2025-08-16
DFRPG Arden Vul Session 23a: Gelatinous Cube and Slime Kraken
2025-08-09
DFRPG Arden Vul Session 22: The Oracle of Thoth and The Litany of Light
Date:
Weather:
Player Characters:
Vallium Halcyon, Archontean fighter (Greybrown)Ioannes Grammatikos Byzantios, Archontean cleric of Demma (Demented Avenger)Merenuithiel "Lacrymosa" Armaris, Elven mercenary archer (Archon Shiva)
Significant NPCs:
GM's Comments:
Achievements:
- The Rescuers: 1 XP for pulling Anaximander out of the Oracle of Thoth and bringing him back to town
- The Litany of Light: 1 XP for restoring the mirror and performing the full Litany
XP:
- Exploration: About 17 new locations, 1 XP
- Loot: A few magic items plus 5 of those valuable huge ancient platinum coins, 2 XP
- Achievements: 2 XP
- Total: 5 XP
Next week:
2025-08-03
How I'm dealing with friendly NPCs in DFRPG Arden Vul
Arden Vul is full of NPCs, some of them in town, some of them in the Halls. Some of those NPCs are actually adventurers who might be happy to visit the Halls. Some are friendly to the PCs, and might be happy to accompany them.
But I'm not generally letting the PCs bring NPC companions into the Halls with them, for meta reasons. My general rule is that I limit delves to 5 PCs, because each additional player or token slows everything down. NPCs don't slow things down quite as much as PCs do, because they don't add additional players, just additional tokens. But they still add significant overhead. I tolerate this for key PC powers that they paid points for -- the GOAT's summoned animals are annoying to manage, but he's a druid and summoned animals are a major part of a druid's powers so if I allow druids I pretty much have to allow summoned animals. But I'm not letting PCs buy the Ally advantage (which isn't in DFRPG, only GURPS, so it appears Kromm agrees with me), or pay hirelings to come into the dungeon with them.
So, basically, my rule is that if you rescue an NPC in the Halls, they may stick with the party until you get them back to town, and they may be your friend in town or even let you hire them in town to do non-dungeon jobs, but they're not coming back into the Halls with you. Because I don't want to deal with a party of 15 dragging the game to a crawl, making it less fun for everyone, and eventually killing the campaign. Of course like all rules there may be very specific exceptions -- if one particular NPC really wants to do one thing in the Halls, they may ask to come along for one targeted mission. (As an example, Thalia, the ranger the PCs rescued in Session 21, really wanted to kill the vile 4-armed baboon Umsko. But since Uvash already killed him, she no longer needs to go back to do that.)
Note that this kind of rule varies from campaign to campaign, and from game system to game system. If I only had 2 players, I would let them each bring an Ally, and probably have them run each other's Allies. If I were running a very lightweight system with no VTT maps, I could be freer with NPCs, as they would require less work to keep up with. So I'm not saying that GMs who allow tag-along NPCs are wrong, just that it's something to carefully consider rather than blindly allow.
2025-08-02
DFRPG Arden Vul Session 21: The Library of Thoth
Date:
Weather:
Player Characters:
Vael Sunshadow, Half-Elven mage (Kyle)Vallium Halcyon, Archontean fighter (Greybrown)Ioannes Grammatikos Byzantios, Archontean cleric of Demma (Demented Avenger)Sister Valya "Basilisk" Hushbreaker, Halfling mercenary monk (ArchonShiva)
Significant NPCs:
GM's Comments:
Achievements:
XP:
- Exploration: 5 new locations, good for 1 XP
- Loot: Isocritis's and Yamki's and Umsko's stuff. Not a huge amount, but enough for 1 XP
- Achievements: 1 XP
- Total: 3 XP
Next Week:
2025-07-31
How I Do Surprise, Initiative, and Turn Order in DFRPG
One of the DFRPG Arden Vul players asked how I do surprise and initiative. I think I do them pretty much by the rules, but then most GMs probably think that, and yet they still do slightly different things because it's impossible to write RPG rules that are perfect and complete. (This is the RPG version of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. If you can write perfectly clear rules for it, it's not complicated enough to count as an RPG.)
I use "Initiative" to mean the order in which combatants move in a role-playing game, and "Surprise" to indicate a special situation at the beginning of some RPG combats where some combatants don't get their normal actions until they recover. ("Turn order" is a synonym for "initiative.")
