GURPS EverQuest: Lessons Learned

Using old strategy guides, a few others and I worked on converting EverQuest to GURPS. A friend wanted a Shadowdark conversion first so she could play with her friends and a few EverQuest players, so we started that conversion. Shadowdark is like "rules light" 5E, and I get why it is popular; it is 5E without wasting all the time and money.

Shadowdark is simple enough that once EverQuest characters are boiled down to basic abilities, we can use that as a framework for a GURPS conversion since we won't need to dig through our source material and all these ancient, yellowed strategy guides we picked up on eBay.

We are avoiding the D&D 3.5E version of the game to keep D20 out of the conversation. The strategy guides are the source of truth here. The spell lists will be the ones from the game, and we will make a formula to convert those into each game, which is easy because we can just make a guideline chart based on levels and what the spells should do.

So, we got the first five classes converted, and...?

Umm...

Let's stick with Dungeon Fantasy characters. Even the spells are "meh," and the Dungeon Fantasy ones are better if you choose each class spell list with a theme. A shadow-knight with a pain, stun, and wither limb power is much more thematic and fun than the EverQuest spell lists. I can design good GURPS characters and stick to a theme when picking spells. In any D20 game, you design all the options first and tell players, "This is all you get."

My GURPS characters feel more like real characters in this world, and honestly, the setting is better than the EverQuest game rules and spells. Even in our Shadowdark game version, we must make up "cool thematic powers" for each class to give them some "zing" and playability. Otherwise, these are straightforward B/X style classes with a hit die, progression chart, and a skill list.

As-is, the Shadowdark version of the conversion feels plain, and it needs sprucing up outside the rules of EverQuest to make it attractive and worth playing. Let's invent an extraordinary power for a druid, like animal friendship? Let's give the necromancer special powers, too. We must give them more than a spell list and an allowed set of weapons and armor.

Also, casters in the Shadowdark version of the game will end up with hundreds of spells from the strategy guides and be far more potent than the martial characters. Even if you only say, "Pick ten memorized," and cast them with Shadowdark rules, they will still be insanely powerful.

GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy?

The characters as I designed them are perfect, thematic, and feel realistic and gritty. Even my friend says she likes the GURPS characters better than our converted ones, even though our Shadowdark version is much more faithful to the game. My GURPS characters are much more open to different progression paths, whereas my Shadowdark characters are stuck in a class and five rolls on a talent chart over ten levels, and that is it.

Using GURPS eliminates playing with her friends, but given people's time and attention these days, it may be a lost cause, hoping they will play any pen-and-paper game with her. I will jump at the chance, of course! But for those in her online gaming circle, I severely doubt they will even play Shadowdark. Most people who play 5E will play D&D on the Beyond platform and have no interest in Shadowdark or EverQuest, nor would a complete 5E conversion even be worth doing.

GURPS is better for characters; even if you use stock GURPS spells and powers, you can get closer to feeling than design. That is the thing with GURPS conversions, stick with GURPS stuff first, and you may find it does the job better than an item-by-item perfect total conversion.

My druid could learn to become a bard in GURPS. Just spend the points over there and sing to woodland creatures, if you want. In Shadowdark, you are stuck in one class with minimal customization options.

The EverQuest setting is still a classic, and the strategy guides have maps, monsters, and zone information. We are sticking to the first three expansions in the classic, maximum level 60 era of Kunark, Luclin, and Velious. Even with zero EverQuest spells and powers and just using stock Dungeon Fantasy and designing for "close enough," the conversion is already a home run. Monsters? The level is just "toughness" or a point value; we can use GURPS Ultra Lite to create them.

The only advantage Shadowdark has is that the monster list works well and fits EverQuest's game world. The exploration and play systems are tight. The game is D20. It is easy to hand a player a character sheet and just play. Getting friends to play Shadowdark is easier.

The advantage of GURPS?

Everything is better here, even without a complete conversion. The characters feel better, play better, advance better, and feel realistic and fantastic. The world is just "the setting we play in." The classes are just "frameworks we design within." The different spells aren't a problem since the Dungeon Fantasy spells are better than the MMO's math-based, button-mashing, circa 1999 computer game standards. If you wanted one spell, designing it would not be a problem.

Do you play with GURPS fans or solo?

Choose GURPS.

