RPG Party Disaster Recovery Planning

In the last session of DFRPG Arden Vul, the Right for Riches company came pretty close to a total party kill.  (It would not have been the whole company, as Vael wasn't there.  But both Vallium and Uvash were out of the fight and at the mercy of undead, in a no-mana zone.)

Since then, the players have been reviewing the tactics that almost led to their defeat.  But they're also making plans for party continuity if they do get wiped out.

The Right for Riches company has three assets that many less experienced adventuring parties do not: money, allies, and communications.  So these ideas won't work for every group, but some of them might.

Money is great because it pays for things like Resurrection spells and bounties to recover your body.  If you have enough money, someone will probably be motivated by it.  Crucially, the money has to actually be available; if it's all on your body, and nobody knows where your body is, then it's not so useful.  Gosterwick has pretty solid banking services from three different merchant Factors, and each member of the Right for Riches company has substantial deposits at them, so they have this covered.

Money isn't enough though, as someone needs to coordinate paying it out.  That's where non-adventuring allies come in.  Right for Riches have three key allies to help with disaster recovery.  The first is Akla-Chah, the Rudishva AI in the Beacon, with whom they can communicate with their Rudishva Command Bracelet.  As long as they remember to call her often enough, she knows where a search should begin.  The second is Barnaby Goodbarrel, their lawyer in Gosterwick, who can write binding legal documents such as wills and contracts.  The third is Basil, their employee, who can travel between the Beacon and Gosterwick and coordinate rescue or recovery efforts.

Not every group has the ability to frequently communicate back to base, but next best is just telling someone your planned route before you leave, and then sticking to the plan as closely as possible.  Right for Riches designs a plan for every delve, and sharing it with Akla-Chah and Basil gives them a starting point for a search, even if they forget to call with updates.

While rescue is ideal and resurrection is second best, sometimes really bad things happen and nobody can ever find the bodies.  At that point you need a succession plan.  Right for Riches has a couple of levels of that.  First, the company is legally incorporated in Gosterwick and can own assets, so much of the group's property belongs to the company rather than its members, so if the party is wiped out, at least the property they own back at the Beacon still belongs to the company.  Second, they have a plan to allow Basil and Barnaby to hire new adventurers to reform the company if the current members are missing long enough.

Finally, for personal property, there are wills.  Does your personally owned stuff pass out of the game, or to your close friend or relative who just happens to be your next PC?  So far Uvash is the only PC with a designated successor, his son.

Ultimately this is all a meta play.  The GM has to decide what's too cheesy to allow.  But Right for Riches are at least making an attempt to spin things so that, if they get wiped out, their replacement PCs get to keep some of their stuff.  We'll see how it plays out, if things ever reach that point.

DFRPG Arden Vul: Start of 2994 Summary Post

The PCs in DFRPG Arden Vul have survived to the start of the year 2994 AEP, so it's time for another campaign summary.

• Number of sessions: 46
• Number of weeks with no session: 2
• Number of distinct delves: 41
• Number of PCs: 11
• Current Right for Riches Company Members: 4
• Former Right for Riches Company Members: 1
• Grudge Brigade Mercenaries: 6
• Number of PCs killed: 1
• Number of PCs resurrected: 1
• Number of PCs given donkey ears: 1
• Highest PC Point Total: 259 (Ioannes and Vallium)
• Entrances to the Halls of Arden Vul found and used: 12
• Pyramid of Thoth, statue arms forward, stairs to Glory of Thoth
• Well of Light
• Over 200' down, requires magical flight or a lot of rope
• Pyramid of Thoth, statue arms up, stairs to pit to scorpion teleporter
• Teleported to Great Hall
• Teleported to Gog's Cave
• Teleported to Ruby Chair
• Beastman secret entrance from Long Stair to Great Cavern
• Cistern leading to tunnels to Howling Caves
• Tunnel plugged using Shape Earth, may no longer be usable
• Underwater tunnels behind waterfall plunge pool
• Found using Water Vision spell
• May require super-human swimming or water breathing to survive
• Ruined basement to hidden staircase northwest of Glory of Thoth
• Found by Dalton's Darlings, secret shared by Jost
• Basket up the Cliff Face west of the Swift River to the Forum of Set
• Chimney from Arden Vul ruins to Well of Light level
• Cliff Face entry to Lesser Baboon Caves
• Stairs from warehouse to behind Pit of Fire northeast of Glory of Thoth
• Hidden Stairs to Beacon to Rudishva Teleporters
• Rudishva Secure Treasury
• Rudishva Bastion
• Arden Vul Iconic Locations found: 13
• The Pyramid of Thoth
• The Glory of Thoth
• The Well of Light
• The Great Hall
• The Great Cavern
• The Great Chasm
• The Howling Caves
• The Archon's Palace of Arden Vul
• The Court of the Goblin King
• The Forum of Set
• The Sundered Span (a.k.a. The Imperial Span)
• The Arena
• The Great Cavern at the Base of the Great Chasm
• NPCs rescued from the Halls: 24
• Klisko
• Versania
• Samantha the Red
• Jost
• Tresti
• Susarra
• Gribble
• Eadgithu
• Geleg
• Grist
• Aelfred
• Ragnar
• Basil
• Bobo
• Bifki
• Harold
• Hjalti
• Kiglon
• Anaximander
• Egrk
• Ketil
• Marco
• Thalia
• Burris
• NPCs who ran off and got killed while being rescued from the Halls: 1
• Gwelf
• Number of distinct teleportation methods used: 7
• Blink spell
• Scorpion teleporter, in the Pyramid of Thoth
• Pyramids of Venerable Age, near Glory of Thoth and Well of Light
• Blue Pillar on Set level
• Rugs of Instant Access 
• Portals between Tikun Thane's room and the Tower of the Ape
• Rudishva Teleportation Network
• Number of teleportation methods discovered but not used: 2
• Thothian Teleportation Rings
• Pit of Fire
• Number of Levels of The Halls Visited: 9
• Number of Sub-Levels of the Halls Visited: 6
• Number of Mapped Areas outside the Halls Visited: 6

Escalating Cost of Living for PCs in Dungeon Fantasy RPG

In the full GURPS rules, your Cost of Living scales with Tech Level and Status.  Dungeon Fantasy RPG doesn't really have Tech Level (it's all Tech Level: Olden Days a.k.a. Tech Level 3 plus whatever your GM thinks is cool).  It doesn't really have Status either.  (Obviously the king has higher status than a commoner, but it's all abstract, not a stat on your sheet.)  So does a PC's Cost of Living stay $150/week forever?

Well, it can if they really want it to.  The Miserliness [-10] disadvantage is available, if you want to play Warren Buffet, a multibillionaire who still lives in a regular house in Omaha and drives an Oldsmobuick.  Most rich people want to spend at least some of that money on fun stuff though.  So in addition to the useful things like magic armor and healing potions, it's reasonable to spend money on comfort items like a house or a horse or a servant.  Or security items like banks and guards.

In DFRPG Arden Vul, the town of Gosterwick has two full-service inns, the middle-class Yellow Cloak Inn and the fancy Stunned Acolyte Inn.  I ruled that the standard PC Cost of Living gets you a shared room (two or three PCs to a room) at the Yellow Cloak Inn and three meals per day in the common dining room.  If you want to eat most of your meals in the upper class dining room, or have a single room or a suite, cost of living goes up.  If you want to stay at the Stunned Acolyte, it goes up more.  If you want the Archon's Suite at the Stunned Acolyte, you can spend a ton.

There's another inn within the ruins of Arden Vul itself, the Inn of the Broken Head.  It's not as nice as the Yellow Cloak, let alone the Stunned Acolyte, but its location makes everything more expensive.  (All the supplies need to be brought up the Long Stair via mule train, with the teamsters paid hazard pay because of the dragon in the area.)  So if a PC wanted to live there full time, they'd pay full cost of living to sleep in a shared bunkroom with strangers, or double for a private room (if one were even available).

Ioannes got himself in trouble with the Yellow Cloak Inn for a critical failure making Continual Light stones, that ended up accidentally casting Continual Darkness on his bedding and freaking out a maid.  So he and Vael decided to move to an apartment at the Arcane Practitioners Club, which explicitly allows spellcasting.  And later, the other PCs decided to join them there.  This initially only cost the regular cost of living, plus the reasonable APC membership fee ($13 per week each).  However, at some point Lyssandra and Pelteon decided that having lower-class adventurer tenants was too annoying, as they did things like drag monster corpses through the hallways.  So they decided to renovate their eight small apartments into four double-sized luxury apartments and charge double the rent.  With only four apartments available, they planned to offer their four least annoying tenants (not the PCs) the first opportunity to lease one -- but Vael subverted that strategy by giving Lyssandra a valuable magic item in exchange for a two-year lease on all four apartments.  So now she's stuck with monster-corpse-hoarding assassin-attracting fireball-trap-owning tenants for a while longer, and has to keep putting up passive-aggressive signs about New Club Rules every time they do something she didn't think she needed to put in the rules before.  But they're paying double their previous cost of living.

