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.

Review: Psi Wars End of March Patreon

The end of the month has come and gone, and it's been a busy time for Psi Wars. The foundations of the Empire have been laid, with the Imperial Ministries and the Senate making their debut. Imperial Security has dominated the last week, with the organization, its tools, its personnel, and its spaceships all getting their own posts.

It's also been a busy month for Patrons as well, most of which I've covered in my previous post. Today I'm going to cover the results of the Emperor poll, and the new Patreon posts that have come out since then.

Like before, I'm going to break down my review by support level.

Dreamers ($1/month)

There's two new posts at this level, one covering the process of designing vehicles in GURPS 4e and another introducing the Security Agent template.

Modeling Vehicles in 4e comes in two parts. Grav Cars outlines the struggles that Mailanka experienced with trying to reverse engineer GURPS 4e vehicles to build new ones, and is interesting to read if you want to gain an appreciation of the challenges and limitations that GURPS imposes. The second, Guide to Vehicle Design in GURPS 4e, is the more directly useful of the two, since it explains how to actually build new vehicles. While it requires GURPS Classic Vehicles and some judgement on how to use it, this is as good as it's going to get, barring the release of a 4e version of Vehicles.

The Security Agent is a standard 250 point professional template, with three 25 point power-ups to further customize the character. The signature of this character is his power to enforce the laws of their society, with many Security Agents choosing to do so through their combat prowess. The Riot Trooper power-up doubles down on this by improving their hand to hand skills. The Interrogator is more subtle, focusing on manipulating others psychologically. Finally, the Special Agent brings the full institutional weight of his organization to bear, with broad enforcement powers and increased rank.

Fellow Travelers ($3/month)

There's one new offering at this level, a preview of Imperial Personnel, Materiel and Spaceships. The bulk of it is dominated by the technology of the Empire, with sections on weapons, armor, vehicles, and spaceships. These are interesting because they help to characterize the Empire, with its expensive, difficult to maintain, but high quality personal equipment, disposable fighters, and massive dreadnoughts.

Furthermore, the existence of the Overtech Corporation, which makes weapons and armor for the Empire, gives a prime target for adventures, since their R&D division could contain secret projects to improve Imperial technology or to build weapons of terror.

The personnel portion is mostly a collection of minions that have already been released, but the Imperial Pilot, the Black Ops Commando, and the Black Ops Demolitionist are all new. The pilot gives opposition for space battles, while the Black Ops soldiers are scarily competent soldiers that player characters will dread to face.

Imperial Personnel, Materiel, and Spaceships is an excellent addition to Psi Wars, giving a player-facing side to the Empire and many tools for the GM to build scenarios with.

Companions ($5/month)

The polls on the Emperor have closed, and it was just as much fun as I thought it was going to be. Watching the other Patrons post their ideas and then offer new ideas in response is a fascinating process. My personal favorite part was how the Emperor's role as a Mystic Tyrant turned out. Initially, I didn't favor the idea of him following the path of the Mystic Tyrant, but upon seeing how popular it was, I offered the idea of styling him as the Futurist, based on one of the alternate names for the path. The Emperor as a visionary trying to build a better future stuck, especially as it tied in nicely with the Empire's Neo-Rationalist philosophy.

Mailanka hasn't yet had the time to develop the Emperor based on these polls, but he has posted a Results document summarizing the outcome. This is another part I really enjoy, because he is skilled at taking the many ideas people offer and synthesizing them into a whole. This is especially evident in the Emperor's origin, where he neatly takes all of the suggestions people had and weaves a cohesive narrative out of them.

Disciples ($7/month)

Nothing here yet, but later this month, there's going to be a call for the Empire's signature characters! Mailanka has said that he'll be offering prompts similar to the $5 polls, with many options for people to mix and match. I'm certain that this is going to be just as much fun as the rest has been, and I'm looking forward to making iconic characters for Psi Wars. I even have a few ideas in mind already!

Conclusion

March has been a very good month for Patrons of Psi Wars, and April looks to be just as promising. Besides the opportunity to create signature characters, there's also going to be releases on the scale of the Empire, Imperial tactics, and the names used by humanity's sub-groups. There's even going to be polls on the Tactics to determine which parts will be part of the final Psi Wars document. For more information, see this post on Mailanka's Musings.


