GURPS: Zero-Level Funnels

A few games have the concept of "zero-level funnels" in the system, most notably Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. The game has a mode of play where zero-level characters (without a class) are rolled up randomly, and each player gets a few of them to control, such as four, and they get a random profession (farmer, baker, butcher, gong-farmer) that determines their starting "skill" and equipment. A character may get a chicken and a pitchfork as starting gear, while another may get a bag of flour and a rolling pin.

The result is a hilarious "last person standing" style of play where characters are sent into danger and sacrificed to solve the adventure's challenges, traps, hazards, and puzzles. The characters with terrible ability score rolls are typically disposable mooks, while the highly desirable characters are held in reserve in the hopes they survive.

The characters that survive become the choices for player-characters, who are graduated to first level when the campaign begins.

You can do a zero-level funnel in GURPS pretty easily. I would stick to very low-level character point totals, 25 or 75 maximum. If you have GURPS Character Assistant (GCA) from the Warehouse 23 store, create a library with GURPS Basic Set, GURPS Fantasy, and GURPS Magic, and you can apply randomized 75-point templates from GURPS Fantasy as your starting characters. They have archers, bards, knights, holy men, and a good selection of fantasy archetypes.

If you ever get duplicate skills or selections from a randomized template, don't worry about it; just play with what you got. When your zero-level funnel is done, then allow players to "rebuild" the character with a few extra character points (maybe allow a total of 100), and give them a chance to clean up the skill list, add a few they want, and clean things up to make a platable and well-rounded hero. Stick to most of what was there, and you could make tweaks like replacing a few disadvantages that don't make sense and cleaning things up so the character fits how they were played in the funnel, while getting rid of things that make the character unplayable.

If your character survives, this is the part where players can "create a level one character" and make those tweaks. Do not care about balancing points, either; if some come out 60-point, and others 120-point, just roll with it. When it is time to create "level one" character, pick a ceiling above the highest surviving point total, and set the design point limit there. So if you have characters from 80 to 120 points as your "level one pool," then set the ceiling at 150 points, and let them design for that.

My random "spellcaster" ended up with two spells, detect magic and lend energy, along with bad temper, bloodlust, overconfidence, and gluttony. This guy will be a hoot to play as he steals food from the monsters, and if he is ever denied a chance to chow down, flies into a fit of rage and starts trying to kill everyone in the room. I dare say this is a more hilarious character than anything I would get in DCC or Shadowdark, just due to GURPS' excellent disadvantage system creating memorable personalities to throw into the meat grinder.

His spells? Well, he can lend others energy and detect magic, so if he is ever in a funnel with a magic trap, he will be useful. He does not have a direct attack spell, but, hey, it is a funnel; make do. If a referee is feeling generous, throw a spell scroll with an attack spell in the funnel somewhere and allow a CP spend on the spot to buy it.

My barbarian came out pretty useful, an impulsive pirate from an uneducated, mundane background. He can also throw sticks! The radioactive wasteland could be interpreted as a magic-blasted wasteland from some mage war in the long-lost past, but as a mundane background, he doesn't know why the land was blasted raw; it just is what it is. Hey! We are getting worldbuilding happening here, too! I would consider this barbarian a keeper. At only 58 points, I have a lot of room to tweak and build with when he "graduates" to a "level one" hero.

This archer does not even have a ranged weapon skill. Since he has overconfidence, maybe he lied and thought he could make it as an archer without knowing how to fire a bow, and just got by winging it, and is now stuck in a terrible situation. He has leadership, too, so maybe he figured out he could get an officer's role without doing too much archery. Even a "junk" character like this can become a memorable and hilarious personality with a little imagination.

The lying archer seemed like a randomized, mistake, garbage character, but now I imagine him with a compulsive lying disadvantage and never buying him archery, yet carrying around that bow and pretending to know what he is doing. He has a smallsword, so have him fight that way if needed, and he can pump that skill up to be a highly effective close-in fighter who is still useful to the party. Buy bluff and intimidate skills and let him use the bow to threaten others and get his way, if push comes to shove. He never knows how to shoot the thing, but he uses it as a tool to get things done.

