(DF) Western Adventures
 

I love Christopher R. Rice's Pyramid article "Eastern Adventures", which takes DF games to Eastern inspired lands, as "Oriental Adventures" once did for AD&D. This really should be a full DF supplement!

I'd like to see a supplement that does the same thing for Europe. Yes, DF at default generally feels more "Western" than "Eastern", but a lot of it's tropes tend more to generic fantasy rather than having a distinctly Western feel.

How would you modify DF for games set in the mysterious West?

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

I would think that the GURPS Fantasy would be the goto for something like that. Maybe also the Third Edition books Russia, Greece, Vikings, Middle Ages 1, Celtic Myth, and Imperial Rome.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

You mean, like in The New World? The Americas?

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

Yeah, I'm having trouble envisioning what this might mean. Most "generic" fantasy tropes are pretty emphatically western.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

It might be clearer to call it "occidental", which would be covered by GURPS Middle Ages 1; at first glance, I thought "western" meant GURPS Old West.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

My thought would be to play up feudal relationships and the (mounted) knight in shining armor. A lot of Dungeon Fantasy plays around in a world that's rather more urban and modern that the Medieval period.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

To be fair, an Old West game with DF tropes (but of course lacking Fantasy Gun Control) could be fun. :)

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

I'm at a bit of a loss too. I think the article was more about how you could reshape Dungeon Fantasy into a Non-Greyhawk setting. The Dungeon Fantasy default is fairly Western. The absence of Medieval European politics and social order is more a function of the fantasy setting. If you're looking for something that feels more profoundly Western European I'd toss out the Dungeon Fantasy aesthetic entirely and start with GURPS Middle Ages and prop it up with some Low Tech equipment and methodology. From there you can decide how much magic and supernatural beasts to sprinkle into your game.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

Two things here:

• Rice’s article shows just how long these reskins should be. There’s no reason to go much beyond Pyramid article length. AD&D Oriental Adventures was as long as it was because it replaced huge swaths of the Players Handbook, often with itself. Most of the spells were the same. The monk was mostly the same. The attributes were the same. It added new rules for skills because AD&D thitherto had lacked them. Without doing these things, it would have been about half length, at most. A GURPS Dungeon Fantasy supplement would be even less since the skill system is baked in and
• “Generic fantasy” tropes are mostly European.

The problem is that no longer is a Dungeon Fantasy game, but rather a straight fantasy one using Dungeon Fantasy as a base for character abilities. Dungeon Fantasy is about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Can you use Dungeon Fantasy to play the game you describe? Sure. It’s a fair amount of my campaign, in fact. But those parts of my campaign are hardly Dungeon Fantasy.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

Oh yes indeed. That’s what I thought this thread was until I read it.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

I could get down with some DF frontier justice'ing.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

You could make a Northern Adventures.

Northern mythology is different enough from Classical (D&D) fantasy that many things would be different. But still contain so many similarities that it coould fit right in.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

Given that Adventurers are already murder-hobo's, I'm pretty sure they're already doing this.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

So: variants on the musketeer template from Pyramid, and maybe the demolisher for characters who like to run around hurling lit sticks of dynamite. Artificers to make gatling guns and fix locomotives. What else?

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

A lot of the classic fantasy stuff comes from Norse, Celtic, and Germanic sources: Elves, Dwarves, Giants, Trolls, Leprechauns, Selkies, Named Possessions, etc. Mediterranean mythology gave us Centaurs, Satyrs, Mummies, Manticores, Phoenixes, Nymphs, Naiads, Nereids, Dryads, and a few others. Medieval mythology gave us our classic dragons. I forget where our lizard-men came from. So it is more possible to tailor DF to a certain portion of Europe through exclusion rather than inclusion.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

Yes and no. Thats what I mean by "different enough".

I know D&D (which I equal to classic RPG fantasy) have gathered inspiration from northern sources. But they are not the same.

So instance. Elves would be more Tolkien like and less Faerun like. More mystical. more recluse. More sinister motives. More callous towards humans.

Dwarves would be very magical.

And trolls would also be very different. Both much more magical, more intelligent. Have no regneration but turns to stone in sunlight.



But I agree that it's more of a "narrow focus" instead of "a different world" and exclusion of certain creatures goes a long way to narrow the focus.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

If SJG would just offer an universal rpg that would made it possible to run such campaigns ... ;-)

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Good example! There is indeed a lot that could be done with races. Some questions might include:

How do Christians (or the religious groups that represent them) respond to non-humans? Do Elves have souls and can they be saved?

Are Halflings appropriate, or does their non-magical nature make them unlike the little folk of folklore?

