Review: Pyramid #3/104 Dungeon Fantasy RPG

Last September, SJ Games ran a Kickstarter for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG, a standalone version of their GURPS Dungeon Fantasy line. As part of that Kickstarter, they promised to release three issues of Pyramid focused on Dungeon Fantasy.

This month, Pyramid #3/104: Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying game was released, representing the first of these three issues. So, what do we have in here? Let's take a look.

Trapped in the Living Tomb
By Steven Marsh

This is a solo adventure geared for new players, and as such, I'm going to be circumspect about spoilers. However, I will say that it's a fun little adventure, and reminds me of old-school text adventure games. The included character sheet is comprehensive, but too detailed for the adventure, which only involves a small subset of the traits listed on it.

It also serves as an introduction to GURPS, and while it doesn't go into detail, it provides you with enough mechanics to get by. After playing through this once, a new player should have at least the basic concepts for playing through a full game.

And again, it's fun. Even if you're experienced, just playing through it is a fun experience, with danger and puzzles and mysteries. But for new players, it's a great way to introduce them to GURPS. If you know someone who wants to try out GURPS, start here.

It's a Quest!
By Christopher R. Rice

One of the most challenging aspects of running a roleplaying game is taking disparate events, places, and people, and tying them all together into a coherent, engaging adventure. In this article, Christopher takes a look at how to do just that.

It begins with a section on sandbox play that is, honestly, out of place. Since the focus of the article is on narrative play, it's necessarily short, and so doesn't offer more than some abbreviated advice on how to keep the GM's workload from becoming too taxing.

The next section, Railroads and Hell on Wheels, briefly discusses what a railroad is, why players react poorly to an adventure with a structured plot, and then offers some advice on how to preserve players' feelings of choice. The advice it offers is sound, including presenting players with options, taking player ideas and incorporating them into the game, and including elements that the players enjoy. Still, it's brief, and a discussion of how to give players a feeling of choice could easily be an article in its own right.

Prodding the Quest, though, is the real meat of the article. There's some advice about how to learn what your players learn through running short, single session adventures, followed by guidance on how to organize and link the elements you're using to build longer adventures. The part on building a Game Clock, where you map out roughly how much of a session your players want to  spend on combat, social interaction, puzzles, and so on, is a great idea. Knowing how much time you're going to spend on something will, with some experience, let you know just how much of that sort of material you'll need to prepare for the session.

Finally, you have the Random Quest Generator. This is valuable, and could accurately be called the GM Writing Prompt Tables. The best part about them is that you can use the tables independently of each other, so if you're at a loss for where the adventure should be, roll on the Place table. Not sure what kind of monsters live there? Roll on the Monster table, and so on.

In the worst case, where you're at a complete loss for what to do, then you're covered as well. By rolling for Touchstone number and then for Tile number, you know how many important elements are going to be in your quest. Then flesh them out by rolling for type on the Keystone table, and continue rolling on the appropriate tables until you've filled everything out. It's quite likely that you'll have a spark of inspiration while doing this ("I've got a Knight and a Faerie involved? Hey! What if the Knight is sworn to the service of the Faerie?"), and then you can play off of that to fill out the rest of the structure.

I suggest liberally crossing over between the tables in this article and the Heroic Background Generator. Sure, one's meant for quests and the other's meant for people, but every adventure will have both, and you can use both sets of tables for filling out details.

Overall, this article has some good advice on how to build adventures, and an even better set of tables to do it with. Even if you're not running Dungeon Fantasy, they're broad enough to be used in any fantasy-esque setting.

Eidetic Memory - Heroic Background Generator
By David Pulver

So who is your delver? For most Dungeon Fantasy games, it's sufficient  to say that they're a Knight in search of treasure and glory, but what if you want more detail? Well, that's where the Heroic Background Generator steps in.

This article is a large number of tables that, when used in order, gives you a more or less complete outline of your character's past, from birth to why they took up delving in the first place. The one drawback is that it's designed to start before you've decided on the sort of character you make. However, this isn't a big issue, because you can go through the steps, picking something appropriate for your character, and then rolling for those things where you don't know or want more detail for it.