GURPS: EverQuest - A Tale of Two Necromancers

So, I was designing characters for my GURPS: EverQuest game, and as luck would have it, one of the characters was a necromancer. Regarding exceptional cases, players will always pick the one that makes your life the hardest. But in this case, it wasn't that hard, but it did bring up a massive issue with Dungeon Fantasy Spells versus GURPS Magic.

Dungeon Fantasy defaults to a lower magic power level, a low fantasy feeling, where magic has actual costs, and its effects are limited in scope and often at the time of the impact. The Dungeon fantasy game has necromancy spells, so we can use those for our skeleton summoning caster, right?

Let's open Dungeon Fantasy Spells and see what we have. And we are hit by this line, under Necromantic Spells, page 59.

Rituals for creating or becoming undead exist, but no reputable temple or guild teaches them.

What? Okay, "by-default you-are-the-hero" assuming game, let's start hacking these spells to let our necromancer work at least halfway decent. And, we referees are much less reputable than the magic guilds in this game. We will have to change a few spells, but don't panic; GURPS lets us do this and not have an army of 5E Internet people come down on us saying we have homebrewed our game, which is terrible. In GURPS, homebrewing is the standard and sane thing to do.

This is a vast difference from 5E or Pathfinder 2, where you are not supposed to change rules. GURPS assumes you hack the game, just like any sane old-school game.

We need to slightly change two spells to do this: Command (Spirit) and Summon Spirit. Command Spirit will be used to grab a random wandering undead and make it ours. If this is a random skeleton or zombie wandering in EverQuest, that would cost 5 for "fodder" creatures (10 for worthy undead like ghouls, and 20 for boss monsters like vampires), last for one minute, and cost 2 per extra minute to maintain (half, and we round down for everything not a cost or weight). When you run out of power and haven't sent the undead away, it will turn hostile (or you can roll a reaction). This is lower power necromancy, where you won't control a skeleton for long.

The other spell is Summon Spirit, which costs a lot more, 20 to cast and 10 to maintain. This cost can be halved if you are over the corpse and halved again if over the site of death. So casting this over a fallen soldier in battle would only cost 5, and wandering around a graveyard would cost 10. This is a pretty hefty cost, and it has a hefty maintenance cost, too (but in the best case, it would still be only 2 per extra minute). So if you can't find a random wandering undead, you need to go make one not-so-fresh. Also, summoning like this and stopping maintenance means the undead just falls down and goes away.

This is, again, low-magic necromancy, so I am okay with it. Only high-powered necromancers can create undead, and they will need power items to burn off some of this cost. Also, remember, if your skill is above 15, you reduce the power costs by one; if it is above 20, you reduce it by two (and one point per five points of skill above that). So, a skill 20 necromancer in a spell will reduce maintenance costs by two, keeping that skeleton around free of any maintenance power cost.

What I thought was unworkable, is now workable, and you can have a necromancer with a skeleton "pet" that sticks around indefinitely without a power cost. Lower-level necromancers are struggling to maintain control and must pay a hefty fee to keep the pet as a companion.

This does not change the rules too much and lets you use the existing spells without adding new ones to a character creation program. This is also a very low-magic solution, and it also aligns well with the Create Animal spell on page 19, with a cost to cast and maintain per minute.

A solution that only makes a minor change to a few spells enables our necromancers (or demonologists) to work, and it has a similar spell in the same book? This very workable solution fits what we already have in the game and keeps the same power level intact.

It feels good when you can hack a mod like this with the books you have, and it creates a balanced and fair solution. I like high-skill necromancers maintaining rabble undead for free, and remember that those maintenance costs go up with minor or significant undead, so even higher-power necromancers need to spend power on maintaining control.

So let's use Dungeon Fantasy 9, Summoners, to fix our necromancer problem. This is a good supplement for the game, but it is much closer to the default GURPS Magic power level and feels super-heroic and high-powered. This uses the Zombie spell from GURPS Magic, which costs 8 to cast, has no upkeep cost, and the undead stays around until destroyed. Control Zombie in this book costs 3 and lasts indefinitely.

Wow. Do you mean our necromancer just pays 8 powers to cast this spell and has a pet undead forever? Yes. This makes low-level necromancers (and summoners) insanely powerful. They do not have to worry about maintaining control of power expenditure, and there is only a minor benefit to a high skill level. This starts to make a difference with "major" undead

This is the difference between Dungeon Fantasy's power level and the regular game GURPS Magic power level. In Dungeon Fantasy, you have (in general) a lower level of power, whereas in the main game, you have the complete GURPS Magic system - which is more on the level of superhero magic. Coming from 5E or PF2, you would expect all magic systems in the game to be unified and one power level. This is not true, and also it is a huge thing to grasp when you want to understand GURPS.