If you like Psi Wars, consider supporting it on Patreon. It's been great so far, and there's still so much more to come. 

Ravens N' Pennies April Patreon Review

Another month, another couple of specials for Patrons from the ever prolific Christopher R. Rice of Ravens N' Pennies. This time, there’s a trio of items. The first is the Mahotsukai variant of Ritual Path Magic that I’ve already reviewed in my guest post on Christopher's blog. You can find that review here. The two new items are Japanese-themed Ritual Path Magic spells and a fighting style for whip users. Let’s take a closer look.

Melee Academy: Whip Fighting

The whip is a versatile weapon, and in the hands of a cinematically skilled wielder, it’s capable of amazing feats like pulling weapons out of someone’s hands or swinging across large gaps. Whip Fighting caters to those who’d like to pull off stunts that would make Indiana Jones proud, and provides the basic skills, the advanced tricks, and advantages suitable for stylists.

All in all, this seems like a fun style use, and it’s available for $1 and up Patrons.

Boil and Bubble: Shinto Ritual Path Magic Spells

In this offering for $2 and up Patrons, Shinto Ritual Path Magic Spells provides four spells designed for Ritual Path Magic practitioners from Japan, especially in the Edo period. Two of them, Chains of Heaven and Chains of Hell are binding spells, flavored just as their names suggest. A third, Summon Kinzoku Samurai, brings forth a suit of animated armor to do your bidding.

It’s the fourth and last spell that’s most interesting. Summon Greater Kami is a ritual for contacting powerful spirits, and notably, it doesn’t give the caster any control over the spirit. No, these are spirits too powerful to be compelled, and instead the caster must make a Reaction roll, which determines what aid (or punishment!) the kami provides. This is a great idea, and captures the potentially mercurial temperament of such beings nicely. Even if you don’t use Ritual Path Magic, the reaction table can be used on its own.

Conclusion

This is a solid pair of offerings, so if you’re interested, go support Christopher R. Rice over on Patreon before the end of April.

Review: Psi Wars February and Mid-March Patreon

Daniel Dover at Mailanka’s Musings runs a Patreon for those wishing to support the Psi Wars project, and over the past month and a half he’s released quite a bit of material to backers. Like his blog, it shows careful thought and a great deal of skill in roleplaying game design, setting building, and creative writing.

There’s four tiers of support, and since each level gives access to progressively more material, I’m going to cover them in order from lowest to highest.

Dreamers ($1/month)

There’s three posts at this level, covering behind the scenes thoughts on running capital ships, expanding on Communion, and the design of two power-ups for Psi Wars characters.

Rethinking Capital Ships starts with the premise that an Officer should be able to stand on the bridge of a capital ship, and have her abilities make a meaningful difference in the battle. The new rules deliver on this in spades. Building off of his revised system for spaceships, Officers can now use their Leadership and Tactics to bolster the performance of their crews and outmaneuveur and outwit their foes.

You’ll also find rules on how to handle large squadrons of fighters, which is absolutely essential when commanding dreadnoughts, who could easily carry hundreds or even thousands of smallcraft within their cavernous hangars. These rules have yet to make it into a public release, but add quite a bit for these large ships!

Rethinking Communion outlines the design for social engineering campaigns that give bonuses to Legendary reputation, and is interesting as a window into how Mailanka works. The actual rules and the 24 (!) new Communion miracles are included in the Psi Wars Iteration 5 documents as well.

Power-Ups: Conspirator and Magnate introduces two new power-ups, with the first focused on characters who don’t have a direct connection with Communion but are so favored by it that things tend to go along with the story that Communion has for them. With a good reaction roll, this support can take the form of very dramatic Communion Miracles! The second, Magnate, is for those characters who have so much wealth or pull within their organizations that they have access to the biggest and best toys, and influence on a large scale. This is where you’ll find your dreadnought captains and influential senators. Again, what you’re mainly getting here is the design process, since the rules are in Iteration 5.

The discussion of the thought process behind these design choices is quite valuable in and of itself, since it will help understand why they were made and how you can use them in your game.

Fellow Travelers ($3/month)

At this level, you get to see early drafts of Psi Wars material. At the moment, this includes drafts of the Patron-designed Trader alien race, the history of the Psi Wars universe, and an early peek at the Empire!

