Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 01-14-2012, 06:33 AM   #11
griffin
 
griffin's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
So how hard would this be to adapt to a GURPS Banestorm/DF campaign. I recall someone having a thread about Banestorm/DF crossover which I found interesting -- in that I think that clerics and druids would be hardest to workout in the setting. Still I like in depth settings and that's pretty much the best one for GURPS (at least the best supported and most detailed).

If I were to use the adventure this way, where would be the best location to put it given the map for Yrth/Ytarria? Cardiel is probably where I'd want to start a campaign so I'd want to place the adventure somewhere there or in one of the surrounding areas. The islands are a possibility also since sailing from Cariel isn't out of the question.

Thanks in advance for any input.
griffin is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 06:54 AM   #12
Woodman
 
Woodman's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Hannover - Germany
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

Clerics and Druids dont seem like a big Problem, i'm not finished with the npc chapter, but there seems to be only one cleric and one Holy Warrior as major NPCs, both could easily be based on Faiths that exist on Yrth. For the Location i would say Caithness is a perfect fit, just use the Border to the Great Desert in the West and the only thing you have to change is rotating the directions 90° counterclockwise.

PS: I think Transhuman Space and Traveller both outperform Banestorm when it comes to details
Woodman is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 07:24 AM   #13
griffin
 
griffin's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

Quote:
Originally Posted by Woodman View Post
Clerics and Druids dont seem like a big Problem, i'm not finished with the npc chapter, but there seems to be only one cleric and one Holy Warrior as major NPCs, both could easily be based on Faiths that exist on Yrth.
Can you be more specific on that point. What faiths could the Holy Warrior and cleric be based on? Any druid NPCs to consider? If so how would that one be handled in Banestorm?

It seems to me that DF style clerics and druids don't work well at all in Banestorm. There don't seem to be any gods to work with clerics -- at least not ones you can gain power from in the plane Yrth exists in. Perhaps I've overlooked something. Perhaps druids can work, though I'm not sure. The elves seem to have some connection with an eternal nature, but I don't see them gaining any power from the connection and that seems key to DF druids. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.

I would really like to have druids and clerics as good PC options for my players. I'm just not sure how to handle them in the Banestorm setting.

[quote]For the Location i would say Caithness is a perfect fit, just use the Border to the Great Desert in the West and the only thing you have to change is rotating the directions 90° counterclockwise.[quote]

Cool.

Quote:
PS: I think Transhuman Space and Traveller both outperform Banestorm when it comes to details
I was speaking strictly on GURPS Fantasy settings, specifically where I could fairly easily adapt the adventure in question.

I'll probably have some free time on my hands next week, so I'm looking for input this weekend so I know if I should buy this adventure. I haven't run a campaign in ages and I'd really like something I can use in Banestorm setting.

I'm planning on using at least one adventure from GURPS Fantasy adventures -- the Mordag's Little Finger one. I will probably start with that one but will need to convert to GURPS 4e and probably power it up a bit since the characters I'm planning on using will be DF style 250-300 point, though they will also need to use some of those points for non-dungeon crawling stuff that can be used in more general adventuring in the Banestorm/Yrth setting.
griffin is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 07:39 AM   #14
Bruno
 
Bruno's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

There are specifically options for mystically empowered religious characters in Banestorm - it's not clear it's religiously empowered, or some sort of odd psychic effect, but it's there, and it's an option.

If you're not using that, you can definitely remove the two religious NPCs entirely without doing damage to the adventure. If you're using that, drop the cleric and either handwave the Holy Warrior as someone who is religiously empowered and Christian, or drop the Holy Warrior as well to keep things tidy.

There are orc shamen, but they're wizards.

The orcs don't have the orc racial template from Banestorm - it's up to you whether you want to run them as is, retune them to have the Banestorm template, or just shrug and say they've been mutated by exposure to the Mirror of the Fire Demon (dun dun duuuuuuuuun) and add that to the list of reasons to get rid of it.
__________________
All about Size Modifier; Unified Hit Location Table
A Wiki for my F2F Group
A neglected GURPS blog
Bruno is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 08:17 AM   #15
Woodman
 
Woodman's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Hannover - Germany
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

If you dont want to get holy powers into Banestorm, make the Cleric a Wizard with affiliation to some church, she is a rather benevolent person, so practically any of the abrahamic religions should work, pagan ones would probably need more tuning and be rather exotic.
The Holy Warrior is rather low on holy powers to begin with and any member of a religious order can fill his role just as well, a fanatical Hospitaller is probably perfect.

The Henchclerics would probably need some reworking into religious wizards too, basically switching Power Investure to Magery and then redoing the Spellselection to satisfy prerequisites.
Woodman is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 08:37 AM   #16
Rasputin
 
Rasputin's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

At last I've read the whole thing, more or less. Not even getting into the geomorphs, the Wilderness chapter is maybe the most interesting of the adventure proper, lending itself to sundry different encounters. You go through the dungeon, which is surprisingly little of the whole adventure, once; the wilderness has loads of replay value.

Also of note that this adventure was brought to you by the letter N. It appears to be a clever way of scaling up an adventure, and will probably be a feature of any later adventure. How well did the extra 100 points being an extra character work out, anyhow? Can it be used to scale up a big boss monster?
__________________
Cura isto securi, Eugene.