And there are a lot of details to be found in these taables. You've got tables for families, ghosts that might be haunting the character, tables for other supernatural entities, prior experience, and many more. While this may sound like a bit much, the purpose of tables like these is to help you answer questions that you're not sure about, and so the best way to use it is to roll on the tables you want and then ignore the rest.

Even after character creation, it's useful as a GM tool. Need to flesh out an NPC's background? This is a great resource. Need to pick out monster types for something? That's in here, too. Bored and need ideas? Just start rolling on tables and see what pops out.

It's tuned for use with Dungeon Fantasy, but like It's a Quest!, you could make use of it in any fantasy-esque setting without much trouble.

Random Thought Table - Preparing for the Hero's Journey
By Steven Marsh

This is a fairly short article, offering various tidbits on how to build a Dungeon Fantasy character. It's general advice, including figuring out what your skills let you do and what will hold you back, but it's useful food for thought.

Impulse Control in Psi Wars

In Pyramid #3/100, Christopher R. Rice of Ravens N' Pennies wrote the excellent Impulse Control article, which expands on the concept of Impulse Buys from Power-Ups 5 and extends it to other narrative-influencing traits like Luck and Serendipity. This is an excellent system to use in a cinematic game, where the power of plot favors the characters except at those dramatic moments where it turns against them.

As a highly cinematic game, Impulse Control is a natural fit for Psi Wars, especially since it already features Destiny points. In fact, you could just rename Destiny to Impulse Points, use Impulse Control as written, and call it a day. But Impulse Control has so much more to offer than that, so let’s run down the options that fit in a Psi Wars game.

Using Impulse Points

Both Impulse Points and Villainous Points fit, since while the former represents the advantage that heroes have, the latter represent bad luck and dramatic twists against the player characters. Enhanced Refresh for both IP and VP are appropriate, as is the optional rule for faster refresh rates on page 5. Game time refresh rates are not, given the genre’s tendency to gloss over travel time, down time, and other intervening gaps.

For Gaining Points, dramatic in-character actions, staying in-character and in-genre, and trading IP for VP are all appropriate, since they encourage players to do cool, in-genre stuff and offer a chance to succeed at something now that they’ll pay for later. Likewise, Losing Points is all valid. Use the table on page 7 to guide IP awards and penalties.

Since Psi Wars uses the Action framework, including BAD, Really Bad Impulses is quite suitable. Better watch out when accumulating karmic debt, or things may get a lot worse for a while!

For Spending Points, use the rules on page 6 as is. Appropriate expenditures of points include:

• Big Entrance/Exit (Pyr. 3/100 p. 8)
• Buying Failure (Power-Ups 2 p. 4)
• Buying Success (Power-Ups 2 p. 4)
• Cursing Mooks(Power-Ups 2 p. 6)
• Deflecting Disadvantages (Power-Ups 2 p. 10)
• Dooming Foes (Power-Ups 2 p. 5)
• Favors in Play (Power-Ups 2 p. 8)
• Flesh Wounds (Power-Ups 2 p. 10)
• Lucky Break (Pyr. 3/100 p. 8)
• Perking Things Up: Buying Success (Power-Ups 2 p. 6)
• Player Guidance (Power-Ups 2 p. 7)
• Power Boosting  (Pyr. 3/100 p. 8)
• Roll Bonus (Pyr. 3/100 p. 9)
• Trading Points for Money (10% of starting funds) (Power-Ups 2 p. 8)

Divine Intervention (Power-Ups 2 p. 9) is also appropriate, but it can only be used by player characters with Communion and uses the rules for influencing Communion rolls given in Psi Wars - Heroes.

Modifying Templates

Using The Buck Stops Here (Pyr. 3/100 p. 8), any Destiny, Luck, Serendipity, or similar traits are converted to the appropriate form of Impulse Points. While Daredevil is included in this list, I suggest leaving it unmodified.