In addition to increasing the cost of necessities, players can decide they have more things they want to buy.  At some point the PCs bought a mule to help haul things to and from Arden Vul.  I think they only actually used the mule two or three times, but it cost a couple thousand silver up front, and it costs $30 per week to board and feed at Sakeon's Horse Market.  Recently they hired an employee, Basil, to help take care of their secret base in the Beacon and the two unusual people (a holographic projection of an alien AI psychologist, and an animated statue head of a Thothian librarian) who live there.  Basil works pretty cheap, only $100 per week, but they also pay $75 per week for his room and board.  And another $100 per week to keep food stocked in the Beacon.  The burn rate keeps slowly rising.  And then there's the eccentric stuff, like Ioannes paying Fael the druid $100/week for a Beast Speech spell so he can not only talk to his cat (that's free), but get answers back.

Of course, even relatively rich PCs can't always afford everything they want.  Uvash wanted to build his own church of Zodarrim in Gosterwick, but the price was beyond his current level of funds, so that might have to wait a while.  Maybe if they defeat a dragon and take its hoard...

Limited Point Consolidation House Rule

In DF Whiterock, I allowed fairly unlimited point consolidation.  For example, I let a PC reduce 10 DX skills from [2] to [1] points each, plus pay 10 more points, for a point of DX [20].  As long as nothing went down.  See https://dfwhiterock.blogspot.com/2018/09/update-on-trading-in-house-rule.html

I think that was a bit too good.  So in DFRPG Arden Vul, I have restricted this further.  I'm still allowing buying attributes piecemeal: you can trade in 1 HP [2] and 1 point of Striking ST [5] along with 3 points to get a full point of ST [10].  And I'm obviously still allowing leveling up leveled advantages: obviously you can trade Fit [5] plus 10 points for Very Fit [15].  (I think the latter is RAW, not even a house rule.)  But I'm not allowing taking points out of skills (including spells) to bump attributes anymore.

(The fine print: you can only trade in secondary attributes that were bought independently; you can't do this with stuff from a racial template.  If you're a dwarf and you got Lifting ST 2 [6] as part of your dwarf template, you always have to keep that Lifting ST 2.  You can't just trade it in when you raise your ST.)

My justification for not allowing it for skills is that skills aren't always used against their base attribute.  For example, Traps is listed as an IQ-based skill, but it's very often used with Per (for finding traps) or DX (to disarm traps) instead.  So when you take points out of a skill and put them in the controlling attribute, it gets worse when you use it with another attribute, which breaks the "nothing gets worse" goal of the house rule.

I see the counter-argument for spells: they're only used against IQ+Magery (or Power Investiture or Bardic Talent), so taking points out of spells to boost IQ or Magery (etc.) should be fine.  I see the point, but I reject it for two reasons.  One, I want simple house rules, not complicated ones full of exceptions.  Two, spellcasters are already too good, so they don't deserve house rules to make them even better.

Campaign-Changing Magic Items

The PCs in DFRPG Arden Vul have found a few unexpectedly powerful magic items that have significantly changed the campaign.  If I had written Arden Vul, I would not have put any items that powerful that close to the surface.  As a teenager I read all the Gygaxian advice from the 1970s Dragon magazines about avoiding Monty Haulism, because once power spirals out of control the campaign is doomed, and I've tried to be cautious about giving out too many powerful items ever since.  But maybe it's different for items that aren't the +5 Weapon of Effortless Killing or the +5 Armor of Completely Ignoring Danger.  Maybe Richard Barton knew what he was doing.

Larel's Sack

Larel's Sack is a Bag of Holding.  Not even a particularly big Bag of Holding.  It can also create small items, with limitations.  (Though my PCs haven't really used that power much; they just use it as a Bag of Holding.)  And they found another, larger, Bag of Holding later, so Larel's Sack doesn't feel that powerful anymore.  I think the first method PCs find to significantly increase carrying capacity is a big deal (as it means they can get heavy treasure out of the dungeon, which increases their loot and thus their XP if you give XP for loot), but additional ways of carrying more stuff give diminishing returns, once you can usually carry all you find.

Larel's Cloak

Larel's Cloak gives Invisibility, which is either amazing or not a big deal, depending on whether you already have a mage who can reliably and repeatedly cast Invisibility.  It also gives reaction bonuses, which is either amazing or not a big deal depending on how often NPCs are actually making reaction rolls.  If the GM makes reaction rolls in secret then players might underestimate the value of reaction bonuses, since they can never be sure if that NPC was always going to be friendly, or if their reaction bonus saved them from a fight.  On the other hand, if the GM mostly determines NPC reactions by fiat, maybe the bonuses don't help much.  (You can't use random reactions for every single NPC, or the beautiful nymph face character just charms her way past every challenge and the other PCs are just there to carry the gifts from her adoring fans.)

Larel's Pin

Larel's Pin is a really good magic stiletto.  It has bonuses to skill and damage, and a chance to slow opponents it hits.  In games where every weapon is about the same, that's a really good weapon.  In games like GURPS where different types of weapons use different skills and do different amounts of damage, knives aren't great.  They don't completely suck, because you can use them in close combat, and you can fast draw them, and you can hide them.  But if nobody puts points in Knife skill because a knife isn't a good a general-purpose weapon as a sword or axe or spear, then nobody's going to get that excited about a magic knife.  I was kind of surprised that my PCs actually chose to sell it, but it was worth a lot of money and they wanted to curry favor with Wicktrimmer, one of the more connected and powerful NPCs in Gosterwick.

Rugs of Instant Access

Teleportation is especially called out as a problem in DFRPG, and the Teleport spell from GURPS Magic is not in the DFRPG spell list.  (There's an advantage in one of the Dungeon Fantasy books to get around this if the GM wants, but it's 100 points, not 1 point [once you have the prerequisites] like most spells, so it's not common.)  The Rugs are a super powerful item because they allow teleportation.  They are also portable, and seem to be reliable.  A portable, reliable teleporter is an extremely valuable thing.  But they have limits.  You can only teleport from one Rug to the other Rug, so you need to get them both in place first.  So you can use them to go between two fixed guarded points, but how many PCs have two fixed guarded points?  If you want to go from one fixed guarded point to random places, someone has to carry the other Rug there first.  If you want to use the Rugs to evacuate the whole party, you're leaving a Rug behind with whatever made you run away, and you might not get it back.  So I think the Rugs are amazing most of the time, but they have drawbacks.  Probably the best kind of magic item.  They change the campaign, but make the players make difficult choices.  Do you sell it to an NPC, do you use it for your commute, or do you use it for tactical movement?  So far the Right for Riches company has gone with tactical movement.

Does Goblintown Count as Town?

The Right for Riches company has now visited Goblintown twice, and they are currently friendly with King Weskenim and the goblins.  At the end of the last session, one of the players asked me if Goblintown counts as "Town".  I thought for a second, and said "not yet."

What is Town?  Town is a place where you can safely rest for a week between delves (so no significant risk of dangerous random encounters).  There are other things PCs want in a Town (like stores and healers and trainers), but I think safety and a place to rest are the absolute bare minimum.

Goblintown seems pretty safe and friendly, but the PCs haven't fully explored it yet, so they can't be sure it's safe, so it's not considered Town yet.  Also, they haven't found a place in Goblintown where they can sleep yet, so even if it were safe, it wouldn't be appropriate for a whole week of downtime, just for a short visit.

On a meta level, for a game where not all the players are available every session and some players control multiple PCs, another purpose for Town is to have a way to swap out PCs between sessions.  For that purpose, you want there to either be exactly one Town where all the PCs stay between sessions, or multiple Towns with totally safe travel between them, so you can handwave the logistics.  The path between Gosterwick and Goblintown currently requires traversing some dangerous wilderness and dungeon, so even if Goblintown itself counted as Town, having some of the PCs in Gosterwick and others in Goblintown would be a bit of an issue.

So what would the PCs have to do to make Goblintown count as town?  First they'd have to explore it fully enough to be sure that it didn't contain hostile random encounters.  Second they'd need to find a place to sleep.  Third, they'd either have to gather all the PCs together in Goblintown, or find a safe way to travel back and forth to Gosterwick.  If they achieve all three of those goals, then Goblintown becomes Town, just like Gosterwick, but with a shorter commute to the rest of the dungeon.

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.

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.