This is GURPS. You can get away with this here, and the design system supports it. The tactic of bluffing with a bow you don't know how to use is supported in the rules, and you can pump these skills and abilities up to a high level and support them with force-multiplying advantages.

You can't do this in D&D 5.5E, DCC, or Shadowdark.

My randomized "mistake" characters are coming out better than my boring optimized designs.

GURPS is hands-down cool.

We don't have great random starting equipment tables in GURPS, so borrow one from another game. You don't want to be buying and equipping four randomized characters, so either do a cold start, such as all the characters being stuck in a cell without gear and organizing an escape from the goblin fortress, or some other cold start where the characters wander into trouble and must find, steal, or figure out gear. As an option, give everyone their highest-trained weapon as a starting item. You can also create your own tables.

Once you can get beyond character generation and use the randomized template characters, you get over a huge hurdle to running a funnel. From there, it is just printing the characters out, handing them to players, and letting them use their imaginations.

And with these types of quirky, randomized, sometimes hilariously limited characters, your funnel experience could be better than it is in games that directly support the funnel-style adventure. Letting players figure out randomized disadvantages and skill lists, and come up with stories? This is insanely fun! Running the angry glutton mage or the lying archer through a funnel is going to be a fun game to play and outshine experiences in other games.

And you can do zero-level funnels better in GURPS.

GURPS: Old West, Adventure Ideas

Yee-haw! Today, we are rustlin' up adventures and adventure ideas from a few different Western-themed RPGs and converting them all over to GURPS. There is a severe shortage of stock, no high-falutin' magic, none of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo, rough and tumble Western adventures, but there is gold in them thar hills if you know where to look.

So we are looking for Wild West adventures with no magic, and they don't have to be for GURPS. They just need a plot, characters, situations, and an adventure progression. A great campaign starting location is also a massive plus for our adventure cattle drive. We will do all the converting to GURPS ourselves; getting our hands dirty down here on the wagon train isn't anything new to us 3d6 cowboys.

The fact that I started this roundup with the classic Boot Hill meant something. Well, there are five solid adventures for that system, y'all can throw a lasso around and round up for your Old West adventure collections. These also have the advantage of being free from all that hocus-pocus magic and weird west tomfoolery, and they are a straight-shootin, rootin-tootin good time.

Now, Mad Mesa here is a solo adventure! This means you can create yourself a GURPS 4th Edition cowpoke, saddle hand, saloon gal, vagrant, cattle rustler, bank robber, or some other man with no name and run him or her through this adventure all by your lonesome! You can read the entries, make your choices, and perform minimal conversions to make all this work according to GURPS rules.

Heck, rustle up a free copy of GURPS Ultra Lite (GUL) if you wanna create bad guys for your six-gun to blast at! This is right fine for creating NPCs as well, and even vamints like wolves and rattlesnakes can be quickly thrown together using this little book of guidelines. This works seamlessly with the full GURPS rules, and will get you quick stats for any character in this here solo adventure, or any of these other adventures you rustle up.

I hear you saying, Prove it! Alrighty, here's my GUL rattlesnake for ya, using three levels as my base:

• ST: Weak (8 HP, d6/2 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Rattlesnake Skill: 2 levels (+8)
• Rattler Poison: 1 level (+4)

Wut? Reading GUL, that rattler will attack at a -6 for a skill that needs training, so that blasted snake in the grass's base attack will be DX + skill - 6, or doing the math we get: 12 + 8 - 6, or a 14- to-hit. Pretty dangerous! It doesn't do much damage (d6/2 + 2), but the poison is where it gets you.

I used a skill level to give that varmint a special ability for rattler poison, which I am sure you could find in one of the GURPS bestiaries, but I treated it like a skill here for a quick-and-dirty pick. If a creature has a special attack or ability, treat it like a skill and throw a level or two at it. Note: Use a contested roll with the skill level for poison creature HT + skill - 6 versus character HT, which is 14 + 4 - 6 = 12- on a contested roll.

Yes, skills can utilize any ability, and even multiple ones, such as a giant spider with a web attack that has a to-hit based on DX and an entanglement level based on ST. And skill levels can be used to buy creature special abilities, attacks, and defenses. Damage? Use the STR table for the ability, plus levels of skill.

