Pyramid, edited by Steven Marsh, is the monthly GURPS supplement
containing short articles with a loose linking theme. This time it's
back to the dungeon, looking at both the Dungeon Fantasy RPG and the
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series. OK, not really an exciting theme for
me, but let's see how it goes.
Five Easy Pieces (Sean Punch) allows the construction of DFRPG
characters by assembling five 50-point modules – much in the manner of
the excellent GURPS Action 4: Specialists. Several of these can be
selected multiple times, to add bonuses in a particular area. If I
were playing the DFRPG I'd welcome this degree of customisation, even
if I don't find the individual packages particularly inspiring;
they're more like a Bézier curve, allowing characters who blend
together elements of the various existing archetypes rather than
adding anything particularly new.
Simple Spell Components (Peter V. Dell'Orto) is a deliberately
lightweight system for allowing power boosts from expendable (and
expensive) spell components, while not getting into finicky tracking
of just how many spiders' legs you're carrying. You buy a
"single-spell component", a "college component", or a "general
component" (druid or wizard or priest), with increasing generality but
also increasing cost. It's a good worked example of a GURPS rules extension.
Eidetic Memory: Monsters as Treasures (David L. Pulver) gives
writeups for seven monsters that have some value beyond their
treasure: their corpses, their eggs, and so on. This mostly means that
they need to be killed carefully.
All Wet (Charles Saeger) gives writeups for ten underwater monsters.
Yay, more stuff to kill.
Designer's Notes: Dungeon Fantasy Traps (Christopher R. Rice with
Jason "PK" Levine) is a description of how the book was written, and a
few more traps cut for space.
Random Thought Table: Can You Spell Thrills With No Hill? (Steven
Marsh) is a plea to signify the end of the dungeon with an escalation
of tension and a big battle, rather than to have a succession of
similar challenges and a "that's all folks" – and a series of
suggestions on how to do it.
Well, if I were playing a dungeon bash, or planning to, I'd like this,
particularly Simple Spell Components. But I'm not, and there's not
much here for games that aren't based on the traditional fantasy
violence model. Pyramid 113 is available from
Warehouse 23.
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