DFRPG Arden Vul: Mid-2993 Summary

It's the end of Jelenios, halfway through the year 2993 AEP, so it's time for a quick summary of the state of the DFRPG Arden Vul campaign.

Number of sessions: 16

Number of players: 8

Number of PCs: 10

• Cheese and Crackers / Right for Riches / Left for Loot members: 5
• Grudge Brigade mercenaries: 5

Number of PCs killed: 0 (!)

Highest PC point total: 179 (Ioannes)

Entrances to the Halls of Arden Vul found and used: 7

• Pyramid of Thoth, statue arms forward, stairs to Glory of Thoth
• Plumthorn's halflings may no longer allow entry
• Well of Light
• Over 200' down, requires magical flight or a lot of rope
• Pyramid of Thoth, statue arms up, stairs to pit to Scorpion teleporter
• Teleported to Great Hall
• Teleported to Gog's Cave
• Teleported to Ruby Chair
• Beastman secret entrance from Long Stair to Great Cavern
• Cistern leading to tunnels to Howling Caves
• Tunnel plugged using Shape Earth, may no longer be usable
• Underwater tunnels behind waterfall plunge pool
• Found using Water Vision spell
• May require super-human swimming or water breathing to survive
• Ruined basement to hidden staircase northwest of Glory of Thoth
• Found by Dalton's Darlings, secret shared by Jost

Entrances to Halls of Arden Vul rumored but not yet explored: 1

• Basket up the Cliff Face west of the Swift River to the Forum of Set

Arden Vul Iconic Locations found: 8

• The Pyramid of Thoth
• The Glory of Thoth
• The Well of Light
• The Great Hall
• The Great Cavern
• The Great Chasm
• The Howling Caves
• The Archon's Palace of Arden Vul

NPCs Rescued from the Halls: 5

• Klisko
• Versania
• Samantha the Red
• Jost
• Tresti

NPCs Who Mysteriously Disappeared While Being Rescued from the Halls: 1

• Gwelf

Largest Enemy Killed:

• Giant Snapping Turtle (SM +4)

Largest Enemy Appeased:

• Craastonistorex, Green Dragon (SM +5)

Smallest Enemy Killed:

• Bees (SM -10)

Smallest Enemy Appeased:

• Plumthorn's Halflings (SM -2)

New Loot XP thresholds for DFRPG Arden Vul

When I agreed to change loot XP to be based on gross loot rather than net loot after expenses, I told the players that the amount of loot they would need would go up, but didn't give them exact numbers because I was still fiddling with the formula.  Originally I had a table with values that went up every 50 character points, but that was gross -- I'd really prefer a continuous equation to a table.  Preferably a short, simple equation that I could remember.  Anyway, here's what I came up with.

Minimum loot to get 1 loot XP:

min(cost_of_living, current_character_points ^ 2 * $0.01)

The cost of living term is there for very low point PCs.  Even if you only have 50 points, if you don't make enough on a delve to pay your cost of living for the next week ($150 by default in the DFRPG rules, more if you have certain disadvantages that require spending more), you're going to need to get a job to pay the rent, so you're clearly not making it as an adventurer yet.

The other term is what actually matters for my current PCs.  If you have 160 points, square that to get 25600, then multiply that by $0.01 to get $256.

Then earning 2 loot XP takes 10 times the amount you need for 1 XP.  So if $256 gets you 1 XP, $2560 gets you 2 XP.

A quick table of how much you need at a few round numbers, assuming a cost of living of $150/week:

Points	1 XP	2 XP
50	150	1500
100	150	1500
125	156	1560
150	225	2250
200	400	4000
250	625	6250
300	900	9000
350	1225	12250
400	1600	16000
450	2025	20250
500	2500	25000

(Note that the table is just giving some examples; I actually use the equation.)

What counts as loot?  These rules are the same as I was using before, except I'm not subtracting off expenses anymore.

Any negotiable and identified coins and gems that you found for the first time on a recent adventure are counted at full value as soon as you bring them back to town; you don't actually have to exchange or spend them.  (So really the only way you don't get full value for coins and gems is if you lose them before you get them to town, or you mis-identify the value of a gem and sell a $5000 diamond as a $50 cubic zirconium.  Note that being tricked in the other direction won't generate extra XP; the power of positive thinking only goes so far.  But feel free to take a Delusion that you have more points than you really do.)

(The "first time" rule is there to keep PCs who find a gigantic hoard from calculating exactly how much of it they need for 2 XP, only taking that portion of it back to town, hiding the rest, and then returning to the hoard again and again to grab loot in carefully measured 2 XP chunks.  Would Conan milk the system like that?  I don't think so.)

Other valuable items (jewelry, weapons, bottles of wine, scrolls, padlocks taken from chests, ...) generate XP when you sell them and turn them into cash.  If you keep them for use, no XP.  Again, there's a line there.  If you only use them on the way back to town, or fiddle with items to help identify them, that's totally fine: the GM will give you full XP when you sell them.  If you use them on future delves and sell them when you find better replacements, sorry, you don't get XP for the sale value.  Basically, if you've used an item enough that you a reasonable person would no longer be able to return it to a store without feeling bad, it's not worth XP anymore when you sell it.

PCs with average Wealth typically get 40% of new cost as sale value on most items, so the Wealth advantage, which increases the sale value, indirectly helps you earn XP.  Of course it also costs points, so the breakeven point where the advantage pays for itself might be far in the future.  What's really good is convincing one of your friends to buy Very Wealthy and sell your stuff for you.  They'll probably want a cut of the extra value they generate, though.

What's the intent of this rule?  The "gamist" intent is that we're simulating the way the amount of XP needed to go up a level increased at higher levels in D&D.  Because there are no levels in GURPS, we can't have increasing costs to go up a level, so instead we make it harder to earn each XP as PCs get more powerful.  The "motivational" intent is to give PCs a reason to keep looking for bigger and better treasures even if they have enough money to buy whatever they can find for sale in the Gosterwick area.  "Now that the castle is paid off, I'm thinking of going part-time" is totally reasonable, but probably not something Conan would say.

First Deliberate House Rule Change in DFRPG Arden Vul: XP Now Based on Gross Loot

I'm trying hard to keep rules consistent across this campaign.  I've found that players hate it when the GM changes things in the middle of the game.  Except maybe if they asked for the change and it's clearly in their favor.

In this case, I'm not sure if it's actually in their favor, but they specifically asked for it, and voted 5-0 for it.  (We currently have 6 players; 1 hasn't voted yet, but 5 is a clear majority.)

The previous rule was that loot XP were based on net profit during the delve.  If you brought $3000 of loot (coins, gems, plus anything else you immediately sold and turned into coins or gems) back to town, but used $500 of potions and rations and arrows during the delve, you got credit for a net profit of $2500, $3000 income minus $500 expenses.  Several players really hated this because it made them not want to ever use any consumable items because that might cost them XP.  (It probably wouldn't, but it could if the expenses pushed them right below a breakpoint, and they wouldn't know for sure until the end of the delve when we ran the totals, by which time it was too late to undrink those potions.)

The change is that now loot XP is based on gross loot found, brought back to town, and turned to coins and gems.  Expenses no longer matter for XP.  If you burn $5000 of potions and scrolls to find $1000 of loot, that's fine, you still get credit for $1000 of loot.  (Of course if you do that too many times you'll be broke, but that's a separate problem.  You may have 99 problems but loot XP won't be one.)

Of course there's no such thing as a free lunch.  The tradeoff is that I'm going to raise the thresholds needed to get 1 XP (a reasonably rich delve) and 2 XP (a great haul), now that they are based on gross rather than net loot.  But the tracking and calculations will be simpler and players will feel more free to consume their consumables.

My Megadungeon Conversion and Prep Sequence

So you've got a big megadungeon for D&D and you want to run it in GURPS.  The adventure only has GM maps available in black-and-white (or even old-school anti-1970s-photocopier blue-and-white), and you want player-friendly full-color detailed maps in your VTT.  How do you get there?

The first step is to read the whole adventure before making the final decision to run it.  You don't want to start running the first level of the adventure because it started well, without knowing that level seven isn't finished or sucks and then start changing everything at the last minute once you realize you're in a corner.  That way lies Game of Thrones Season 7.  Converting a good adventure is much easier than finishing an unfinished adventure or fully rewriting a bad adventure, so make sure you like the whole adventure (or at least 95% of it with a concrete plan for how to fix the last 5%) before you start running it.  It's well worth a bit of reading to avoid starting something you won't want to finish.

