Story Mechanics

Story mechanics sound like something you call in when your story is broken.

We have so many new games now with "narrative mechanics" as if tens of thousands of years of human storytelling were somehow broken, and game companies need to reductively sell us the most basic of game activities. 

Storytelling does not need narrative mechanics. 

GURPS gets it, since it is more an old school game, it puts all the focus on the most important pieces of the puzzle - the characters. My character has a weakness or compulsive behavior, and these are the same things an actor needs to know when making a movie, then the game gives us rules for that. There is a slight gamification on the power of these "inner motivators" and the story is the combination of the referee reflecting the current state of the environment, the plot the NPCs are trying to drive, and the natural chaos of the characters inserting themselves into the situation.

While there is no "script" in GURPS since the game is more of a "simulator" - there is a "script" for the adventure for NPCs, motivations, maps, keyed locations, and events that will happen in the future at certain times. So it is not a "set story" that the referee is trying to tell, and there are no "pool mechanics" that players use to alter the course of events.

So the referee is like the director of a movie, but the script does not lay out what is to come as strictly. That is up to the players.

GURPS gives the players the best character backgrounds in role playing. This is the stuff actors need, the strengths, weaknesses, skills, history, and background of the character. Who they are. Where they came from and what they have done, and the choices made during character creation reflect that. A game like Traveller may have random tables for life events and service terms, but GURPS goes a level deeper, not using the charts but giving us full control to "write" a character and reflect that with our choices for them.

There are times I am struck by a typical B/X style OSR character, you know, class, race, and 3d6 down the line for character statistics, and how hard that is to role play. Who are they? What got them here? What are they like?

We need to fill that in ourselves, and nothing in the rules reflects our choices. Sometimes this "100% role playing" is hard to get started with, and I can see why people like the "life-path generators" of Traveller, or even the funnels of DCC. We are taking nobodies and turning them into somebodies.

The "nothingness" of D&D is what makes the game great for some, and impossible for others. 

But past that, when we have our character, and we are like the actor trying to bring that "person only on a sheet of paper" to life, we have complete freedom. We don't need pools, dice, story points, or anything else to interact with the world around us. The world acts as it should. Just like the world.

We have a generation of games with "doom, fear, malice" or other points that gamify the story and world, as if we needed to put another set of training wheels on creativity. Perhaps being a game master is that hard, and nobody really knows "how to do it" and the industry is dumbing down the experience to a board-game where everyone has rules for what they can do.

Refereeing isn't refereeing anymore, it is the "story master" who has cards and can never imagine something into existence, they can only pull a card from a deck and "make the text on it happen." I can just see the Kickstarter for that game now, and it making a few million dollars as another snake-oil solution for all our imagined role-playing problems they keep telling us we have.

This is also why D&D YouTube is so toxic, the constant barrage of referee advice makes you think you are not doing it right, and that you are somehow inferior to the anointed masters. YouTube advice channels hurt your self-esteem and willingness to "just get out there and do it" and force you into a dependent habit of buying more and more advice. These charlatans of self-improvement and professional advice came from the books telling writers how to write, and how to unlock the magic formula for a bestselling novel. Amazon is flooded with them, and they all end up endlessly complimenting you and telling you the same thing: get out there and do it.

All the "how to write a story" frameworks are horrible. You will follow a scaffolding and your story will be just another similar empty shell. The story won't come from you, it will come from the framework, and the author of that supposed self-help book. Same thing with story mechanics. While you may "fill in the blanks" the story tools tell you to make happen, the story won't be yours anymore. Or the players. The story will be what the game wants it to be.

Humans don't need to be told how to tell stories.

We are born with that ability. 

GURPS Just Drops In

GURPS fans are familiar with this, but since my other blogs have been gaining a lot of new views, we may be attracting a lot of new readers here, as my sites are like a spider's web of games and interests. There are times when I like to write thoughts for people who stop by and wonder why I cover GURPS and why I consider this game one of the best of all time.

GURPS just slots into anything. While I know Castles & Crusades gets called a "Rosetta Stone" game for any edition of D&D, the real Rosetta Stone game for any setting is actually GURPS. While Castles & Crusades has a modern-pulp game called Amazing Adventures, nothing compares to GURPS and the promise it delivers on:

• Any character.
• Any world.
• Any time.

That last one, any time, is so amazing. Unlike D&D and even Pathfinder 2E, you are limited to one world and a very narrow range of technology. Even if you try to use D&D for a "swashbuckling high seas and pirates" game, you will have characters flinging fireballs and magic missiles, and it will just feel like "a D&D game with pirates." It won't really be anything different than putting pirates in a Forgotten Realms campaign, and you will be back to square one.

Eventually, D&D's meta-setting will creep back into the game, and you will be doing planar travel and leaving those grand-masted pirate ships behind. The entire point of your campaign will be lost. The game's rules are designed for a specific planar progression path, and even these days, extensions such as bastions will hinder you every step of the way. What good is calling your bastion a "pirate fort" if it can never be attacked and destroyed? Who cares about pirates if mind flayers and beholders are sailing around on much-better spell-jammer ships?

In GURPS, I can work with my players to define a game, including the appropriate character types, the technology level of the game, and the campaign's flavor. If there is no magic, there is no magic. If the only way of travel is tall ships, walking, and horses, that is it. If the game focuses on pirates and the navies of early colonial nations, that is the game. If the players are the commanders of a pirate ship, we can use generic NPCs for the crew, and do not need to create every character on the boat.

And I can do all of this with the basic GURPS books, and the extra sourcebooks exist to do more of the work for you in researching the area of interest. You buy a sourcebook, and you now have an "expert resource" to draw from! This makes your period-specific game even more authentic and realistic, and provides suggested ways to handle the different challenges of playing in such a setting. You get setting ideas, character options, history, flavor, settings, special game systems, and adventure suggestions. The book reads like a wealth of information and resources, engaging your mind and sparking excitement about exploring a world like this.

One of the biggest challenges to GURPS is getting fluent enough in the system to "get there." However, the most straightforward approach is to download the free GURPS Lite, invest in a sourcebook, and simply wing it to the best of your ability to start to see if you like it. Yes, you will likely be "playing it wrong," but there is nothing wrong with that! We all start playing any new game completely wrong, and the process of learning something new is fun.

You will be creating basic characters, rolling 3d6 or less, sailing around on pirate ships and having swordfights, firing your flintlock pistols, hearing the roar of the cannons, and completing a sample boarding action to steal the treasure of a corrupt and wealthy merchant king.

Accept that you are doing it wrong, have fun, and use that experience as a springboard to learn different parts of the game that interest you, step by step.

Now compare this with the D&D and 5E models. You want a pirate-themed game! Let's either wait for a Kickstarter project or go search DriveThruRPG for a 5E pirate-themed supplement. If it is a Kickstarter, we are likely waiting a year for fulfillment and out a hundred or more dollars. If we want a hardcover on DriveThruRPG, that is about the same price as these days, given shipping.

Let's say we can find one. Let's hope it is well-researched and generic enough that we can use it for our setting. It may be tied to its own setting and have shark-men or something, which may be cool, but all of a sudden, our historical game is out the window unless we want to limit character options.

