GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 1: Glittering Prizes

[Kromm]

We opened the chest
To find coin bearing The Mark
But gold is gold, right?

— A cursed man

The essence of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is slaying monsters and taking their stuff. Until now, though, the monsters (lurking in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Monsters 1 and 2) have filled more supplements than the loot (stashed in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables). We can't have that! That's why we're kicking off the new GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures series.

The inaugural volume, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 1: Glittering Prizes, offers the GM a wealth of new ways to tempt adventurers with cash, going into great detail on the composition, size, and appearance of not just coins made from precious metals but also nearly anything else that might count as money – including some things that don't look the part. As well, it expands on what Treasure Tables has to say about costly fabrics, remarkable materials, decorative motifs, and cultures of origin. In short, it transforms a pile of plunder from a $ value and a collection of generic items into a find that requires a little thought (and possibly an adventure!) to count, spend, or sell. And some of these valuables are better kept than traded, whether because they're intrinsically useful or because they're magical, while others are best left where they were found . . .

Everybody loves a good haul of booty! Drop some of your real-world coin on Glittering Prizes and you won't be disappointed.

—

Store Link: http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG37-0332

[Pseudonym]

This sounds really cool and sounds like something I might be interested in.

I dunno if this is the appropriate place to put it, but one other thing I'd kinda like to see in future installments is guidance for potentially mapping the tables to slightly higher tech levels (for Victorian/Steampunk treasure, and lowish tech guns especially, since Dungeon Fantasy sits on the border of TL3/4 apparently) But from just the short description it sounds like this one answers a lot of the popular economics lore questions I've seen and heard.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Pseudonym

I dunno if this is the appropriate place to put it, but one other thing I'd kinda like to see in future installments is guidance for potentially mapping the tables to slightly higher tech levels

Since higher TLs have progressively more and more stuff than lower ones, that'd be a pretty long book. Having said that, just about everything DF8 and this new book have to say about decoration and embellishment can be applied with little or no modification to higher-tech goods.

Originally Posted by Pseudonym

(for Victorian/Steampunk treasure, and lowish tech guns especially, since Dungeon Fantasy sits on the border of TL3/4 apparently)

As I've suggested elsewhere, DF is TL Olden Times. That is, it doesn't fit into the regular GURPS TL progression. Rather, it's a particular popular conception of pre-industrial technology, the sort of romantic thinking that has knights in shining plate armor all over the landscape but not even a hint of the most primitive guns [1].

Originally Posted by Pseudonym

But from just the short description it sounds like this one answers a lot of the popular economics lore questions I've seen and heard.

To be clear, it deals with money as an object for adventurers to examine and manipulate and for GMs to set up as window-dressing for the campaign. It doesn't get into economics at all. In DF, money is how adventurers keep score, but economics is something that happens to other people.

I leave you, then, with the theme song I've selected for this book.



1. Well, sort of. There's a Pyramid issue which has not one but two takes on gunpowder-using characters in DF.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

As I've suggested elsewhere, DF is TL Olden Times.

That certainly gets the series creator's seal of approval! Dungeon Fantasy merges everything from fur armor and stone axes, through the shiny bronze of Classical mythology, onward through sword-and-sandal gear, further to the Middle Ages, and finally to the Renaissance – with side trips for exotica like obsidian- and shark-tooth-edged "swords," and even a few modern-day items in drag – all while kicking guns and other inconvenient truths to the curb. Doing so lets hide-clad barbarians with big clubs, knights in full plate harness, swashbucklers with smallswords and powdered wigs, and so on adventure together, and makes room for artificers with clockpunkish inventions. GURPS tech levels break trying to deal with this, so Dungeon Fantasy just tosses them in the bin. That's why none of the skills or gear in the series have a TL on them.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

To be clear, it deals with money as an object for adventurers to examine and manipulate and for GMs to set up as window-dressing for the campaign. It doesn't get into economics at all. In DF, money is how adventurers keep score, but economics is something that happens to other people.

If I could pick a study that characterizes this volume, it would be numismatics, not economics.

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Well, sort of. There's a Pyramid issue which has not one but two takes on gunpowder-using characters in DF.

Oh, let's advertise our handiwork! That's Pyramid #3/36: Dungeon Fantasy.