The next part is going back to the start and figuring out the basic challenges at the start of the adventure.  What is the entry point, or in the case of a megadungeon with multiple entrances, what are the most likely initial entry points?  How hard are the challenges there?  Are there any likely first-session TPKs?  If so are you okay with that, or do you want to insert some hard or soft barriers to prevent them, so you don't lose your players before they get invested?  Hard barriers would be something like an unpickable locked door between the PCs and the Totally Out of Depth Boss Monster, where the key is a couple of levels down guarded by a Less Unfair Boss Monster.  Soft barriers would be direct warnings or fuzzier rumors that a certain area is really dangerous; PCs can still go there and get killed if they want, but they can't are slightly less likely to blame the GM.

Once you know how hard the start of the adventure is, you can figure out about how many PCs you want and their rough starting power level.  You need to know this before you start recruiting players if you don't already have them; some spoiled power gamers will want to skip any game where they don't get to start as a demigod, while some old-school hardcore types will dismiss any game where their PCs start already knowing how to walk as too easy for them.  The point isn't to judge anyone's preferred style of play; it's to honestly communicate so that you get players who want to play the same kind of game you want to run, so everyone is more likely to have fun and stick around.  You also kind of need to know this before you start converting the first level of the adventure, so you know where to set challenges.  For example, if you have a D&D module where the adversaries on level 1 are mostly small groups of orcs with 1 hit die, designed to be a reasonable challenge for level 1 D&D PCs, then if you're starting with 125-point GURPS characters, maybe those goblins should have weapon skills in the range of 12, damage low enough that they're unlikely to down a well-armored warrior with a single hit but high enough that the squishy mage feels vulnerable, damage resistance somewhere around 2, maybe some sub-optimal weapon choices like unbalanced knobbed clubs and no shields instead of harder ones like broadsword and shield, and use mook rules so they go down or run away after one solid hit rather than fighting forever like horror movie boss monsters.

Then I think you want to fully convert enough of the dungeon for the first few sessions.  You don't need to convert a whole 15-level megadungeon before you start running it; if you or your players don't love it and you quit a month in, you don't want to have spent months of prep time.  But you want to be far enough ahead of your players that there's no significant chance of them hitting a totally unprepped area.  I think doing 2 or 3 levels is enough to start, depending on how big the levels are, how many accessible entrances there are, how long your play sessions are, and (if you know your players) how likely your players are to crash dive versus make sure the current level is pretty clear before going deeper.

What comes first, the maps or the room descriptions?  Up to you.  You already have both the maps and room descriptions from the original adventure, so you have a place to stand either way.  My advice would be to do one at a time though, as switching modes between editing maps and editing text has a cost.

My choice is to first look for nice VTT maps that other GMs have made available.  If you run a very popular old adventure like Keep on the Borderlands or Ravenloft, they will definitely be out there.  (But it will be harder to find players who aren't already familiar with the adventure.)  If you run something newer or more obscure, they may or may not be.  Also, it's common for GMs to start running a megadungeon and not finish it, so you'll find a lot more level 1 maps than level 15 maps.  Once you find or make map images, keep in mind that you might also need to make time for manually drawing line-of-sight-blocking walls, and adding dungeon dressing, and testing your maps with an NPC token to verify that they really can fit through the narrow passages and the secret doors aren't too obvious.

As far as converting the room descriptions, I see three major phases.  I don't need to convert plain text, as text is universal across game systems.  But I need to convert monsters, and treasure, and ability/skill checks.  I find the skill checks the easiest to convert, so I do those first.  Need to roll 4d6 under DEX to make this climb?  I'll call that a straight Climbing roll (which defaults to DX-5) in my GURPS conversion.  Lifting the lid off this sarcophagus needs a Bend Bars check?  I'll call that a ST-6 check and say there's enough room for up to 2 PCs to participate.  Maybe give a bonus if they use a lever or something.  I don't need to anticipate everything players might do, just give a starting point for the challenge level, so when they do something unexpected my level of needed in-game improv is something like "I'll call that a +3 bonus" rather than having to rethink the whole framework.

Monster conversions basically fall into two buckets: easy and hard.  The easy ones are the ones that someone has already converted.  If there's a common monster like a goblin, there are probably already 7 GURPS versions of it, so I pick one.  I check my piles of official GURPS books, Gaming Ballistic's Nordlond bestiary, the GURPS wiki, Enraged Eggplant's blog, do a web search for "GURPS monstername" in case someone else has it on their blog or it shows up in a forum post, etc.  I might tweak it a bit, then I'm done.  If it's a monster that I can't find an existing conversion for, because it's obscure or sometimes only found in this one adventure, I do it myself, and that's 30 minutes of my life gone.  (More if it's a really complicated monster.)

Treasure conversions also come in two kinds, easy and hard.  For really basic stuff like coins I make up a formula and stick to it.  First I read enough of the adventure to see how generous or stingy it is with treasure, then I make something up like 1 gold piece in the adventure means $1 or $5 or $0.1 or whatever in GURPS dollars, then I can translate the total value back into flavorful fantasy coins and gems.  One caveat here is that it's easier to add more treasure later than to take away treasure you have given, so err on the side of less generous to start and then become more generous if it becomes clear you need to.  Stuff like gems and jewelry is about as easy as coins.  The hard stuff is magic items.  Some of the simpler ones are formulaic, like you might say that a D&D +1 longsword becomes a fine, balanced GURPS broadsword.  But if you have to convert something like a Rod of Lordly Might that has like 7 different powers, it can be tedious.  Note that if something is too annoying, you can just substitute something else.  Your players won't know, and as long as the substitute item is something they like, they won't care.  D&D modules tend to be full of scrolls and spellbooks, which are important in a Vancian system, but not so much in a point-based mana point system, unless they contain secret spells that are otherwise hard to learn.

The other thing to think about is the starting town or towns.  Is town a safe zone or part of the adventure?  What goods and services are available there?  What is in ample supply, what requires an availability roll, and what requires a trip somewhere else?  It makes sense to detail town a bit before starting, as your players might want to take the location in mind before making their PCs.  ("The only temple in town is to Mitra?  What a great coincidence that my PC is a devout, consistently-tithing follower of Mitra!")  I don't think a mostly-safe town typically requires a lot of game mechanic conversions, though I personally convert things like "5% chance of a minor magic item appearing in the market" to "minor magic item appears in the market on 4-" just to use fewer kinds of dice and simplify my VTT macros.

My final conversion tip is the TODO note.  If there's something that's really annoying to convert and you just don't feel like it today, leave a TODO note in your conversion and move on to the next thing.  When you finish your first pass at converting the level, search for TODO and maybe go back and do any that seem important, and leave the others for later.  The point is that you don't have to do everything in order, but you do want to remind yourself if you skipped something so it doesn't surprise you in play.

Once you've got enough of the adventure converted to start playing it, you have to make the decision to actually start.  It's tempting to say "one more level to be safe", and if you enjoy prepping more than playing that's fine, but if you don't it could be painful to prep more than you end up using, so try to find that balance between fear of your players overtaking your prep and fear leaving prep unused.

Once you actually announce the game and start recruiting players, keep in mind that much of the time you previously spent prepping the dungeon will instead go to talking to prospective players, introducing new players to each other, helping players build their PCs, etc.  I find this stage the most difficult part of the process of running a campaign.  When you're just prepping you're just prepping and it's just you and nobody else cares so your decisions have no real impact (yet), and once you get into the swing of a campaign it gains its own momentum and if it's going well the players help you keep it going, but the first time you post in some Looking for Players forum looking for the right 5 players and not being sure if you'll get zero or 50 is a bit tough.

The first few weeks of a new campaign are pretty busy dealing with new players and new PCs and (maybe for some players) new rules, so you might not have much time for dungeon prep.  This is why it's important to prep ahead enough to give yourself some runway.  At some point things calm down: the PCs (or maybe just some of them) survive their first few delves, the players (or maybe just some of them) like the game enough to keep playing, the GM handles things well enough to keep running it, the new players get to know each other and start helping each other so the GM doesn't have to do everything, and you start a regular loop.  For me, running a weekly game, it looks like this:

• Friday: game night.  Send reminders ("Game tonight at 8, get me your updated character sheets by 7 if you want the updates in effect for this session"), do last-minute review of the part of the adventure they're most likely to visit, actually run the game.
• Saturday: Post-game writing.  Write a recap, sum up all the loot found, award XP.  See if any players have immediate responses like "we need to find a wizard we can pay to identify that sword" or "we're definitely going after the lizardmen next week" that can give clues on what to prep next, and add notes to the todo list.
• Sunday: Short-term prep.  Go back through the last session's log and mark dead monsters as dead and taken treasure as gone in your conversion notes; you remember well enough now that you don't think you need to, but you probably won't remember so well when your PCs come back to this level in 6 months.  Resolve any town stuff that can be resolved out-of-game.  Make any short-term changes in the areas of the dungeon affected by the PCs' recent actions.  (Do the ogres put new guards in the upper guard post to replace the ones that got ganked?  Do the oozes to the west take advantage of the portcullis the PCs left open to add themselves to the random encounter table for the east?  Do we need a couple of new rumors to replace some that got used?)  
• Monday: Announce the next session and ask the players who will be available for it, to see if you have a quorum and help you and your players plan ahead.  (Alice: "Bob's not going to be here Friday so we won't have Gronkar the Tanky, so maybe this week is a bad week to do a frontal assault on the gnolls."  Clarence: "Maybe we should consider a scouting mission on the swamp level instead."  GM: "I haven't looked at the swamp level in 6 months but I'll add that to the todo list.")  
• Tuesday-Thursday: Long-term prep.  Once I'm confident that whatever we probably need for this week's session is ready, I can go back to working on the unfinished level 3 levels below the deepest the PCs have been.  For a simpler dungeon you might just go top to bottom.  For a more complicated and less linear dungeon you might be thinking in terms of what unprepped area they're most likely to discover next, rather than just prepping in order.  (You won't always guess right, which is fine.  Make your best guess, and keep prepping something almost every week, and eventually you'll get to all of it.)