All non-psionic templates have Luck, which becomes either IP 3 (Aspected, rerolls only, -20%) [12]. Add 3 points to be spent on optional advantages. The options to upgrade Luck become Remove Aspected for 3 points, Enhanced IP Refresh (Per Session) 2 or 3 [10 or 20], and Enhanced IP Refresh 1 (Per Hour) [20].

For all templates, Serendipity 1-2 becomes IP 1-4 (Aspected, Player Guidance Only, -20%)  [4/level].

In Disadvantages, add Villainous Points 1-3 [-5/level] to the list of options.

For the Con Artist, the prerequisites for Fool’s Luck become IP 3 and Enhanced Refresh 1 (Per Hour). Improve Extreme Luck to Ridiculous Luck becomes Improve IP 3 to IP 5 [25] for 10 points and improve Enhanced IP Refresh 1 (Per Hour) Enhanced IP Refresh 1 (Per 30 minutes) [40] for 20 points. Destiny 1 (“The Price of Fortune”) becomes Villainous Points 1 [-5].

For the Mystic, Psi-Hunter, and Space Knight, Destiny and Luck become IP [5/level] and Enhanced IP Refresh 2 (Per Session) [10].

For the Heroic Lens, Destiny 3 becomes 15 points spent on additional levels of IP [5/level] and Enhanced IP Refresh (Per Session) [10/level]. Alternatively, remove 5 points from the list of advantages and spend 20 points on Enhanced IP Refresh (Per Hour) [20/level].

Review: Pyramid #3/98 Introduction to Dungeon Fantasy

Back in September of 2016, Steve Jackson Games ran a Kickstarter for their Dungeon Fantasy RPG, which is a standalone version of the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy gameline. One of the stretch goals for the Kickstarter was a promise to release three Dungeon Fantasy themed Pyramid articles over the next year. Pyramid #3/98: Introduction to Dungeon Fantasy was the first of these to be released, and as the name suggests, it’s all about helping new players and GMs get started with Dungeon Fantasy.

Let’s take a look at what’s inside, shall we?

You All Meet At An Inn

By Matt Riggsby

Meeting in an inn has long been a cliche of fantasy tabletop roleplaying, but Matt Riggsby offers a fresh spin on the concept. Instead of the party all meeting and deciding to adventure together, in this scenario adventure comes to the inn instead! Can chance-met travelers band together to fend off and then put a stop to the danger?

The article starts with a brief description of the inn that the adventure starts in, and while short, it provides enough detail to run it without issue. It even comes with the HP and DR of various parts of the inn’s construction, which is a welcome touch for any group of delvers inclined to smash their way out of problems.

The action kicks off as the delvers are settling in for the evening, with a zombie attack! The initial group of zombies should be an easy fight for the delvers, but there’s more on the way, with no end in sight. Now, they could try to escape, or they could try and find the source of the attacks, which just so happens to be beneath the inn itself.

I think that realizing where the source of the zombies is may be a potential point of failure for the adventure, since it requires that the delvers make a roll or look in the right spot. A few more hints would not have gone amiss, especially as the adventure makes it clear that escape is a much more dangerous approach.

The search for the source of the zombies takes the delvers on a short dungeon crawl, which is sufficient to introduce them to most of the ideas of dungeon fantasy, like traps, puzzles, and monsters. At the end, they face off against the source of the zombies, and upon its destruction, all of the zombies deanimate.

Several maps are included, two of the inn’s levels, one of the temple. They’re simple but functional, but the floor textures in some places make it hard to see the hex grid. Also, it’s unclear what size the maps are meant to be, and there’s very noticeable compression artefacts at higher levels of zoom. There’s no key, either, which is a mixed blessing, since it means you can reuse them elsewhere, but you need to do a bit of work to match the descriptions with the places on the map.

On the whole, this is a solid intro adventure, with plenty of potential for DMs to add in their own touches. The inn’s location, the temple, and more are all deliberately kept generic, allowing you to easily drop this into any suitable campaign.

The one potential drawback for new DMs is the need to get Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1 and Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 3 in addition to DF1 and DF2, but those books provide a wealth of monsters and are worthwhile in their own right.

Using this Article

As Written: It’s an intro Dungeon Fantasy adventure. Round up some players, make characters, and go.

