GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Kickstarter
2016-Sep-05, Monday 21:17
I've been wanting to run a megadungeon game for...well, for years now. Basically ever since I read the entire archives of Grognardia and saw how well a long-term megadungeon game could work divorced from the usual context I thought of them in, which was mainly computer games. Hack and slash is pretty fun, but computer dungeon crawls don't have the social dimension that an actual tabletop brings. In Dwimmermount it was the revelation of the setting's history and the way that the PC's actions in the dungeon reverberated out into the wider world, especially the zombie hordes. In Felltower, it's the way that the party killed nearly everyone who lived in the upper levels of the dungeon and a group of nearby orcs became so entrenched that they were able to charge the PCs a toll to enter.
Felltower is extra-relevant here, since it's run using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. And I just recently saw that they're making a standalone boxed set and put it up on Kickstarter, and I backed it almost immediately:
I've never played GURPS, but I've owned GURPS Myth for over a decade and I'm familiar with the basics of the system. I've also been reading the Felltower game over at Dungeon Fantastic for about a year, and GURPS looks like it does some things I want in a fantasy game that D&D doesn't. I know that OD&D is a very well-designed game when you use it the way it's intended--going into dungeons and extracting loot from them--but I really like bell-curves on dice rolls and point-based character creation and advancement. And Dungeon Fantasy splits the difference between the freewheeling madness of GURPS as written and the rigid classes of early D&D by having a series of templates that characters have to pick. The templates are pretty standard--Bard, Knight, Wizard, Druid, etc.--and they help set expectations, prevent choice paralysis in a point-buy game, and still allow more freedom. Dungeon Fantasy is pretty directly focused on smashing, but the benefit of GURPS is that I can draw in other stuff if I need any expansions in any direction.
I'm really tempted to run a game in the Forgotten Realms when this comes out. Undermountain is an obvious choice, but FR has thousands of ruins everywhere and is pretty purpose-designed that I could plop a game anywhere I want and run with it. I've mentioned this to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
schoolpsychnerd and she's pretty jazzed at being able to reprise her priestess of Sehanine Moonbow from the old aborted AD&D 2e game I ran. The more I think about this, the more interested I get in it.
Have to wait until March to really start in, though!
Felltower is extra-relevant here, since it's run using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. And I just recently saw that they're making a standalone boxed set and put it up on Kickstarter, and I backed it almost immediately:
I've never played GURPS, but I've owned GURPS Myth for over a decade and I'm familiar with the basics of the system. I've also been reading the Felltower game over at Dungeon Fantastic for about a year, and GURPS looks like it does some things I want in a fantasy game that D&D doesn't. I know that OD&D is a very well-designed game when you use it the way it's intended--going into dungeons and extracting loot from them--but I really like bell-curves on dice rolls and point-based character creation and advancement. And Dungeon Fantasy splits the difference between the freewheeling madness of GURPS as written and the rigid classes of early D&D by having a series of templates that characters have to pick. The templates are pretty standard--Bard, Knight, Wizard, Druid, etc.--and they help set expectations, prevent choice paralysis in a point-buy game, and still allow more freedom. Dungeon Fantasy is pretty directly focused on smashing, but the benefit of GURPS is that I can draw in other stuff if I need any expansions in any direction.
I'm really tempted to run a game in the Forgotten Realms when this comes out. Undermountain is an obvious choice, but FR has thousands of ruins everywhere and is pretty purpose-designed that I could plop a game anywhere I want and run with it. I've mentioned this to
schoolpsychnerd and she's pretty jazzed at being able to reprise her priestess of Sehanine Moonbow from the old aborted AD&D 2e game I ran. The more I think about this, the more interested I get in it.Have to wait until March to really start in, though!