In theory, eventually you'll have the whole dungeon converted and prepped, and you can drop the long-term prep part of the weekly loop and only make little tweaks in response to your players' actions, until they finish the campaign.  Now you're on GM easy street, basically running an adventure on rails, like people who run adventures for the systems they were actually designed for without changing anything.  If that gets boring, you can always start converting another megadungeon...

Does an Inn in a Dangerous Area Count as Town?

Last session, my players found the Sign of the Broken Head, a fortified inn located just ouside the crumbling northern wall of the ruins of Arden Vul.  And one of them asked if it counted as Town.  And my answer was "sometimes, sometimes not."  I should elaborate.

In most fantasy RPGs, Town is where PCs get to exchange money for goods and services, and otherwise interact with NPCs in a relatively safe environment.  I'd say the minimum standards for a place to count as Town are:

• You can rent a reasonably safe and comfortable place to sleep.
• You can buy food and drink.
• You can buy at least basic equipment, like rope and torches.
• You can find training for at least basic skills.
• You can use various abstract skill rolls to brew potions or carouse for rumors or maybe earn some money.
• You can get magic items identified, curses removed, and wounds healed.
• You can sell stuff.
• You can meet new PCs and hire hirelings.

Of course there may be levels to all these things.  A better Town could have better equipment available, more esoteric trainers, the cash to buy more expensive items, access to the really good healing like Resurrection, sages or libraries to give bonuses to Research rolls, etc. 

In this campaign, Gosterwick qualifies as Town.  It's not a completely abstract safe zone: it has a name, it has businesses and NPCs with names, and things can happen there.  But it has the basics.  It even has a few features that not all Towns in all games have, like banking and caravans.

The Sign of the Broken Head definitely isn't a full Town.  It's just a small fortified inn on a dangerous map.  So:

• There is one private room.  If it's available, you can rent it, but it's expensive.  If it's not, you can sleep in the shared bunkroom, unless that's full too.  If they're out of bunks, they'll rent you a spot on the dining room floor.
• You can buy beer or ale, brewed on site.  It's actually good, but expensive.
• You can buy whatever kind of food they have available that day, but it's expensive and there will not be much selection, as they have to carry most of the food up the Long Stair on mules.
• There may or may not be any traders at the Inn that day.  If there are any, you can buy what they have, at the prices they ask.  There will not be a lot of selection, as they have to carry their wares up the Long Stair on mules.
• Finding trainers is unlikely.
• It's too small a place for most Town skill rolls, but there's beer and ale, so Carousing is a possibility.
• Magical and divine services look unlikely, but who knows?  Estelle was wearing a holy symbol of Tychias.

The one surprising thing at this Inn was not one but three different merchant factors, competing to buy statues from the ruins.  So there does appear to be some economic activity beyond selling beer.

The PCs decided to go back to Gosterwick this week, rather than staying at the Broken Head.  We'll see if they keep doing that consistently, or if they start varying where they sleep.  That could get complicated if it splits the party.

Things I Want to Do Differently This Time Around

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 the games they run, so there is some consensus in long-running groups, but it might not be complete.  So I think it's important for GMs to both get feedback from players, and to analyze their games and think about what they can improve.

This is particularly important for DFRPG Arden Vul because it contains several players from the DF Whiterock campaign, that I stopped running after 2+ years and one of the players later picked up and finished.  Since I know that one lasted a long time but eventually fell apart, how do I avoid quitting or losing players this time around?

My first goal for improvement is to keep rules consistent throughout the campaign.  I made two rule changes in DFW that players didn't like.  I thought both made sense at the time, but I was wrong on at least one of them, and not clear enough for the reasons on either.

One was limiting players to 3 attacks per turn no matter what was on their sheet, for a combination of game balance and speed of play.  It's not fun when one player's turn takes too long, but that's better handled with an explicit turn time limit rather than indirectly with an attack limit.  And it's not fun when the PCs get too powerful and wipe out enemies too easily, but that's fixable by adding more or better enemies.  So for Arden Vul I'm removing the attack limit, but might impose a time limit if combat length becomes a big problem, or some players' turns take too long.  (But not at the start, because we don't know if we actually have a problem yet, and also because some players are new to GURPS or Foundry and deserve a grace period to learn before being forced to play faster.)

The other was slowing down the rate at which character points were awarded.  I never promised any particular number of XP, but players got used to me lazily handing everyone 4 points per 4-hour session, regardless of accomplishments, with maybe some bonus points on top if they did something special.  When I saw that PC power was growing a bit faster than I wanted, I first stopped handing out bonus points, which nobody complained about because they were pretty rare anyway.  Then I slowed the regular reward from 4 to 3 for PCs over a certain point level, which caused minor grumbling.  When I slowed it from 3 to 2 at a higher point level, it caused a revolt.  Even if I never promised anyone 4 XP per session, it became expected, and changing the behavior from the expected caused problems.  Relevant xkcd.

So this time around I'm going to make it clear that PCs get 0 to 2 XP per session for loot (with 1 being pretty easy to achieve and 2 being hard, and the required threshold going up over time with PC point level, but the exact table of loot thresholds not (yet?) public), 0 to 2 for exploration (again 1 being pretty easy and 2 being harder, but the exact amount of exploration required not (yet?) public), and then again the possibility of bonus points for achievements (which I'd like to make more common this time, but small).  So with more variability in reward and more explanation for how the awards are given, I'm hoping that if players want more XP, they try to make their PCs achieve more per session, rather than whining about the GM.  I'm envisioning players figuring out the thresholds to get 1 loot XP and 1 exploration XP every session and always aiming to hit those, then going for either big loot or big exploration for a third XP (with loot being easier if you know where some loot is and think you can beat whatever might be guarding it, and exploration being easier if you know where some unexplored territory is), and then looking for things that might get them bonus XP.

My second goal is to actually finish the megadungeon.  That's a tough one because it's huge, but I think it's achievable if players are oriented toward accomplishing large goals (rather than enjoying killing wandering monsters and searching for every last copper piece), though I suspect there will be some turnover of PCs and possibly players along the way.  Ultimately it's up to the players what they do, though; the GM provides challenges and incentives and hooks but the players act.

My third goal is to play fair in both directions.  Players deserve consistent rules and rulings and to be allowed to use all the fun ideas they have and the cool stuff on their character sheets, but NPCs deserve a chance to win too, and if one of them rolls a massive critical hit against a PC who's out of Luck and Bless, no mercy.  I'm going to set the scene and then let the dice decide.  My one grudging concession to real life on that one is that I sometimes skip wandering monster rolls near the end of a session, if that would force pausing a probably-meaningless fight across sessions and deny PCs access to town, because of an arbitrary real-world time limit.  What I should do in that case, now that I think of it, is make the roll anyway but hit them with the wandering monster early next session instead of late this session, satisfying both the players' need to stop at the agreed time and the wandering monster's need to get a fair shot at eating a delicious PC.

My fourth goal is to have an entertaining GURPS recap blog with a few hundred loyal readers, which requires good source material (Arden Vul is awesome), the players doing fun stuff (I'm sure they will), and consistency.  Because this will be a voice game, I won't have complete logs to refresh my memory, so I'll try to write the recaps every Saturday morning before I forget too much.

