Vulnerability x1.5

This is another one of those house rules that have lived in my mind forever, but I always forget to write down:

you can take Vulnerability x1.5 for half the cost of Vulnerability x2. I most often use this for crushing damage on things like birds and skeletal undead. Double damage from crushing is usually too much, but crushing at x1.5 is threatening without getting the target crippled anytime a blow lands and matches cutting damage

I don't remember if I came up with this number myself, but its useful, and it stuck.

Related side note: I also like to treat vulnerability x4 damage as actually being x5, mostly to make the progression follow the size/range table.

I hope people find this useful, I've been trying to actually write down the house rules I use. Happy Gaming!

Imozu, Ancient Backwater

Imozu is another worked planet for Psi-wars. Its probably a lot more integrated with psi-wars than Highlun was. Its home to both Ranathim and Mogwai, as well as other races and dusty ruins. I wanted to explore what a completely Mogwai society would be like, as well as what an alien rebellion in the core might look like.

If you don't know what psi-wars is, the best place to start is probably The Psi Wars Primer. The project is great, and if you haven't read enough of it to get its basics, you should, because its really cool!

Overview

Nestled in the Trader Band, Imozu has seen empire after empire conqueror it, and promptly forget it exists. But Imozu has accumulated lasting marks from all of these empires, accumulating ancient ruins and stubbornly resilient cultures. Once conquered, the old cultures are usually left to themselves as long as there's no signs of an uprising. Imozu is too poor and too stubborn to be worth the effort.

 Imozu has a fairly typical climate and an abundance of terrain to settle, and most empires that have conquered it have left communities on its surface. These communities are diverse but insular rather than cosmopolitan. Over the Centuries they have each grown in their own directions, distinct from both their neighbors and their mother cultures.

On Recyling PC's

For my current game "Trouble on the Way to La'Moran", I needed (wanted) a caravan full of named NPCs with distinctive personalities. I wanted the characters be easy to play, easy to remember, and hardest of all, easy to build.

So I stole my players characters from old campaigns. I've been playing with this group for a while, and I run relatively short campaigns, so there are a fair number of old PC concepts lying around. The idea kind of got going from my players reusing variants on their characters. A young doctor with an eccentric family. A Japanese officer with a fear of deep water. Then last game we reused the Japanese officer as a joke, and now I'm opening the floodgates: about half of my caravan is named after old PC's with reasonably matching professions and outlooks.

So far, its gone great. The "Nepotism" on display can be humorous at times, as players give namesakes of their old characters more than the benefit of the doubt or go out of their way to interact with or praise them. It also lets me highlight characters that should be treated as mysteries or puzzles: the remaining NPC's are more interesting, because we already know the others. It also helps with the cognitive load of trying to run 20 NPCs.

This doesn't mean that the borrowed characters are "safe" and "known" though. One of them is almost certainly a vampire. Another is likely to blow something up unadvisedly. The Japanese officer is obviously playing some sort of cat and mouse spy game with another character in the caravan (an old NPC uncomfortable ally... and you can guess which character they are more sympathetic to). I've also switched up backgrounds a little: The explosive loving lieutenant from Upstate New York is now a dwarf that smells suspiciously of gunpowder. He's still got the same name, but how much else is the same, how much else is different? The guy from New York was in love with a senator's daughter, does she have an equivalent in a generic fantasy setting with a very different core activity? We'll just have to see.

The campaign isn't over yet, but so far the character reuse has gone well.I've been really surprised at just how enjoyable the experience has been. It certainly helps with the players remembering everyone. I don't think I'll do it every campaign, it lends itself to a little playful levity, but for this campaign, its been great.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I hope this gives you some ideas for new NPC's in your games. Happy Gaming!

Retrospectives: Egg of the Wyrm

I just finished my latest campaign, Egg of the Wyrm. This campaign focused on a heist in a fantasy setting based in medieval Indonesia and with very restricted but impressive magic. It was the first campaign that I've really leaned into meta advantages. It was a wild ride, and I have a lot of thoughts afterwards. We tried a lot of new things, both in terms of game-play, rules, and setting.