GURPS is a toolkit, and there are systems in the game that do the same thing but on wildly different power levels. It is up to you as a "game creator" to pick the best systems for your game and lay those out for the players to work with. Yes, you can have two fantasy games in GURPS, one where the characters are gritty survivors in a low-magic world and another where they are flying around like superheroes. Looking at all the GURPS books and games you can buy, you don't realize this at first, but after you do a few character designs you begin to see the differences and can make good choices for your game.

"Making good choices for your game" is another thing you should keep in mind as a GURPS referee, and this is another alien concept for 5E and PF2 players to grasp. GURPS is closer to a "game programming language" than it is to an "everything is done for you" experience.

So, TLDR?

Dungeon Fantasy Spells are low-fantasy magic.

GURPS Magic is superhero magic.

GURPS: EverQuest - The Characters Get Better

So, I was designing my characters with the GURPS Character Sheet (please support the project, sidebar link) for my GURPS EverQuest game. I started with my basic "level one" starting characters using the 62-point templates.

Those came out nicely, but as I researched the classes and powers, I revised them again, and they got even better. GURPS is the only game where you can design a character and then go back over it in a second pass and improve it substantially, tighten it up, strip out things you don't need, and add things you do.

You can't do that in 5E; it typically optimizes your point buy and makes the one or two choices it allows you to make at the first level. You have a few options with the newer "lineage, heritage" combinations (and I suspect these have already been hyper-optimized). I bet in the future, someone will complain about spatial and temporal bias, and all those picks for background, history, and where you come from will be put into a "free pick pool," just like ancestry bonuses are now.

My characters are very cool. They have templates for their races, and in classic EverQuest fashion, some have "evil or good" race social stigmas attached to them, so those parts of the world are forbidden to certain types of kin. Different religious beliefs come with vows and skills. Classes have flavors, and you can tweak those a little to get the character you want to play.

Playing EverQuest in 5E? Why? I am not getting skills and vows for all the gods in here. My Erollisi followers must "love not hate," and my Innoruuk characters must "hate not love." I can't tweak my spell selection to "flavor" my paladin or shadow-knight. Seriously, will my paladin focus more on combat spells or healing? You need to choose, and not all classes are the same. I can think of six different types of rangers as it is now. Most 5E games would never give you this many choices.

And the social and RP elements of a character matter. 

All of this in 5E? Hand-waved and told to "just roleplay it."

In GURPS, these things are in the rules and are parts of your character sheet.

GURPS: Everquest

EverQuest is one of those games that is more of a setting than it is a game. The MMO has been going on decades, and the definition of "what a class is" and "what classes have what powers" is a subject really only for the hardcore players, and even then, the endgames is where the action is at, and the numbers are so high damages are in the billions these days.

It is an easy setting for a game like Dungeon Fantasy to simulate, and you can get away with all of the standard Dungeon Fantasy templates as the standard EverQuest classes. Not many will really notice, and to most, a fighter is a fighter in this sort of setting, and the setting is why they are playing. This is almost the opposite of D&D, where people will play more for the classes than the setting, but here, you give me a Dungeon Fantasy wizard, and yeah, that could be an EverQuest wizard easily with very little suspension of disbelief.

The only notable must-haves for this world is Dungeon Fantasy 3 (The Next Level) for shadow elves and other backgrounds you may wish to reskin, and there is also the unholy warrior here for a nice shadow-knight template. Dungeon Fantasy 9 (Summoners) is good for beast-lords  and necromancers. To be fair, these are more "advanced classes" for a game like this, and you can add these in later as needed.

Playing in the classic EverQuest setting is the huge appeal here. There is also an alternate timeline for EverQuest II, and all that really changes is the map and current events. They are both pretty much well interchangeable except for the story and the places you can go.

Monsters are pretty well much standard fantasy monsters, and there are fewer than most OSR games when you start. A lot of these will be goblins, orcs, gnolls, skeletons, giant rats, fire beetles, spiders, and your typical MMO creatures. If you want to simulate the special dungeons you will need a strategy guide with maps and monster lists.

Plenty of online resources exist for EverQuest.