[Bruno]

As someone who keeps popping up in the threads here about coins, I really really love this book :)

So, some thoughts, which is sort of a disorganized review:
I love the various tables and charts for making up coins and etc, either once at the start of your campaign to make up some generic coins everyone uses (with flavor!), or to make a unique horde that's potentially quite annoying for players to spend. I'm happy to see non-coin money (like paper money, shells, and rai) in the book. Great for characters from That Foreign Place (you know the one, the one were all the weird PCs come from).

The magical and cursed coins are cute, as well as the weaponized coins and coin-based gadgets :) I like the rogues tool of the sharpened coin making it into the book.

I think the Hell Money box could be adapted in general to interesting money sacrifice tricks for PCs, which could make for equally interesting dungeon puzzles.

"Details, Details" overrides or expands on the similar parts of DF8. I really loved the details and embellishments sections of DF8, and if you did too, you're in for a treat. I'm also left wanting to make one of the particularly annoying monsters a sources of exotic fluorescent yellow dye, or something like that. Who's the natural market for day-glow colours in the DF universe?

"Implausible Materials", to me, is an extension on Details, but it's a particularly fun and exotic take on the idea. Adding more Implausible materials, with some small game impacting details? Totally awesome loot ahoy!

Despite being focused very much on the shiny sparkly decorative bits of treasure, Matt managed to shoehorn some weapon modifiers and a gadget in the back. The gadget appeals greatly to my old-school roots :D

[Bruno]

What I would call "mild disappointments" except that's much too harsh:

1) Length. Only 22 pages, and that's counting index and cover and so forth. It's not that I felt things were lacking, I just want more because I love treasure stuff.
I don't feel like I'm being over-charged for the length - I just want more of the same.
So publish more in this series ASAP so I can keep giving you my money!

2) I have a retro-fondness for the old treasure type tables, or even D&D 3e and 4e's "treasure for level" and "treasure parcel" tables. I have no idea how you'd do something like that for GURPS, but I want it.
I can't say I was set up to think this was in Glittering Prizes, but a big book on coins sorta feels like a good place to put things like "bandit pocket change tables" or some sort of guideline on how big the dragon horde should be[1]. Regardless, I'd love to see that in a Pyramid article or in another book in the series.


[1] Possibly taking into account the horribleness of the dragon, but I think even pointing out less meta and more practical things like "You will need $2 000 000 in gold coins regardless of size to make a Smaug-like bed for a SM X dragon".

[Pseudonym]

Originally Posted by Bruno

"Implausible Materials", to me, is an extension on Details, but it's a particularly fun and exotic take on the idea. Adding more Implausible materials, with some small game impacting details? Totally awesome loot ahoy!

Do any of these game impacting details have anything to do with hard crafting?Maybe it's covered in another book, but myself not being a master seamstress nor fashion designer, nor armor expert, I had a situation where one of my players said they wanted to craft a nice set of clothes out of some mink furs they discovered. And I had no idea what to do; didn't know how long it'd take a character to design, cut, sew, fit, and what kinda penalties to assess, or how much it would cost to farm out the work, so I pulled numbers out of a black hole, which worked, but felt a little short of the detail I hoped for.

Though... thinking about it, I think I heard something like this being covered somewhere once, but specifically armor. Though, that would probably be a good launching point to extrapolate easy to believe numbers.


Oh, and one other idea, if it's ok to spit something like that out here...

Some guidance for ensuring (or at least increasing the probability) higher quality loot when drawing from the table in circumstances where it seems like the players deserve something awesome. I think I read a small blurb suggesting just adding a small modifier or something to dice rolls, but does that actually necessarily improve odds? I can kinda wing it for example by saying, "a weapon that someone in this party can use with at least one enchantment, with a divine background origin story," but if there is a way to extrapolate "Do these modifications to get lower-on-average tier items and these ones to get higher-on-average tier items" that'd be real nifty.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Pseudonym

Do any of these game impacting details have anything to do with hard crafting?

No, that would be Low-Tech Companion 3.

[Pseudonym]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

No, that would be Low-Tech Companion 3.

Ah cool! This sounds like something I need like tens times over. Thanks for pointing it out.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Bruno

2) I have a retro-fondness for the old treasure type tables, or even D&D 3e and 4e's "treasure for level" and "treasure parcel" tables. I have no idea how you'd do something like that for GURPS, but I want it.

I think there's room in DF for a system which quantifies "level" as a general measurement of hostility of environment, like BAD in Action, and could similarly serve as the basis of monster threat levels and available treasure. There's already a bit of work out there which could be used as part of that (IIRC, Ravenpenny did a Pyramid article on quantifying how much of a threat monsters are), but it'd probably need to be its own book.