Smooth Operator Should be [10] points

We were in a character building session when I went on a long tirade about why smooth operator is a bad talent and you shouldn't take it,. As I was winding down, one of my players said "If its such a bad idea, can I take it for 10 points a level?" I thought about it, and then thought about it some more, and said "Yes". And the more I think about it, the more I think its a great idea in general. Here is my reasoning:

First, 15 points can get you a lot in GURPS. You could add +4 to a skill you have. You could get +1 to all defenses. You could get a reroll once per hour. You could get +3 to a more narrow group of skills. If you save 5 more points, you could buy a level of IQ and add +1 to a vast swath of skills. 

Second, Smooth Operator is barely a 15-point talent as it is. It has 13 skills, which is just barely the threshold for a 15 point talent. It has two skills that are HT-based, One that's Per-Based, and ten that are all based on IQ. That's some reach across attributes, but not a lot. Its reaction bonus basically says that if the person matters, the reaction bonus doesn't apply. Its not as narrowly focused as some talents, but it clearly represents a very coherent set of skills. Despite this, I struggle to imagine a character who actually uses all 13 skills, because several of them are pretty niche in application, like panhandling or politics.

Third, the Basic set acknowledges that "the GM’s word is law when determining which skills are “related” and how may points the Talent is worth." This is for custom talents, but its also a general caution that there is a "Feel" to designing properly balanced talents, rather than just relying on counting skills.

So I don't feel bad telling people not to take smooth operator. And that indicates its not worth those 15 points. Is it worth 10 points? probably. It still faces some pretty stiff competition from options like Charisma and the Talker Talent from power ups. So even at 10 points, its not an obvious choice for the type of character that its designed for. And that, to me, is the best proof that lowering its cost to 10 points isn't broken: that it doesn't create a rush of players trying to take it.  

So go ahead and try pricing smooth operator at 10 points. Hopefully it makes a certain type of character more viable, or at least less awkwardly built. Happy Gaming!

GCS files for Historical Folks Skill Sets

One of GURPS's specialties is historical games. So it should not come as a surprise that one of the more impressive fan-made projects is GURPS Historical Folks. This project comes in both a 3rd Edition and a 4th Edition version. And recently Infornific on the Forums decided to turn the templates into Skill Sets in the mold of Action 4: Specialists or Delvers to Grow. And I decided to write GCS templates for all of them. So these are GCS templates for the Historical Folks Skill sets:

GCS Templates for Historical Folks Skill Sets

They come in a zip file you will need to unzip: the file is about Half a Megabyte but contains about 150 templates. They are written for GCS 5.20.4, which is a pretty recent version. You can open the files in GCS directly by double clicking, or by putting it in your GCS folders (usually at C:/Users/<username>/GCS, or by going to GCS and right clicking the library and selecting "Show On Disk")

This is the very tip of a lot of work done by a lot of people. You can find their work here:

Historical Folks Skill Sets

Historical Folks 4e

Historical Folks (3e)

I hope you enjoy this, and find it useful. There is a LOT in here. Happy Gaming!

Control (Shaping)

In the powers book is the Control Advantage. And I'm glad we have the control advantage, but I have a few complaints with it:

• quantity and finesse of control scale together
• It gives massive arbitrary bonuses
• Its priced fairly for someone who uses those massive bonuses for every single thing they do

I was building a powers based magic system and had the thought that I didn't want the ability to move a cubic yard of dirt to also include the ability to give anyone in that hex -5 to basically everything. I wanted something that acted like the shape spells from magic. And so I decided to wing the advantage:

Control (Shaping): Rather than using the standard rules for control, base the rules off of the shape spells, like shape earth or shape water. You can control level x level /2 cubic yards. Notably, this cannot be used to give arbitrary combat bonuses. The cost is the same as any other level of control, and can only be taken for solids and liquids.

Is it any good? Well, I haven't tested it yet. But my Tuesday night game is going to be playing in a game with it for the next few months, so in a while I'll be able to tweak costs and tell you how well it did or didn't work. I do know that shape earth is one of the most widely used and best liked spells in Gurps Magic. We'll see if this is overpowered, or if its just fun.  Hopefully it will play out like having a mage with shape earth, which I've played before and seems to constantly be useful but never quite be broken.

I look forward to reporting on this tweak!