Random Undead Generator

Need an undead monster for GURPS but just can't decide what kind?

Jerander over on the SJG forums came up with a solution:

The Random Undead Generator

You'll need Fantasy, Horror, and of course Basic Set: Characters to get full use out of it, but you can get by with the same traits defined in Undead, if necessary.

It would be pretty trivial to add life-draining attack powers (or any other attack powers) to the critters, too - just add a new table, call it 3F, and add 1-6 cool powers lifted from existing undead.

Nice stuff.

GURPS Hommlet & TOEE

If you haven't looked at Patrick Halter's blog d20to3d6, and you're a fan of T1 The Village of Hommlet, you are missing out.

It's useful people in either of these camps.

I love Hommlet and I love GURPS!

Then you have stats for ghouls, Elmo, and thoughts on lower-point starting PCs.

Dude, I don't play GURPS.

Maybe not.

But he's provided some really interesting ideas on how to present Hommlet vs. Nulb as bases.

He's got a nice diagram of the relationships of the various villagers.

He's got random encounter tables.


It's a really interesting project, with all the i's dotted and t's crossed, done right in front of you. It's not a fast-and-loose conversion, either, but one that stays loyal to both the source material and the GURPS ruleset. That makes me happy in both ways.

Either way, take the time to check out d20to3d6.

More on Disposable Heroes

I started to write this as a comment on Talysman's blog, but then it got long and I decided I'd like to keep it here, too.

Yesterday's post was about why I think it's contradictory on some level to expect players to have their characters flee, and play games that make characters less valuable and more easily replaceable. In brief, why make your disposable hero run?

What I'm not saying is that people come out and say that characters are disposable. Or that players believe they are, and they don't care if they lose them. Or that GMs organize all games with the assumption that PCs are disposable.

I'm saying (in part) that being blase about TPKs, not worrying about encounter balance, having character funnels, and praising lethality implies some level of disposability of characters. To me, that's inherent in those ideas taken as a whole. So I wondered, maybe there is a perfectly valid reason a player might have their character do risky stuff, fight battles they might not win, and experiment with things that can be character-lethal but oh-so-entertaining. You might need one to get the other - maybe the fun can't happen in that way without both elements.

I don't think it is either/or, however. You can have high-value (even irreplaceable) characters and high lethality. I ran a game like that for years - just ask the half-dozen or more PCs who died permanently in that game. But I also think you get more risk avoidance and running from monsters than when you the player are just trying to see who lives to improve/level up/etc. In that game, with many of the same players I have now, avoiding fights was paramount and dodging away from things they perceived as death threats was common, even if there was a reward. These same guys now test teleporters in terrible circumstances, and launch into bloody fights with things that can kill them dead, and push one more room and laugh when it turns out disastrously. I draw a lesson from the fact that in this current game, the characters are ultimately replaceable in a way they weren't in my last game.

I seems clear to me that there is some connection between how easily you can replace characters (all the way up to the Undo-button of a Save Gave in a video game) and your willingness to risk death. You play Hardcore Diablo much more cautiously than regular Diablo, and and you'd play even more carefully if you couldn't make a new guy if you died.

In my DF game, which is high-lethality with easy replacement of characters, lots of PCs have died. But for the players, the only loss, is the loss of the fun of playing that particular guy.

So it's less surprising to me that they flee pretty rarely.

Disposable Heroes & Running Away

Do your players have their characters run away from fights?

If so, why?

If the PCs are essentially disposable, not-special, not-beautiful-and-unique-snowflake playing pieces, and the fodder by which GMs prove their willingness to play tough, why flee?

I read somewhere someone saying that OSR stood for "Oh shit, run!" - but does it? Why run? Especially at lower levels, you can just make up a new guy. At higher levels, you can get your guy fixed from anything short of "irrevocable death" and wishes will make that negotiable.

I think there are two opposing strains of thought here. One is the idea that the PCs are disposable. The other idea is that you should flee from tough encounters.

Maybe when players ram their hapless heroes into brutal fights just to see if they can pull it off, they aren't being tactically dense or foolish or playing the game incorrectly. They're showing a real understanding of what "your PC is disposable" means.

Running way shows you value the PC. You have your guy run away to live and fight another day. You have him tough it out and die a terrible death for the amusement of yourself and your friends at the table because you value the entertainment more than the PC. And isn't that what you're saying is the point in a high-lethality game?

I'm beginning to think the guys who have their imaginary guy fight to the death, or quaff that unknown potion, or push the big red button, have a good reason for it. The fun is the point, and if the PCs are disposable, they're just the means to the fun. Greg Costikyan's Paranoia RPG classically makes this the whole point of the game. But there is a reason that resonates - it's the logical extreme of a disposable hero game. Fleeing to fight another day is a good idea if you want to preserve your guy but it's not the message that character funnels, high-lethality play, unbalanced encounters, and TPK-as-common-event play sends.