Now, let's set up our game. We want a historical game, so here comes the massive list of "no's" in character creation. We need to cut out most of D&D's race and class options just to get something close enough to what we want. None of what remains is a perfect fit for the characters we want, and eliminating certain classes and powers will significantly alter the game and disrupt the balance. D&D will continuously fight us when a character levels up, and you need to tell a player "no" on every option.

D&D's spells and default world model will fight you, too. You need to start banning planar travel spells, all of the gods, healing magic, spells that replace cannons, most of the magic items, various monsters that just don't fit, and the ban lists just go on and on. Just to get a new player into the game will require them to read a list of banned options and items as long as a book report. The game's balance will be broken. It will likely work for the first five levels, and then the game will break apart, and the challenge will be gone, or so impossible that people will wonder why they are playing this freakish mess.

And we don't have ships, cannons, history, a world, ship battle systems, and there is so much else we need to buy or create ourselves. Forget it, let's just play D&D with this set of rules. It is too much work trying to make it do anything else.

It is a lot of work just to play that pirate RPG that you may have seen in a movie and wanted to explore.

Becoming fluent in GURPS, a game that people say is "notoriously complicated" (it really isn't), is far easier than modding even the core books of 5E to do a new idea. D&D is only suitable for D&D. Even teaching GURPS to new players is easier than modding 5E and paying tons of money to Kickstarter books that will never support the simple thing that you want.

I just want to play a pirate! Give me a saber and some daring-do sword fighting skills and acrobatics! Give me a flintlock pistol to fire a single shot off as an attack option! Let me swing on a rope over to the other ship and join the fray! I want to be a pirate!

Okay, D&D says, you are a fighter. Are you wearing plate mail? Because you need plate mail. Even if you are a rogue, are you sneak-attacking? Picking locks? The D&D class abilities are all wrong for this! Nobody wears a plate on these ships; it is too heavy to swim in, and that is certain death by drowning! And don't give the excuse of "well, I have quick-release straps." Good luck with that when you are dropping like the ship's anchor into the cold darkness, and rolling to remove each piece.

Even in 5E, each piece of plate armor would be an action to unhook, with a roll that can fail for each, and that can add up to dozens. The armor is lost forever. If you are wounded, you likely won't even get a few pieces off before you drown. Even healthy people would struggle, and it would be a miracle to survive. You would need to pull off a Houdini-like escape.

In GURPS, here are the handful of skills you need. You have a few ability scores. Over there are your hits and move score. This is how combat, parries, and dodging work. Okay, now you know the game. Here comes a merchant crewperson with a saber. Now you can fight them in one-second combat rounds. Do one thing and don't worry about "action types" or "action economies." What one thing do you do? Close? Do defensive? Draw your flintlock so you can fire next turn? Can you quickdraw your flintlock and fire in the same turn? Do an all-out attack?

All the combat options are built into GURPS' combat system and not hidden in subclass abilities across a dozen classes. They are not hidden in feats. Anyone can accomplish these things if they possess the necessary skill levels. GURPS combat is easier than D&D, since nothing is off-limits and every combat option is universal.

But I have superpower-like abilities in D&D! If that is a part of your game, give casters "magic superpowers" like fire bolts, magic shields, healing hands, and other powers. You don't even need to use the spell and magic system. GURPS does that too. If you want a realistic world with no magic, you can do that too. If you wish to have a special magic system, just a thaumaturgic or shamanistic one, you can do just that, too. You don't have to "take the whole bag" of the D&D spell and magic system.

Becoming fluent in GURPS, which is not particularly difficult, is far easier than modding D&D.

And once you do, you unlock the ability to create any game, in any world, at any point in time. If you want to make "My Favorite Movie: The RPG," you can do that, too, without D&D getting in the way.

So many doors are open to you once you grasp a few simple GURPS concepts. All of these are in the free copy of the GURPS Lite rules.

Playing D&D is like playing a video game.

Playing GURPS is like getting an education and being able to make any video game you can imagine.

Wildcard/Bang Monster Skills

When I do my quick-and-dirty B/X monster conversions from old-school games such as Basic Fantasy, I will assign them a hits value based on my conversions, give them a base damage value based on hit dice, and then for most everything else, combat skills, special attacks, defenses, and other powers - I will just assign the monster a simple wildcard "bang skill" that is a catch-all skill roll for anything the beast is likely to do.

These are explained in the GURPS Basic Set Characters book (B175), and they are meant to group together like skills for a simpler game. An example is the skill Detective! in the game, which groups together all specific skills in their area, such as the ones a detective is likely to know.

So, in this case, a goblin gets the Goblin! skill, and a giant spider gets the Giant Spider! skill. If my goblin needs to make an attack roll, be sneaky, disengage, set a trap, hide, or do sneaky and stabbing, I would use the Goblin! skill. For my giant spider, that skill covers ambushes, hiding, wall crawling, web throwing, entanglement in spider webs, spider poison, scampering away, grappling, seeing in the dark, sensing movement, and spinning webs around a grappled character.

The critical part of this second case is that the wildcard skill covers "monster superpowers" that a monster should naturally have. Want to resist the spider poison? Opposed HT roll (Contests, B375) versus the bang skill, or you take the damage or effect. Web entanglement? Opposed ST roll versus the bang skill.

You can even use the Margin of Victory (B375) as a modifier to the effect roll, such as a spider poison being death on a loss difference of 6 or greater, damage for a failure of 3-5, nausea on a failure of 1-2, and no damage for any success.

I typically set this skill to 11+ the monster's hit die rating in B/X rules, and the Basic Fantasy set is just as good as any to use for this, plus the PDFs are free. That is a good baseline, and some "zero hit die" monsters, such as goblins, will just default to an 11-minus roll for everything.

If a power needs an exceptional modifier, let's say my Giant Spider! skill is at a 12-, I could modify STR-based rolls by a +4 (to the skill level) if I want that spider to be stronger in terms of grappling and STR-based checks. These one-off modifiers are easier to track than a complete design, and they add a little extra flavor to the monsters beyond just assigning a bulk skill level for everything. I could throw in a +2 skill level to web-based rolls if this type of spider is primarily known for its web-spinning and throwing powers.

More hit dice? That is going to be a higher base skill level and a more brutal monster to fight. Please remember that parry and dodge ratings are exceptional and should be rated in the usual GURPS manner (see my B/X conversion page), or else the fights will quickly become frustrating as high-level monsters will always be able to dodge and parry any attack coming their way.

One to three special case modifiers are enough to give any monster a custom feeling that avoids it from being too generic. If a monster is really good at flying, give it a bonus there, and so on. You can also add penalties, such as making an unintelligent monster, like an ogre, penalize its IQ-based rolls, perception, and other areas where you want it to be weaker. This makes ogres that are easily tricked, or ones you can try to sneak by while they are sleeping.

For the effect value, I will calculate a base damage or effect die roll based on the hit dice, but otherwise, most results can be figured out using opposed skill rolls, like "spiderweb strength versus character ST."