I’m going to cover the Traders in more detail when I get to the Companion tier, but seeing how Mailanka takes the ideas and votes of his Patrons and weaves them into a cohesive whole is absolutely fascinating. The Traders themselves are pretty neat, walking a line between attractive and unsettling, with an ancient, proud culture that has seen better days.

Psi Wars History 1.1 is an overview of Psi Wars history extending back almost 6000 years. It paints a picture of a deeply cyclic universe, where empires rise, prosper, decline, and then fall either from internal crises or the pressure of external forces. It also gives a glimpse at the major civilizations that now coexist with humanity, which I’m not going to spoil here.

Hot off the presses as I write this is the first draft of the Empire! Here, we have our first look at the force dominating the Psi Wars setting, and while it naturally has echoes of the Star Wars empire, it is very much its own entity. Part 1 provides new options for creating Imperial characters, ranging from simple Citizens to commandos working for the dread Imperial Black Ops.

The history of the Empire is light on details, but this is mostly because the key figure of the Emperor is a current topic for Companions and up to vote on (More on that later!) The structure of the Empire is fascinating, since while there’s a strand of meritocracy and the benefits of technology, the whole system is shot through with corruption, oppression, and fallout from those advances. It’s founded on good ideals, and is actually nice if you’re a member of the privileged classes in the core worlds, but that polish is quickly stripped away once you move out of the public eye.

This is a very long document, and outlines all of the major organizations, capabilities, and philosophies of the Empire. Standard operating procedure for the Imperial war machine, the interplay between the major organizations, and the difference between ideals and reality in the Empire are all laid out in detail. While there’s no way to fully cover an entity as vast as the Empire, this is a very good start and gives you plenty of material to play with.

Companions ($5/month)

This is where the real fun of being a Patron begins, since not only do you get to see Psi Wars as it’s being made, you’re given a voice in the process!

The first round of polls focused on the alien race known as the Traders. Starting from the simple concept of an alien race that used to hold power in the galactic core, but was defeated by humanity and now roams the stars, they quickly evolved through several rounds of polling into a distinct culture and personality. They are now an ancient race, proud of their traditions and valuing honest dealing, with the ability to quickly process information and a talent with robotics that far surpasses the rest of the galaxy.

The reason that this is so fun is that each poll serves as a writing prompt as well, and Patrons (include myself) are enthusiastic about jumping in to offer their own take on the options presented. The fact that Mailanka then takes these ideas and weaves them together with the poll results to create a cohesive whole is impressive, and end results are a delight to read.

For one example, the votes to decide on the social structure of the Traders were fairly evenly split between Family, Trade, and Patchwork. But in the comments, you could see a strong preference for a blend of these ideas, where the Traders were organized into fleets that were nominally familial, each with their own craft, and the occasional meeting to swap ideas and members. Mailanka then took all of that feedback and created the Kin-Fleets, the descendents of old corporate fleets that became refuges for the Traders. Over time, the bonds took on a familial status, with the leader of each fleet being called Grandfather.

It’s just so much fun to watch this process in action, and now we get to do it again, this time with one of the most important figures in the Psi Wars universe: the Emperor himself! Over the next few days, Patrons can vote on his origin, abilities, agenda, and heirs. I’ve already posted some of my own ideas, and I’d love to see what other people want.

Disciples ($7/month)

There’s nothing yet at this tier, but it comes with the right to a place in Mailanka’s game when he runs one, and I’ve been told that there’s plans to let this tier write up signature characters for the setting, which I think will be an absolute blast.

Conclusion

Mailanka has put out a lot of good content on his Patreon, and the opportunities to be a part of the creative process are more fun than I thought they would be. So, if you like Psi Wars and want to support its creation, join in. If you want to add in your own touches to the setting, now’s the time to join in!

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.

Ravens N' Pennies March Patreon Review

Every month, Christopher R. Rice over at Ravens N’ Pennies releases a selection of goodies for his Patreon backers. Befitting the blog’s namesake, they are an eclectic bunch, and no two months see quite the same things covered. So, what do we have this time around?