If running has value, then PCs have value. They have to be "special" in some way to make it worth running away. If they're replaceable or easily fixable, then what is there to run from?

So yeah, maybe the guys who don't want to run have a point.

(Editing Later: I wrote a followup here: More on Disposable Heroes)

Level Drain & GURPS: How I do life-draining undead

For background to this post, see the following:

Patrick Halter's post on converting level drain to GURPS.

My response, where I discuss level draining and what I think is the folly of converting rules to rules.

Patrick Halter's response to my ideas.

Okay, all up to speed (or you just don't care)? Let's go.



In my own Dungeon Fantasy game, I use undead from GURPS (especially the excellent GURPS Undead), Rolemaster, and AD&D, as well as from other sources (video games, my own crazy ideas, etc.)

Most of them are fairly straight-up conversions, since the effects are "game world" effects (damage, death, disease, aging, fear) and not "game rules" effects (loss of temporary constitution, level drain, or status/stat change - Rolemaster, AD&D, and Bard's Tale respectively).

For the level-draining AD&D conversions, here is some of what I've done.

Mild Life Drain

My wights are AD&D wights, but instead of level drain I gave them a combination of a claw attack, paralysis, and a followup drain of fatigue. I felt this was a scary combo (and it's proven to be so) but not unfairly punishing. Here is it statted up for DF:

Claws (14): 1d+2 cutting plus 1d FP followup.

Paralyzing Touch (HT): Victims touched by the wight are paralyzed for (margin of failure +1) minutes; cosmic, ignores DR.

The basic effect of this is that if the claw attack penetrates your DR, you also lose 1d FP; either way if you're struck you may suffer paralysis. Wights also have Infectious Attack, so if you're slain by a wight you'll rise as a wight later on. More powerful wights are easy - up the base damage, give them more FP drain, reduce the resistance to the paralysis, and/or change Infectious Attack to Dominance, so they can rule over their created allies.

Why is this scary? You might get paralyzed, so you're a bad roll away from out of the fight. The claw damage isn't weak, either, and the dual track losses of energy (FP) and health (HP) means you're fast-tracking towards death and losing the resources you most need to counter them.

That's pretty tame as far as permanent damage goes, though. Sure, if you're dead and your friends lose your body it's bad. But win the fight and you'll just need to get healed up normally - the Infectious Attack isn't the werewolf/vampire kind that infects those who survive (although that's a nasty variant too). So here is an undead that does something much nastier - it inflict lasting harm until a power cleric removes the effects.

Lasting Life Drain

This attack is from a ghostly undead that shall remain nameless until my players fight them.

Death Touch (16): 1d toxic damage; cosmic, ignores DR. Cannot be parried or blocked.

Life Drain (Special): Resisted by HT, minus 1 for every point of damage inflicted by Death Touch. Failure means -1 to ST, DX, and HT indefinitely - it can only be cured by Remove Curse.

In DF, Remove Curse takes a Power Investiture 5 cleric (out of a 1-6; the base PC clerics start with 3), and it's not terribly cheap in mana to cast, so it's not an easy fix by any means.

If you prefer to make these even nastier, add this to the end of "Life Drain."
" Critical failure on the resistance roll lowers one of these stats permanently." Or just put "One Try ever" as a limitation on Remove Curse for this particular effect, so only one priest ever gets a shot at it. The priest probably won't roll a 17 or 18, but if it happens . . . you're screwed permanently barring Great Wish (possibly).

You can easily make these Afflictions - either a condition (Heart Attack, Coma, Seizure) or one that grants a disadvantage (Epilepsy, Hemophilia, Wounded, or Chronic Pain leap to mind) or a stat loss. You can make them all pretty nasty and permanent (well, the disadvantages and stat loss) if you really feel like you need to put total fear of these undead into your players.

Costing these up in GURPS isn't difficult, but I didn't bother because they are monster powers and I don't care how much monsters cost to build. They should be possible to build, though.

Anyway, those are two actual undead "life drain" effects from my GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game. I don't like ones you can't fix - yes, I know AD&D level drain was fixable, but we didn't let people just go get Restoration in the good old days. So mine tend to be "lasting" and not "permanent." It's there until you get something done about it, which won't be free or easy, but it can be done. Couple that with infectious attack and a tough monster and they are genuinely scary in the same way level draining undead are, without needing to try to convert the mechanic of another game to the mechanics of GURPS.

Oh, and Merry Christmas!

Level Drain & GURPS

Over at Renovating the Temple, Patrick Halter posted about level drain in GURPS terms as a possible drain of character points.

