Here is a very brief look at the 10-page PDF GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 23: Twists, by Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch, creator of the DF line.
This book covers "twists" to change the heroes-clear-dungeons approach common to a lot of DF games.
The twists come in three categories:
- landholdings and status for PCs
- really scary evil
- high tech and ultra-tech
Each section is a couple of pages of advice on how to implement these things in your game. They aren't heavy on "crunch," but rather on page numbers, plus some numbers. For example, status effects are spelled out and benefits given, costs for castles and strongholds provided (but DR, HP, size, etc. is handwaved a lot), etc. There aren't any example ultra-tech weapons, but there are page refences to the relevant rules, advice on controlling such items (with more references), and penalties for using items, defaults, tables, and spells on tech.
It's all concise and easy to read, and if you've got a use for any of the three bits the whole PDF is worth the cost even if you won't use the other parts.
Felltower and DF23
I'm likely to use the first two parts. I already do use some of the second part. It's not really new to my game, but does provide some useful ideas for expanding the "really scary evil" bit. Damnned immortal souls? Yeah, although the PCs like to pat themselves on the back for killing Evil Sterick, his backstory (known to them) makes it clear that he wasn't alwasy that way, and then suddenly things went very, very bad and so did he. It's not an isolated case . . . and DF23 gives me some more ideas on how to make it clear that's the case. The third bit . . . not in Felltower, but I do want to run a DF game that features high-tech at some point. Going back to the landholdings and status - yes, if PCs want to invest the money, they can absolutely do this. I finally have some easy numbers to use in terms of points and dollars to charge for the benefits you get, and have the benefits spelled out. I'm in.
Good stuff.
I was surprised to read this:
ReplyDelete"A surprisingly effective way to accomplish this is to be firm about enforcing the rules surrounding injury and healing: Minor Healing and Major Healing spells suffer penalties for repeated uses, while other spells (especially Great Healing) can be attempted once per day. Players often work around this by taking long pauses, so put the adventure on a strict clock and have the monsters press."
Wait, doing this is the *exception*? But I'm glad it reminded me of the strict rules for healing potions …
I apply all of that as well, including potion breakage . . . although enemies rarely waste time trying to hit a potion, and potion belts are exceedingly common. But otherwise, for me it's the default. I wouldn't be surprised to find that most people do otherwise. My game is deliberate on "hard mode," which is why so much of that second section is stuff I already do.
DeleteFor added "grimness" remove the Potion Belt automatic protection (it's for GM convenience more than anything else) and make it improve the odds by +2, so potions can still break on 1-2 on a d6.
DeleteI mean unless it's a steel padded container (and thus Ruggized for CF+1, reduces breakage to 1 on d6, DR 4 versus strikes, $120, 2lbs), falling //on// a potion could still break it.
I like that as part of a "gritty" switch for DF. I won't re-con that into my game, but I do like it. It's another mundane equipment money sink, too, which I like.
DeleteI've read three of them at this point, Action 8 Twists (what I really wanted), DF 23 Twists (another really want), and DF 22 Gates (was happy to buy it but suspected I'd read it all here before...).
ReplyDeleteAction 8 is a let down (compared to other Sean Punch books). I have strong suspicion Kromm had to leave some stuff on the cutting room floor. I do enjoy all the shout-outs to other products that contain Action "twist" materials that I've forgotten alonf the way, but I'm really growing weary of 4e having been deliberately setup to be exactly what SJG proposed it wouldn't be, rules spread across a million books. Though to be honest I can't see how it could be anything else, until the product goes completely digital with hyperlinkages.
Regardless, Action 8 is a great book if you're not me, someone who has given a lot of thought on how to spice up his action games. i wish Kromm had done more with the Social Action sections, something he does in the next book...
