Ritual Path Magic in Glasstown

 Glasstown has a few different sources of supernatural ability available to player characters. Two of them both use GURPS Thaumatology Ritual Path Magic.

Swords in the Time of Guns

 GURPS is fundamentally based on reality (or at least realistic adventure fiction) and reality has a ranged weapons bias.

Glasstown: Introduction

 My current GURPS Game is Glasstown, a six-guns and sorcery megadungeon campaign. Here's the overview.

Random Effects Roulette

People often want abilities that produce random effects when activated but GURPS doesn't have a published modifier that does this. 

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Void Wasp and Giant Wasp

At last the final two adventure seed entries for The Bugstiary and a very silly weapon.

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Swarms

Instead of a regular adventure seed for The Bugstiary this week's post is a creepy-crawly artifact.

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Giant Scorpions to Giant Sun-Spiders

With more adventure seeds for The Bugstiary, (written by me and published by Gaming Ballistic LLC for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game), 

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Mimic Beetle to Móðir

Finally returning to the adventure seeds for The Bugstiary, (written by me and published by Gaming Ballistic LLC for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game), I give you a creature feature, and a cryptid.

No Bob, You Did Not Just Invent Bread

 Has something like this:

Player: So I'm casting Create Object to make 25 pounds of silver. This costs 4 energy, because I have skill 15, and gives us $25,000. We get $5000 each to spend.

GM: You know that it's not real money, right? As soon as they aren't touching it it vanishes?

Player: Yeah, but we just have to pay and leave before that happens. How would they ever know?

Ever happened to you?

I can help!

Kicking Grenades For Fun And Profit

 

How (Not) to Cook a Hand Grenade

Never, ever, "cook" a hand grenade. The fuse is supposed to be four seconds and was made by the lowest bidder. 

- USMC Instructor c. 2003

Listen up Marines, this is how you "cook" a grenade.

- USMC MOUT Instructor c. 2008.

Gun Stats: M252 81mm Mortar

Now that GURPS Gun Stats is out, I can finally stat the gun that, while absent from GURPS High Tech, will forever live in my head rent free: the M252 81 mm mortar.

Steel Rain, Steel Pain

Fright Checks: Rule of 19

The GURPS Rule of 14 (p. B360) says:

If final, modified Will exceeds 13, reduce it to 13 for the purpose of the Fright Check. 

This means that there's no way to ever not fail a fright check at least 16.2% of the time (unless you have Unfazeable; or 9.25% of the time with Rule of 15/Brave (GURPS Power Ups 2: Perks p. 13, GURPS Monster Hunters 1: Champions p. 25) no matter how many positive modifiers apply.

How to Bring Your Face to a Sword Fight

Parrying Unarmed Attacks GURPS Basic Set Campaigns p.  376 says:

Parrying Unarmed Attacks: If you successfully parry an unarmed attack (bite, punch, etc.) with a weapon, you may injure your attacker. Immediately roll against your skill with the weapon you used to parry. This roll is at -4 if your attacker used Judo or Karate. If you succeed, your parry struck the attacker’s limb squarely. He gets no defense roll against this! Roll damage normally. 

This rule has some problems. It's actually pretty vague about what kind of damage you do ("normal damage", duh) and it can result in some silly outcomes and degenerate tactics.

Disadvantage "Load"

GURPS Characters p. B11 suggests limiting disadvantages by total number of points in order to keep the game from becoming a "circus". This is at best a blunt instrument.

The Ultra Simplified GURPS Combat System You Probably Don't Know About

Are you a person who wishes there was a way to run combat in GURPS that was super simple? One even simpler than the Combat Lite chapter of GURPS Characters (pp, B324-328)? What if I told you this system exists in an often overlooked GURPS book and that even if you are aware of it, you might have missed that you could just use it as your only combat system?

Wealth in Glasstown

Working my way around wealth rules in GURPS was done with intent. I needed to work out how I wanted Wealth to matter in Glasstown (my in-development six-guns-and-sorcery megadungeon). 

Wealth and Money in GURPS: Bean-Counting vs Abstraction

The one part of character creation that I like the least, (and the one that I often see players forget they need to do) is buying starting equipment. I know that some people really do enjoy the fantasy shopping minigame, but I have always seen it as a necessary evil. Even after that is done, in play, characters often need to buy (or sell) things. Regardless of how you feel about it, role-playing games need rules for player character economics and GURPS is no exception.

A Possibly Nonsense But Playable Solution to The Crossbow Conundrum

So there's a problem with crossbows in GURPS. I go into it here. Essentially Rated ST has no limits, and nor does it change bow stats no matter how arbitrarily high it gets. This is despite the TL4 Steel Crossbows saying they exceed this nonexistent limit at the cost of halving ST for range and damage (which pretty clearly makes them useless).

Bugstiary Adventure Seeds: Maurakappi

Continuing the adventure seeds for The Bugstiary, (written by me and published by Gaming Ballistic LLC for the Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game) we have the ant-folk.