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: 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.