The best part about wildcard monster skills is that they can be used for mobster thugs in a 1920s Noir game, alien creatures in a science fiction game, enemy soldiers in a WW2 game, planar creatures in a plane-walking campaign, robots in a steampunk game, armored clone troopers in a space opera game, zombies in a post-apocalyptic horror game, orcs in a fantasy game, or any monster or enemy for other setting or world imaginable.

I can even rate "non-monster" things, like traps or automated gun turrets with a similar system, as long as an opposed skill roll can be used to defeat it, there is no reason a puzzle, computer security, or a lock can't be given a wildcard skill. The characters make an opposed roll to beat it. This differs from the GURPS way of doing things by rating tasks with a difficulty modifier (easy, hard, etc.), but it gets us to the same place just as easily (and maybe with an extra die roll for the opposed side).

I do not need a massive bestiary for every world I visit, and this makes GURPS a faster and easier game to run for any genre than games that require huge monster books, such as D&D. While large, detailed bestiaries are nice and an invaluable resource (thank you to our devoted fans and community members who pour hours into these and generously share them), GURPS gives us the tools to "wing it" when those resources are not available, or we just need to have something quickly and off-the-cuff.

GURPS becomes very easy to run with the tools the game gives us; all we need to do is figure out creative ways to apply them to our games.

Western Realm Atlas, Worldbuilding

I like converting campaign worlds to GURPS, but I often feel the original systems were just "made" for them. My current campaign is set in the Aquilae world, which is an extraordinary setting over on DriveThruRPG, which is a system-neutral setting where you can do anything you want. It's just maps, roads, towns, cities, kingdoms, ruins, and terrain, and you fill in the rest. For creative people who want to fill in "what goes where," this setting is a fantastic canvas. Those who want a fully developed setting will find this lacking. I love worldbuilding given a set of parameters, and having a setting where I can just "fill in what I am given" is endless enjoyment for me.

Aquilae is sort of like a "paint by numbers" campaign setting, where you are given a premade picture, paints, what color goes where, and you fill in all the rest. True artists will hate these, but they can be fun projects that are relaxing and low-key chill. It doesn't matter if it looks different than the picture, as skill varies and people may make other choices. Do you want to put in a fluffy cloud layer in the middle ground? That is your choice, go watch a few videos on how this is done, practice, and add that to your masterpiece. Want to blend colors and create a pretty shade of green (for color 45) with a hint of blue and purple? Go for it! The guidelines are here, but you can be infinitely creative within them. In the end, you will have something you made by hand, with your own personal touches.

Everyone can feel like a world builder, just like everyone can feel like an artist.

Yes, GURPS: Forgotten Realms is fun, and it plays very nicely, but a part of me will always see that as the AD&D world, before all the novels, that it was in our campaigns. The same with Dark Sun or Greyhawk, those will always be tied to one version of AD&D or another. GURPS versions of these are fun, but I feel at home in them with a decent first-edition game, such as Adventures Dark & Deep, or even Castles & Crusades.

Also, other settings that were designed to fit a theme are fun, such as the Conan-inspired Savage Thule, but if I am playing GURPS, I am playing GURPS Conan. Some of the "flavored" 5E settings are very well detailed and make fine GURPS settings, but given a choice, I will play GURPS: Vikings over a Viking-themed 5E setting. While these are fun, they are more "best of" and "tribute" settings when GURPS can give you the real thing.

And Harnworld is also a fantastic GURPS setting, one of the best. This is my dream GURPS setting for a serious, meaty, political game. It is not so much a "dungeon" setting as it is a "Game of Thrones" one. I could put dungeons on the map, but the world is far more interesting to explore and meet the people of. Everything you can ever want in a classic Middle Ages setting is here.

Something keeps me coming back to the very strange and almost quirky Aquilae setting, a system-neutral setting by design, that lets you fill in all the blanks. It is nothing more than a giant hex map of cities, roads, and optional GM's information on ruins and other secret places. You do with it what you want. Harnworld assumes "you read the books," where this setting "has nothing." 

That is a freedom I like, since there is no required reading (while fun), and if I want this city to be one thing, and that another, I can just have it. This kingdom in the middle can be the evil one, and the two on each side are good, but weaker. There are plots and motivations in my head. If I need NPCs or taverns, I have plenty of random charts. Maybe the evil king has a black dragon he rides and sends on missions. There are ruins and dungeons out there, and I get to make them myself.

It is much more of a sandbox canvas for my ideas than it is anything else. It gives me a map and names, and I do whatever I want with them. Another thing I like is that the world does not rely on a set of monsters being the villains; I can use whatever I like, the monsters from Dungeon Fantasy, some of the excellent GURPS bestiary conversions on the Internet, my B/X converted monsters, or any other monster I want. Also, there are no assumptions on fantasy races here; if I wanted this to be all human, I could have that. I can put the standard four here, or go all out with the modern mix.

Anything I want, I can have.

Just like GURPS.

GURPS as a Forever Game

There's a new question on YouTube: "What is your forever game?" This is a sort of question asking, "If you could only have one game, what would it be?"

Many are pointing to AD&D 2nd Edition, which is a good choice for a dungeon-style game. Others recommend Savage Worlds, which is also a good choice and arguably better than AD&D, as it can be applied to any genre. But in my mind, there is only one forever game. It is a no-contest, hands-down winner.

The best forever game is GURPS. It's not even close; even if I had to create character sheets by hand, it would still be GURPS.

The versatility of this game is fantastic. I can adapt any book, movie, IP, TV show, comic book, or graphic novel into a game. I can take any setting from any other pen-and-paper game, fantasy to sci-fi, and turn it into a game. I can take any video game and turn it into a role-playing game. Put GURPS in front of anything, and it becomes a game.

And there are whole shelves of games I do not need if I have GURPS.

During the Pandemic, the first game I started collecting was GURPS, because if the world ended, I knew that game would give me the most fun in isolation. I would not need "content streams" for it, Kickstarter projects, or anything else but the two core books. Software is nice, but GURPS is not that hard to hand-create characters for. The other books were still great to have, but not really core to the "forever" game.

That still holds true; games have come and gone since GURPS, and very few of them have managed to keep my attention. With 5E, it is always "the latest thing." With OSR games, it tends to be "the gold standard." Then there are a few publishers who put out interesting stuff. Some use very unique art styles, such as those found in Dragonbane or Dungeon Crawl Classics. While GURPS is not the most popular, nor the most complete, nor the most compelling art, it wins where it matters: in the rules.

The rules of the game are where it matters. If I am going to play a game "forever," all that will matter are the rules. Everything else is secondary. While 5E has a lot of rules, the entire game is a house of cards that, at its core, is no different from an OSR game; the difference lies in the intricate, carefully designed, finely tuned, and fun-optimized class designs and those "trees" of options. This is no different from an MMO with a "talent tree," and one thing about those designs is that they have a short lifespan before the tree needs to be cleaned out and updated.

Character classes designed like talent trees put an artificially short lifespan on your game.

I would rather have a game that offers a comprehensive, DIY character creation system.