Of course, that snake is dumb as a box of rocks, so you could distract it by tossing a river stone past it and watching it snap at it, and that may give you a chance to bean that scaley viper with a camp shovel. Just remember to skin the thing for meat and its hide; the town trading post may give you a few buffalo nickels for that.

That rattler works with the full GURPS rules, too! And your players will be none the wiser, you are building these with the quick ruleset and not flipping through books to find this critter. This will mean faster play, a still true-to-GURPS experience, and using a supported and official system to guesstimate NPC and creature statistics. Guesstimate is one of those words that those folks from Philly use, and it means to spit in the wind and get a hankerin'.

If yer' not using GURPS Ultra Lite fer' your games, you are doin' a whole lotta work you don't need to be doin. Most NPCs and critters don't need to be designed using a fancy character sheet program, and these rules we got in this one-page game work just fine for 95% of anything you need.

Want more proof? Here's my GUL grizzly bear, and I will use five levels since these are supposed to be very dangerous predators of the wilds:

• ST: Very Strong (18 HP, 3d6 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Grizzly Skill: 2 levels (+8)

Woo doggy! That grizzly attacks on a 12 + 8 - 6 = 14- but does a whalloping 3d6+2 damage per hit.  This is a massive, legendary bear; for normal ones, I could do one less level of ST for 2d6+2 damage and 14 HP, and up the DX by a level.

Wait one second! You designed a rattler and a grizzly using the same GUL design system, and did it in less than a minute? And these work well enough with the main rules; no one knows the difference? That's faster than flipping through a 5E Monster Manual and taking 30 minutes to read a whole stat block! People who say GURPS is too complicated are full of hogwash. Making NPCs and monsters in GURPS is easier than 5E, B/X, or any other game on the market.

In fact, GUL is the key to quickly playing and converting these adventures on the fly, with a minimum of fuss and reference. Yes, if you have the GURPS Bestiary and want to run a full rattlesnake, be my guest, but this works just fine for our needs.

Pardner, I ain't doin' any more work than I have to so I can run these here Old West adventures, nor does having perfect stats matter all that much. Just look over yonder at D&D-land; they keep changing their monster stats every five years for the last fifty.

We got Mad Mesa, The Lost Conquistador Mine, Ballots and Bullets, Burned Bush Wells, and Range War for a complete campaign of adventures to play with GURPS Old West and the 4th Edition rules. You will get a decade of campaign gaming out of these five adventures alone, and they are worth checking out.

Some of these are right excellent campaign starters and home bases in their own right, with Ballots and Bullets featuring a small city as its home base of operations. While you can play through the main adventure, creating linked adventures for an epic campaign set in any one of these adventures would fill out a whole pickle barrel of adventure time for your cowpokes.

BH4 and BH5 are from the third edition Boot Hill, but they are still fine additions to your Wild West adventure library.

If I were looking for adventures and campaign starters, you couldn't get any more classic and good old-fashioned clean fun than these classic Boot Hill adventures. The old game's rules are so simple that they don't take up too much of the book, and you can just drop GURPS right in and make your own stories with one of the best generic universal role-playing games this side of the Rio Grande.

https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-TV-Western-Collection-Television/dp/B003ANP8CO/

Another downright mother lode of adventure ideas is any of these huge DVD collections featuring westerns, cowboy TV shows, and all sorts of rough-ridin' adventures. Sure, you've got to mess with those old-fashioned "movie disc" thingies, and maybe round up one of those movie disc players. If y'all can operate a remote and hook up one of those HDMI cables, you are gonna have a good time.

The quality won't be like a new-fangled 4K masterpiece, since some of these shows are as old as the hills, but all the work is gonna be done for you when you pop in a disc and turn an episode of some random TV show into a GURPS adventure idea.

Those writers from the golden age of Hollywood, creating these "moving pictures," will probably be tickled pink that you are reusing their plots and stories for your "silly dice games." And these TV shows are so old; none of your players are going to know better. Use the GURPS Ultra Lite system and create characters, no good outlaws, and critters from the stock footage included in these films, and you will have some right good gaming.