My GURPS blog.
Rasputin is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 08:48 AM   #17
Bruno
 
Bruno's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

Big boss monsters are almost always better served by giving them some extra company than they are more HP. More defenses/DR/magic resistance can help but it mostly just frustrates PCs.

If you really want a classic boss fight against a single creature, the first place to start is 6x HP and either area attacks that are large enough to hit most of the party, or some other way of duplicating the attack output of a group of Worthy monsters (four Extra Attacks and Long Arms works). Another thing that's pretty important is a way to prevent Resisted spells from ending the fight with a single die roll - if it's a large monster, then the scaling of FP costs based on SM helps here, but may be a bit binary.

There's a whole other thread here on Boss Monster Design that doesn't have anything to do with the adventure so I'll take this elsewhere.

EDIT: new thread here
__________________
All about Size Modifier; Unified Hit Location Table
A Wiki for my F2F Group
A neglected GURPS blog

Last edited by Bruno; 01-14-2012 at 09:13 AM.
Bruno is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 08:58 AM   #18
griffin
 
griffin's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruno View Post
There are specifically options for mystically empowered religious characters in Banestorm - it's not clear it's religiously empowered, or some sort of odd psychic effect, but it's there, and it's an option.
Bruno, thanks for this and the other advice. Looking more and more like this would be a good buy for me.

Quote:
The orcs don't have the orc racial template from Banestorm - it's up to you whether you want to run them as is, retune them to have the Banestorm template, or just shrug and say they've been mutated by exposure to the Mirror of the Fire Demon (dun dun duuuuuuuuun) and add that to the list of reasons to get rid of it.
I'll need to examine the differences between Banestorm orcs and DF orcs. I don't mind making some adjustments as long as it won't screw up Banestorm setting entirely. For my campaign I'm planning for having orcs return in force, but mainly from the area where Castle Defiant is located. Still they will be come more prevalent in Yrth now that the Banestorm has subsided and is a very rare occurence.

That mirror sounds more and more interesting. Perhaps I can build an entire story arc around it.

Thanks for your feedback.
griffin is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 09:03 AM   #19
griffin
 
griffin's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rasputin View Post
At last I've read the whole thing, more or less. Not even getting into the geomorphs, the Wilderness chapter is maybe the most interesting of the adventure proper, lending itself to sundry different encounters. You go through the dungeon, which is surprisingly little of the whole adventure, once; the wilderness has loads of replay value.
If I wanted to use this adventure as a convention or store demo, do you think I could drop the wilderness encounter and run the game in a four hour time period just focusing on the dungeon portion.

As far as replay value, what about the town? Does it have decent detail? I like Mordag's Little Finger adventure (from GURPS Fantasy Adventures) as it features a town section (Northside, I think) with a nice little map and some NPCs and at least one tavern/bar.

I'm looking at getting lots of use and replay value out of this adventure.
griffin is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 01-14-2012, 09:11 AM   #20
Steven Marsh
 
Steven Marsh's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Default Re: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Adventure 1: Mirror of the Fire Demon

Quote:
Originally Posted by warmachine View Post
GURPS authors have told me they don't write adventures because they don't sell. This has changed?
There are a couple of different issues here, so I'll tackle them both:
  • GURPS authors don't want to write adventures because they don't sell. This may well be true; given sales of past adventures, it wouldn't surprise me if many established GURPS authors would rather spend their time reaching a larger audience. If Random GURPS Adventure takes the same amount of time as GURPS Ultra-Cool Add-On Design System but only sells half the copies, it'd be an understandable decision to go with the latter.
  • GURPS authors don't write adventures because we don't try to wrangle them up from authors (because they don't sell). Again, there's also truth to this. From my POV, Mirror of the Fire Demon is quite probably the most complex project we've assembled that didn't receive a hardcover-level 40-person playtest (which would've been counterproductive). Unlike other projects that benefit from "armchair reviews," a full adventure really requires extensive play testing to make sure it works. If something needs to be tweaked significantly, than it usually has to go back and be played again. Taking care of corner cases, contingencies, and other unforeseen difficulties adds to word count, which adds its own problems. So, since adventures take a lot more work than a normal project and don't turn out to be as worthwhile, we need to careful in how we proceed.

(Let me also take this moment to offer a special thanks to those brave souls, who -- with their groups -- truly kicked the tires on this one to the best of their abilities. Thank you, Peter, Antoni, Christopher, and Emily!)

We took great pains to ensure that Mirror of the Fire Demon was just about the "best case scenario" (pun only slightly intended): It's for our most-popular GURPS sub-line, written by an established author, and designed to have reuse applicability for other campaigns. Because of this, we'll be looking at its performance closely when deciding if/how we should tackle other adventures; if the sales of this adventure don't justify the effort we put into it, any future adventures will have a much harder time.

Which is to say, a dollar-vote for Mirror of the Fire Demon is also a dollar-vote for more adventures. :-)
__________________
Steven Marsh
Steve Jackson Games
smarsh@sjgames.com
Steven Marsh is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
adventure, dungeon fantasy

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 06:12 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.