Monster Hunters: The same general premise could just as easily be used in Monster Hunters as well, and if your campaign is in a sufficiently remote, old-time area, then the inn can even be used as is. You might want to beef up the monsters, though, since 400 point champions should make light work of foes built for 250 point delvers.

The Monstrous Monstorum

By Christopher R. Rice

One thing that Dungeon Fantasy DMs can never have too many of is ideas for monsters, and Monstrous Monstorum adds fifteen more to the menagerie. They range from nuisances like the bandit snatcher to the terrifying stone sharks, and from mundane pack hunters like the bouda to the eldritch grü. Whatever your needs, you’re likely to find something of interest to torment your players with in this article.

A common thread among many of the monsters is that they’re likely to have lingering effects that will make delvers regret running into them, above and beyond any damage they may take. Curses and diseases are regular occurrences, and what the excremental can do is just plain wrong.

All in all, Monstrous Monstorum has something for everyone, and if you’re at a loss for ideas, then you’re likely to find one (or more!) within this article.

Using this Article

As written: These are Dungeon Fantasy monsters. Drop them in and go!

After the End: Some of these creatures would be very appropriate in a post-apocalyptic setting, like the excremental, though you may need to tone them down.

Monster Hunters: Another genre where having a variety of creatures is useful. Just remember that 400 point champions are likely to stomp on these monsters if you don’t buff them first.

Grave of the PIrate Queen

By David L. Pulver

Another short intro adventure, this one takes adventurers on a romp through a network of seaside caves containing the grave and treasure of pirates and a temple to a nasty old god of the sea.

As adventures go, this one is pretty straightforward. The adventures roll into town for one reason or another, hear about a seaside cave complex that’s recently been uncovered by an earthquake, and off they go! Once there, the delvers find a combat-heavy series of encounters within the relatively small series of caves.

One downside of Grave of the PIrate Queen is that it’s light on non-combat challenges. There’s no interesting traps or puzzles for the delvers to contend with, so thieves and the like will lack for things to do.

On the upside, this adventure gives a nice selection of hooks for further adventures. As the name suggests, only the pirate’s queen is buried within the caves, and the fate of her crew is left unstated. Perhaps they left more buried treasure somewhere? Alternatively, the delvers may find themselves contending with the cults of Tentacle Beard.

This adventure also comes with a map, and unlike You All Meet At an Inn, this one is keyed, making it easy to reference in play. Unfortunately, it also suffers from compression artefacts at reasonable levels of zoom. There’s also a nice, unlabeled sketch that you can give out to the players as an in-game map. It’s accurate, but gives no information beyond the layout.

Using this Article

As written: Another intro Dungeon Fantasy adventure. Drop your players in and have at it.

Variants: You could just as easily use the concepts of this adventure in a swashbuckling high seas campaign, or perhaps a Monster Hunters game with a nautical focus. Just make sure to tune the challenges accordingly.

Building a Long-Term Dungeon Fantasy Game.

By Peter V. Dell’Orto

This is an excellent collection of advice for anyone looking to run a Dungeon Fantasy game, including suggestions on how to keep it easy for players to pick up, how to make some of the more situational classes useful, and how to keep the game’s scope from expanding if you don’t want it to.

While mainly useful for new DMs, there’s enough in here that’s worth a peek for the more experienced folk as well, especially if this is their first Dungeon Fantasy campaign.

For people wanting more, I recommend also checking out Dell’Orto’s excellent Dungeon Fantastic blog, which chronicles his on-going (and long lasting!) campaign.

Back to Basics

By Steven Marsh

This is a short article on mundane but potentially useful prep work that you can do for a game, whether you’re a player or a game master. Advice on building cheat sheets and useful props is included, and the uses for items like glass beads and dice in tracking game information could be quite handy.

Review: Pyramid #3/100: Pyramid Secrets

February marks the 100th issue of Pyramid magazine's, which is a major milestone. Congratulations to the Pyramid team, and good luck on the next hundred issues!

But just what does one find in an issue that marks such a momentous occasion? An intriguing sampling of offerings from across the board, from the decidedly crunchy, to the details of a secret operations group of a far future government.

