Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

ATLANTIS: THE SECOND AGE

You can even get it online at RPGNOW.COM. I don't favor the incarnation of A:tSA, but instead, would recommend the one with the cover of a young woman's face on it. Email me personally I'd you'd like. The maps for the latest edition are with the while.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

You can have a setting background, or not; like most AD&D inspired fantasy games. Banestorm, as written with its assumptions about magic and religion does not make a good fit, but that can be changed. I used Yrth, but changed when the Banestorm event happened by backing it up to roughly 200 AD. In my setting Megalos is smaller, Roman, instead of Byzantine, and still using non-hereditary Emperors, and the Senate still has real power. Local god like entities jumped all over the mishmash of religions available at this time, and pagan religions are an on going item, you do have Jews and Christians, but no Islam. Al-Haz and Al-Wazirf don't exist and are occupied by the various horse lords from Central Asia.

-OR-

If this doesn't work for you, will it not create more stress?

Of course, use the background that you and your players are comfortable with, I've always liked Greyhawk, and it WILL make a fairly good quick fit.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

There's no conflict between using DFRPG and having a pre-detailed setting. There just isn't a setting published for that purpose.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

Well not any super detailed, official SJGames, ones. As others have pointed out, old school, and even some newer, kitchen sink FRPG settings are usable with various degrees of conversion required and a few Pyramid articles have DF suitable settings, for GURPS DF, but usable as is for DFRPG, just not full book length treatments.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

One way to mix Banestorm and Dungeon Fantasy would be to say the world is Yrth just like in the book, but a few years ago there was a new banestorm-like event that tossed a bunch of new races, monsters, and treasures in and scrambled magic. A couple of colleges of wizardly magic stopped working, but a select few pious people got access to Clerical magic, and some primitive cultures discovered that their old Druidic rituals started having real effects again.

The big powers of the setting haven't had time to adapt yet, so the setting description works pretty much as-is, but the player characters are involved in the booming business of collecting banestormed-in piles of treasure from ruins and caves.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

It's not as detailed as most rpg settings but you might want to take a look at Fantacide by Rick Priestly, Andy Chambers, and Allessio Cavatore. It's a flat world with a hole in the middle surrounded by The Great Waste of Time. There are winged monkeys with blunderbusses, native American centaurs, the hungry woodlands, and the creatures that claw their way up from beneath to eat your skin and eyeballs. Great place to wander into through a portal or just fall through the hole in the middle.

Anyhow, you could always just use Middle Earth and watch the pure fans squawk and squeal as priests of Thor throw death spells at beholders. :D

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

That's the sort of thing I would totally do! Maybe you had to be there, but back in the late 70s and early 80s, a major part of the charm of FRPGs was throwing in the kitchen sink:

"I read this fantasy novel one time and there's some stuff I want to work in."
"Cool. I skimmed this one my older brother had, called Gor. Also, I just saw Hawk the Slayer and it gave me this idea."
"Awesome! Hey, in history class we just learned about these badass Persian warriors called the Immortals, so I totally want them in the game – only they'll really be immortal!"
"Great, and I'll be putting in this monster my uncle heard about from an old Mohawk guy."
"Guys . . . can we step away from the world-building? I want to talk about my fighter. He's like a half-elf Bruce Lee mixed with Aragorn, and he uses Excalibur."
"Dude, you can't start with an Excalibur. You have to find one, and there are only, like, 20 or something in the world."
"Maybe I can kill a medusa for it?"

Anyway, that's the feel the DFRPG was going for (okay, maybe not Gor). You can actually get a good appreciation for what you can do and how far you can go with just implicit world details – mostly ripped off from random myth, legend, folklore, fiction, and even history – by playing a little NetHack.

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

I think a simple hex map and gazetteer would be the right way to approach a Dungeon Fantasy world.

I'll try and find time to draw something up.

My thought is that in the middle of the map is The Crucible, an area of semi arid plains that lie between five warring nations. Around the outer edges of the map. To the north: impassible mountains. To the south: impassible oceans, to the east: storm tossed trees. To the west: impassible mountains impassible oceans, and storm tossed trees. Perhaps the dungeons should have a maze of twisting passages, all the same.

The two major nations would be human. The minor ones elves, dwarves, and orcs or hobgoblins whichever's less barbaric and more militant. Other races are found in the mountains and so forth.

The history of the world begins with the ancients, who's cities got covered with silt in a great flood that wiped them out a long time ago. Each race had an epoch they dominated the lands before declining to current borders. The dwarves came south out of the mountains. The orcs came west out of the mountains. The elves came across the oceans and out of the woods to the west. There's probably an indigenous race. The undead are stirring in the desert but aren't yet a major power.

How's that for relatively basic and generic. It's tempting to go to a really balkanized world with more general settlement periods. Which would people prefer?

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

If you want something pre-existing, I would also recommend Greyhawk, especially the area around Greyhawk city itself. Within a dozen hexes in every direction, you have just about every terrain type except tundra and tropical jungle. We loved this when we played AD&D when it was first published. Elf problems in the Gnarly Forest, undead in the Cairn Hills, lizard people in the Mistmarsh, all kinds of spooky options in the Abbor Alz and the Bright Desert. You've got other towns and cities and, of course, the obvious hack-and-slash setting of the Wild Coast with enough piracy and chaos to keep a band of delvers busy for a few campaigns.

With all of that said, to help me buy off my disadvantage of Obsession: World Building, I'm starting my DFRPG campaign with nothing. I'm just going to take notes as we make stuff up and see what emerges. Good notes are always the key. Nothing more frustrating than naming a town and then having to rename it the next month because nobody wrote it down... "But it HAD a name! This new name isn't right!"

Re: Dungeon Fantasy(DF) and regular GURPS 4/e questions (Yrth too)
 

Honestly, that's one reason I keep thinking of Banestorm as being appropriate for a Dungeon Fantasy game, because you can always justify stirring the Fantasy Kitchen Sink pot with a new rush of Banestorms bringing in all sorts of new stuff.

Edit: The other great Fantasy Kitchen Sink setting I used to consider for Dungeon Fantasy was The Wellsprings of Creation, by Matt Rigsby, which was basically a big meta-setting that fitted in every Fantasy-related GURPS article ever written in Pyramid Online at that point, tied in to a world concept of "things constantly being created out of nothing" that excused the Kitchen Sink.