I started to respond there and decided I'd do it here instead.

How I do level draining undead

For my wights, I went with a normal HP-damaging claw attack, but with both a followup FP (fatigue point) drain and paralysis. Any of the claw damage penetrates the armor and bam, you have a nasty roll to resist paralysis and you start to suffer from exhaustion. That can quickly lead to death - not many people have a lot of FP, it's usually down from effort, and you die at -1 x FP so you've got less chance to survive than you do from normal HP loss. (Editing later: as Douglas Cole pointed out, you don't die at -1 x FP. You go automatically unconscious and your further FP losses are from HP; I meant you are effectively in a death spiral at that point and should have said so more clearly).

Why this way?

Because they're scary (assuming they get through your armor) and potentially lethal. Plus it gives some of the flavor of the temporary stat-draining undead of Rolemaster.

I figure if I use incorporeal undead that do this, maybe I'll make it Cosmic (Ignores DR) and that'll make them really terrifying (a few hits to death, extremely hard to stop). A followup effect like aging or adding Unhealing to the PC (if they can't be cured until some curse is removed) or Wounded (for damage that leaves a weak point even after the HP are cured) would make the attacks nasty, too.

I like that approach and I feel it makes life-draining undead really scary.

But I also do this because Character Points don't really exist in the game.

They exist in the meta-game, in the rules we use, but they don't exist in the game world any more than the die rolls exist. They're there to generate characters and put a balance-of-cost/tradeoff structure on making PCs. Why would getting clawed by a wight make your skills go away, or permanently ruin stats, or make you lose advantages? And if they did, why would they do it through the meta-mechanic of character points instead of a specialized attack that drops stats or inflicts disadvantages through Afflictions and modifiers like Cosmic? Who would choose what goes away? Would it have to be in reverse buy order (and what's the buy order of a starting guy?) Could you lose knowledge this way, or only physical stats? What happens when you lose 10 character points and decide you weren't using Fast-Draw (Arrow) anyway so you'll ditch that?

It's a potential mess.

It doesn't seem like it would be smooth in play, either - "Okay, let's stop while you ditch 10 points."

Plus, like I said, it's not like PCs in the game world have character points. Your paper man does, but what the paper man represents doesn't. Why not stat up attacks that have some kind of reasonable-to-explain game world mechanic?

"You lost 10 character points" is odd, and brings chargen back into play as a negative effect, while "Your health weakens; lose 1 HT" or "You gain the Wounded disadvantage" makes a lot of sense to me. It also keeps them scary, as no one likes getting slammed down with a new disadvantage or near-permanent damage.

Disassociated Mechanics

I've come across the term "disassociated mechanics" before - stuff that works as a game-rule but doesn't really make sense in the game world. I personally find level drain feels like way to me. What is it? It's a drain of holiness against a cleric, magic power and spell knowledge against a magic-user, of fighting power against a warrior, and of who-knows-what against an NPC monster. It makes sense as a scary "you lose stuff you worked hard to get!" power in the game rules, but in the game world? Why not go with the aging of ghosts, or make them unheal-able HP losses ("You wounds will not close!"), or some kind of long-term or permanent stat drain? Those numbers mean the same thing for everyone, while "level drain" means something different for each class and each level it's used at.

I'll probably catch hell for saying all of that, but that's how it feels to me. It never felt like it had a good in-game reason other than Gary Gygax wanted to put some real tension into the game for his players.

So it's not something I miss, really. I read it as shorthand for "this sucks badly, and for a long time after" without getting hung up on the odd and very gamey mechanics used in its original class-and-level system.

Bard's Tale I-III and The Bard's Tale - thanks inXile

A while back I contributed to the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter. I figured, what the hell, it's worth risking $15 for a post-apoc game I might like. They seemed to have a track record of actual producing games, so I figured it wasn't a blind risk.

The game still isn't out (it's not due out until October 2013), but it's already paid off:

As a contributor "Happy Holidays" thank-you, they've given me a free copy of The Bard's Tale, and the original games it takes an ironic look at - Bard's Tale I, II, and III. All three of the DOS-era games work just fine on my Win7 laptop.

I never played II or III, but I played the living hell out of I. I still make "The room contains 396 berserkers!" comments when I'm gaming with folks who might recognize it.

So I immediately started to play both "The Bard's Tale" (for goofy click-and-laugh fun, so far) and Bard's Tale I. It's been a long time, but my bid already paid off. I just wish I had a party from Wizardry or Ultima III to download, but no, I don't . . . not anymore.

You can get these guys on Steam pretty cheaply even if you didn't contribute. Good fun.

So if I'm not posting much for a few days, well, my holiday schedule is busy. And Bard's Tale, man. I already offed 4 spiders and a group of 7 hobbits that messed with me.