For a "forever game," I will get sick of 5E's character classes after two or three campaigns and be looking for something new. The choices will be the same. Exploits will be found. Some options and combinations will be garbage. The only way to keep this system fresh is to multiclass, which extends the game's lifespan somewhat, but it ultimately reveals critical exploits that break the game. Another option to keep the game fresh is to continue purchasing expansion books to acquire the limited number of class options they offer.

D&D 2014 and 2024 were always "live service games" that dropped a few new things in each book, forcing you to buy them to alleviate the stale set of options and refresh those character builds.

With GURPS, I am the designer. If I want to break the game, I can, but out of respect for the game and my campaigns, I won't. The options never get stale. There are no "talent trees." I don't have to pick a character archetype, which is a limit on choices. With GURPS, I have an infinite number of options.

There is a power curve in D&D games, much like in video games. If I lost that and switched to a flatter-balance system, like GURPS, I wouldn't mind at all. Not all worlds should "scale" like a videogame, and flat-balance fantasy worlds where skill matters and hit points are lower are entertaining. Every blow means more, and the game is more deadly. Magic is more powerful. Every point of skill is critical.

You do not need a lot of enemies to have challenging encounters, and on a flat power level, enemy skill matters more, and the game is easier to balance. I can have a small, one-on-one combat in GURPS and have it mean more than a one-on-one combat in 5E or an OSR game. My fighter is facing off with a goblin in a dungeon room? That could go a lot of ways, good, bad, or somewhere in between, with 5E or the OSR. I may lose a few hit points. I will heal, and in 5E, it is gone after the next short rest.

With GURPS, that goblin's life meant a whole lot more. People often prefer not to think about this, and D&D provides them with an easy set of "rose-tinted glasses" to look through when considering combat. In GURPS, I have the skills to defeat that goblin through many more means, without killing, and like a proper old-school game of the 1980s, combat is deadly and serious business. No matter how good you are, one lucky hit can be your end. "To kill" is a vast choice narratively. In D&D, they reduce killing to making enemy sprites flash and disappear, much like in a video game.

GURPS will give more narrative weight to combat and violence, resulting in a more satisfying experience for storytelling. For a forever game, GIRPS will win in the narrative storytelling area every time.

What makes the perfect forever game?

It isn't the number of books, the art, or whether it excels in one niche; if it has pool mechanics, uses tokens or cards, or is even a generic game.

It will always be the rules that elevate a game to the status of a "forever game."

For me, GURPS is it.

My GURPS Shrine

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDQ4P7TF

A friend introduced me to these shelves, and I got one completed last week that now houses my entire GURPS collection. This is also a sturdy wood-and-steel shelf, capable of holding a significant amount of weight without sagging. These are put together with wood screws, and are not those fiberboard cheap pieces of junk with shelves of books held up by tiny plastic tabs. I have had many of those break apart over the years under the weight of books; it's not funny.

These are pretty shelves, more like display stands, but they give me what used to be three packed shelves of GURPS books, now loosely populated, but still on the mostly-filled side, with books.

The bottom shelf fits all my GURPS 3 books, which are still very useful. The second shelf up is for GURPS 4 and those eras of books. The third shelf up is filled with Dungeon Fantasy, which is my most-played version of the game, conveniently situated at eye level.

That third shelf should be your "star game" to keep it always the first thing you look at when you walk by. I'll wander by and say, "Hey, that looks fun!" There is a reason the highest-priced shelves in grocery stores are located at eye level, since humans will focus on that first every time they go by.

The fourth shelf up is for dice and figurine storage, adding some style and character to my shelf. If I play mecha-suit anime games with GURPS, what is going on that shelf? All my impressive figures to help tell me, "GURPS does this too, come and play!" I can do my fantasy figures, or any of my others, to set the tone of that shelf and the infinite fun it provides me.

This way, I don't need a GURPS: Mecha Suit Gundam book, and I have the figures up there to inspire me to find out what happens next in those characters' stories.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRRTXQC4

Since this is a free-standing shelf, I will place most of the softcover books in these handy file holders, which are large enough to accommodate even the hardcovers. Once these are full, they act as bookends, and I never have the problem of all my books flopping over to one side or another.

I can also create focused groups of books, such as fantasy or sci-fi, and label them accordingly on the holder. I can also pull the whole file holder out and put it on my table, which means less searching through the shelves, less looking for the book I need, and everything is all together for me in one organized place.

The only downside is having to slide the holder forward and pull a book out, but that's a minor complaint considering the benefits of becoming so hyper-organized and keeping my GURPS shelf clean and organized. The focused collections, with everything not flopping to one side or the other, save me a lot of time, frustration, and keep my shelves more open and airy. 

I find a packed shelf is a shelf I do not use, since I rarely want to pull something out once I cram everything in there. Shelves with some open space and room to breathe are far more usable and playable than an archive shelf packed full to the brim.

Each organizer holds 8-10 of the GURPS books thick enough to have a title on the spine, or about 6-8 of the thicker hardcovers. The very-thin books it can hold are 14-16. This is without being packed too tightly, as I leave some breathing room to pull things out when I want a book.

My loose-leaf folders, containing notes and character sheets, are stored in these organizers, one per shelf, to keep my notes and papers organized. One folder is used for each campaign. This keeps all my notes and campaign information hyper-organized. I would still like to find a Trapper-Keeper-type solution with room for sheets and a legal pad or spiral notebook for my game notes, and I will continue to look for one so I can get my campaigns hyper-organized.

My old shelves fit five of these on a shelf; these new ones can fit seven wide, which allows me to use the lowest shelf as an archive, and the upper shelves can be more open and user-friendly.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB5SNCJ3

Having a more open shelf means I can store dice on it! I use these clear plastic candy jars, which allow me to sort dice into collections based on color and style, and I place the jars on the shelves next to the books. Nothing gets me in the mood to play like seeing a massive container of pretty dice, ready to grab-and-go. I have a Fall and Earth-colors set for Dungeon Fantasy, as well as a more modern, red, black, blue, and white GURPS set for science fiction and contemporary-day campaigns. The dice for that shelf go on the shelf next to the books, since I have the room.

Yes, I have genre-themed dice sets. What else do you do with this many dice? Sort them and create play sets based on themes! After years of collecting, you eventually end up using these buckets of dice as display shelf kitsch.

Clear containers mean I see them out, all beautifully organized, screaming at me to play with them! They look like candy in there, which is a positive mental reinforcement, and it is another "come play with me" thing that I do on my game shelves.

Additionally, all other games are prohibited from this shelf. There are no 5E books, Cypher books, or any other games listed here. My only exception is Basic Fantasy, which I use for conversions for my GURPS: B/X games.

I also have the excellent Solo Game Master's Guide from Modiphius Entertainment, which is a fantastic book of inspiration that keeps me gaming. This one includes the gem "everything is playing," which helps alleviate the guilt of not being in a game. If you are thinking about campaigns, messing with character designs, or otherwise doing things for the game, that is equivalent to playing GURPS on the hex grid.

