Past blurbs from the “Hear Ye” sidebar section. Announcements too trivial for a full blog post. Minor side thoughts of the sort that used to go to Twitter before its Fall. Any such town crier missives, now collected here. 2024-10-19: A shirt or other piece of silk cloth won’t stop an arrow or sword from piercing its target, but it’ll neatly encase the weapon, traveling along with it into the target. To extract the offending object, just pull on that tough, un-penetrated silk cloth, and it’ll carry the object out with it; no messy surgery needed!You’ve probably heard that one, a common (?) bit of gamer knowledge. The idea even…
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GLAIVE Mini levels up to v2.4
It’s a small level-up. A GURPS-style level-up: a handful of character points, not a feats-and-hit-points dump. In short: My one-page melee weapon-building system for GURPS/DFRPG, reverse-engineered from the games’ weapon tables, improves its list of weapon mods. The list is now organized by type, not alphabetically, which I think makes quickly picking out the right mods much easier. It also gains color coding that instantly shows which mods are mutually incompatible. A bigger change is on the webpage. An Appendix now offers a small but growing armory of sample builds, notes on builds that don’t want to conform to published stats, a peek at potential new mods, and other commentary.…
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Coming for DFRPG: Artifacts of Legend
Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, the powered-by-GURPS adventure RPG that out-dungeons and out-dragons them all, is getting powered up again. Artifacts of Legend and Artifacts of Saga, written by Marko Vujnovic and Christopher R. Rice and brought to you by Gaming Ballistic, will deliver over 70 new god-bestowed artifacts, fell weapons of darkness, and other weird wonders. The Kickstarter campaign’s sneak peek teases some good stuff, including Legendary Possessions: divinely granted items that grow in power as heroes complete great deeds. This sounds very good. (And needless to say, magic item write-ups are usually easy to port to any game system. You don’t have to be a DFRPG or GURPS player…
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The Least of Kickstarters: DFRPG Monster Seeds
If you read this quickly, you’ve still got a short window to get in on a Kickstarter campaign for a mini-sized product: Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game Monster Seeds, a collection of adventure ideas starring demons and lurching dead and other evil from DFRPG‘s original Monsters book. (See additional announcements here and here.) This will be a short book, apparently with only 12 entries, two per page. And you don’t even need to buy it! As the campaign page cheerfully notes, the entries are already collected on this forum thread. So it’s a packaging of freely available material, and just a few pages of it – but hey, it’s one dollar.…
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Grow a delver – fast! – for the best dungeon RPG out there
I’m late wth this post; the Big News in question is a Kickstarter campaign with 60 hours to go. But better late than an ogre punch upside the head (or something like that), as they say. Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game (DFRPG) is the best dungeon RPG out there, for a ton of reasons. Its competition in the market includes a lot of truly great games (including a really big name or few), but DFRPG out-dungeons and out-dragons them all. (Yeah, that’s an opinion. Got lots more where that came from.) Characters in DFRPG are rich and detailed (like this guy!), and that’s a beautiful thing. Creating those unique personas can…
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Cardboard Heroes artist hard at work on new figures for GURPS Dungeon Fantasy boxed set?
Hey, GURPSters! Eager to scry even one more crumb of information and/or rumor about the in-development, powered-by-GURPS, and eagerly-awaited Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game from Steve Jackson Games? Crumb ahoy! Here’s a tiny (and speculative) morsel from – of all places – recent The Non Prophets podcast episode 16.02. Hm? A GURPS tidbit – in a podcast focused on religion and gods and related topics? It’s not so surprising, given that the podcast is based in the home town of GURPS – and that it’s hosted by two bona fide gaming art gods. Just around 5 minutes into the episode, regular host and Art God #1 Denis Loubet reports that he’s…
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Updated: GLAIVE Mini weapon builder system hits v2.0!
It’s out: v2.0 of GLAIVE Mini, my super-short, home-made system for building weapons in GURPS. (That’s “GLAIVE” as in “GURPS Light Arms Invention Expansion”.) GLAIVE Mini remains what it’s always been: A one-page system for generating GURPS damage and required ST for most any melee weapon. (There’s a bonus second page, too, with an option for semibalanced weapons falling between GURPS’ balanced and unbalanced weapons, along with system customization notes and a couple of odds and ends.) What’s new in GLAIVE Mini v2.0: Notes addressing new weapon stats and options in GURPS Low-Tech. (Spoiler: GLAIVE Mini works even better with Low-Tech’s revised stats!) A new mod: Poor Stabber, good for…
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Update: A better cost for ST – now with HP too!
It’s A Better cost for ST… and HP too! Oh, and Striking ST and Lifting ST! An article that’s received many kind remarks over the years (and has been put into use by GMs far and wide) now gets a v2.0 update. The first version put ST on a diet with a neatly-declining cost scale (designed by D. Weber), enabling easier and cheaper power for supers and giants. The update goes on to address ST’s component parts: Striking ST, Lifting ST, and HP. In the end, the rule provides a single scheme for pricing ST (and its components) in normal Joes, over-muscled barbarians, boulder-hurling giants, and planet-cracking supers, with no special size-based…
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Minor brush-ups to COSH
I made some very minor tweaks to COSH, my GURPS 3e-centric combat skill creation system. The changes consist of a few wording improvements and typo fixes. I also clarified that the reader-created Evade is best built as an unarmed skill, with oddness resulting when built as armed; it’s a good exercise in design. Those changes don’t make for a must-re-read, but COSH itself is worth checking out if you haven’t done so yet! Take that Evade, for example (with thanks to KBantar!); it’s a cool skill that lets you slickly evade any sort of attack, and is perfect for an unusual alien fighting style, a pacifist martial art, or a…
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Minor update to GLAIVE Mini
Hear ye, hear ye. I’ve made a minor update to my GLAIVE Mini super-easy melee weapon design system for GURPS 4e, taking it from v1.0 to v1.1. The changes consist of minor clean-ups, plus a change to skill use for semibalanced weapons. The old rule specified the use of unbalanced weapon skills, or balanced skills at a -2 default. The new rule suggests either balanced or unbalanced skill as the natural skill (designer choice), with the other at a -2 default, depending on which is more natural for the weapon. Thus, a semibalanced weapon could be specified as using Axe/Mace or Broadsword skill normally, and the other at the -2…
