Pyramid #3/89: Alternate Dungeons II

[PK]

(This is me speaking strictly as a fan and gamer who's part of an active DF game, not as an editor or employee.)

I'm honestly surprised that "Eastern Adventures" isn't getting more love. It's something that people have been asking for for a while now -- seriously, not a month goes by that someone doesn't ask, "You've done a supplement for ninja, but what about samurai, gungdo archers, etc.?" And for me, at least, this one hit all of the points I was hoping for.

To my eye, the "alternate" part here was that DF always focuses on a pseudo-"medieval European kingdom" setup, with the Mysterious East being a distant and unknown place -- so this article flipped that around, letting you base the entire campaign in the Familiar East, with the occasional gaijin imported from the Mysterious West.

[Kalzazz]

PK, well, speaking as someone who hasn't bought this Pyramid and is not inclined at the moment to do so (though can never say never), and someone who thinks Eastern Adventures style ideas are an awesome thing, the reason I did not immediately go out and buy this Pyramid (since if it sounded sufficiently awesome I would have) is it sounds like it hits squarely in the wheelhouse of 'the one part of Eastern Adventures I do not need'

The two biggest needs I have for Eastern Adventures are
1 - Monsters. Honestly, I wound up running Faux Fantasy China with . . . kobolds. Because my knowledge of appropriate Eastern monsters runs into 'Uhm, so there are Oni (which are like ogres, and/or whatever they want to be), and Dragons don't have which don't have wings, oh, and hopping corpse vampires, and you got nezumi and kenku and kitsune but those are more PC races / monsters dual class. . . . and I have no idea, lets bring on the owlbears, orks and kobolds!

This isn't GURPS specific, I would have equal problems running Eastern Earthdawn or Eastern DnD . . . . . . (it would actually be a problem running Western European Fantasy to! Or Greek or Aztec or Sumerian! I have a vast store of knowledge of 'random fantasy RPG monsters', but setting specific RPG monsters? Not so much)

2 - Ideas on making your Eastern RPG Eastern, DM advice type stuff and so forth. Not sure exactly, but you need something, and I don't have it

What I don't need
1 - Templates. I am not a fan of the DF templates, and I can't imagine the use of new templates. Want a samurai? Fine, take a Knight, Scout, Swashbuckler and tweak it a bit. Or a Bard (samurai are totally into poetry), or take a Mystic Knight or the Imbuement versions of Swashbuckler and Scout and swap 'magic' for 'chi'. Want a Wu Jen or Shugenja or whatnot? Take whatever spellcaster you like and you are good.

Except I don't even use the DF templates to begin with, I much prefer just free hand chargen

[PK]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

it sounds like it hits squarely in the wheelhouse of 'the one part of Eastern Adventures I do not need'

The two biggest needs I have for Eastern Adventures are
1 - Monsters. [...]
2 - Ideas on making your Eastern RPG Eastern, DM advice type stuff and so forth [...]

What I don't need
1 - Templates.

I understand your point completely. It sounds my wants and needs from this sort of article are almost completely inverted from yours, so I definitely get why this article worked for me but not for you.

Thanks for the feedback, though, since we take that sort of thing into account when deciding on future issues, future articles to accept, etc.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Kalzazz

The two biggest needs I have for Eastern Adventures are
1 - Monsters. Honestly, I wound up running Faux Fantasy China with . . . kobolds.

It's almost as though there were no GURPS China or Japan books.

...it would actually be a problem running Western European Fantasy to! Or Greek or Aztec or Sumerian!...

Okay, you have a point there. There is no GURPS Sumeria.

I see a need here... maybe Ghostwind has a Patreon article to fill this hole?

2 - Ideas on making your Eastern RPG Eastern, DM advice type stuff and so forth. Not sure exactly, but you need something, and I don't have it

See above GURPS Aztecs, China, Greece, Japan...

[Kalzazz]

Well, the GURPS 3e books, while neat are not GURPS 4e. And if Im going with 'not GURPS 4e' I wind up getting decision locked in all the 5 bazillion equally valid forms of 'not GURPS 4e' books and really can't figure out how to identify what works best . . . . they are also not heavily discussed on this forum, which is one of my favorite forms of GURPS. DF Anything tends to have exhaustive discussion about it which is very interesting. I mean, GURPS at its heart is a classic 3-18 stats system, so you can steal from a huge swath of 3-18 stats everything under the sun . . . . but try to figure out which Not GURPS 4e book to get? Thats tough. And being not GURPS 4e, it won't be discussed much here, and since I want to use it for GURPS 4e, the discussions on Rifts forums or such won't help as much. I've read a decent number of Eastern related Rifts, L5R and various stripes of DnD books in the past, but have since forgotten most of it.

[PK]

Okay, I moved the discussion about ATE1 and its templates into the ATE1 discussion thread. So let's keep any "Eastern Adventures" talk here and any "ATE1 templates and templates in general" talk over there.

[b-dog]

I bought this issue just because I want go support the GURPS DF Other Cultures version. The Eastern templates were useful but I would like to have more exotic stuff than just the standard eastern stuff like the samurai. Maybe something about Thailand (Siam) or Indonesia or India would be great. Plus info on the types of stuff found,in dungeons in those regions, types of monster and types of treasures. East Asia and South Asia are of a lot of interest to people now so I guess that explains why there are no GURPS books on this subject. GURPS tends to be very late when getting to cool stuff.

[evileeyore]

Comments as I read the issue:

I'm liking Haven and Hell so far... but on page 6 I've stumbled across one of those niggling little things...

"As travel outside Havens is rare and herding is impossible, there’s a notable absence of efforts tied to large animals, such as tanning and stable-keeping."

So... with the absolute need to use available arable land for food crops... what are these people wearing? With no tanning and no textile crops... are they wearing clothes of woven chicken feathers?


Honestly I suspect their would be a tanning industry, developed around tanning the hides of the slain beasts of Chaos. They probably use every bit of such a creature. Sinews for bowstring, bones for weapons or mortar or added to clays for ceramics. Every bit of it...

Maybe this is explained when I get to the section on magic...


[EDIT]
Okay... with no access to permanent magical creations... seriously, what are these people wearing for clothes?
[/EDIT]

[evileeyore]

Finished Haven and Hell and did some noodling...


Personally: Not a setting that appeals to me. It takes the standard Orc and Pie of DF, cranks it up to 11 and rips the knob off. So I can see how this would vastly appeal to others!

Intellectually: I like the setting for some of it's assumptions*, and for taking Diablo and turning it into a reasonable rpg setting. It would take minimal tweaks to make this into Diablo, or even some sort of Fantasy ATE setting...


* No seriously, where are they getting clothes from?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

So... with the absolute need to use available arable land for food crops... what are these people wearing? With no tanning and no textile crops... are they wearing clothes of woven chicken feathers?

Well hemp is a pretty nutritious oilseed crop that produces useful fibers too. And some other desirable secondary products, so I've heard.