I needed a shelf system that was organized and far easier to clean. Here, if I want to completely wipe down and dust the shelves, I pull the organizers out, wipe the whole shelf down, and put them right back. I am not hauling books out and putting them on a table, clearing space to clean another space, only to have the stacks fall over. Cleaning these types of shelves is trivial and takes me far less time and effort since it is so open, and there are minimal surfaces to wipe. Additionally, the Roomba can navigate right under here on its own.

Does any of this have anything to do with GURPS? Yes and no. I call this new, beautiful, amazing creation my "GURPS Shrine," and it keeps me busy. It is designed to be used efficiently and to pull books from. It has room for my figures that represent the games I play. It holds all my dice.

This is an investment in my hobby, and one of the hindrances I found in actually making me want to play my games was that they were so packed into shelves they would collect dust, be untouchable since they would constantly flop over, and look unappealing, like a hoarder's book collection with junk all over the shelves. Dust would collect, and I would not want to touch the entire mess.

Also, we are GURPS players. We are used to lengthy mental calculations, keeping our character sheets organized, optimizing our designs, and calculating every blow in melee combat. The organization appeals to us on a fundamental level. We have the "nerd gene" in our DNA, and I find that having a premium shelf that is amazingly organized sits in my play area like a beacon of light. It resembles a high-end gaming store's shelf, filled with endless fun, including dice, figures, and a variety of other gaming-related items.

If one reason you don't play more is that you wish you were more organized, with your shelves being more attractive and cleaner, this is the way to go.

The Cinematic Campaign

"The 'cinematic' campaign is one where realism doesn’t rule – because if it did, it would constantly get in the way of the story. In a cinematic campaign, swashbuckling heroes can defeat dozens of foes because the story calls for it. Spacecraft whoosh or roar in the silence of space because fast things whoosh and powerful engines roar. Rightness always overrules mere correctness." - GURPS, Basic Set, Campaigns, page 488.

Cinematic here seems to imply "pulp adventure," but in reality, it can refer to any cinematic genre. The rules favor pulp, as it is the best example of a cinematic style, but I argue that any style is a valid one, as long as it is established, adhered to, and agreed upon when the game begins.

If you are playing a GURPS: Back to the Future game, you need that fish-out-of-water, time-travel, slapstick humor level of genre. I usually have three qualifier words to describe my settings, and I stick to those as a universal rule. If something conflicts with a rule, then it "gets in the way of the story" and is changed. In Back to the Future, people aren't getting shot and stabbed, so that does not happen like it would in real life. If it does (in Doc's case), it is the "bullets make someone fall down" sort of moment, like an old-time Western TV show, and it gets later retconned.

However, GURPS gives us the freedom to establish these cinematic parameters and reach an agreement on them before play. Unlike modern "dramatic narrative systems," this is done more traditionally, and the narrative parameters affect every aspect of the game, allowing players and the referee to equally adjust outcomes, actions, and suggestions on what happens next.

In a GURPS: Looney Tunes game, the destructive weapons from ACME, Inc. would not be treated as realistic weapons or devices of destruction. If a player wanted to come up with a slapstick gag of their own, it fit with the theme, and it made people laugh, then let it be.

Since society, for the most part, has lost its imagination (due to the Internet, AI, YouTube, smartphones, and so on), we see newer games go out of their way to replicate a theme through their rules. Games require the "training wheels" of narrative control to establish a theme and tightly control the action through extensive lists of "dos and don'ts," along with mechanical systems, in an attempt to reproduce free-form imagination. In a modern Looney Tunes game, you would likely use a currency of "Looney Points" that allows you to make toon-based special attacks, and have to look through long lists (or desks of cards) of "gags" and "slapstick moments" to throw a pie in someone's face.

You see this in Daggerheart with special attacks from characters needing "hope points" to trigger. The cool attacks, best special moves, and other narrative moments are controlled via in-game currency. In my GURPS: Looney Tunes game, if my fire-breathing dragon has a "fire breath," I buy that as a power, give it a fatigue cost, and we are good. Now, my dragon can breathe in everyone's faces and turn them into a charcoal briquette. Yes, fire breath is a "narrative power," but it is just a power, and we can put any cost on it we want, as long as it fits the theme.

But note this game design strategy. You give up something, your ability to use your special attacks and powers, and give control of that to an in-game system. In GURPS, we are used to "characters being the master of their destinies" and being able to spend FP for powers, and those resources being internal character components. In Daggerheart, we are in narrative game land, and now parts of our characters exist externally and within the current context of a game and session.

Internal versus external designs, make note of this. GURPS primarily relies on the former.

GURPS being GURPS, you could invent a "hope" secondary ability score, start it at zero, and throw points in there on even rolls, give the referee fear on odd rolls, and use it as an alternate fatigue source. Or you could make some abilities "hope-powered" for a -20% modifier to their cost, since this pool controls activation. There, now we have GURPS: Daggerheart.

It is not as elegant or "design slick" as the Darrington Press game, but GURPS exists in a tinkerer's universe, where we love our strange, bolted-on, and hacked-together creations. We are more like coders on this side of the hobby, and we will kludge together rules and subsystems to simulate any experience in our game, since the tools we have been given are amazing and powerful.

Where other games give you these "drag and drop" game creation tools that can't do much beyond what the creator allows, GURPS is more like a full C++ or Java coding environment. GURPS is one of the first "Professional RPG systems," with Champions being the other.

I saw a GURPS Fantasy mod that gave clerics a "healing touch" superpower that cost fatigue instead of using spells. No skill roll needed, no buying spells as skills, just pay the fatigue cost and heal. Is this a valid way to do magic? Shouldn't we be using the systems in the book in the magic chapter, or Dungeon Fantasy spells? This is GURPS. If it works, it is magic. Whatever way you want to do it is right.

Which circles back to cinematic campaigns. We had to go down the "design rabbit hole" to prove a point; any method to get to a desired outcome is valid in GURPS. You can design a magic system a hundred different ways, and as long as it works for you and fits into the game's framework, it is a sound system.

So if you establish your cinematic campaign parameters and use them to move results to "rightness" rather than "correctness," then you are on the right track. In Looney Tunes, if you put your face in front of a pirate cannon, humor will result! You won't be simulating realistic terminal ballistics and rolling tons of damage dice, just say "something silly happens" and make up the funniest result, and move on.

Similarly, if you are playing a GURPS: Rom-Com game, you will abide by the "romantic comedy" cinematic campaign parameters, and everything in the game will be seen through that lens. Don't just think this is for pulp adventures or comedy, GURPS can do it all.

Note the use of the word "lens" here, which is a constructive framework for describing cinematic campaign parameters to players. People understand "we are using a comedic lens" to grasp that concept.

Also, if you are playing a GURPS: Slasher Movie game, you could force everyone to take a "do something stupid" disadvantage, which requires a self-control roll. The Final Girl (or Guy) does not need to take this one, either. Now you will have someone heading down to the basement when the power goes out, looking for the fuse box. Here is a hint: don't always kill off the character who fails this roll. Let them turn the lights back on, make it back upstairs, and kill off a character who was smart and stayed upstairs but wandered off to grab a snack.