GURPS initiative is different from initiative in most other role-playing games. Because there are active defenses, everyone's turns overlap. Also, because all the turns overlap, there's a fixed turn order for the duration of a combat, rather than constant re-shuffling. Surprise means that some combatants suffer Mental Stun and lose their turns until they recover, then proceed normally after that. Dungeon Fantasy RPG slightly tweaks the basic GURPS surprise rules (see Exploits page 26). I follow the DFRPG rules, but there's a certain amount of GM judgment required.
The first thing to consider is surprise. There are three possibilities for a two-sided fight: nobody can be surprised, one side can be surprised, or both sides can be surprised.
Rule zero of surprise is that if there's no chance of surprise, you don't roll for it. If two groups approach each other across clear terrain in broad daylight, you're done.
When there is a chance of surprise, you have to think about whether only one side can be surprised, or both can. If two groups approach each other across clear terrain in pitch darkness, and one of those groups has Darkvision, they have a chance of surprise and their opponents do not. Life isn't fair. On the other hand, if two groups who've both been sneaky both turn a corner at the same time and end up meeting each other at close range, they both have a chance at surprise.
The rules say you can only achieve surprise if you're being sneaky (meaning you move at half speed), or you have some advantage that makes you sneaky by default (like Invisibility). If you're loud, brightly lit, and stinky, then you don't get to roll.
For a one-sided contest, you roll the sneaky side's worst Stealth versus the other side's best applicable detection roll: Per (a good default if you have no specialized senses or detection skills), Vision (assuming you have a chance to see your opponents), Hearing (assuming you have a chance to hear them), Smell (I don't allow this for humans unless the opponents are extra stinky, but something like a guard dog with a really good sense of smell could use this to detect invisible and silent foes), Observation (if you've trained it up higher than your base senses), whatever the GM agrees makes sense. If the sneaky side wins they get surprise, otherwise no surprise.
(Note that, for me, worst Stealth literally means the worst Stealth in the group. I don't use the "part of the problem or part of the solution" rule to let a mostly sneaky group ignore a non-sneaky member, unless they actually take appropriate action like having a quiet person sneak ahead while leaving the loud person behind. This means that every adventurer should have some points in Stealth, and every adventuring party should figure out how to get the least stealthy person in their group better at it.)
For a two-sided contest, it's a contest of each side's worst Per-based Stealth. This is a clever way to combine both Perception and Stealth into a single quick contest. Losing side gets surprised, and on a tie both sides are surprised. (I don't think I've ever seen mutual surprise in several years of running DFRPG, but it'll happen someday.)
Once you're done computing surprise, you mark everyone who was surprised as Mentally Stunned, and then you do the usual turn order. GURPS turn order is Basic Speed first, ties in Basic Speed broken by highest DX, and ties in both Basic Speed and DX broken by a die roll. I also let players freely move down (later) in order, but once they do so, they can't move back up, as that could potentially be exploited to get two turns in a row. (So, if your slower friend is in your way, you can either take a one-time Wait maneuver to Wait until your friend goes, or you can permanently move below your friend in turn order. The advantage of the latter is that only some maneuvers are valid after a Wait, while if you just delay your spot in the turn order you can take any maneuver.)
The basic effect of Mental Stun is that you Do Nothing on your turn except roll to recover from Mental Stun, and all your defenses are at -4 as long as you're stunned. So being surprised can get you killed. The roll to recover is an IQ roll, with +6 for Combat Reflexes, so a rule of thumb is that dumb combatants need Combat Reflexes. (Smart combatants might want it too, but they already spent all those points on IQ...)
With FoundryVTT keeping track, I'm happy to do individual initiative. Groups of identical monsters will all be clumped together in turn order anyway, since they have the same Basic Speed and DX. If a player controls multiple tokens and they're not clumped together and this bothers the player (because they prefer to move all their tokens together) or the GM (because the player loses focus when it's not their turn and this means getting their attention back more often), then a player can move all their tokens down in turn order next to their slowest token. But this is definitely a place where house rules are fine -- if you want to do side-based initiative, you can. You just have to decide whether the side with the fastest member goes first, or the side with the slowest member goes last.
I should also mention where new combatants slot in. Basically, if you magically summon something in the middle of a fight, I don't let it do anything immediately on the turn it appears, but it slots into its normal spot in the turn order the next turn. (Summoning sickness from Magic the Gathering in my GURPS? It's more likely than you think.) On the other hand, if something comes onto the battlemap from offscreen, it's probably in the middle of a Move maneuver in its first turn (though it could be Concentrate instead if teleportation is involved) and then can take any normal maneuver when its turn comes around again.