My fifth and final goal is to listen to my players better.  A GM can't do everything players ask for because a lot of what they ask for is "let us win more" and if you always do that the game becomes a cakewalk and actually becomes less fun for most players.  But you can bend their requests in a way that gives them some of what they want while preserving some game balance.  For example, one request I got from a couple of players last time was "if a PC dies my next PC should get all the points my old PC had," which would remove all penalty for death (except the time to make a new PC) and takes a lot of tension out of the game.  But starting new PCs all the way back at 125 points might be too harsh the other way, if it causes players to play too cautiously.  So I've announced I'm going to award new PCs a fraction of their players' previous dead characters' earned XP, with the exact fraction not (yet?) public.  If this rule actually gets exercised multiple times then I need to be consistent, so the players will eventually figure out the formula, but I don't need to tell them yet.  Another one is "yes, but".  I need to be open to more weird player ideas unless they're actually a threat to the game, rather than just a challenge to my expectations.  One player wanted to play a rotating stable of hirelings rather than one consistent PC, so I'm letting him do that.  Another player wanted a weird backstory that didn't really fit the setting, but that's fine, Irthuin is a big continent, he's from a remote spot on the map that isn't detailed in the setting, and if any details about that spot become important I'll ask him.

Finally, no plan survives contact with the enemy.  Any plan for a perfect campaign goes out the window as soon as you add the chaos of actual players, and GMs need to forgive themselves and their players for mistakes made in good faith and just try to keep things going and keep them fun as best they can.  The main GM response to most setbacks should be "Noted, we'll fix that next time, next game scheduled for next week."

First game Friday night, half of the PCs done and the other half mostly done, I've got this huge megadungeon about 1/3 prepped and I'm pretty sure they won't be able to reach the other 2/3 in the first session, let's go.

GURPS March Harrier GM's Campaign Retrospective

Introduction

Now that the GURPS March Harrier campaign is over, here's a quick retrospective of what went right and wrong, and whether I'd like to run another GURPS Traveller campaign.

As a high level overview for people who haven't read this whole blog, I ran The Traveller Adventure using GURPS 4th Edition, with a group of players recruited over Discord.  We played weekly for 13 out of 14 weeks, using Foundry VTT for dice and maps and Discord for voice and text communications.  We had three consistent players for the whole campaign, plus a fourth player who joined a few weeks in and then played consistently.  We also had a few other players who dropped out after playing zero to one sessions.

Why GURPS?

One question is why I ran a Traveller campaign with GURPS, rather than Classic Traveller or MegaTraveller or Mongoose Traveller or T5.  The short version is that I think GURPS has far superior character generation, skill resolution, and personal combat rules to any other Traveller system, with the possible exception of Traveller Hero.  And there's a lot more GURPS Traveller stuff than Traveller Hero stuff.  But the drawback of using GURPS is that it's a huge system with way too many possibilities, so it's a challenge to constrain what the the players can use to keep the game from getting out of hand and turning into a rules quagmire.  Also it's probably harder to find players who like both GURPS and Traveller than players who just want to play Mongoose Traveller 2E.  There were a bunch of GURPS Traveller books for 3E, but there's only the one book (Interstellar Wars) for 4E, and that book is aimed at an earlier time period in the Traveller timeline, so adapting it to the year 1105 of the Third Imperium was a bit of work.  Anyway, I think the GURPS Traveller career templates from GTIW worked well.  One challenge was equipment, as GTIW doesn't have much, and GURPS Ultra-Tech has too much, so the GM needs to filter down to what equipment fits Traveller.  Also, GURPS has several possible systems for space combat; I ended up picking the one in GTIW just to try to be consistent and use as much as possible from one book.  Similarly, I used the trading rules from GTIW rather than the ones in GURPS Traveller Far Trader.

Why The Traveller Adventure?

First, nostalgia. I bought this adventure in paperback when it was new and I was in middle school, but never got around to running it. It was the first really large campaign in a single book I ever saw, and I always regretted not finding the time to run it when we were kids and had whole summers of free time.

Another reason I liked this adventure was I wanted to see if players could work together as a full merchant crew. I basically said that we needed a captain and a first officer, and that we needed a pilot and a navigator and a steward and a medic and an engineer, and let the players run with it. We ended up with a pretty well-rounded initial starship crew, though they were somewhat weak on other useful abilities like combat and thief/spy skills. The other challenge was that a few players made characters but then dropped out, but a starship needs a pilot, so sometimes the GM needs to run some characters as NPCs rather than just removing them.

Adventure Review

I'd like to briefly review The Traveller Adventure.  It was written by Games Designer Workshop (Chadwick, Harshman, Keith, Miller, and Wiseman) back in 1983.  You can get it (along with all the other Classic Traveller books) for $35 from farfuture.net.  It was re-released by Mongoose as The Aramis Adventure for Mongoose Traveller 1E, and you can get that version from drivethrurpg.  (The Mongoose version is pretty much identical to the original with a new cover.  I don't see any reason to prefer one over the other.)

If we're grading in a historical context, TTA definitely gets an A.  There weren't a lot of adventures this big available in 1983, and it was the first big self-contained campaign released for Traveller.  So for a lazy GM who wants a whole campaign in a box, it's a great start.  Drawbacks would be that you don't really get a fully ready-to-run campaign.  You get stats for the Aramis subsector, descriptions (in varying detail) for its worlds, some maps (but not as many as you want), descriptions (but not stats) for major NPCs, etc.  There's still a ton of work for the GM to do.  Furthermore, because of the scale of the adventure, it's really not possible to pre-prep everything in advance.  For example, you might have maps for one part of the surface of Aramanx, but what if the players steal a car and drive through another country that you didn't map?  At some point the players are going to do something the GM didn't expect, and the GM will have to wing things.  So you have to think of TTA as a campaign framework that the GM adds to, rather than a paint-by-numbers adventure.

One real issue with the adventure was that the whole plot depends on the PCs helping Gvoudzon (who may be a PC or an NPC) on Aramis.  If Gvoudzon is a PC then they probably will, because most PC's tend to help PCs because they're PCs.  (Also, if it's GURPS, and I say "Sense of Duty (adventuring companions) [-5] doesn't count against the disadvantage limit" then every single PC will usually have it, which is a way to bribe the players into cooperating with each other.)  If he's an NPC that they just met, then why are the PCs motivated to help this random Vargr break into a museum to steal back his stolen brooch that he alleges a pawnshop stole from him after he pawned it?  I was lucky enough that my players were game, but probably should have engineered some additional motivation, like Gvoudzon being an old friend of one of the PCs.  (In my defense, Gvoudzon was supposed to be a PC, but his player didn't show up.)

Another issue was that the Anolas' psionic drawbacks can really mess up the PCs (cumulative -1s or -2s to intelligence is no joke) over time, and it's not easy to find the Psionic Institute to fix the problem.  I chose to reduce the severity a bit and only have Gvoudzon (an NPC at that point) be severely affected, as he spent the most time with the anolas, so the rest of the crew could successfully operate the ship while looking for help.

The Zilan Wine chapter was basically navigating a bureaucracy, which would not be to every group's taste.  I was ready to start fast-forwarding through the details if the players seemed to hate it, but my group was up to the challenge and actually roleplayed talking to dozens of bureaucrats.  Again the prep challenge here was that the adventure has 47 Zilan bureaucrats, but none of them have names or sexes.  Fortunately random name generators exist.  Unfortunately most of them don't give you a nice mix of Solomani and Vilani names with the occasional Vargr name thrown in.  Also the different government buildings are in different places on Zila, but there's no map of Zila, or of its capital city Crescence.  Like I said, the GM has to do a lot of prep.

The adventure was fairly light on combat, which is a good thing in a high-tech setting because guns kill PCs.  We had a couple of gunfights, the standoff with the kidnappers on Aramanx and the attempted hijacking of the March Harrier on Junidy by Llellewyloly-rights activists.  We also had one melee fight, with Gani's morph axe taking down a feline pouncer on Pysadi.  The Aramanx fight resulted in a dead Captain Wilder, which was thoroughly deserved because the Captain had been abandoned by two players and I was sick of running him as an NPC.  (Some of the the players suspected that I rigged the combat to kill Wilder.  In practice, the rigging was limited to Wilder being automatically chosen as the sniper's target.  The to-hit roll and damage rolls were legit.  Again, guns kill PCs, so if there has to be a gunfight, have some disposable NPCs around.)

There was also one session featuring space combat, the space ambush of the March Harrier and a free trader and a patrol cruiser against various Tukera-affiliated freighters and scouts.  In theory the March Harrier was mostly a decoy and the patrol cruiser did most of the fighting, so a lot of the combat could be handwaved.  In practice I felt like it was necessary to actually run the fights (though the fights started with a morale check so the outgunned freighter captains could surrender), and the March Harrier actually got shot up once, so it was a reasonable mix of danger and quick resolution.  We used the space combat system from Interstellar Wars, which seemed to work okay in this limited instance.