And if you can't get your hands on this, there are loads of 10 and 25 Western movie collections to get your grubby hands on, and you can score them used or dirt cheap at places like Oldies.com.

https://www.oldies.com/Western-Movies/collection.cfm

What is this? A place you can pick up Western TV shows on DVD for as cheap as $2 per disc? And the Blu-rays are $4 each? I will stop trying to sell you things now, and I won't be getting any money for it. However, deals are available, and there are some amazing collections and affordable discs to own. If you are a fan of the genre, you will love having these to enjoy. 

Additionally, physical media remains a viable option in an age of streaming services, where content can be easily taken away. People have lost entire libraries of films they thought they owned forever.

Popping in a TV show or movie you never saw in your favorite genre is a far better experience than YouTube or random scrolling to find entertainment. Plus, all these do qualify as adventure ideas, NPCs, locations, and scenarios for you to use in your games.

Other western games are hit and miss for adventures, such as the 2d6-based Rider and the Hero System Western Hero (WH). The WH game does have a 44-page section in the back with campaign information, a few scenarios, and adventure seeds, so this is still a worthwhile idea book for creating period adventures using Western tropes. This is not as useful a book as the Boot Hill adventures, which I recommend getting first, but it still has a few good bits in the campaign section, as well as maps of trains, buildings, houses, and other period locations.

Rider has a dozen pages of basic information on adventure creation, along with the familiar act structure. Most of the book is 2d6 rules and careers, so it is not as useful as adventures written for the genre. This is not as helpful for GURPS referees and is more akin to a 2d6 version of the Cepheus Engine, designed for playing Wild West games.

The book is enormous; most of it consists of 2d6 rules, but there are some nice d66 charts for encounters, patrons, and rumors. I wish there were more charts for creating solo adventures, plots, factions, and other Wild West scenario pieces. This one is not as useful, but it is still an interesting game. Western Hero is the better buy.

https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-West-Stephen-Hyslop/dp/142621555X

I know I am done selling things, but this is another book in my collection. There are times when beautiful coffee table books, like the one above, inspire me. Just looking at the illustrations, pictures, and reading the stories is worth more than a written adventure, film, TV show, or a game designed to cover the subject, but you need that extra thing to make it feel real to you.

The Old West is more than "playing generic fantasy" and spinning up cowboys to shoot things. It is a love of the genre, the tropes, being a part of a massive sweeping change, and those frontier stories of seeing the last open expanse on Earth being settled. This wasn't just "them 'mericans" doing the settling, either; this was the entire world flooding in as immigrants, the European powers, banks, and the crushing power of the world moving in on a massive land rush for what would become a nation.

But in this grand, sweeping, oil painting of moving West, one you would see on a saloon wall, there are moments for personal stories, struggles to survive, tales of souls fallen to evil, lawmen and those who bring justice, pioneers, settlers, trappers and hunters, wagon trains, cattle drives, saloon gals, railroad workers, share croppers, townsfolk so poor they lived in dirt hovels and sewed clothing out of burlap sacks, farmers, ranchers, investors, schoommarms, cowboys, marshals, bandits, and so many others living a dream in a grand experiment and moment in time that did not last forever, but left its mark on us all.

Playing an Old West game is more than simulating a cowboy movie or screaming yee-haw!

It is about a more profound love of the genre, of this being a uniquely "American fantasy" with legends, myths, stories, giants, gunfights, and a mythology all its own.

How You See the World

GURPS is unique in its approach to character development. It starts with an average zero-point character, a ten in every ability, no skills, and the default chance to do everything. This character is a nobody and an everybody, representing the baseline average person. As the game progresses, this character can pick up skills through education and evolve into something more, reflecting the theme of heroism, sacrifice, and the potential to change the world.

GURPS is a very down-to-earth, holistic, almost traditional view of life. It is a game that models the "base character" around us, something very relatable and familiar, and it can model an average life. This is one reason I love GURPS; the default character is not some marketed, overly fantastical CGI hero with artificial power. There is no "level chart" with a pre-programmed track of "amazing powers." The starting zero-point GURPS character is like you and me.

And then something magical happens.