You can "wing it" pretty easily in a world like this, and inventing new dungeons in this world will be pretty simple, as you can just say there are forts, caves, villages, evil temples, and other places not in the main game that are in your world. If you are trying to do a "Guk-like" dungeon, just makes it a twisting maze of hexes with evil frogs, trolls, and other swamp beasts living in there. No one is going to call you out for things not being perfect, they will be happy to play in the setting and not worry about the specifics.

Close enough in Everquest is just fine as long as you get the major cities, locations, and places correct. You can play a "softer lore" setting and include other fantastical races not normally playable, like the Minotaur-like Tizmaks, or the otter-like Othomirs, and be just fine, too. Again, it really does not matter much how closely you play the lore to the game, the game as it is today is very little concerned about lore outside of the RP communities.

You can run an entire campaign out of one of the major cities and be just fine, with limited visits to other locations. Your players, their experiences with the game, and their interests will drive where you need to focus on. There will be factions, conflicts, and races that will play the starring role here, and there are some great ones. The dark elven city of Neriak, the good city of Qeynos, and the evil Freeport are all amazing locations, and they don't really have to be "lore accurate" in terms of maps and locations. If you get the flavor and feeling right, that will be great for most players. These locations have changed over the years, and even during each game's lifetime, and there is also the limited part of the city each game can simulate - so you are free to expand and make up as much as you like about these places.

If you ever played these games, the maps are pretty primitive, so anything you imagine will definitely be an improvement. EverQuest 2 has a few more "interesting points of interest" so you may run into those expectations, but for the most part you will be fine, or the players can help you with lore. Most hardcore fans will be thrilled to play in this setting, and will be more than willing to help out fill in the details.

These games are also free-to-play, so if you needed to log in and see a place, it is certainly possible.

The normal Dungeon Fantasy magic items are also "good enough" for this setting, and you don't need a complete magic item list for the game out of a strategy guide, unless you really want to, or have a favorite item you want your character to get their hands on. Dungeon Fantasy (Magic Items) is a good resource to have here, and you can do some fun items, like making musical instruments as "casting items" (or bonus items), and you can outdo the original game pretty easily. Dungeon Fantasy 8 (Treasure Tables) is also an excellent resource for creating treasures and magic items.

I like this conversion since there isn't that much pressure to "rebuild the MMO" in the GURPS rules. Bog-standard fantasy will cover most of the pieces you need, and you really only need a few flavor locations, gods, and foes to get the feeling right. The games have progressed decades of expansions, and it would be impossible to recreate everything exactly how it exists in the game.

This feels different than kitchen-sink fantasy or B/X conversions since there are more current expectations there that you have a near-complete set of conversions of monsters, magic items, and the standard tropes. We have a feeling that we need to be "much closer to the rules" with B/X conversions to GURPS than does a setting like EverQuest, where in all honesty, if it played and sounded like an "EverQuest the streaming TV show" it would be more than fine in most player's eyes.

This feels more like a novel of TV show conversion than a "game into another game" conversion, which makes the work a lot easier, and sets the expectations bar pretty low. The "realistic feeling" of GURPS will also be a plus here, and put a more realistic lens on the setting than a typical d20 or 5E game, and yes, there was a D&D 3.5E game for this world. 

GURPS will do the setting far more justice and give us some hardcore "grind and simulation" which is what the original game was all about back in the day. I don't want 3.5E "bags of hit points" for this setting. I want realism and drama, and that movie-like feeling that GURPS does so well.

Ignore It All, Play GURPS

When the dust settles, I will return to GURPS, using my Pathfinder pawn collection on my Fantasy Trip hex grids. I love my pawns and plastic stands, I have about three shelves full, and these are such great miniatures they are great for many games. I also have a few of the Starfinder ones, and these make extraordinary sci-fi figures.

I like Pathfinder, I was giving the second game a try, but whenever I try something new and give it a chance, the entire community blows up, and I want to shelve the whole game and forget about the negativity and mess. This also happened with 5E, and part of why I play a game is to escape the darkness and negativity of the real world. This will end in a few months, but I am unhappy with all the negativity.

The best part about GURPS is the community. This is such a fantastic place; it is welcoming, there is little drama, and people mostly know better than to be idiots. If you love GURPS, you are here.