DF 23 Twists: Best book of the three. This is like DF 16 Wilderness for me, it's another game changer. Where DF 16 made me fall in love with DF, DF 23 nicely summarizes all the extra add-ons I've been collecting and building for myself, and does it simpler and betterer; Lords and Ladies (Retainers, Social Advantages, etc), Demons and Darkness (making it darker in the dungeon), and Sufficiently Advanced (a Technowizard did it) are all great sections, with Lords and Ladies shining in a way the social Action rules flounder in Action 8. In fact, Action fans? Pick up DF 23 and read this section, you'll thank me later.
And finally (but not leastly) DF 22 Gates. Sorry Pete, but I really did read all this here. It's a great book, but for me... well... it was kinda superfluous? Still, it's a great book, an excellent collation of you thoughts from over the years on how to implement Gates into a Megadungeon (or Hexcrawl, or even Kitchen Sink Fantasy).
It felt like it could have used a little bit more on Gate magic (mana or divine) and adding it into a campaign, bit I suspect this section was short both due to a constraint of space and utility.
No worries on DF22. You've read this blog for a long time, quite closely. It was going to be hard to be anything but a way to collate all of my experience on gates into one spot.
DeleteI agree on 4e . . . I love the system, but yeah, here we are with materials scattered all over the place again. It's inevitable. really - supporting the line means adding more books which means adding more things that could have been elsewhere, had they been written earlier.
Promises of the "no rules spread all over" variety are great for the early years of a new edition, but they are unsustainable and honestly shouldn't be expected to be sustainable 17 years into an edition's lifetime. In the case of Fourth Edition, it was a promise that we felt we could keep throughout the hardback period. When that wound down in late 2007 and the Dungeon Fantasy and Action series popped up shortly afterward, we felt we had held up our end.
ReplyDeleteThough gamers seem to love to pretend otherwise, we're a business. We have to make money or die. We don't make money on core sales; we make money on expansions. Compendia and collections are self-competition, so though we can make money on those, we lose money on all the things they crib from. See the trend?
What I try to do with many of my works is not add new rules and thereby contribute to breaking the old promise, but create focused, thematic indexes of where to look in a sprawling system if you just want to buy the subset of supplements that support the them. Of course I also add advice on using these things, creative interpretations, and occasional pre-calculated figures to save time, so the words are useful even without the page references.
But ultimately, this is just what supplements for a product line with hundreds of titles have to be.
I'm happy 4e gets new rules as otherwise we might have to suffer 5e and ugh I don't want that
DeleteAnd most of the new rules are new rules not 'hey, we didn't like what we did in X, let's release a whole new book just to nerf X all over' which is what certain other companies support feels like 'same as we had before just more nerfed'
For as much as I grumbled about it, I'm less annoyed with new rules as the diaspora of them across //Pyramid magazine articles//. Which Action 8's callouts back to them helps fix, but ironically also pointed them all out at once and made me realize just how much rules diaspora we've undergone.
DeleteLike I'm actually not against it when they're in a series line, like rules "paring down" and "cinematic emphasizing" of the Action series, and the collating and thematic shifting of DF, as I suddenly was with the Pyramid articles... which I enjoyed when they came out but have become this vast sprawling spread of rules that feels like it's overwhelming. If I were a newb to GURPS 4e, reading Action 8 and all the callbacks to articles would turn me away "What? There's more things I need to buy to understand the rules you're talking about here?"
And yeah, I watched WotC realize they couldn't make bank off of core rules sales of D&D 3e, and they're the 800 pound D&D gorilla, so I never expected GURPS to survive off of Core books sales, it's just the rules spread that's riled my ire today. WHich yeah, it's not even the same level of spread suffered in 3e GURPS, it's not like you guys have been making up new Skills or Advantages with every supplement so the comparison is unfair on my part.
The biggest problem with GURPS as a business is that an experienced GURPS GM really only needs the two core books. Like a big generic Lego set, it has enough blocks to build most of the other toys you might want to play with. It is not surprising to me that both products ended up in a business model of "Highly optimized sets to do a specific thing."
ReplyDeleteIn theory, that sounds right. In practice, I buy all of those highly optimized sets to do a specific thing, and I'm not alone.
Delete