The Hurt Locker - More Psi-Tech I

In this article, you’ll find a collection of gizmos that are either useful for psis or make use of psionic phenomena to operate. This first issue gives you the Obfuscating Material Coating for the sneaky sorts, Telekinetically Bouyant Textiles that gives psychokinetics a way to carry loads more easily, and the Sonokinetic Sound Baffler that, funnily enough, muffles sounds in its area of effect.

On the whole, this is a neat collection of useful toys, and if you’re making use of GURPS Psi-Tech, these will fit right in. If not, then reflavor them for your preferred brand of paranormal phenomena and use them anyway.

Boil and Bubble: Thaumaturgic Ritual Path Magic

Christopher loves creating variant forms of Ritual Path Magic, and they’re always interesting to read. Thaumaturgic Ritual Path Magic is no exception, which reflavors Ritual Path Magic and tinkers with its rules to suit a form of Christian magic that invokes angels to power its spells. It’s well worth a look as a basis for spirit-invoking Ritual Path Magic as well as an interesting variant in its own right.

The one disappointment I have is fairly minor. While it lists patron angels for a few of the Paths, it doesn’t do so for all of them.

GURPS 101: Alternate Alternate Form Rules (June 2016 Special #1)

A guest entry from Emily Smirle, Alternate Alternate Forms is one of the most elegant rules I’ve ever seen for GURPS. Treating alternate forms as alternate abilities is a simple yet brilliant idea, and there’s a good bit of advice on how to use this variant. If you have shapeshifters in your campaign, this article will be very helpful, especially if you’re running a high point total game with correspondingly powerful alternate forms.

GURPS 101: More Telepathy Powers for Psionic Powers (June 2016 Special #2)

As Christopher notes in the intro, there’s never enough powers for Psionic Powers. So, this article presents two more Telepathy abilities. Affinity gives you a telepathic bond with a person of your choosing, while Telelinguism lets you learn any language given enough exposure to it. Both come with suitable techniques that increase the usefulness of the two powers.

If you’ve got telepaths or telepathic creatures in your game, give this a look. They’re very thematically appropriate and have many applications for the creative.

GURPS 101: Dungeon Fantasy Styles - Zodiac Styles

A long guest piece by Hal Batty, Zodiac Styles details six martial arts for Dungeon Fantasy, based on animals of the Chinese Zodiac. To say that this is a fun article is an understatement. Each animal style comes with its own set of skills, perks, and power-ups, perfectly suited to the animal in question. The strong, tough Ox, the fleet-footed Rabbit, the cunning Snake, and more all make an appearance.

My favorite of the styles may be the Snake, with their focus on cunning, sneaky tricks, and rapid, precise strikes that leave their foes unable to effectively strike back.

If you have martial artists in your Dungeon Fantasy, this will give them some fun options to play with. If you don’t have martial artists, make a few as adversaries so that you can play with these. And if that’s still not an option, consider allowing other characters to learn these styles. That’s just how much fun they are.

In fact, the only real downside is that the other half of the Zodiac doesn’t get their own styles. On the upside, that gives you room to create your own styles, using these as inspiration.

Review: Psi Wars

Over the years, I have to say that I've spent more time in the Star Wars universe than in any other, watching movies, playing video games, and reading books. Something about the combination of intense action and epic scope, perhaps.

When I learned that there was a Star Wars conversion for GURPS in the works, I was naturally quite excited. But then I began delving into it, and what I discovered was something far more interesting than a mere conversion.

Psi Wars, by Daniel Dover (aka Mailanka), is an ambitious project to take the tropes and conventions of Star Wars, existing GURPS material, and his own experience to build a space opera campaign framework perfect for high action roleplaying and mythic world building. And while it is still a work in progress, it succeeds admirably at these goals.

The core gameplay is based on GURPS Action, adapted for the advanced technology of a Star Wars-like setting, with twelve character templates perfectly suited for the larger than life adventures. But this is just the foundation, and Mailanka quickly expands from that beginning to touch on just about every element of setting design.

To better model the World War II-esque combat of Star Wars space battles, Mailanka revamps the combat system introduced in GURPS Spaceships. Now you can have grand capital ships engaging in stately duels while clouds of fighters swarm around them. Fighter aces square off as bombers dive in to cripple engines and weapons, and officers bark orders from the bridge of their ships, commanding it as if it were an extension of their own body.