Impulse Control
By Christopher R. Rice

Disclaimer: I had the pleasure of reviewing a playtest version of this article, and some of my feedback made it into the final version.

This excellent article expands on the system of Impulse Buys introduced in Power-Ups 5 [link], and not only extends its uses, but unifies with other metagame mechanics like Luck, Serendipity, and Destiny. If you're running a cinematic game, this is a great way of representing the conventions of heroes pulling off desparate feats at dramatic moments, bad stuff befalling them at the worst time, and so many others.

The core of the system is a regenerating pool of Impulse Points, which can be spent on effects outlined in Power-Ups 5 and the article, like scene alterations, buying criticals, and many others. The article also introduces Villainous Points, which is the dark twin of Impulse Points, and gives the GM a pool of points to spend on effects that cause the character trouble. Watch out!

My favorite part of this article is the way that it brings together Luck, Destiny, Serendipity, Unluckiness, and other traits into a single system. The Buck Stops Here explains how to represent these traits as combinations of Impulse Points/Villainous Points, with appropriate modifications. So, not only do you know just how Unlucky you are, you also know that your specific kind of Unlucky is always looking like a fool in front of an audience. And if you take advantage of Going Cosmic, you can readily represent godlike entities that can dictate events around them.

It also introduces some new uses for Impulse Points, like adding flat bonuses to rolls, moving faster, and temporarily adding enhancements to skills. This is an excellent way of representing heroes (or villains!) pulling out some new trick when needed, but that they can't repeat later on.
Some other useful aspects are the outlines for breaking down stretches of time, like actions, scenes, and adventures, using Impulse Points to modify BAD from Action, and rewarding characters for in-genre actions.

I'd normally go into ideas on how to vary the system, but Impulse Control is already so flexible that it's unnecssary. Instead, I'll provide a few ideas for aspected Impulse Points:

• Destiny (The One True King): Impulse Points 3 (Aspected, "Acts of a king", -5%*) [15], Enhanced IP Refresh 2 [20]
• Divine Power: Impulse Points 20 (Cosmic, +300%) [400], Enhanced IP Refresh (Per Five Minutes) [240]
• Untouchable in Combat: Impulse Points 1 (Aspected, Defense Rerolls Only, -40%) [3]
• Weirdness Magnet: Villainous Points 4 (Aspected, Attracting Weird Stuff or Occurrences Only, -20%) [-16]

* Per Christopher R. Rice, this is a fair way to represent the limits of Destiny.

Infinite Weapons
By Hans-Christian Vortisch
In this article, you'll find a selection of real world firearms that never made it, ranging from the early days of guns up to the modern day. Many of these have interesting features, which often contributed to unreliability and their ultimate failure, but for a campaign set in the Infinite Worlds, you could find variants on other timelines where their kinks were worked out.

Sadly, I'm not much into firearms myself, but if that's your thing, this article will provide plenty of fodder for ideas for unusual designs.

The Galactic Operations Directorate
By David L. Pulver

This article was one that I was really excited to see, since throughout Ultra-Tech, you're given tantalizing glimpses of a far future civilization and the clandestine Galactic Operations Directorate that protects it from the gravest of threats. Now, the curtain has finally been drawn back, and we're given a glimpse into this secretive organization.

It starts off with a brief history of the GOD, and offers an interesting insight into the minds of the elite in this world. The idea that one's most trusted operatives are androids speaks of paranoia, and a desire to have definitively loyal agents.

The organization itself would make for an excellent Patron for player characters, since the agency's mandate is to predict, investigate, and countering ultratechnological threats to the Emperor and the Empire as a whole. It even comes with a set of brief statistics that let you assess its capabilities at a glance.

Typical agents of GOD are teams of combat androids, all named after angels or angelic beings from Earth myth. However, while the article gives you a basline for these characters, it sadly doesn't include a template for any. Since it also suggests that these are 1,000 point (!) characters, you're given a lot of wiggle room for design.