Finally, the showdown on Jesedipere at the end of the adventure was the March Harrier crew plus a few Vargr refugees against the crew of a Tukera landing station plus two Kforuzeng corsairs, two Kforuzeng freighters, a Tukera patrol cruiser, and lots of Tukera and Kforuzeng bodyguards.  I think this was a very difficult fight for the PCs to win, with the only real chance being to turn Tukera and Kforuzeng against each other and mop up the depleted winner.  The PCs instead recorded the presence of the stolen Imperial Navy meson guns and then blew up the meson guns (using stolen Tukera Air/Rafts as improvised missiles), which I thought was a pretty good solution to mostly spoiling the bad guys' plans while also not dying.  They then told the Navy what had happened, which was a very Good Citizen thing to do, but which cost them a big reward from Oberlindes, who really wanted to keep the secret to blackmail Tukera.

With those nitpicks, I think it's an excellent adventure overall, with a nice mix of trade and following a couple of major criminal plots and exploring most of a subsector.  You just want to read it several times and then read multiple reviews before running it, so you can flesh out the weak parts.

Recruiting Players on the Internet

Finding reliable players is hard.  I advertised this game on this blog, on the biggest GURPS Discord, on the biggest Traveller Discord, and on a few smaller IRC and Discord servers where I knew people.  That got about a dozen interested players, one of whom I knew and the rest of whom I did not.  Making GURPS characters is a lot of work, which some players love and some players do not, so I made a bunch of pre-generated characters in case anyone wanted one.  Some players made characters (including one amazingly detailed character) but then didn't play.  Some players agreed to use a pre-generated character but didn't play.  One player played once but then dropped out.  It happens.  Free time evaporates and not everyone enjoys every game.  My plea to players would be that if you're going to drop out, be a grownup and tell the GM you're dropping out, so the GM can start working on replacing you rather than wondering.  Don't just disappear.

Anyway, amidst all the chaos, we actually got three starting players who played every week or almost every week, and one more replacement player who played almost every week after he joined.  So a pool of about ten players winnowed down to four reliable players.  Kind of like a Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel.  One suggestion I would have for GMs recruiting random players on the Internet is to use adventures where the early sessions work for a lot of players, later sessions work for fewer players, and it's not a huge deal if some players drop out.  Adapt to the reality of the player pool and make it work.  This particular adventure was not really that kind of adventure, because the PCs were owner/operators of a merchant ship and some continuity was required, but the crew recruited two new members (one plot-critical NPC and one new PC) and lost two members (one to a bullet head wound and one because he fell in love with the captain of another ship while in prison) and it mostly worked out.

Things I Did Wrong

In the first session, on Aramis, after the PCs tried to meet Roet Bannerji at the Travelers Aid Society, Commander Eneri Giilaan of Imperial Naval Intelligence was supposed to overhear them mentioning Bannerji's name and then later try to meet with them and gather information about Bannerji.  I totally forgot to do this encounter.  I later moved Giilaan to Aramanx so the PCs could still have a contact with the Navy.

I wanted to avoid too much railroading and let the players decide what to do, so I decided that any starting PC with Merchant Rank 1 or higher was a co-owner of the March Harrier and any other starting PC or any PC that joined later was just hired crew.  I also said that the captain had to have Merchant Rank 3 and the First Officer had to have Merchant Rank 2.  This was probably excessively complex.  In practice the crew never voted themselves any dividends from the March Harrier's operational profits, so it would have worked just as well if I made everyone hired crew.  I could have also provided an NPC captain to railroad them around the subsector, but I really wanted players to have more agency.  Of course the player who was playing the captain dropped out so they ended up with an NPC captain for a while anyway, until he got shot and the players promoted a PC to replacement captain.

I spent a bunch of time making a spreadsheet with all the March Harrier's passengers and cargo and fuel expenses and stuff.  Ultimately, other than the ship generating enough cash that the PCs got their monthly paychecks, I don't think it mattered.  So I probably should have handwaved more there.

One of the PCs was looking for a Psionic Institute and actually found the (illegal, undercover) Psionic Institute on Junidy but was so paranoid that he was afraid to talk to them for fear they were going to narc him out to the Imperium.  I thought that was kind of funny but probably should have sorted it out better so the player could play with psionics.

Two Vargr NPCs, Gvoudzon and Gharukh, had a complicated interpersonal relationship.  I don't think the PCs really figured out what was going on, so I probably should have either cut that out or made it simpler.

I never managed to get the crew to do the Yebab alien side quest, which I think would have been a lot of fun.  They just always seemed to avoid Yebab, until the very end of the campaign, where they were in too much of a hurry to take any charters.

Things I Think I Did Right

I entered all the character templates from GTIW into gcs (gurpscharactersheet.com) so nobody else ever has to do that again.

It was a low-combat campaign, with only one melee fight, three gunfights, and one protracted series of 3-on-1 space battles.  Combat is very slow to resolve and tends to kill PCs, so I think this was a good choice, and explained why we finished in 13 3-hour sessions.

I gave out a reasonable amount of character points (4 per PC per session if they played up for the whole session, less if they arrived late), and a reasonable amount of cash, which seemed to keep the players happy.  In a long campaign, giving out too many rewards can eventually lead to a power explosion problem, but in a short campaign it's fine.

I tried to say yes to player requests, like figuring a way out mail-order stuff from high-tech Rhylanor, or letting a PC have a secret power, or letting one PC surgically install a hidden compartment in another PC, or letting PCs quickly train each other in various starship skills during jump, or letting a PCs set up a food truck on a remote planet to make some extra cash during a layover, or letting the PCs steal a ground vehicle and avoid a long hike through a combat zone, or letting the PCs turn Air/Rafts full of chemical fuel and fertilizer into missiles.

I didn't say yes to extreme player requests though, like stealing Bannerji's Far Trader and having an extra starship to play with.  (The adventure specifically warned against that one.)

I decided to handwave some rules that didn't look very fun, like the large amounts of maintenance that starships in GTIW need.  A jump in GTIW requires four skill rolls, but I decided to only do that a couple of times: the first time they jumped after annual maintenance in case something was broken, and when they jumped in a big hurry to evade pursuit.  Otherwise I tried to make routine starship operations routine.

Will I run GURPS Traveller Again?

Maybe.  There are two other large Traveller campaigns available, Pirates of Drinax and Deepnight Revelation.  Drinax seems to be super-popular (because everyone wants to be a space pirate?) and maybe it would be hard to find players not already familiar with it.  Deepnight is more of a long exploration campaign.  Both would require a lot of prep, but both are so large you can't thoroughly prep everything.

I could also run something smaller, like the crew of an active duty Scout/Courier doing small scale exploration, or a detached duty Scout/Courier and his friends bumming around doing whatever they felt like, or the crew of a noble's yacht doing whatever Sir needs, or The Love Boat In Space aboard a luxury liner.  I would probably avoid another trading campaign, just because it's a lot of random cargo and passenger rolls and spreadsheet work to little effect unless the players really love that kind of thing.

What went right in DF Whiterock

It's bittersweet that the DF Whiterock campaign ended before the PCs quite reached the bottom of the dungeon, but we kept the game going for over two years, so most things went mostly right.  Peter asked for a post about things that went well in the comments, so here goes:

Converting a D&D 3.5 megadungeon to DFRPG (with a few other GURPS things thrown in) was work, but mostly went pretty smoothly.  GUPRS is a very flexible system that can emulate most other games.  Probably the hardest part was converting enemy spellcasters, because there are so many differences in the magic systems.  The easiest part was converting DCs to GURPS skill penalties and monetary treasure in gold pieces to GURPS $; I did both of those purely mechanically.  And thanks to all the people who put conversions of D&D monsters to GURPS on the Internet.

The house rules for building a DFRPG character with 125 points and no templates worked pretty well.  Players seemed to have fun making characters, and the first few sessions were pretty challenging.

The rules for improving characters, where points spent on skills could be traded back when attributes based on those skills were raised, were pretty popular.  (It seems that anytime you let players do more than the official rules allow, they're happy.  So this was not surprising.)  Not limiting characters to templates provided a different challenge than most GUPRS Dungeon Fantasy or DFRPG games.

Five players played in a majority of the sessions, and four played in a vast majority.  I had only played with one of the players before, so this showed that it is possible to assemble a reasonably cohesive group from random people on the Internet.  Of course it's not quite as easy to do it this way as to use a group of people who already get along: we had a few players who dropped out due to intra-party conflict or because it just wasn't the right campaign for them.

Making "Sense of Duty: Adventuring Companions" not count against the disadvantage limit had the intended result that everyone took it, and then the intended result that PCs who didn't get along kept it at the level of verbal sniping (and occasional Levitation), rather than violence.

