GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Denizens: Barbarians

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

I don't have this book yet. Is there an option to skip purchasing Outdoorsman and/or Gigantism?

I don't know that there'll be an option to skip Outdoorsman, but DF11 offers an alternative Talent for more Viking-type Barbarians.

It'd be a serious oversight to not introduce an option to have that Talent instead of Outdoorsman, in this type of volume, and SJ Games sometimes surprise positively. I remember being delighted to see an "Urban Explorer" version of the Parkour'er template in Action volume 3, not really because I have any personal interest in urban exploration, but because I remembered that years earlier, more than one Daily Illuminator had touched upon the subject of urban exploration. So it'd have been a sad missed opportunity, a failure for the volume to be truly complete, but SJ Games didn't miss that opportunity.

Sometimes they do deliver.

In this particular case, though, an official RAW-published option isn't really needed. It seems very reasonable for me for a DF GM to say yes to a player request to have his Barbarian have a different Talent than the one in the DF1. Barbarians are characterized by modest IQ (examples from written fiction, such as Conan and Lord "Tarzan" Greystoke notwithstanding) and so it makes sense that a Barbarian should be forced to start the game with at least a few levels of some Talent to partially compensate for modest (if not downright low) IQ. But there's no reason it has to be Outdoorsman.

At worst the Talent might be required to not cover any weapon or other combat skills, and to be of a breadth to cost 10 points/level, same as Outdoorsman, but as long as the player-proposed Talent lives up to those two criteria, and as long as it smells at least vaguely barbaric, then I don't see why an even semi-reasonable (and somewhat experienced) GM would say no.



Gigantism... I think it kinda fits the the barbarian stereotype. Big and very strong. I'm under the impression that DF barbarians routinely end up with ST 25. That is, for me, a lot easier to swallow if they're SM+1 than if they're SM+0.

I can envision a more or less "tarzanic" type who isn't big and who isn't almost super-strong (ST 25 feels rather less super than something like DX 20 or IQ 20), but at that point a different template might be warranted. Either the Hunter template from DF1 (or whatever it's called) or else the new template from the Action volume of Pyramid v3. Obviously that's for Action and now DF, and so would need to be adapted, but it could be a good starting point.