What's the relationship between the fae and the divine? Is there a clear line dividing them?

For classes, consider questions like

Cleric: How to make this fantay trope more like a western priest?

Druid: How does this class relate to the celtic nature priests called "druids"?

Holy Warrior: Can only Christians (or adherents of whatever faith represents Christianity) be Holy Warriors? What are appropriate powers for this exclusive religion anyway?

Knight: What's the connection between being a mighty knight and status?

Wizard: How do these relate to the wizards of Western folklore?


I agree that variation accross Europe complicates things a lot. Then again, the Pyramid article covered everything from Japan to India, noting variations.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

I think that GURPS people think of the DF series as a discreet separate entity from regular fantasy. In DF you can ONLY kill monsters and take their stuff and then exchange the loot in an abstract town. In general fantasy you can have cultures and towns that try to make sense along with monsters and dungeons that have some reason for existing. With GURPS DF there is no way to incorporate things like culture into an easy to use book. If you want to do that you have to do it yourself. There is no continuum between hack and slash DF and a historical fantasy, they are completely separate. If you want to make a dungeon setting in medieval Europe the GURPS writers will not write a book on how to set up a town and how to make the monsters seem like the ones from myths instead of being like in AD&D or Lord of the Rings they will just point you to GURPS Fantasy and then say DO IT YOURSELF! There will be no easy to use book where there are classes that fit into Norse myths and legends along with notes on how towns and dungeons would be like and monsters that fit the Norse myths. DO IT YOURSELf!

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

To be fair, there are a lot of different ways to build such a setting … and that's what it would become, a specific setting, rather than a piece of a toolkit. The SJG practice seems to have been to publish settings that were unique to GURPS, rather than being semi-generic fantasy.

This is not the only way to do it, of course. Douglas Cole has been gradually creating a Norse-flavoured setting, via Hall of Judgement, and further forthcoming books.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

GURPS Monster Hunters 6: Holy Hunters could help with that.I forgot GURPS Camelot in my last post.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

Huh. I'm a GURPS person, and my DF game is a crossover with broader fantasy. No abstract towns at my table. The abstract DF town rules have worked well in my non-abstract towns.

I also highly recommend the Caverntown supplement for an awesome worked example of a DF town.

I don't doubt that SJG would publish such a book if they thought there was market appetite for it. Look at the vast library of 3e world books that they published. (GURPS Arabian Nights is one of my favorite and most used RPG books for any system ever.) I consult many of those books in my 4e DF games all the time. Sometimes I need some NPC names, or a generic layout of a hill fort, or some religious fluff for a cultist, or stat ideas for a monster that's not in the DF canon yet. GURPS Celtic Myth, to name another example that is available (cheap!) in both PDF and PoD, is packed with cultural material (literature, fashion, board games, bagpipes...) and plenty of crunch on character types, magic, Sidhe, etc.

This is more about the marketplace than about the desire of Steve Jackson Games. A book like this would only sell to the subset of GURPS players who want a tightly focused Norse/DF crossover. That's a small group! Mind you, I don't speak for the company in any way, but I've seen dozens of posts from employees (from the CEO on down) about this, and they constantly emphasize that this isn't about "not wanting" to do such things.

Our best way to see more publications like this is to vote with our dollars. I echo johndallman's recommendation to see Hall of Judgment if you haven't already. It includes another example of a non-abstract town and lots of Norse culture to add to the DF stew. I love it and hope to see more like this from Doug. (And I hope jhis example inspires other 3rd party authors and publishers to jump in!)

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

This is false.

Is DF set up to explicitly handle this sort of play? Yes. Is the only sort of play you can run using DF? No.

Also false. And pointedly false with the adventure Hall of Judgement sitting right over here...

Until someone else writes. But that's the way of things. If someone else doesn't do it and you really want it badly...

Can I say false again? Should I break out a thesaurus yet?

This is ... oh hang on. This one is true, so far. As in, "no one has yet written a book on how to make monsters from medieval European myth or how to run towns like medieval European fantasy for DF yet".

But I bet that 3e book, Middle Ages 1, would go a very long way in fulfilling part of this. I mean if I wanted to run medieval European DF, I'd certainly start there.

And if I really wanted to go to town, it looks like there is a series out there just for this, City Builder. Though I just discovered this series exists*, so I have no idea how GURPS and/or user friendly it is. I'm looking at picking up number 1 though...



Does anyone know what else the authors have written?

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

This aren't the sort of things that should be coming up in a DF game.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

Those are all perfectly fine questions to tackle in a DF game if that's the sort of DF game you want to run.

Re: (DF) Western Adventures
 

I was going to also suggest the Deadlands series, but those are all out of print.