Having a dedicated Discord for the campaign seemed to keep everyone in the loop.  We mostly knew if we were playing on Friday and who was showing up, and everyone mostly had their characters ready to go.

Roll20 mostly worked okay.  The fact that it's web-based is nice because people can play with their phone or tablet when away from a real computer.  On the other hand, it doesn't work nearly as well with a phone or tablet as with a real PC.  And it doesn't support large maps very well, so some of the larger levels ended up being many maps rather than one map, which was annoying.

We got a surprising amount of roleplaying for a dungeon crawl.  The PCs made both allies and enemies.  (Of course the allies tended to survive longer than the enemies.)  And they each had enough of a personality that when a player was out and someone else ran their character, we got fairly accurate mockeries.

The game featured a lot of combat, and the players got pretty good at combat tactics against various enemies.  Outflanking enemies to hit them in the back happened a lot, especially once everyone had Flight all the time.  Sacrificial Parry was used a ton.  And the players were constantly trying to balance Deceptive Attack, Rapid Strike, and hit location penalties.  There were also a lot of stunning attacks, via Rapier Wit, the Stun or Death Vision spells, or Kiai.

This player group had more of a hive mind than most I've seen: everyone shared their character sheets with each other and gave each other advice on how to improve their characters, and the group mostly functioned as a collective with respect to equipment.  This was pretty effective.

GURPS DF/DFRPG Conversion Notes Available

In case anyone else decides to run Castle Whiterock using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy or DFRPG, I put my conversion notes up at https://github.com/dripton/gurpswhiterock .

Ultimately every group of players and PCs is different, though, so every GM is going to have to scale the challenge of the adventure to their players and characters.  If you run this adventure for two novice players, they're going to need a lot of help.  If you run it for five experts, they're going to stomp all over it unless you're really stingy with the character points and magic items.  So be flexible and do what you think fits your group, rather than assuming I know something you don't.

The Premature End of DF Whiterock

The Bad News

I ended the DF Whiterock campaign today, after over 2 years and 100 sessions, but before the dungeon was finished.  (The Thane was the end of level 12 out of 15, so they were about 80% done.  Though they had skipped level 5, the underwater level.)

I'm disappointed we didn't finish, but I wasn't having fun anymore, and running this game was way too much work to continue doing if it wasn't fun for the GM.  I know some of the players weren't super-happy with the way it was going either.

What went wrong?  Ultimately I think a mismatch between player and GM expectations.  From my point of view, the players wanted continual increases in power, and complained about not getting enough points or treasure.  Meanwhile I was trying to keep the adventures challenging for the increasingly untouchable PCs.  Giving them more power was the last thing I wanted to do, as I thought they had too much already.

Also, in the game world, the PCs had defeated the Thane of Narborg, who appeared to be the ultimate boss behind the orc and human slavers who had dragged them into this adventure in the first place.  The fact that the red dragon Benthosruthsa was probably allied with the duergar was not clear enough to them.  I had Chauntessa clue them in a bit more last week, but they still didn't have enough motivation to do her dirty work.

Things I'd do differently if I ran this again

1. Award character points for accomplishments rather than play time, to give the players a reason to go faster.  And award fewer points overall from the start.  (If you set a low baseline rate of improvement and give bonuses for significant achievements, players are happy.  If you set a high baseline then slow it, players whine.)

2. Make the dungeon a bit smaller.  As written, it's the surface level with human slavers, then two orc levels, two trog levels, the underwater level (which our group skipped except for one brief encounter with the hydrohydra), the underground river level, the Immense Cavern, three duergar levels, the Demonhold, two levels of Burning Maze, then the final level with the dragon boss.  I think it could be reduced from 15 levels to 9 by removing an orc level, a trog level, the underwater level, two duergar levels, and the Demonhold.

3. Figure out voice or text ahead of time.  It appears that most players have a very strong preference for one or the other, so voting each session isn't a great idea.  (We stopped voting after text won about 20 times in a row, but at least one player was never happy that the game was text.)

4. Write up more ahead of time to make sure all the players are on the same page.  One player quit early because this was too much story, not enough mindless hack-and-slash for his vision of DFRPG.  I guess you can never do enough Session Zero.

5. I probably wouldn't use Roll20.  Making dungeon maps in Roll20 is too painful, because there's no support for doors, and you have to do line of sight blocking manually by drawing all your walls again on another layer.  If I had to start a new game today, I'd probably choose MapTool because it's the most mature cross-platform VTT available, even though its scripting language is gross.  FoundryVTT looks great, though it's really new and doesn't support enough game systems yet.  And the future not-Windows-only version of Fantasy Grounds might also be a contender.  Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side.  I know everything I hate about Roll20 after using it for two years.  I'm sure the others have warts too; I just haven't found them yet.

6. Give more blatant clues on what the PCs should be doing next, rather than expecting them to figure it out.  Player agency is great, but when there's only one dungeon prepared, the PCs always need a good reason to go into it.

7. Writing long detailed recaps for every session was a lot of work.  I think I'd try to farm that out to the players.

Random observations

1. If you remove mandatory templates from Dungeon Fantasy / DFRPG, the PCs will be more powerful.  You need to account for that when handing out points.

2. Wizards get drastically more powerful as their spell skills reach 20 (which is achievable with a stock 250-point wizard) and 25.  In particular, Flight-25 is "all the PCs fly all the time."

3. Bless is broken.  Luck is really good.  Having one of them is pretty good: it means fewer dead PCs.  Having both is probably too much.

4. Great Haste is broken.  I ended up limiting attacks per turn to 3 to curb the worst abuses of it, but just eliminating the spell would probably work better.

5. Mass Daze is often End Fight.

6. Everything in DFRPG is aimed at 250-point characters.  Balancing 125-point or 500-point characters is an exercise for the GM.  Getting it right is tricky.

7. In this particular adventure, wandering monsters had very little effect.  The PCs usually felt overpowered enough that nothing on the wandering monster table would be much of a threat, so wandering monsters were mostly a waste of time.  This probably contributed to a lack of urgency, as the players found no cost to slowly moving around looking for every secret.

8. Different players like different things.  I think (borrowing the terminology from Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering which I think all GMs should read) our group was one Roleplayer, one Tactician, one Butt Kicker, and two Power Gamers.  (They might disagree with those assessments though.)

The Future

A couple of people want my Castle Whiterock GURPS conversion notes, so I'll throw those up on Github at some point and post here when I do.

I have a couple of GURPS oneshots I'm thinking of running for a group of friends and maybe at a (virtual?) convention: the Star Trek and Harry Potter adventures from 1shotadventures.com .  (So if you think you might want to play in those, don't read them.)

I'd also like to run The Traveller Adventure (for Classic Traveller, from 1983) in GURPS.  That's another campaign-length adventure, like Castle Whiterock, but it's 156 pages, versus about 800, so hopefully it wouldn't take as long to run.  It's kind of the polar opposite of Whiterock though: SF vs. fantasy, trading vs. combat, a subsector versus one town and one dungeon.

House Rules about PC Names

Here are some completely meta, non-power-affecting, house rules about player character names that I'm thinking about for future RPG campaigns I run.

One hard rule is going to be "no accent marks."  I don't measure the exact amount of time I spend writing game recaps, but I suspect it's about 1/3 actual writing, 1/3 reviewing Roll20 logs for details I can't remember well enough to keep one of my players from pointing out an error later, and 1/3 putting the accent mark in Seépravir's name.  So future names in games I run will be rendered with only plain ASCII characters.  (Now, it's entirely possible that in the original Elvish or Dwarven or Chinese or Vilani or Klingon or whatever language the character's name comes from, the character's preferred spelling has accent marks or runes or emoji or heiroglyphics or non-Latin letters or space holograms.  And that's totally fine.  I'm just saying that when I render it into English for use at the mostly-English-speaking gaming table, I will stick to ASCII so I can type it faster.)

The corollary is that if your character has a long name, we will end up abbreviating it and using the short version most of the time.  So players should put some thought into the short version of their name, that their companions will actually use most of the time.  Maybe that's their full legal name; maybe it's just their nickname.  They can write a longer version on their character sheet if they want.  (Sometimes there's just no time to say "Look out, Helgevottir Hirgebottom, rocks are falling.")  Note that this has real world parallels in groups like the military and hockey teams: it's just more convenient to have a short nickname when you need to yell orders or warnings quickly.

The final rule is "only one PC with the same first initial at the same time."  Just because being able to refer to people with one letter is convenient.  (For example, when maintaining a text box of active spells, being able to type "Flight: Z, P, G" is awesome.)  Obviously this limits games to 26 characters at a time.  Which is also a good rule.  (I prefer 4 or 5, but 27 is right out.)