On the ground, you have teams of commandos going up against Imperial soldiers using top of the line equipment, while out on the rim you frontier marshals, smugglers, and bounty hunters clashing, where law and order run headlong into the demands of survival. And all of these use combat styles carefully devised or modified for Psi Wars.

Naturally, you'll also find Space Knights, force sword wielding champions of either righteousness or villainy, while Mystics serve as guides in their mysterious ways. But it is here that you find the biggest divergence from Star Wars, for they do not draw on the Force, but psionics drawn from GURPS Psionic Powers. And these abilities are not the sole purview of mysterious, secretive orders, for anyone can unlock the powers of the mind.

No, the true mysterious power of Psi Wars is that of Communion, the gestalt super-consciousness that embodies the wishes, dreams, desires, and fears of sapient life. Those who learn its ways may petition it for miracles, from minor and subtle guidance to the history shaping primordial avatars.

These avatars are linked to another manifestation of Communion, the recurring stories and archetypes known as paths. Whether it be the Righteous Crusader bringing justice to the world on behalf of their community or the transgression of the Mystic Tyrant in search of forbidden power, those who follow the strictures of these paths gain power, for the collective will of sapient life is to see these stories told again and again.

Not only does Psi Wars give you these frameworks for capturing key elements of the Star Wars genre, there's also a wealth of game and setting design notes captured in Mailanka's blog. In my view, these represent the most valuable part of Psi Wars, for it explains the philosophy behind his design, how he adapted GURPS to capture his vision for Psi Wars, and and then lays the groundwork for building your own organizations, worlds, and cultures.

The one drawback of Psi Wars is that, as a third party project, it cannot be used on its own. At a mimimum, you'll need GURPS Basic Set, Ultra-Tech, Action 2, Psionic Powers, Divine Favor, and Spaceships to make use of 90% of its material, and there are many references to other books. However, with just the books I listed, you can pick up the Psi Wars Primer and start running it.

Of course, I also have to repeat that Psi Wars is a work in progress, and there are many points for editing to clean up. But as of Iteration 5, it is a solid reference, and Mailanka is not only working diligently on improving it, he is also very receptive to feedback and suggestions. So, go take a look at Psi Wars. It's free, and even if you never play it, you can learn a lot about designing games for GURPS, how to build a space opera setting, and more.


If you like it, consider supporting Mailanka on Patreon. You can get access to behind-the-scenes looks at design notes, early access to Psi Wars material, or even the opportunity to contribute your own ideas to the setting.

Review: Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

Star Wars holds a special place in my heart, since I loved the movies and the expanded universe when I was rather young. Naturally, I also played many Star Wars video games, and in total I've probably played more Star Wars games than games set in any other universe.

Recently, Humble Bundle offered their Star Wars III bundle, and as it contained some of the games I played growing up, along with many that I hadn't played, I was quick to snap it up. Among those games was Shadows of the Empire, which is one of the leading candidates for the first Star Wars game I ever played.

How did this childhood memory stack up after all these years? Well...my experience was decidedly mixed. It was nice to revisit Shadows of the Empire, but the game has aged poorly, and I'm forced to admit that it probably wasn't all that great a game even back in its day. But, let's break it down:

Graphics

These have obviously not held up well over the course of time. Textures are simplistic, models are low polygon count, there's heavy use of fog to reduce draw distances, and lighting is strictly ambient. But for their simplicity, they are functional, and you'll never have any trouble distinguishing enemies, terrain, and the various pick-ups.

The repetitive textures have the potential to contribute to disorientation in some of the more maze like levels, but since none are very large, you won't get lost for long.

Controls

If you come into this game expecting it to play like a modern FPS, you will be in for a rude awakening. The controls are, to be generous, quirky. Most notably, under the default controls, your mouse both moves your character forward and backwards and rotates the camera side to side. But wait! What about looking up and down? For that, you have to press and hold a button to enable the mouse to shift your view up and down. By default, your camera will return to the default position when you release the key. I suggest switching the controls to one with view lock, since there's a few sections where looking up or down is important.

The other major quirk with the controls is that the game autoaims for you to a certain extent, which partially compensates for the difficulty in adjusting your viewpoint. This causes problems when it's trying to hit the wrong target, or if it locks onto an enemy that's just out view instead of one you can see. Since you generally only face one or two enemies at a time, this isn't too much of a problem.
Quirks aside, the controls are largely solid once you've gotten used to them, though you have to take care not to move when you're simply trying to look to one side. Jumps are floaty, but that's also something you can adapt to.