The section on GOD is then followed up with the Yezendi Antimatter Syndicate, another organization that appears in the Ultra-Tech vignettes as an antagonist organization. As their name suggests, they deal in antimatter, smuggling it through Imperial territory as a way of bypassing the restrictions the Empire places on its manufacture and sale.

While the presence of antimatter in quantity raises concerns about the setting for me, the organization itself is nicely set up to be a foe for the GOD. They're certainly an ultratechnological threat, and their layers of middlemen means that they're hard to shut down and the leaders are insulated from Imperial retaliation, both by distance from the operations and their presence outside Imperial space. Player characters trying to roll up this organization have their work cut out for them.

The Yezendi race itself gets a brief overview, and so could be adapted to other roles in the setting, if you'd like. The existence of castes and the Questioners who challenge those caste roles give plot hooks of their own, and the internal tensions of the Yezendi could serve as a focus in a campaign.
On the whole, I rather like this article, and hope that we get another look into the world of Ultra-Tech at some point in the future.

Using This Article
As written: The player characters are agents of GOD, going up against the sinister Yezendi Syndicate. Can they stop it before a reign of antimatter fueled terror and destruction descends upon the Empire?
Alternatively, the player characters could be renegades, who defected from GOD with technology that the organization planned to turn to sinister ends. Can they elude the Archangel teams long enough to bring the agency's plans to the attention of the Emperor?

There's many other possibilities, of course, but no matter what you choose, you'll have to fill in other aspects of the setting. I suggest going through the Ultra-Tech vignettes first, and expand on them. Also, since this is an unrestricted TL12^ setting, don't try to make complete sense of it. Rule of Cool is the order of the day.

Variants: By toning down the setting, you could use both organizations in a less cinematic Ultra-Tech setting. GOD's teams are still highly trained agents, but their scope is more focused, and Yezendi deal in more conventional weapons and fuels.

Fashion Forward
By Matt Riggsby

What would fashion look like in the far future? Unfortunately, there's no pictures, but the article still offers rules on how to dress to impress, including how much you have to spend to get reaction bonuses for the quality of your clothing.

While I've seen objections to letting clothing provide more than a +1 bonus, there's another way to use these rules: for you to claim the reaction bonuses from high relative status, you need to be wearing clothing with a bonus equal to or greater than your status.

There's also interesting tidbits on how high technology might affect the ways we approach fashion and what's considered impressive. The section on new materials for clothing could also provide inspiration.

On the whole, this is a fairly functional article, but it's also dry.

For variants on this article, simply change the underlying basis of fashion from technology to whatever suits your setting. You could reuse this with magic, for example.

Gods of Commerce
By Christoper Conrad and Jason "PK" Levine

Delvers are greedy folks interested in making as much coin as possible, and now their gods can get in on the action! Variant clerics and holy warriors serving gods of commerce, wealth, and prosperity are the focus of this article.

In Dungeon Fantasy's minimalist fashion, the article focuses on how the attitudes of gods of commerce affect the delver, with holy gods expecting fair dealings, while unholy gods care only about money at any cost, but will desert you if you get caught.

There's also a nice list of new Holy Might powers suitable for the faithful, and they're quite useful, even in areas beyond the commercial. They're good for making money, yes, but they also make you quite personable, and lend to an additional roll as a face for the party (assuming that they're willing to try talking!)

Using this Article
As Written: If you're running Dungeon Fantasy, it's plug and play. Everything you need to know is in the article.

Monster Hunters: Gods of commerce per se don't really suit the genre, but you could reuse the Holy Might abilities as powers for a Crusader serving a god of prosperity and good fortune.

Realistic Injury, Expanded
By Peter V. Dell'Orto

This is a quick article that's exactly what it says on the tin. It's focused on the lingering effects of injury, and offers some new details for how lasting injuries to various parts of a character affect them. It's solid work, and even if the detail isn't appropriate to your campaign, there's a simplified set of rules you can use instead.

Briefly, An Adventure
By Steven Marsh


Another short article, this time on how to building a short adventure. It's well worth the read, and even if you run longer adventures, the advice is still useful in figuring out what the important elements are.