That is an example of using the tools GURPS provides to simulate a genre within the design system we were given. The "cinematic parameter" means all but one of the characters at the table must take that "do something stupid" disadvantage. Roll for it, or draw straws. Let players decide how many points they will get for that disadvantage, too, whether they are "slightly stupid" or "completely foolish." If you play this right, the most foolish of the group will be getting everyone else killed, and the players will be rooting for that character to get it next.

In a Rom-Com game, you could use similar disadvantages to shape character actions, and create a pool of character archetypes with templates, such as: the too-cool guy, the wing man/girl, the bestie, the cheerleader, the nerd, the jock, and so on. Yes, they are stereotypes, but they are also genre conventions. In a modern narrative game, they will create these for you and put them on cards for you to use, fill them full of special rules, and invariably sell you more in expansions. In GURPS, we have the tools to do this all for free.

However, we only put in the work when we need to. If we're playing a Rom-Com with these character archetypes, go ahead, put in the work, and make it happen! If all you want to use are "cinematic parameters" to achieve the same effect, that is fine too; save yourself some design work and just get started with those ground rules. If you want to create custom disadvantages with "compulsive behaviors" like jock, cheerleader, and so on, do it that way. When a character has a moment to do something "the most nerd way," and it would make things more difficult or hinder the character (these are still disadvantages), then make a roll when it feels right.

In a way, the default parameters of GURPS are characterized by "hardcore realism," which is how the game earns its reputation. However, the game needs to start from this point to reach every other, and you are often paring back the rules to make things work as you want them to. The game instructs you to do this on page 489, under the rule "Damn the Rules, Full Speed Ahead!" Run a game with wildcard skills (page 175), talents (page 89), and ability scores. Ignore most of the rules and run GURPS Lite combat and skill resolution. Now you have a B/X-style game that is simple, fast, and fun.

You can develop your Rom-Com game the same way: make a list of talents, wildcard skills, archetype disadvantages, and let players throw together characters out of those parts. You do not need to spend a few hours building characters with the character creation tools and worry about buying levels of driving, languages, fashion sense, and computers. Doing this will likely turn players off. If the genre says "simple, archetype characters," then that is how you will play the game and build characters.

Doing things this way also dispels the biggest myths about GURPS: that the game takes forever to create characters, is overly complicated, forces you to sort through hundreds of skills, has complicated combat, and only supports hardcore realism. None of that is true.

Play the game straight from the book, just like it is in 5E? That will happen. But the game goes out of its way to tell us not to do that. Every rule is optional. You build games with these rules. You pick and choose. The game is a toolbox, and you don't always use every tool in the box to do a job. If all you are doing is hanging pictures, all you need is a hammer, perhaps a drill, and a screwdriver for mounting picture studs. Do you need to use the pipe wrench, strap wrench, or blowtorch? For most nails, the hammer will do.

Taking a little care in setting up your game and deciding how you want to play it will make the game more enjoyable to play and share with others.

Dice Towers

https://www.amazon.com/Cherry-Dice-Tower-Tray-Tennessee/dp/B0BCX9VZ6G/

This is my dice tower, while there are many like it, this one is mine.

There is nothing else like a real, natural, made-in-the-USA, handcrafted wooden dice tower. This is not plastic; it's not cheap, and it's solidly made in a woodshop. Warning, this is expensive, and it is the price of a costly gamebook. It is worth it so much, though.

This dice tower is why I game.

This isn't cheap plastic; it's more like a furniture purchase, specifically for gaming. It stores well as the tower is not connected to the base, and it fits perfectly in the tray for storage and travel. This is costly, yes, but buying a premium gaming accessory will encourage you to use it, and making it a quality item that lasts will prevent you from buying junk that keeps breaking.

The wood on this is thick! This will last a few hundred years, unlike some of the plastic and fiberboard trash I see these days. It is also made of natural wood, stained, and is a beautiful item.

The noise this thing makes is pure happiness. My sister, when she visits, loves the sounds this makes when the dice tumble through and make those thunk-a-lunk dice on wooden sounds that resonate through the tower, and it is one of the most pleasing sounds I can ever imagine in gaming. To make those die roll "sound effects" with every roll is so soothing, fun, and enjoyable, it makes me want to play more just to hear these affirming, positive, happy sounds of dice on wood.

When they spill out, it is so much better than a VTT animation. This is real. This is something happening, like a live event, something real and tangible.

Using a dice tower puts weight and impact into my rolls. It is hard to "just cheat and roll again" to get the result I wanted once they spill out of the chute. Rolling flat on a table is so easy to say, "Well, I did not roll them well enough, so this horrible roll is invalid, and I can roll again."

Rolling again and again ruins solo play.

I am sorry! I do that! If I did not roll the dice well, I will reroll them, and once I do that, doing it again and again is too easy a terrible habit to slip into. This is one of my gaming sins, and I confess. I know this ruins my game, as it's one more step into fantasy fulfillment and "just making things happen that you want."

From that point, I quit the game because there is no challenge, and it was boring to play solo if "all that happens is what you want to happen."

With GURPS, not taking a roll back affects balance, and it especially hurts self-control rolls. If my character succumbs to a weakness, that is a key narrative point that should never be taken back, since, well, I got points for that! I earned extra points for my character, and if I cheat on the self-control rolls, then I am cheating the system; those disadvantages should not have given me all those valuable character points.

Dice towers discourage cheating yourself in solo play.

If an enemy rolls a hit, don't take that back. If I miss or roll a critical failure, don't take that back. A dice tower makes it much harder to cheat yourself, since there is a positive auditory reinforcement, a slight amount of time taken for the dice to fall, and the result being truly random and not "take-backable."

Also, a dice tower, since it takes a little more time than a table roll, will reduce the number of times you roll, and force you to "only roll for things that matter." I have played d20 games where I got into a quick series of a dozen d20 rolls, trying and retrying the same thing until I got the result I wanted. Like teaspoons of sugar in a cup of coffee, it is too easy to keep "spooning it in" and ruining the drink. There is a theory of "only making important dice rolls" in a game, and a dice tower helps make that happen.

There are some things you should not roll, and the referee should just decide them and move the game along. Don't drop those dice in the tower unless you really should. Dropping the dice in is a contract with yourself that this roll means something important, and it will not be taken back.

If you play solo or even with a group, the dice tower is something a VTT can never replicate or do, and it is a wonderful, almost delightful gaming accessory that I can never game without.

Reading Level?

I brought this subject up on my SBRPG blog, and YouTube content creators are now picking up on it. This was initially targeted at D&D and how the reading comprehension level of that book drops with every edition. The game seems almost too simple at this point, not in its rules, but in the language it uses to present them.

Shadowdark requires even less reading comprehension to understand, and is far better situated than over a thousand pages of D&D 2024 reading. I saw videos on YouTube where 3rd-graders were reading and playing Shadowdark far better than many 50-year-olds. It is not just the level, but the amount you require players to read that will take your game from being "for everyone" to "the 2% that could read through a thousand pages and grasp it."

