Wizardry: Shining South Spells II

Wizardry: Shining South Spells II

Land Womb is an interesting spell that lets you hide from detection spells underground for some time.

Lightning Fog is a powerful combination of Fog Cloud and Lightning Storm.

Mycontil's Last Resort explodes your body. It has a very expensive material component to avoid having armies of fanatical weak mages exploding themselves.

Rock Catch is a situational spell that lets you catch thrown rocks. Useful when fighting giants.

Sea Legs is a very situational spell that nonetheless could be very useful on a rocking boat.

Sparkles is a variant of Glitterdust that cannot blind, but has a longer outlining effect. This is mostly a spell for festivals with a side effect of revealing invisible creatures.

Stone Trap turns a block of stone invisible and suspends it in the air until somebody walks under it.

Stonefire is an expensive spell that burns through rock and creates hot smoke.

Suspend is a spell that suspends an object in midair for a couple of days. The enchantment rate was derived from Impulse Buys, assuming ST 10.

Wall of Pain is, well, a wall of pain.

Wizardry: Shining South Spells I

Wizardry: Shining South Spells I

It's been a while since I've converted any spells, so let's switch gears and do some spells from Shining South.

Arcane Sensitivity is a perk-level spellcaster detection spell.

Circlet of Enervation is basically the same as Enervation points-wise, but is more efficient in terms of FP usage. However, it balances that out by requiring an expensive focus and a rather rarely-used skill.

Coral Growth can be used to expand a piece of coral into a structure.

Daltim's Fiery Tentacles is a fiery variant of Evard's Black Tentacles.

Darsson's Chilling Chamber is similar to Cool, but has different range, duration, casting time, and area of effect shape. I think it is justified to be a separate spell.

Darsson's Fiery Furnace is the inverse of the previous spell.

Dispel Fog destroys natural and supernatural fog in an area.

Easy Trail is a spell appropriate to druids, clerics of nature deities, and wu jen. It allows moving unimpeded through undergrowth.

Mass Entropic Shield is a mass version of Entropic Shield.

Mass Jump is a mass version of Jump.

Fiery Vision is essentially a variant of Scorching Ray that uses a different skill to hit and requires no gestures.

Kyristan's Malevolent Tentacles is yet another variant of Evard's Black Tentacles.

GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

 GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

I've been running my BrOSR-style game for almost a month now, and the experience has prompted some introspection. Was GURPS the right choice? Why am I playing GURPS in the first place? What's missing? Why is GURPS like this? Eloquence isn't my forte, but I'll try to explain my thoughts.

GACKS AAR: Session 3

GACKS AAR: Session 3

Between session 2 and session 3, I recruited eight players to control the various factions in the game. I wrote up some order resolution and rumor-posting rules, such as GOSS and SEEN, and while diving headfirst into running this sort of game without proper preparation felt daunting, I think I'll be able to handle this. Let's see what happened in the world both faction- and PC-wise. I will avoid giving out any information that isn't public.

GACKS AAR: Session 2

GACKS AAR: Session 2

Between the sessions, I recruited a faction player to run the goblins. Certain events transpired that I will not elaborate much here to avoid revealing non-public information to the players. However, we had another session with the players, and it was a hilarious trainwreck.

Herb Gathering

Herb Gathering

One of my players wanted his character to use his Naturalist skill to find some valuable herbs to earn some money. This prompted me to investigate the rules and finding that there's no out-of-the-box solution to this somewhat simple request. As a temporary ruling, I ruled that this is similar to a job roll for the gatherer - this worked for that purpose, but what if the character wanted to find something more concrete? Let's see.

GACKS AAR: Session 1

GACKS AAR: Session 1

All right, now that the groundwork is all done, I began my in-person GURPS game that borrows a lot of ACKS procedures to see if GURPS can support a BrOSR-style game. It has been a long journey (that still isn't complete), and I've been very excited to give it all a try. I have five players whose only TTRPG experience is D&D 5e and one GURPS game that I ran for them to showcase the system. Despite this, they seem to have had zero problems understanding how 1:1 time works, and all the other BrOSR concepts as well. So, it's time to bring receipts!