The biggest actual problem I had with the controls was in the early section of the Gall Spaceport level. There, I found some of the ledges you have to traverse to be rather slippery, and downward slopes were treachorous. Since this level also takes place in a canyon with steep drops, this led to many unnecssary depths. Take it slow, make sure you're moving directly to your destinations, and you'll mostly be okay.

Finally, there's no in-game tutorial for the controls, so you'll have to consult the pause menu frequently until you memorize them.

Gameplay

For all the faults I just mentioned, Shadows of the Empire is actually fun to play. It offers a good mix of level types, with some having you piloting vehicles, while others have you making your way through facilities on foot.

The first level has you piloting a speeder in the Battle of Hoth, facing four increasingly difficult waves of Imperial forces. You even get a chance to trip up AT-ATs with a tow cable, which is the first time you could do this in a Star Wars game. In fact, this level was so popular that it led to the creation of the Rogue Squadron game, which remains one of my favorites. The only weird thing is that, despite destroying all Imperial forces sent against you, the shield generator is still destroyed through the power of plot.

A later level has you chasing speeder bikes through a city and out into a canyon, and while I found the controls for the swoop to be very sensitive and difficult to control, it has the potential to be a lot of fun once you've gotten a handle on them. Also, I remember this being the hardest level for me when I played it years ago, so finally getting it and successfully pushing enemy speeder bikes into walls and such was a great experience.

The foot levels are, on the whole, less interesting. If you take your time, attack enemies as soon as you can see them, and make sure to grab health pick ups, there's little challenge to them. The exception is the high speed train level running through the Ord Mantell junkyard, where you have to leap from car to car as you run through a landscape littered with the detritus of the Empire. The floaty controls make it more difficult than it strictly needs to be, but it's still a fast paced, intense experience that contrasts nicely with the other foot levels.

Each foot level has one or more bosses, and these represet a real challenge. You'll need to learn and respond to their patterns if you want to stand a chance of surviving, let alone defeating them. It's immensely satisfying the first time you bring down an AT-ST without damage, too, and the challenge only grows from there. You end up facing two of the bounty hunters from Empire Strikes Back, two different combat droids, and a giant sewer monster the size of a building.

The game is also short, with only ten levels in total. This is something of a mixed bag on its own, since while it means that you can get through the game in a few hours of dedicated play, it also means that it doesn't overstay its welcome.

That said, Shadows of the Empire does offer you reasons to go back and replay each level, since there's a number of Challenge Points hidden in them, and it can take some real thorough exploration to get them all. Also, your starting lives on a level depends on how you did on the previous one, so the fewer times you die and the more Challenge Points you collect, the more you'll have for the next level. This can help make some of the later levels easier, too.

Music

Shadows of the Empire has an excellent soundtrack, and consists of tracks taken from the films with new ones composed specifically for Shadows of the Empire. They're all well suited for the levels they appear in, and help set the mood of each appropriately.

Story

I've left this for last because, while Shadows of the Empire does have a story, it's fairly thin. The player character, Dash Rendar, is essentially meant to be a cooler stand-in for Han Solo while the latter is frozen in carbonite following the events of Empire Strikes Back. There's also glimpses of a plot by the crime lord Prince Xizor to kill Luke Skywalker and discredit Darth Vader in the eyes of the emperor, but it comes up so briefly that it's hard to make sense of what he's trying to do.

Also, there's a weird moment where you chase down and defat Boba Fett, the bounty hunter that takes Han Solo to Jaba the Hutt. But because the canon requires that Han get to Jabba's palace, Fett somehow gets away with the aid of local Imperial forces. Oh well.

Summary


So, would I recommend this game to people? The answer is, unfortunately, an unequivocal no. Between the dated graphics, quirky controls, generally lackluster levels, and excuse of a story, Shadows of the Empire has little to offer today. If you played the game and want to revisit it, or if you want to see a glimpse into this era of Star Wars game design, it might be worth a quick playthrough. But otherwise, there are better games, both in the action/FPS genre and in Star Wars in general.

However, there's some interesting moments and ideas in the game, and I plan to make use of them in the future.

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.