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? In the 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.
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