Review: Pyramid #3/99: Death and Beyond

January is a month of beginnings and ends, for as it marks the beginning of one year, it marks the end of another. Fittingly, January's issue of Pyramid is all about the ultimate end: death. In it, you find a variety of death and death-themed articles, including death oriented psionics, a location built with necromancy, and a setting switch for how severe death is.

Like most issues of Pyramid, Death and Beyond is a grab bag of ideas, and while they are all individually excellent, they cover a wide enough range that only one or two might be useful at a time. Since Pyramid is meant to be a showcase for ideas, this isn't a flaw, and the variety can be a way of getting inspiration.

Now, without further ado, let's dive into the articles themselves.

Necro-Psi
By Christopher R. Rice

Here we have a collection of psionic powers focused on death, souls, and darkness, made to give psis abilities similar to necromancers. For that purpose, they succeed wonderfully. You have three groups of abilities, Animakinesis for interacting with souls, Thanatokinesis for manipulating death and the dead, and Umbrakinesis for controlling shadows and darkness.

They are all wonderfully thematic, giving psis a good selection of abilities in each area. The highlight is the Thanatokinesis powers, with the ability to animate the dead, see the last thing someone saw before death, and use deathly psionic power to inflict harm. You can even make your undead puppets explode! Combine this with the Umbrakinesis powers to obscure the senses, and you have the makings of a very creepy psi.

They're all built using the framework established in Psionic Powers, making that book very useful in making use of this article. However, you can also use the Basic Set rules for psionics instead, with the loss of some detail that Psionic Powers offers and the inability to make full use of the techniques.

Using this article
As written: If you're already running a game using Psionic Powers, you can drop this in and go.

Dungeon Fantasy: Replace the Psionic Powers rules with those in DF14 and swap out the Necrokinesis PM for the DF Psionics PM. Ignore the techniques.

Monster Hunters: You can use it as written, but like using Psionic Powers in general, you have increased complexity and may need to tweak the Psi template. Alternatively, use the powers under the Basic Set rules and simply omit the techniques.

Remix: Swap the Necrokinesis power modifier out for a Mana Sensitive limitation and you have powers befitting a necromancer. I believe you could also adapt this to Sorcery, but I'm unsure how much more work that would entail.

What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Stronger
By Scott Rochat

In the vein of classic dungeon crawlers, Rochat offers something that every right-thinking delver wants: Experience Points! Well, Kill Points, specifically, but the effect is much the same. By going out and killing monsters, player characters grow stronger.

Taken as a whole, this article is very much a switch on the kind of Dungeon Fantasy you want to run. The Kill Point system encourages actions, since in addition to killing monsters, disarming traps and outwitting foes can also award KPs. It also incentivizes the players to take risks, since threats more powerful than the PCs offer significantly more KPs.

And what exactly are these KPs good for? You can use them to negate incoming damage, recover FP, and add bonuses to various rolls. Or you can save them, and at the end of the adventure, unspent KPs get converted to character points for permanent increases in power. This adds another resource management game to Dungeon Fantasy, since you can try and hold on to KPs to increase your long term power, or you can spend them right here, right now to keep your delver from becoming monster chow.

The downside is that assigning KP values to monsters and traps requires some number crunching, and it's probably a good idea to make a spreadsheet to streamline the process. Fortunately, the article comes with a list of KP values for the monsters in DF2, DF5, DF9, DF14, and DFM1.

Using this Article
As written: Are you playing Dungeon Fantasy? Then take this, turn on the switches you want to use, and go to town. Or rather, go to the dungeon. You get no KPs for townspeople, only monsters.
If you're not playing Dungeon Fantasy, use this system with caution, and only if an old school RPG "Kill all the monsters" approach is appropriate for your game.

Variants: A similar system could be used anywhere a running score makes sense. The amount of energy gathered from ritual sacrifices, legendary feats for increasing reputation, and solving problems in a domain game all come to mind.

Soul Reapers
By David L. Pulver

Not all souls pass on peacefully, and when they don't, it's the job of a reaper to ensure that they do. As variant Crusaders or Inhumans, they join monster hunting teams to seek out these restless dead and ensure that they move on.