Even I, with ACKS II, a game I got recently, find myself struggling to read over a thousand pages of stuff in that game. The game is beautiful and one of the best OSR games ever written, but I find myself intimidated by it and prefer the easier dungeon-style games that don't require much of me. There is another factor in this equation of "people rarely have the time" - even among those with the level of reading needed to enjoy your game, today's world takes so much time from us, we seek the easier games, just because playing something is far better than playing nothing.

Given my time, I will always give GURPS the most of it, because the time I spend with this game gives me the most enjoyment per minute I put into it. This is another factor to consider. I rarely have time for other games unless they are so simple I can play them with a few core concepts. Dungeon Crawl Classics and its simplified 3.5E rules are a far better side game for me than Pathfinder 2, AD&D, or even 5E.

This is a tangential point, but I would opt for an easier game that doesn't take as much time to learn over a harder one. Part of the target market who can read your game will opt for the easier one, just due to modern societal time pressures.

Are all classic RPGs doomed because of America's dropping reading level?

Now, when I say "all," I am explicitly referring to GURPS in this context and this space. GURPS is written for a higher level of math and reading comprehension than most games; it is (by my best guess) at the 8th to 10th grade level in terms of writing and math skills required to play the game, which encompasses less than half of the population. Math skills are likely higher at the end of that range. While GURPS does not require calculus, a grasp of algebra makes the game a lot easier.

Approximately 54% of the US population reads at a 6th-grade level or below, and math skills are likely to be similarly low. For most of them, GURPS is out of reach, and a thousand pages of D&D, even at a 6th-grade reading level, are also pushing your player base to a fraction of what it could be.

Growing up in the 1980s, these numbers are shocking to me. Then again, I have a sister who is a teacher at these grade levels, and she says that school systems will fail students up to the next grade without the basic required skills, just so the school districts can look good and meet their quotas.

The school systems no longer care.

Society doesn't care that they don't, either.

Nobody has the time to.

The educational system in the US is failing, and year after year, the skills in reading, math, and comprehension are dropping. Fewer and fewer will play the old games because fewer and fewer will understand them.

I am not talking about current players or anyone on the GURPS Discord! We have already invested, we love the game, and we know how it works. We had friends to teach us, or we loved the game so much we figured it out for ourselves. Even if we had a lower comprehension level, we used the game to teach ourselves what we needed to know and forged ahead. We did this in the 1980s as kids with AD&D. We looked up Gygax's words in the dictionary to figure them out.

It is the next generation, and the one after that, and future players of the game that I worry about.

It is the direction of the next version of GURPS, if it ever happens. We won't have a choice; the game will most likely be written for a very low reading comprehension level, and the math will be simplified to such an extent that today's players will be shocked at how "dumbed down" our favorite game has become.

But don't blame the game publishers; this is pure survival we are talking about. As the country forgets what education is, it fails to hold high standards and excellence in education as an ideal that we should all strive for.

This may sound political, but it really isn't, and it shouldn't be. It is a scary statistic that we can see in new games, and how simple they seem to be getting, versus the older games our community cherishes, which we find mentally stimulating. This is why many classic gamers tend to be older; the games were written at an educational level that we grew up with.

Everyone wants education to be held to a gold standard, and we should require more of our students than the levels we were held to. Sadly, even discussing this issue can evoke anger and divisiveness, and people often give up because no one has the time to dedicate to fixing it, and there will be too many who will exploit the system to benefit themselves.

This is one of those moments that makes me fear for the future of my favorite games. It is a sort of "change or die" moment, not caused by the game, but by a larger societal issue outside of our control. It makes me feel helpless, and like the things I love will be enjoyed by fewer and fewer people as time goes on.

The Weird Fantasy Genre

With weird fantasy, one of the best games that tries to dive into it is the great Dungeon Crawl Classics game. The dungeon is not supposed to be "the normal," as entering the dungeon is more like Alice stepping into the looking glass. This is the upside-down world, where nothing should work or seem normal, and a place apart from reality, like a near-death perception-altered experience.

D&D 5E turns dungeons into video-game levels, boards in a strategy guide to clear. This comes from D&D 4E, which is why modern Wizards D&D is not D&D. The classic D&D experience is defined by that "Beyond the Looking Glass" dungeon crawl, of a dungeon master using their twisted imagination to create an out-of-body experience in other players' head spaces.

I have had my 5E groups go through a dungeon without fear. All my AD&D groups had fear.

Making D&D into "influencer fantasy" with slavish influencer art and the yoke of nostalgia guts the game's spirit and power. Wall Street has stripped D&D of its identity. D&D 2024 is not D&D. It is a tabletop game influenced by Diablo IV.

Is it fun? Yes. Like a video game is fun.

Dungeon Crawl Classics tries to achieve this by using strange dice and random charts, but the charts ultimately define and limit the experience. True out-of-body existential discovery and horror cannot happen if everyone knows the results on the charts.

The charts will prevent you from truly discovering and realizing what we all once knew with these games in the 1980s. The Satanic Panic happened because more and more people were being enlightened (look up the late-80s enlightenment movements, like crystal therapy, and so on), and AD&D 2nd Edition was created to put the genie back in the bottle. Wall Street stopped mass spiritual enlightenment in 1989 when D&D was at its height of cultural influence.

Note: This is not what I actually believe, but to get in touch with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, this is where your thinking has to go. A game is a game, but many in spiritual movements latched onto AD&D as a transcendental tool. Religious groups responded to this and pushed back. 

To get into the proper gonzo mindset, you must free yourself from the idea that tabletop games are simple replacements for video games (2000-2020) or consumer-driven, identitarian lifestyle gaming (2021-present). When you feel "the game is more than just a game," then you have the proper mindset. 

All that sounds crazy, but trying to understand that concept and theory will put your mind in the correct mode to run weird fantasy games. This is not just a video game with goofy stuff or some superhero power fantasy where you are "meant to kill the monsters." Kitchen sink fantasy, while fun, ultimately leads to "videogame-ism" and puts you into a mindset where you will never reach this higher state of enlightenment.

Wall Street took over D&D and made it "safe" again. Even DCC refuses to go to some places, and keeps itself safe for every audience. The collection of things considered to be in "kitchen sink" fantasy shrinks as controversial topics are bleached from the genre, such as half-races and succubi. And stale and controlled is what most of today's "gonzo fantasy" becomes. It is a commoditized fantasy, featuring goofy elements like silly hats, big mustaches, talking bananas, and strangely drawn art. You get the visuals right, but not the heart and soul.

With kitchen-sink fantasy, I love how familiar it is, but the world it creates feels like any version of D&D. Gonzo goes a step beyond that. For me, it is a starting place, a doorway to that more enlightened, mind-altering, and almost spiritual place. It is the "normal" from which we jump into the "abnormal."

True gonzo fantasy is like stepping through the Looking Glass.

Part of me dislikes the kitchen-sink genre since it leans too hard on D&D's tropes. Our games become nothing more than "D&D simulators" compared to our stories and imagination. Yes, they are D&D simulators coaxed in realism, but GURPS can do so much more than power a simulator.

Shadowdark does a little better, and it "gets" what the dungeon should be, if in an abstract form, where "the dark" is a powerful, evil, irrational metaphysical force that wants to consume the party and all that is good. We are making progress, but we are not yet where we need to be.

