Tone whip-lash

[pawsplay]

Obligatory positive comment: I really like the barbarian, everything about it. I'm suspicious of the lack of breadth of weapon skills, but that's easily fixable with Quirk points and experience, if you also feel a little uneasy about that.

Anyway, I've finished chewing through the bundle I purchased. Overall, the game has a strong central conceit and works well for that purpose. For instance, I like that virtually anything bad can simply be handled at The Temple for cash. As it should be! Just like in Pool of Radiance (OG).

However, I find myself a little thrown off by the tone. There seems to be several distinct voices in DF, jumbled together.

• The Playing it Straight Voice: The main voice is just a practical GM voice, telling you how much everything costs, how to modify templates and races, and so forth. Characters are given reasonable, albeit stereotypical roles in society, adventure premises and norms are laid out, and you have all the usual things you would expect, like special materials, Hollywood werewolves, classic fantasy tropes and a few winky things that make it work, like the Common tongue. The helmet lamp is presented as a bit of everyday equipment you might invest in. The upsides of invisible helmets are mentioned. There is a bit of a Hackmaster vibe here.
• The Snide and Cynical Voice: But sometimes the textual awareness and slides into the realm of hyper-awareness. The description of halflings sounds more like kender and the less savory members of the Sackville-Baggins family, and strongly recalls Bored of the Rings, with its parodic halflings having clever fingers of the sort often found in other people's pockets and around the necks of small animals. Drawing attention to the explicit anachronisms like gender parity and the cash economy, while perhaps necessary, are done early on and in a blunt fashion that detracts from the magic a bit. Other times things veer into....
• Munchkin Voice: The text really drills down on the idea of optimization and rinse-repeat dungeoneering. The odd and meta-aware becomes wacky and off-beat, like a monk raised by kung fu orcs. The vocabulary devolves in places into goofy, simplistic phrases like "totally evil" and "The King." It's hard for me to imagine an ongoing campaign where the characters are, foremost, vehicles for oddness, weird puns, and illogical behavior. These sections hit me somewhere between the most regrettable sections of the old Mystara Gazetteers and the Munchkin board game (and its OGL ancestor). A little, you know, as a spice, and all that. I'm just not sure what to think about my monk wanting a dwarven-made nunchaku so he can emulate Bruce Lee. And then at times, I get hit with...
• Heavy Metal Fantasy: Gleefully improbable armor. Elder Things. Curses. Fifteen types of zombies. Humongous clubs. Grim elves and dwarves. Obviously Warhammer is an influence here, which is all well and good. But there's already a lot going on here. Which makes it all the odder when we get large swaths of
• GURPS Voice: Somewhat realistic armor layering. Weapons with two or three attack lines, sometimes with different unbalanced ratings. Skills, lots of skills, like Hazardous Materials, which would normally be done matter-of-course in other games without a specific character focus. Odd lectures about how orcs are basically people, too, despite being presented mainly as monsters. Realistic armor restrictions, with no class-based armor restrictions. Oddly specific polearms, which harkens back a little to AD&D, but is kind of its own thing, with realistic historical examples of weapons being slid right in there alongside high fantasy grins and giggles. We have both a halberd and a dueling halberd, but also a bastard sword presented as being longer than a longsword, without explanation? Weird.

In keeping with the GURPS ethos of being a toolkit, I guess it makes a certain level of sense. You can obviously bend the tone in one way or another, depending on your campaign. But I found the lack of tonal focus a little strange for a pre-packaged setting, even one without explicit world-building. Overall, I don't think it detracts much from playability (I can make my own halflings, and nunchaku could be "Temple-crafted" I suppose), but I'm kind of at a loss at who this is aimed it. It has kind of the unsteady feel of Gen X writing trying to aim at a Millennial audience. There are parts where I wish it was either more earnest, or more meta-aware. So. That's just one reaction I got from these books.