I’ve got pages for new talents, new techniques, new technique-based advantages, and new perks, all waiting to tie up your PC’s precious character points (or cash, in the case of new weapons). Now it’s time to help you claw back some of those points with new disadvantages. My collection of new disadvantages is small, but I’ll of course add to it if I create more. An all-important note: Naturally, these are purely fan blog house rules offered for your amusement. Please don’t mistake them for “official” stuff! Code of Honor variants For some general discussion on these codes and their use in the game, see this forum thread. For any…
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“Hear Ye” archive
Past blurbs from the “Hear Ye” sidebar section. Announcements too trivial for a full blog post. Minor side thoughts of the sort that used to go to Twitter before its Fall (call it prelapsarian Twitter). Any such town crier missives, now collected here. 2025-05-08: If there’s a fantasy RPG bestiary that includes the bonnacon, I haven’t seen it. Never heard of this legendary beast until now. It’s a bull-like creature that does what the skunk and the bombardier beetle do, but with a force that lays acres to waste with a rearward blast. (This one’s just too silly a monster to make “real”. Even in a fantasy game, I think…
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GLAIVE Mini levels up to v2.4
It’s a small level-up. A GURPS-style level-up: a handful of character points, not a feats-and-hit-points dump. In short: My one-page melee weapon-building system for GURPS/DFRPG, reverse-engineered from the games’ weapon tables, improves its list of weapon mods. The list is now organized by type, not alphabetically, which I think makes quickly picking out the right mods much easier. It also gains color coding that instantly shows which mods are mutually incompatible. A bigger change is on the webpage. An Appendix now offers a small but growing armory of sample builds, notes on builds that don’t want to conform to published stats, a peek at potential new mods, and other commentary.…
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GURPS/DFRPG resource: New technique-based advantages
A very particular set of (sub-) skills This article offers a rather unnecessary thing: a number of skill techniques bought to their maximum level and given new names as quick-pick advantages. These came about when I concocted a technique-based bunch of parkour- and thievery-related power-ups during the playtest for Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves. They didn’t appear in the book, so in the spirit of waste not, want not, I leave you with those power-ups here, along with more that I created later. Such technique-based advantages – I’ll call them “TBAs” – aren’t a new thing. Dungeon Fantasy 11: Power-Ups (p. 7) gives them a thumbs-up for simplicity, and offers examples…
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Dumping out the loot sack: More rules and tools for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy thieves
As promised in my mini review of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves, I'm rounding up and presenting ideas and content that I had suggested for the book during its playtest but that didn't end up between its pages.
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A bunch of new content for GURPS, etc.
I’ve added a lot of new content over the past few months. “Yeah, I can see that. I mean, I’m here, on the site…” Right. And thank you. But I’m posting this for the benefit of the RSS feed. A few words about the feed, for the interested only, follow the header below. For now, here’s an update in the form of a TL; DR version, as of late September 2023: The normal, expected RSS feed for this site, http://www.gamesdiner.com/feed/ , should work fine now. That’s all. The rest of this page might be of modest interest to blog managers only. The gripe! Out of old habit, I use the…
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Game design musing: Easiest-ever, zero-math “weight-to-power” factor for characters (GURPS)
The last thing I posted to this site was a book review, and before that, a notice of a Kickstarter campaign. That’s two posts in a row that aren’t overly nerdy (as RPG hobbyist stuff goes). So I’m overdue to post something really dorky. You: “Uh, no, that’s okay, you don’t have to, really…” Say you want to set a weight-to-power ratio, or level of weight-to-ST, however you style it, for characters in your games. “O-o-o-kay, I think we’ve seen this before, and we know how it goes. This is why we got you those meds.” Hold on. There are two parts to a discussion: That second is the big…
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A mini review: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves
Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Thieves is a new entry in the Denizens sub-series of the Dungeon Fantasy series for GURPS. It joins the earlier Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Barbarians and Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Swashbucklers as the third work to explore and expand a Dungeon Fantasy profession. (Or the fourth if you count Dungeon Fantasy 7: Clerics, but that’s a different sort of entry.) What’s in there Like its sub-series predecessors, Thieves aims for completeness in detailing its profession. The main text compiles lots of new and old information: In short, it’s a catalog of traits and gear for thievish characters. Which on its own would feel incomplete, but call-out boxes add thoughts…
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Coming for DFRPG: Artifacts of Legend
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:
