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Old 02-19-2018, 06:12 PM   #11
Teclis
 
Join Date: Jun 2015
Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

For how many Player Characters is Harkwood written ? It says the starting point value is 100 but I couldn't find how many Player Characters the adventure is balanced for.
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Old 02-20-2018, 01:14 PM   #12
cvannrederode
 
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

A more pressing question for me: has anyone updated it to 4th Edition. And what is the canonical ending, considering in the "current" timeline of Yrth, Harkwood was some years ago?
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Old 02-20-2018, 04:34 PM   #13
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

It can't be Lady Aylara, Darrek or Baron Fenmarc, if you care about continuity. This leaves Agrast, Morgris and Lord Telberan.
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Old 02-20-2018, 04:39 PM   #14
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

Even if there were an official answer to that, giving it would feel kind of spoiler-y!
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Old 11-09-2019, 03:11 PM   #15
Teclis
 
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

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Originally Posted by cvannrederode View Post
A more pressing question for me: has anyone updated it to 4th Edition. And what is the canonical ending, considering in the "current" timeline of Yrth, Harkwood was some years ago?
Game mechanics aside that is one of the reasons I prefer 3e. The Yrth source material in 4e is incongruent with what has already been published. If you run your campaign with Fantasy 2e you only need to worry about keeping the Orc Slayer story line in sync. In Fantasy 2e Lord Peredur is dead and the Lady Bronwyn is now the leige lord of Durham. As long as she either not captured by the orcs in Orc Slayer or, if she was, was recused by the squires the story lines are synchronized.....however the way the players I have play she will probably end up recusing herself.
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Old 11-10-2019, 12:57 AM   #16
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

I went through the Caithness Civil War more than once. The first time it was a straight adventuring party competing in the harkwood Tourney, playing little actual role in the war. The second time it was as a mercenary group competing at the Harkwood Tourney to build a rep for potential customers. (Got hired, got framed for a massacre, ended up hiding in Tredroy.) The third time tried to build a stealth colony in the Great Forest with the aid of Harkwood, so as to feed resources to one faction (failed miserably, infiltrated and chased out by minions of Cabble of all people.)

Harkwood is an excellent place to begin a fantasy campaign . You can emphasize politics, combat, or even looting (lots of opportunities to loot in a civil war).
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Old 11-10-2019, 10:33 AM   #17
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

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Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2 View Post
I went through the Caithness Civil War more than once.
Is the Caithness Civil War an a published adventure by SJGames!??! It sounds really cool. Most of the Baronies in Caithness don't have standing armies and there are lots of wild unexplored areas so in Caithness unlike Megalos it is possible for a group of clever PCs to be a guerrilla type group and actually stand up to local lords. In Megalos they would be quickly exterminated.

Players have to want to play though in a setting that draws very heavily on the historical middle ages and interact with an NPC population who's minds are essentially under the grip of a Christian theocracy in a stratified society. GURPS mechanics handles this well with social status, Duties disadvantage, and reaction rolls. However players have to be mature enough to have fun roll playing the sublet interactions between their characters and the NPCs who are locked in the historical mind set of the setting. Some players will not understand the way GURPS mechanics model the social interactions of a historical society and interpret it as the GM trying to use history to impose conservative values on the real world, contemporary population.

When I run Orc Slayer I incorporate a lot of material from GURPS Middle Ages 3e. For example one of the towns the squires passed through on their way to Sterling Forest had called an emergency session of the Shire Court to deal with an alleged adulterine fortification. As the PCs where the highest ranking nobles in the town and squires in the service of Lord Peredur, they needed to make a bunch of law and savoir-faire rolls to avoid having the preside at the shire court and investigate the fortification.