You can be that fantastical hero, that ultimate warrior, or that circus acrobat rogue. You can unlock the secrets of magic or the power of the divine. Slowly, point-by-point, your character becomes more than average and ordinary; your character becomes fantastic. It is not the same "assumed progression" as a level-based game; your mage could veer off into becoming a stealthy rogue for a while. Your bard could don plate mail and become a front-line fighter. Your nature-loving druid could pick up sailing and pirate skills.

GURPS stands out for its organic character development. It does not rely on multiclassing or layering artificial progression tracks. Instead, it allows you to unlock the secrets of power naturally and delve as deep into each one as you desire.

You unlock the secrets of power naturally and explore each one as deeply as you want. With each point spent, you go further in your chosen direction, and it does not even have to be combat or magic. You could become a skilled alchemist, artist, performer, historian, or another role, and your "adventuring abilities" could support that field of study. A long time ago, in the 1980s, someone said this about GURPS, which is still true today:

In GURPS, you can design a scientist character and have them be as fun to play and essential to the party at the table as a fighter.

The old "d20 Star Wars" game was put out by Wizards, and one of the design goals was to make technician and pilot characters "just as fun to play" as combat characters and space wizards. Part of the complaint against many sci-fi games was that "starship crews and technicians were useless" in ground-based adventures, and they had the "Shadowrun hacker problem" of only being useful in a tiny part of the game that sidelined the rest of the party.

Shadowrun and Cyberpunk have had this issue for decades, but they created the problem with lists of programs, such as magic spells and dungeon maps of computer systems, that hackers had to explore in VR. They made a mini-game inside the game for one player.

In GURPS, you can give your scientist or mechanic a few combat skills if you want, and this is if "combat is seen as fun" at your table. If combat isn't fun, you do not need all these combat abilities that d20 games force on you. That 20-sided die has a bloodthirsty legacy, and while this is a strange way to look at the hobby, I get the feeling that a d20 is mainly rolled out of hate and violence. The die is so synonymous with murder-hobo play-styles that entire games are now being designed to "streamline and gamify combat" better than D&D.

Combat in D&D-style games is getting to be like the worst parts of gun culture, fetishizing "what bullet gives the most stopping power and killing potential." Which d20 game makes violence the most enjoyable and "fun?" MCDM RPG eliminates the to-hit roll! Nimble 5E makes combat fast and fun! Tales of the Valiant gives you "luck points" for missing stabbing someone with a knife! Here is your D&D multiclassing optimization build for maximum damage per turn! Fun-death-fun!

Every argument against video games in the 1990s becoming an orgy of death and violence applies to d20 tabletop gaming today.

And they make it worse by gamified violence with abstract mechanics. Some tabletop games will have a "killing spree" mechanic, and it will go too far.

I love my 5E books, but they go too far with the death and violent focus. They are too focused on power. They try to cover it up with happy, colorful, diverse art, but once you lift the veneer, you will find it is stuck on there with the blood of hundreds of monsters, intelligent humanoids, and animals.

But it comes back to that "average Joe or Jane" character I started with. Violence to them is out of the ordinary, shocking, and deadly. It is a last resort. Combat in GURPS is, by default, deadly, so you look for other ways around the problem. This is old-school play more than B/X does old-school play. In GURPS, you can't have a few hundred hit points and laugh off repeated stabs with a knife like in D&D. In B/X, you can have 80-100 hit points and AC of -2 and laugh off dozens of goblins and kobolds. And in 5E, it gets even worse.

Even if you gain much "combat power" in GURPS, you are still rooted in reality. You are good; you can dodge and block many attacks but are not invincible. You still need to be careful. A pile of hit points, AC so high you can't be hit, and an action economy that stacks the deck in your favor will not save you from a lucky shot. One goblin with a lucky strike can take down your 500-point superhero.

You still need to think and role-play, and you still need to approach conflict intelligently. Your non-combat skills are just as necessary as your combat ones, no matter how much combat power you accumulate. In fact, in GURPS, your non-combat skills are often more critical since adventures typically involve solving a series of problems based on real situations.