One of the best parts about GURPS is that GURPS is everything. GURPS is Star Wars, Pathfinder, Star Trek, D&D, Space Opera, Star Frontiers, Gangbusters, Runequest, Traveller, James Bond, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Cthulhu, Alien, GI JOE, Walking Dead, Marvel, DC, whatever movies you love, your favorite book, anime, TV show, and everything else.

And you care less about rules in GURPS and more about characters, stories, and settings.

Many other games push this "rules first" mentality, where the rules define the experience. In GURPS, the "physics" of the world remains the same "simulation-based" reality as the world we live in. The fantastical elements (magic, superpowers, etc.) exist outside the normal but still realistically interact with the world.

The people in all these worlds are mostly the same. A 50-point anybody in Star Wars is similar to a 50-point anybody in a fantasy world. The skills and equipment will differ, but the stats and skills will be comparable.

But the complexity in GURPS is in the characters, where it belongs. Everything else is rules-light primarily. GURPS Lite can get you through through 90% of most games.

And Ultra-Lite makes NPCs and most monstrous foes simple. Stormtrooper?

• ST: Normal, 10hp, 1d6
• DX: Normal, 10
• IQ: Normal, 10
• HT: Normal, 10
• Skills: Stormtrooper 2, +8.
• Armor 4
• Blaster rifle, 5d6+2

It is simple. More straightforward than the OSR. What does this stormtrooper hit on? 18-minus with the standard -6 "trained activity" modifier, which is a 12-minus base, modified by the normal -10 to +10 modifiers. They don't hit much anyway; their armor is pathetic, but enough of them will turn you into blaster Swiss cheese.

That stormtrooper? Same stats as a "guard with a crossbow," and just throw a realistic reload time on there for that one-shot ranged weapon. Also, the crossbow will do 1d6+2 damage since that aligns better with GURPS Lite's crossbow damage. Armor is 2 in light or 4 in heavy; there are bonus points if you make the heavy armored one slower. The skill, of course, will be "Crossbowman Guard," which will be used for all combat, guard skill checks, and other rolls.

UL also makes customizing these stat blocks a snap. Move a few levels into abilities and skills, and suddenly, your opponent is more formidable or weaker. I can throw a level of ST on there for a strong orc (14 hp, 2d6) or pull a level of ST and HT off for a weak, sickly goblin (8 hp, 1d6/2, HT 8). Want D&D 4's minions? Limit their skill levels to one and let them miss all the time with that 8-minus trained skill roll.

These Ultra Lite characters are 95% compatible with the full GURPS rules and more straightforward than 90% of every other game on my shelf for an NPC. A Pathfinder 1e or 2E crossbowman? A half-page block of stats and text.

Any one of those IPs, games, movies, TV shows, or other settings I mentioned? That crossbowman or stormtrooper can be reskinned in those settings and serve as your "mook" enemy type. Your orc, goblin, random guard, thug, space alien, enemy soldier, zombie, bad guy, or what have you.

These stat blocks can cover 50-75% of the monsters you need in a fantasy game, with the outliers being dragons and the like - but I bet if you knew dragon stats from other books, you could come up with numbers and skills that make sense.

In a pinch? Come up with a stat block and use OSR "rolled" hit dice as hp. Level 3 dragon skills, a few stats, a hacked hp, and armor value. A few special attacks and defenses. 90% of OSR monsters can be quickly ported in, and the stats are far less complicated.

Step One

I am still sorting through decades of old games and getting rid of the ones that no longer appeal to me. I tried getting on the 5E train, but the entire market is filled with grift, zero care for play balance, and so many divergent ideas and ways of doing the same thing. It feels like end-stage Windows XP when companies started hacking the operating system to improve it. There was no concept like file, operating system, or driver integrity. People hacked new window managers and system services on the thing, and the company lost control of its platform.

GURPS will likely be my game, but all of 5E lost hard this round of sorting. The system can't do one simple thing without needing a hardcover to support it. The 5E game is as bloated as a set of encyclopedias, and none of the books were written to work with each other well.

The Dungeon Fantasy box set covers more than six shelves of 5E books. Once you add the GURPS core books, you can double that to twelve shelves of 5E books replaced with a few GURPS books that don't even take up a quarter of one shelf. The bloat in 5E books, especially with AI art and text, is approaching a level of obscenity and ridiculousness that feels like creators tossing everything and anything out on Kickstarter and praying for the next payday to strike gold.