Finally, I do not modify turn order due to effects during a fight. If someone casts Great Haste on you, you get two turns, but they're right next to each other, not spread evenly across the turn order. (So as long as you know that nobody on the other side took a Wait maneuver, you can cheesily All-Out Attack on your first turn and then take a maneuver that allows a defense on your second turn.) If you get slowed and only get to move every other turn, you stay in the same place in the turn order, just with a Do Nothing every other time. If you drop your backpack or pick up a wounded companion and your encumbrance level changes, that effects your Move and Dodge, but you still stay in the same place in the turn order. The only things that modify turn order are Wait maneuvers (where you temporarily delay your turn until triggered, take your action immediately, and go back to your usual spot in the order), and voluntarily moving down in turn order (which is usually a once-per-combat thing to move after an ally.)
As an aside, I like the DFRPG surprise rules better than the GURPS Basic Set surprise rules, because they make "no surprise" more likely, while in the Basic version, if surprise is possible at all, you only get "no surprise" if the modified d6 rolls are exactly tied. (So, assuming reasonably close surprise modifiers, only about 1/6 of the time.) On the other hand, I like that the Basic rules give a reason to have a leader (many PC parties clearly do not) and for the leader to have Combat Reflexes and Tactics and high IQ. So maybe I'll write my own surprise rules someday that combine the things I like. But I'm avoiding house rules in Arden Vul, so using my interpretation of the DFRPG rules as written.
2025-07-27
DFRPG Arden Vul Session 20: The Outer Caverns of Set
Date:
Weather:
Player Characters:
Vael Sunshadow, Half-Elven mage (Kyle)Vallium Halcyon, Archontean fighter (Greybrown)Ioannes Grammatikos Byzantios, Archontean cleric of Demma (Demented Avenger)Ashe "GOAT" Maykum, Goblin mercenary druid (ArchonShiva)
Significant NPCs:
- A handsome man with a neat beard, with empty spherical eye sockets
- A stereotypically Archontean looking middle aged woman, with large empty disc-shaped eye sockets
- A monstrous-looking creature that resembled Gog, with an open oval-shaped mouth
- A caricature of a priest of Thoth, with small empty disc-shaped eye sockets
- A goblin with a large hole where its missing nose should be
GM's Comments:
Achievements:
XP:
- Exploration: 20 new locations, good for 2 XP.
- Loot: No really amazing items but a lot of stuff, 2 XP.
- Achievements: 0
- Total: 4 XP
Next week:
- Surface Ruins of Arden Vul
- Basement (they think they have probably fully explored this)
- Well of Light
- Howling Caves
- Halls of Thoth
- Great Cavern
- Caves presumably leading to the Forum of Set
- Gog's Cave
- Bottom of Privy Shaft
- Caves behind the waterfall
2025-07-19
DFRPG Arden Vul Session 19: The Pool of Donkey Ears
Date:
Weather:
Player Characters:
Vael Sunshadow, Half-Elven mage (Kyle)Vallium Halcyon, Archontean fighter (Greybrown)Ethereum "Coinbase" Thuringwador, Elf Illusionist (Mercenary) (Archon Shiva)
Significant NPCs:
GM's Notes:
Achievements:
XP:
- Exploration: 9 new locations, 1 XP
- Loot: Some coins and gems and jewels and gold and silver. A few minor magic items. The most valuable thing by far was the fine mail armor that Michael dragged up from beneath the privy. 2 XP
- Achievements: None
- Total: 3 XP each. Vael also got 1 extra HP for the statue fight.
Next Week:
Maybe they'll keep exploring this level and see if anyone else can get donkey ears. Maybe they'll go back up to the baboon level and look for the Library of Thoth. Maybe they'll go back down the privy. I have no real idea at this point, and I suspect the players don't either.
DFRPG Arden Vul Session 23a: Gelatinous Cube and Slime Kraken
Date: Basilsday, 16th of Gerakios, 2993 AE Weather: Hot, dry Player Characters: Vael Sunshadow, Half-Elven mage (Kyle) Vallium Halcyon, ...
-
Date : Demmasday, 2nd of Ligarios and Demmasday, 9th of Legarios, 2993 AEP Weather : Cool, cloudy Player Characters: Ioannes Grammatikos Byz...
-
I've been going back and forth on which game to run next, and a couple of months ago I decided to try another fantasy megadungeon. So I...
-
I've been running RPGs for decades, so I have Habits and Tendencies and Opinions. To some extent GMs attract and keep players who like ...