If you get a scientist or hacker character in a d20 game, that character is seen as "unfun" and "dragging the party down." The character "monopolizes game time in a single-person minigame" or is "only useful once per adventure for a single skill roll."

GURPS lets me create worlds that aren't bloodthirsty d20 slaughterhouses. Breaking away from that mindset is hard, so I picked up an old-school module like Keep on the Borderlands. This adventure feels like a pen-and-paper ARPG, a killing and grind-fest that I remember fondly, but these days, tossing a fireball into a room full of 40 goblins feels more like a war crime than an adventure. I love this module. It is an essential old-school primer written by Gygax himself, but these days, we have adventures that better fit my idea of roleplaying and what I like in a game.

Trying to play old D&D modules with GURPS feels very strange. I feel as if I am taking people from the real world and dropping them into a peculiar "crazy circus of death and looting." It is almost a "wonderland of madness and infinite power gain," sort of a maniac beyond the looking-glass world where death and killing are entirely justified by the acquisition of power and wealth.

Anything is justified to reach the next level, right?

It sounds like something a blood-soaked Mad Hatter would say.

I would roleplay with the orc and goblin tribes, convincing them to leave the area and find a better way of life—to "leave the maze" and settle the land somewhere else. My GURPS playthroughs are strange, alignment-less negotiation sessions in which my heroes aren't the "kill them all" tropes but sensible, pragmatic, what-are-you-doing realists who try to solve the problem there rather than "go through the keyed rooms and gotta kill & loot them all."

If the temple of evil is keeping you here, then help us destroy it. Then, you can be free of this evil prison and forge a (possibly good) life elsewhere.

Again, my characters aren't the B/X or 5E tropes.

They act like real people would. That 10-point every-person comes to mind.

It tells how a game's design and "content" can lock you into a power-hungry and bloodthirsty mindset and behavior. It is also a story of how these companies can lie with art, flowery words, or comfort-food nostalgia. Players have been "killing their way" through Keep on the Borderlands for 50 years!

Why shouldn't I do the same?

Stop.

Why should you?

GURPS Adventures: Smaller Scale and Focus

You can do grand, sweeping action with GURPS. It is easy to abstract things and handle larger-scale battles and scenes with tactics rolls, other grand-scale skills, and narrative sweeps of flourish.

What I find interesting is the size of the dungeon crawls in GURPS; they can be smaller than those in D&D or OSR games. I am happy with six detailed rooms in a dungeon for a GURPS adventure, while in a traditional dungeon game, I feel better with sixty less-detailed ones.

OSR and D&D characters cover much more ground than GURPS characters, but that is both good and bad. I don't care about any of them if I try to work through sixty rooms. I just don't care. With six, if the side chambers are full of skeletons and the far chambers have a puzzle room and a mummy? That is a good, tight, tactical design with many possibilities, especially if you put puzzles, runes to decipher, little clues to find, hidden things, secret rooms, loot to appraise, and plenty of other skill-based challenges and opportunities.

Give me six fully detailed rooms over sixty bland ones, any day. I will get more play out of them, my skills will matter, and they will be much more memorable than another empty 20x20 room out of the 15 more around here.

D&D and the OSR tend to combat well, but not much else, so they engage in a video game-like "clear as many rooms as possible" gameplay mode.

With GURPS, your focus needs to change. Those skills you bought matter - all of them. If there are twelve possible items of value in the room, but only two are worth hauling back to town, how do you identify them? Would etchings and sketches of the runes and inscriptions on the walls and statues be worth money to a historian or buyer? They may be. The place was too dangerous for most to venture into, and you are there, so why not spend some time documenting what you find? Instead of fighting that drow patrol, try negotiation and trade with them, or get information on the caves you are in. Map the caves and sell that!

A GURPS party are not D&D characters who kill for treasure; they are skilled experts in many areas.

Each one of those skills is a potential hustle and moneymaking opportunity.

Adventure areas should reflect that. Too often, in Pathfinder and many other dungeon-focused games, we get room after room of description, monsters, and treasure listings that feel like trying to eat a whole loaf of flavorless white bread as a meal. I convert these adventures and end up saying, why bother?

They are huge, bland, and made for nothing but killing and looting.