In another case while travelling to Sterling Forest the PCs stop in a town on the Kings Highway. The town is in an uproar because the mayors young daughter has been kidnapped by residence of a neighboring town well off the King highway where the towns folk are know for their ungodly ways. The mayor wants the squires to rescue his daughter as all the knights are away at the tournament. The players want to avoid this detour as they are already being compelled by their Duties disadvantage to rescue a grand daughter of much high social status (the Lady Brwonwyn ). The players are able to ignore the mayor's request because they are nobles and the mayor is a commoner however they are still required to pay lip service to Christianity and attend the Sunday church service. At the Church they get a bad reaction roll from the monsignor because of his high clerical social status and he then commands the squires to rescue the daughter because he wants to reassert church control over the adjacent town. It turns out that the daughter wasn't kidnapped, she ran away to avoid being sent to the convent. So now the PCs have to make a choice between ethics and pleasing the powerful, christian church.

Last edited by Teclis; 11-10-2019 at 11:28 AM.
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Old 11-10-2019, 03:46 PM   #18
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

The whole set-up for Caithness makes a perfect place for an Arthurian-style campaign, with Conall as a stand-in for Arthur. And as Megalos is basically a Fantastical Rome/Byzantium, this set-up is perfect to adapt my favorite Suppressed Transmission article, "Justinian and Arthur: historical high fantasy", which proposes a historical fantasy campaign pitting the demonic Emperor Justinian (as penned in the infamous Anekdota of Procopius) vs the (almost) historical King Arthur, who was recorded as invading the Roman Empire and fighting an Emperor who was bodyguarded by 50 demonic giants.

Now, as it turns out, Megalos actually does have a demonic Emperor, working mostly in secret, while Conall is basically King Arthur at the start of his reign, trying to reunify his kingdom against rebellious lords. Doesn't take too much of a stretch to add more Arthurian elements to Caithness and Conall's court. Maybe make the PCs his own personal Knights of the Round Table, play up the Elves of the Great Forest as behaving more like Faeries (or limit that to the Elrond and Galadriel-like Elven Lords, with Elf PCs just borderline alien in outlook), and build a campaign about the Party serving their King, first fighting to unify Caithness under their king, and then dealing with external threats, like an Orc Horde invading from the West while Eastern Megalan armies begin some border friction.
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Old 11-10-2019, 04:41 PM   #19
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Teclis View Post
Is the Caithness Civil War an a published adventure by SJGames!??! It sounds really cool. Most of the Baronies in Caithness don't have standing armies and there are lots of wild unexplored areas so in Caithness unlike Megalos it is possible for a group of clever PCs to be a guerrilla type group and actually stand up to local lords. In Megalos they would be quickly exterminated.
No, sadly, there is not an official Caithness Civil War campaign. But the seeds are there, and it is a messy set-up, too. That's what makes the CCW re-playable - you have to basically make a new one from the available material every time.
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Old 11-10-2019, 08:49 PM   #20
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Default Re: GURPS Harkwood - how have you run it?

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Originally Posted by LoneWolf23k View Post
my favorite Suppressed Transmission article, "Justinian and Arthur: historical high fantasy", which proposes a historical fantasy campaign pitting the demonic Emperor Justinian (as penned in the infamous Anekdota of Procopius) vs the (almost) historical King Arthur, who was recorded as invading the Roman Empire and fighting an Emperor who was bodyguarded by 50 demonic giants.

Now, as it turns out, Megalos actually does have a demonic Emperor,
Hi,

Is the following article to which you are referring?

http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=82

I am playing from GURPS Fantasy 2e (The blue book with the cover art by Kirk Reinert). The current Emperor is Diophrates XII. On pg. 48 it says that an assassination attempt was made on the emperor's life by a demon, but I couldn't find anything in the book that said that the emperor himself was a demon of half demon.

The demon lore in GURPS seems to be quite sparse. In GURPS Magic there is a generic demon that can be summoned and there is a section on demons in GURPS Wizards but it only contains two demon characters. GURPS Magic also mentions Karth the Bloodletter but doesn't go into a lot of details about the demon Karth itself. There is not enough information for the GM to figure out why Karth would want to take on material form in Yrth or how he could have spawned half human progeny.

Which style of Arthurian campaign are you thinking of? I don't think it could use the historical Arthur from GURPS Camelot because in the 5th century there was no plate armor or stirrups and Caithness is high middle ages. Also squires in GURPS Camelot don't have legal enforcement powers but the ones in Fantasy 2e do.

Last edited by Teclis; 11-10-2019 at 09:02 PM.
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