Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, the powered-by-GURPS adventure RPG that out-dungeons and out-dragons them all, is getting powered up again. Artifacts of Legend and Artifacts of Saga, written by Marko Vujnovic and Christopher R. Rice and brought to you by Gaming Ballistic, will deliver over 70 new god-bestowed artifacts, fell weapons of darkness, and other weird wonders. The Kickstarter campaign’s sneak peek teases some good stuff, including Legendary Possessions: divinely granted items that grow in power as heroes complete great deeds. This sounds very good. (And needless to say, magic item write-ups are usually easy to port to any game system. You don’t have to be a DFRPG or GURPS player…
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Update to new damage for ST
The old article “Rules Bit: New Damage for ST” was a fairly well-visited piece on this site, exploring the topic of a ST-based damage that scales linearly with ST – like “1d per 10 ST”. It’s a change that no one needs but that a lot of rues tinkerers like. I’ve revised the article considerably to cover additional considerations, remove unimportant cruft, and offer a spiffier Damage Table. I’ve also renamed the article, as it’s much more an exercise in system hacking than a mere rules tweak. I invite you to give the renewed version a look:
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Update to alternate cost progression for ST
Rules Bit (GURPS): A Better Cost for ST and HP is an old but relatively popular piece that places ST on an ever-decreasing logarithmic cost progression (the brainchild of D. Weber). A replacement for existing schemes to reduce the cost of high ST, it drastically reduces the cost to build a mountain-cracking jotun or bus-hurling super – and can even make designing such beings easier. I’ve heard nice things over the years from GMs who have put his to use. Give the newly polished old article a read, grab its prettier new Tables, and see whether its cost progression works better for the supes in your games.
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The Least of Kickstarters: DFRPG Monster Seeds
If you read this quickly, you’ve still got a short window to get in on a Kickstarter campaign for a mini-sized product: Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game Monster Seeds, a collection of adventure ideas starring demons and lurching dead and other evil from DFRPG‘s original Monsters book. (See additional announcements here and here.) This will be a short book, apparently with only 12 entries, two per page. And you don’t even need to buy it! As the campaign page cheerfully notes, the entries are already collected on this forum thread. So it’s a packaging of freely available material, and just a few pages of it – buy hey, it’s one dollar.…
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Update to rules for grazes
Rules Bit (GURPS): Grazes is an old house rule that stretches back to the 3e days. It details the effects of a graze: the bullet that only scores a character’s shoulder as it whizzes past, the punch that almost gets dodged but still clips the target, all the scrapes and scratches that heroes accumulate in fiction while escaping serious harm. I’ve given the work a good-sized overhaul. I made the conditions for a graze cleaner and easier, reflecting my experiments and experiences. I simplified the effects of a graze to just two basics (or even one), with other effects made clearly optional. I clarified how the rule’s intent and effects…
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Game design musing: Notes on ST in GURPS
GURPS has a long history of wrangling the cost and workings of ST to make it behave. Simultaneously the most straightforward and the most wily of attributes, ST commands a bizarre amount of attention on this very site. While writing up STROLL, I found myself with a bunch of longer takes and miscellaneous notes on ST-related topics that didn’t quite belong in that article. Well, waste not, want not, Grandma Bone (allegedly) said, so here’s the content for the few interested souls out there. I’ll probably add other stray thoughts on ST to this page in the future. (Maybe rants like “Grrr, lazy media articles, quit saying ‘insects are so…
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Unasked-for silliness: Some gaming “humor”
Any doofus can post a dumb thing online in an attempt at “humor”. But it takes a special kind of doofus to compile and release a collection of his misfires in a warped plea for further public ridicule. Here’s a collection of gamer-related “humor” tidbits that I’ve left steaming on forums or Twitter. Consider it a break from yet more pretentious posts about the proper cost of SM-dependent strength-based logarithmic damage with semi-balanced polearms, or whatever. I serve it as an amuse-bouche (if decidedly light on the “amuse”). Into the breach: The “Three GURPS Books” challenge You are allowed three random GURPS supplements. What’s your campaign? This thread on the…
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GURPS resource: ST Monster Table
What monstrosity lumbers forth? The ST Monster Table for GURPS! Why has it risen? None can say – or perhaps none dare. Born of a mad notion that the Damage Table and Basic Lift and Encumbrance Table could be fused into a single heaving entity, this Qabalic construct reveals even damage scores expunged from the Damage Table. For while summoning new tables for STROLL of late, it was discerned that the stars are aligned and the portals are open; now is the time. The time for what? To create that hybrid beast of a table – and to cram it full of everything! What lies within? Madness, that’s what! Damage,…
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STROLL: ST rolls that work in GURPS
Yay, new content! And look, it’s… Oh. More nonsense about ST. Wait, don’t go. This is a useful tool that I’ve meant to post for a long time. It patches one of the few problems with ST that GURPS 4e left standing: getting rolls against ST (and Contests of ST, and even ST-based skills) to work correctly. The below fixes these rolls for any and all jotuns, teeny faerie folk, super-beings, or normal humans involved. Seriously, don’t run! This upgrade calls for no cost revisions and no new mechanisms, comparisons, or calculations, inside or outside of play. No wholesale reworking of ST into a logarithmic attribute, no changes to ST-related…
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Caged: A year of GURPS and DFRPG tweets
From February 1, 2022 to January 31, 2023, I made daily entries to the @gamesdiner Twitter account, using the hashtags #TRPG, #GURPS, and #DailyHouserule. The concept: Make tweets out of a bunch of minor GURPS houserule items, GM/player advice tidbits, and other tips & tricks, to have fun engaging with other gamers and get the #GURPS tag out there more. (See the initial announcement here.) How many tweets in all? 365 entries, one or several posts per entry… I don’t know, but probably over a thousand tweets. Released into the wild over the course of a year, they’ve now been rounded up and caged at the Games Diner, a page for each month. Birds of a feather they are…