Pick up a 5E book and read the text. They take one whole column of bloviating to express one class feature or power. None of the writers appreciates conciseness and brevity. They don't care about your time or ability to understand what they wrote, and it feels like a game written and "paid by the word."

The more you buy for 5E, the worse it gets. Even if you stick with official D&D books, the bloat is still a problem. By the time Wizards "redoes" all the 2014 books, the system will be 15 years old, and talk of the next edition will be coming around soon once the current design team is fired.

The Open 5E implementations, such as Tales of the Valiant and Level Up, are a little better, but they still inherit the same library of bloat and grift. Sticking with ToV and only Kobold Press books is a sound strategy, but this has weak software support, so prepare for a lot of hand-done characters.

There is only one 5E left worth playing, and its name is Shadowdark. This game captures that old-school purist, imagination-capturing, one-book-system design in a wonderfully crafted book. This game has a magic to it that very few games replicate. This is "the 5E" for 2025 and beyond.

For old school gaming? ACKS II does the entire genre better than AD&D, streamlines the system, and makes the entire adventure to domain management game easy. This also goes beyond the OSR and presses the reset button on the genre. The OGL is gone, and everything is new again. This is also highly compatible with GURPS, and is more of a "fantasy sourcebook" for GURPS than many other books in the hobby. This is great by itself or with GURPS.

Pathfinder 2 Remastered is also my jam. This game is more complex than GURPS, but the remastered books have a freshness to them, and the design team went out of their way to reinvent monsters and spells rather than just reskin them. There is a great deal of imagination and design work here, and even if you play GURPS, you can appreciate the design and creativity the team put into this.

There is one thing about all the fantasy games left on my shelf, and this applies to Pathfinder 2, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Swords & Wizardry, ACKS II, and Shadowdark. These are games where the designer tells you what to do. What a fighter is. What a wizard does. Everything is laid out for you, there are very few options, and each class "tells you  how to think."

GURPS is so different.

In GURPS, my bard can specialize up into a full fighter. My thief can morph into a wizard. They retain the abilities they had, and can improve a few more they want. Each character is unique and different. Each story is "designed into" each character.

With any of the "leveled fantasy games" you do not get this freedom. Some, like Pathfinder 2, give you ways to mix and match powers and "cross spec" but it isn't the truth and freedom GURPS gives us.

Sometimes it is nice to have "things done for you."

But most of the time, I find my imagination to be much greater than the imaginations of any of the designers of these games, or the games they are trying to emulate. When I want my character to be mine, it is GURPS, and only GURPS.

Video: Review: ACKS Imperial Imprint

 

We have an excellent video review of ACKS II today over on the Dungeons and GURPS channel, but this isn't all a review of another game, this is a great compare and contrast with GURPS, where GURPS does some things better (character & combat), and ACKS does most of the rest better.

ACKS II also removes the OGL and a lot of the OSR assumptions, and the review points this out, which is wonderful to see. I agree, most of the advice on how to run games you find on YouTube is slop, and listening to many creators on how to run a game will not only damage your enjoyment of the game, but I feel that it will eventually make you leave the hobby, disappointed and frustrated. And this bad advice comes from both 5E creators and OSR creators.

ACKS II also continued the de-OGL-ification of fantasy gaming, moving away from generic fantasy and into the creator's vision of a world and a game system. This is still a dungeon game, but there is enough different here to make players careful about their assumptions. Too often I find in OSR games "a green dragon is a green dragon" and the mystery, thrill, and unexpected elements are completely removed just to please the nostalgia gods. ACKS II does some of the familiar, but adds a lot of new.

This is also why I like the Pathfinder 2 remaster, they reinvented dragons to a point where you do not know what to expect when encountering one, and it isn't the same old same old. I like the concept of kitchen sink fantasy, but I abhor the predictability to where everything becomes a well-known block of stats that everybody knows. When players encounter a monster, there should be a fear of the unknown, and they will learn about the monster's strengths and weaknesses as they fight it! They will need to adjust and think on their feet, and this process of threat and discovery makes the game exciting and fresh.

Too much of the OSR puts monster stats, treasure, and magic on pedestals and expects nothing to ever change. Since creators have had to leave the OGL behind, we are seeing a renaissance in designs, content, and fresh ideas entering the hobby. ACKS II is one of those games.

Check this video out! I watched all the way through, liked, and I am subscribed to this excellent channel. It is a great video on how to GURPS-ify a system you like, and use the best parts while playing the game you love.