However, Shadowdark also begins with a more humanistic and ordinary world. We can't enter an altered state of heightened perception if we start out in that "101 fantasy races eating cupcakes in a town" mess of fantasy art we get in D&D 2024 these days, which looks more like a Target ad than it does D&D art. We must start with a more "our world" humanistic, grounded base to get that stark difference and experience that perception shift.

These people playing as anthropomorphic dragons or gentrified orcs will never experience a heightened reality because identity swapping dulls their experience and senses. You are so focused on your new self that you never see the outside or witness the stark differences between realities. If a human begins to change into a dragon, that is special. Who cares if you get to start as one and be the same as everyone else?

In GURPS, we have tools to help us journey towards true, authentic, pre-1989 weird fantasy thinking. One of the best is GURPS Cabal, designed for more conspiracy-minded campaigns and urban mysteries. But trying to imagine all these strange planes and dimensions intermixing with a medieval world where they don't even know science yet...

They can't even explain combustion or bacteria. How will they understand a strange point in space where two dimensions cross and the rules of how the world works are entirely different in one or more ways? What happens when a figment of a reality comes close to our own and only affects one aspect of mental perception? There could be a place where you try to write in your native language, and all that comes out is strange alien gibberish.

This place will never be explained, and you will never tell the characters the real reason why. They may never figure out the worlds they inhabit. We have enough trouble in this world trying to figure out the unexplained. Imagine a world of myth, trying to make sense of it all.

Of course, players forget history in modern gaming, and fantasy worlds are just Ren Faire-dressed modern worlds. Of course, these worlds have scientific knowledge because ...magic! GURPS players know about and respect Tech Level, so you will find a player base here with a more profound understanding of history and the progression of technology.

Another great resource is GURPS Powers: The Weird, which initially explores the concept of weird science. However, the later chapters touch on topics discussed in the Cabal book and delve into this genre's power types and sources. You get some great power ideas that places, people, or monsters could have, such as illusions that can heal or harm, scale adjustment, and other strange, mind-altering ones that break your perceptions of reality.

Mix all this with GURPS Fantasy (or Dungeon Fantasy), and try introducing "the weird" into a game world. Don't make "everyday magic" a part of the world; keep wizards and other casters mysterious and rare. Magic is not understood, accepted, or a technology metaphor. It is not used in everyday life by everyone. Magic can be feared as "something that steals your soul" - even if you rely on it for convenience. Wizards must keep their work secret for fear that someone may stab them in the back for being a devil worshipper.

Then, introduce the weird.

Make the population fearful. Make the strange happening truly strange and not reproducible by "simple magic." Something else is going on here. You will begin to experience the reality warping sensation of seeing characters deal with something they can't explain, and their players can't either. What do you do next if you can't explain it, dispel it, understand it with divination, go into a dungeon and turn it off, or wish it away? D&D assumes you have perfect knowledge and control of your world, and that everything on the spell and power lists will be able to solve every problem in the universe.

This is how it was with AD&D for us, of which the excellent Adventures Dark and Deep is my stepping stone. When we entered that dungeon as characters, we felt like we were stepping out of this dimension and into another. There was a transcendental experience that was more than playing a video game or running a simulation. The dungeon door was the portal to another universe. Today, the above game carries on that mantle.

GURPS was created in that era. When we played GURPS, we stepped out of this world and into another on a different path, but it was there. This was when we stepped into another world entirely, created using the alchemical parameters of the game, and felt like we were somewhere else. While in AD&D, the dungeon served as a metaphor for moving into another reality, in GURPS, entering a world nobody had ever seen before was referred to as a "dimension shift."

GURPS is the more mind-expanding game, and it doesn't need the dungeon metaphor for the shift.

But you still need to build the grounding metaphors, establish the parts of the everyday world to relate to, and then contrast the differences between the world we perceive and the one we cannot.

GURPS vs. Realism Fantasy

There is a genre of dungeon-crawling games that relies on high-simulation elements, such as Rolemaster United (RMU), and in a roundabout way, Dungeon Crawl Classics with its rudimentary "crit charts" for warriors and other classes. A few other games try to walk the realism route, but none does it as well as GURPS. Where RMU models weapon attacks versus armor, GURPS models damage types after they penetrate armor. RMU requires a chart for each weapon and a crit table for each damage type.

GURPS is less descriptive but just as deadly. Still, it is not hard to make up descriptions of damage types and special effects, especially if the damage goes overkill. Hits to the arm or hand may cause someone to make a DX roll to avoid dropping a held item. Face hits may damage teeth, eyes, ears, or the nose. Blood may get in an enemy's eyes. A hit to the leg could cause a target to lose balance.

Most crit charts can be replaced with imaginative referee rules.

These rulings will be more logically consistent and appropriate than a chart will force on you.

Your crit effects will be better than the ones in the book and will also reflect the reality you are trying to make happen in your game. Doing slapstick comedy? The orc's pants drop and reveal underwear with hearts all over it, and he trips and falls over. Doing gritty realism? You stab the orc in the eye.

It is the same with "magical mishaps" in many of these games, and being forced to roll on corruption charts that could have tentacles popping from the wizard's body. Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark, and Warhammer FRP all do this. In GURPS, you can critically fail a spell roll. Guess what? Make up an effect.

You can and will do better than any of these charts.

90% of the time, the corruption or mishap effect will be better than anything you can find on a chart in these games. You will miss out on the WTF ones that don't make sense, but if you open up your imagination and think just a little, you could do better than any of the charts in these games.

You could go subtle, like townspeople start acting strangely around your wizard, or you could go freak-gonzo and have your caster grow demon horns. You could roll a reaction roll to see how subtle or severe the effect will be, if you don't have a clue. You could even do things not on the charts, like warp reality and move a door from one side of the hall to another, and mess with the player's minds. When the characters exit the dungeon, they will find that the entire dungeon has moved 1,000 miles to the north. Maybe a group or retainers they never hired is waiting for them outside the dungeon and asking for a treasure cut. Perhaps the town they came from, they went back to, and discovered it was destroyed 100 years ago.

I told you that you can do better than the charts that ship with these games.

Your imagination is 1,000 times better. Don't buy games primarily intended for people who don't have vivid imaginations, and expect the book's limited subset of random chart results to be better than yours.

And trust yourself.

If your "crit result" or "corruption effect" does not seem "as good as one in a book," then tell yourself that your imagination will always be better than what someone else can come up with. If you doubt your idea, roll one die, and make it a 50-50 chance you use it or come up with something else. Come up with two and roll between them; it is either a bleed effect of the leg, or you cut the orc's boot laces off, and a piece of footwear flies off (possibly hitting a nearby goblin in the face).

None of the charts in these other games likely have that boot crit, but that happens in combat. I just made it up. It is just as valid a result as anything in those games.

Some of the charts in these games are interesting, such as random tavern names and other miscellanea. Those are mostly useful and fun idea generators. Charts that affect gameplay or limit critical effects and failures to a subset of results should be scrutinized as possible replacements for your imagination.