This is as thorough an exploration of the concept as one can ask for, with a brief discussion of the culutural background behind reapers, a list of powers, several new Inhuman templates, and an exploration of the roles they can fill in a Monster Hunters campaign all included.

The Reaper powers are all very focused, dealing with finding the dead, fighting them, and helping them pass on. The iconic scythe even puts in an appearance, which is a nice touch. The drawback is that while these abilities are all nicely thematic, they do make a reaper something of a one trick pony. If ghosts and the dying don't show up, their powers are mostly useless.

The Inhuman templates represent a selection of reapers and psychopomps from around the world, with the skeletal Grim Reaper from Western tradition, the Irish Dullahan, the Japanese Shinigami, and the Norse Valkyrie putting in appearances. They serve well in making these incarnations of death mechanically distinct and flavorful, and could easily be reused in non-Monster Hunter settings.

Using this Article
As written: If you're running Monster Hunters, the article itself offers all the advice you could want. I would suggest adding a few more powers so that the reapers don't feel cheated when facing something other than ghosts, though.

For Dungeon Fantasy: Some of the Reaper powers would be suitable for clerics and holy warriros of death gods (see Dungeon Fantasy 7: Clerics), particularly Ectoplasmic Ropes and Soul Scythe. The Inhuman templates are far too expensive for the standard DF campaign, but they could serve as inspiration for a more modest half-spirit template, similar to Celestials and Infernals.

Variants: You could take much of the information on reapers and how to use them and apply it to a lower powered campaign, particularly ones influenced by Japanese anime.

The Slaughterealm
By J. Edward Tremlett

Take a gameshow where the host is a powerful necromancer, the contestants are unwilling abductees, and the challenges include gauntlets of the undead, and you have the Slaughterealm. This is a systemless setting that can be added to any campaign, though you're on your own for stats and mechanics.

All aspects of the Slaughterealm are covered in detail, giving you plenty of information to use in a campaign. The experience of the contestants is laid clearly enough that I came away with a vivid image of what it would be like for the player characters. It starts with how contestants are "recruited", then covers the rules of the contests. This includes the ones for contestants, and for the Patrons of the Slaughterealm that devise these challenges.

The Patrons are appropriately loathsome and creepy, with each bringing their own flavor of contestants, challenges, and foes to the Slaughterealm. There's an world-conquering warlord, a monster-collecting hunter, a vampire queen of the undead, and a trapmaster baron.
At the end, there's a few ways to use this in your campaign, but there's so many possibilities that you're never likely to run out of ideas. If there's room in your campaign for a creepy, undead themed gameshow realm that draws its challenges and participants from across worlds, then you can keep coming back to the Slaughterealm with a fresh approach each time.

Using this Article
As written: No matter what, you're on your own for stats, so you'll have to do the legwork of finding suitable ones to drop in or make up your own. But if you're willing to put in the effort, there's so many possible ways to use the Slaughterealm.

• As a One Shot: The player characters have been abducted and must survive one of the Slaughterealm's infamous challenges. Will they make it out alive? Alternatively, they might be hired to crash the party and rescue contestants that have been abducted from their world.
• As a Recurring Location: The Patrons of the Slaughterealm are powerful individuals, and their reach extends across worlds. It's quite possible that the players will clash with their agents on multiple occasions. Or they might even end up working for one of the Patrons, whether temporarily or on a permanent basis.
• As a Campaign Setting: Leaving aside the obvious possibility of a "dungeon of the week" type camapign, there's plenty of room for intrigue and doubledealing among the Slaughterealm's Patrons. They may be forbidden from directly fighting in the realm itself, but that doesn't stop their agents from trying to sabotage the other, and the player characters could easily get drawn into these intrigues.

Death and How to Avoid It
By Steven Marsh

This is a short little article that discusses what kind of an impact that death might have on a setting, ranging from it being an absolute final end to something completely meaningless or even unknown entirely. It's primarily useful as a GM tool for thinking about how big a role they want death to play in their campaign setting, and it can also be used to let players know how easy it is to come back from the dead in the campaign.