RogerBW's Blog

Pyramid 104: Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game 28 June 2017

Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's one of the three issues promised during the Dungeon Fantasy RPG kickstarter.

Trapped in the Living Tomb (Steven Marsh) is a numbered-paragraph solo adventure, playable without reference to other rules: it includes just enough information to be self-contained. In the long term I think this would make a good give-away item, to show people how easy GURPS can be.

It's a Quest! (Christopher R. Rice) discusses linking of self-contained adventures into a larger campaign narrative, whether in a sandbox or a more dirigiste style. The progress meter is called a "quest clock" here, and there's a random generator which will generate sets of plot tokens for PC groups to collect. The results will be pretty solidly rotefant ("genre fantasy" if we're being polite), but it's better than "here is the next dungeon".

Eidetic Memory: Heroic Background Generator (David L. Pulver) generates ideas for heroes' prior histories: family relationships, omens seen at birth, that sort of thing. It doesn't enforce anything, but if for example you roll up a mentor you can either spend points on them as an Ally/Patron or decide what happened to them and why you're not friends any more. Good stuff. (Reminiscent of Central Casting, though without quite as many excesses.)

The State of the Dungeon (uncredited) is a progress report on the making of the Dungeon Fantasy RPG.

Random Thought Table: Preparing for the Hero's Journey (Steven Marsh) suggests some things to think about before the DFRPG is published in October. Specifically, what sort of thing should your hero be really good at, what should their limitations be, and what are their goals. This is the sort of thing I already tend to do with players who aren't familiar with GURPS rules: they describe the character they have in mind, and then I turn the results into numbers.

I can probably use the heroic backgrounds if/when I run another fantasy game, but otherwise there's not much of immediate use here. Pyramid 104 is available from Warehouse 23.

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