thing? Not much unless you really want to bring about or prevent an apocalypse, and not a very interesting one at that (but see the meat section).

“Random Thought Table – Seriously Mysterious” (2 pages) by Steven Marsh is thankfully quite a bit fresher and talks about why and how to make wizards look mysterious with a lot of useful tips on how to pull it off in game. Again, this is a generic article, but it’s quite easy to tie it in to GURPS and most systems that have skills. It’s more tricks of the trade actually, but it plays around with some common tropes, showing ways to subvert them. A very fun read.

The humour section was quite mixed again. Murphy’s Rules was fun (at the time) and it was nice seeing Frederick Brackin’s name in print again – a big GURPS fan and supporter, may he rest in peace. “Items Found in a Dead Wizard’s Satchel” made me chuckle, but the “Fnordplay” left me stumped – and I wasn’t the only one (title was fun at least).

For a second article Andy Vetromile gives us “Recommended Reading – Tools of the Trade” (2 pages), which at a first glance is more about wizardly boardgames, but the author does include some nice ways to use board-game materials in your RPGs as well as pointing out some interesting ways of working magic in Deadlands and Unknown Armies. Not an absolute must-read, but a nice little addition.

The second recommended reading “Wizards and Gaming” (2 pages) by Matthew Pook is about a (2008) review of wizardly TTRPGs (and a good helping of how wizards work in D&D, 4th edition). It hasn’t aged too well (e.g. even GURPS had a supplement about a magic school by now), but still has some interesting bits if you like older games.

“Last Words” (1 page) features an interview with Chad Underkoffler, which again gives some helpful characterisation tips – a nice way to close the issue.

All in all, there is some pretty good stuff in there with only five pages falling below average.

Cheese score: 8

Sauce

While the writing is above average to pretty good, the same cannot be said of the art. The cover is nice but was already seen in GURPS Fantasy. The humour page had one decent and new image and a tired old one and there are three more reused third edition illustrations that serve little purpose other than providing visual way-points. What else? There are the folding instructions for the wizard’s letter and while these are not especially inspiring they do serve their purpose better than many online tutorials I’ve seen. Then there’s the map of the Guildhall by Matt Riggsby. I’ve never been a big fan of his maps and this one looks straight out of a Campaign Cartographer 3 tutorial, but it does help with visualising the place. Also it can be used as a battle map. Minus points for not providing battle maps as an image file, though. Virtual tabletops were a thing back then too (and so were printers).

In the end this comes in slightly above average, which is still pretty good for GURPS standards, unfortunately.

Sauce score: 6

Generic Nutritional Substance

As far as roleplaying supplements about magic go, this one is pretty generic. It favours traditional fantasy, but not completely. Several articles can be used in many kinds of settings. It does pretty much require some sort of fantasy, though, being about magic after all.

Generic Nutritional Substance score: 7

Summary

I remember not liking this issue much, when I first read it, but that might have been due to the fact that I loved the online Pyramid with its weekly offerings and disliked the map a lot. I might not have read it from cover to cover, because my time for that was rapidly diminishing. Re-reading it now, I’d say it’s a  roughly average issue of Pyramid 3. Certainly not the best entry point in the series, but not bad either and a fine zine in its own right. It’s more generically useful than many of the later issues too – even outside of GURPS.

If you are planning on buying the Pyramid/3 Bundle for $500 you get an even better deal, but maybe grab some issues from the middle of its run first (or read them over a friend’s shoulder) to see whether it’s your cup of tea. Back in the day all of us online subscribers got this even cheaper as part of half-a-year subscription deal, meaning we paid less than $20 for $54 in product. I want to say that I still think this was extremely generous on the part of SJGames.

Total score: 7.3
Total score is composed of a weighted average of Meat (40%), Cheese (25%), Sauce (20%) and Generic Nutritional Substance (15%). This is a meat-oriented book. A “cheesy” setting- or drama-orientied book would turn the percentages for cheese and meat around.

Value score: 7.65 (8.65 as Pyramid/3 Bundle)
Value Score is composed of the average of Total and Price.

GURPS is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and the art here is copyrighted by Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy.