Monsters: Loumara II

Monsters: Loumara II

There's two things that I hate statting up in GURPS - shapeshifters and ghosts. Loumara, fortunately, are only the latter, because otherwise I'd go insane. There's only two loumara demons in the Fiendish Codex I, where they were introduced, but there was also two additional ones in various issues of the Dragon Magazine let's convert the latter two. Caligrostos are very cool, but their abilities are such a pain to stat up!

Monsters: Obyriths II

Monsters: Obyriths II

More obyriths! And that's the last of them, unless there's some new ones in 4e or 5e.

Monsters: Fiendish Symbionts

Monsters: Fiendish Symbionts

Fiend Folio introduces two types of symbionts - fiendish and cerebral. A certain Dragon Magazine issue also has illithid symbionts that I've already converted, and a Dungeon Magazine issue has an additional fiendish symbiont. The entire concept of symbionts was expanded in an Eberron sourcebook, probably Magic of Eberron.

Even though I'm statting them up as creatures, they probably make more sense as gear or abilities bought with points. So, if you're playing a host of a symbiont, buy one as an Ally and spend points on the advantages and/or disadvantages the symbiont grants you.

Why is ghostly visage classified as a fiendish symbiont when it's an unrelated undead creature? No idea.

What rules I would like to try out

What rules I would like to try out

As you probably know, GURPS has a vast number of various optional rules and sub-systems. Some of them seem interesting or even fascinating, but you might not ever see them in play. Maybe that's because they would slow down the game too much, or you can't be bothered to memorize an entire new ruleset, or maybe because you like these rules but your players do not.

Monsters: Devils II

Monsters: Devils II

While I converted many demons, I haven't completely forgotten about their lawful counterparts. Let's convert two devils from the Fiendish Condex II - the legion devil and the pain devil. Why these two? Because both of them do not have any art in the book.

Monsters: Archons III

Monsters: Archons III

And here we have two more archons from the Book of Exalted Deeds.

Sorcery Spells Overview: Communication and Empathy

Sorcery Spells Overview: Communication and Empathy

Let's go over the Communication and Empathy college spells. I remember when I first read GURPS Magic, I wondered why is this college split from Mind Control. Nowadays I understand that Mind Control is, perhaps, one of the strongest colleges even without Communication and Empathy, and find the split reasonable. One of my favorite colleges.

Monsters: Assorted Demons

Monsters: Assorted Demons

I'm not done with the demons yet. Aside from the ones in Monster Manual V and all the various Dragon/Dungeon Magazines, there's three that I've missed - the uridezu, the ghour, and the artaaglith.

Hazards/Equipment: Elemental Hazards

Hazards/Equipment: Elemental Hazards

Dragon Magazine #347 has a very interesting article called Elemental Hazards: An Exploration of the Inner Planes. The article describes various unique hazards, materials, and phenomena that can be encountered on the elemental planes. As a person who adores everything elemental-related, I must convert the article to GURPS. Such features make the Inner Planes feel very different and unique compared to the Material Plane. I've always entertained the idea of running a game set predominantly on an elemental plane, but it would probably be impossible to find players for that.

Sorcery Spells Overview: Body Control

Sorcery Spells Overview: Body Control

Let's go over the Body Control college spells. This is going to be a very long post, because there's just that many Body Control spells.

Equipment: Living Items

Equipment: Living Items

Complete Scoundrel for D&D 3.5 introduces a new equipment type - living items. This is something akin to the biogadgets from GURPS Bio-Tech. However, if we look into the other books, we may find similar exceptional items in Stormwrack and Magic of Faerun.

Monsters: Archons II

Monsters: Archons II

Generally speaking, D&D has many more fiends than celestials. For example, in D&D 3.5 there's probably more than 50 demons, but only 10 archons. And I can see why - your typical adventurers are expected to slay fiends and not angels. But anyway, here's two archons from the Book of Exalted Deeds.

Lens: Aleax

Lens: Aleax

Book of Exalted Deeds has a pretty interesting monster section. The section starts with a template - the aleax. A deity can send an aleax to punish someone who enrages it. An aleax looks like its intended victim, but has glowing eyes. It is very difficult to harm by anyone other than the intended victim, but if the intended victim slays the aleax, it absorbs some of the divine essence. Also, the divine wrath is nullified.

Monsters: Monster Manual IV Demons

Monsters: Monster Manual IV Demons

Here we have the conversions of all the demons from the Monster Manual IV. Interestingly enough, only one of them is a tanar'ri.

Monsters: Monster Manual III Demons

Monsters: Monster Manual III Demons

Monster Manual III for D&D 3.5 has only two new demons - the arrow demon and the sorrowsworn demon.

Everything About Ultra-Tech Weapons

Everything About Ultra-Tech Weapons

In this episode I would like to discuss Ultra-Tech weaponry. Most of the past posts were devoted to low-tech games, so it is time to shake things up. After all, I like both fantasy and sci-fi genres, and I grew up reading Heinlein’s novels. So, let’s open up GURPS Ultra-Tech and check the weapons chapter. In addition to that, I will talk about some fan-created content.

Ultra-Tech: Premade Armor

Ultra-Tech: Premade Armor

GURPS Ultra-Tech has a bad reputation. In some aspects, it is justified, in some it is not. One of the problems people often bring up is the deadliness of weapons and uselessness of armor. In my opinion, this problem is not as bad at people make it seem. I've played in quite a few high TL games and never really encountered such deadliness, especially if you use the Body Shots rule from GURPS High-Tech. People also seem to forget or misuse LC. I also ran some calculations in a post a long time ago to show things off mathematically.

I rarely GM high-TL games, but for the last one I GMed (that was a disaster!) I created a lot of guns and armor, using different design systems. For armor, I used the articles from Pyramid #3-96 and Pyramid #3-85. You can create any kind of armor you want, but I decided to create a table of premade armors with maximum DR for the material, half-maximum (to be concealable), and quarter-maximum (to be very concealable). I actually really like the results. DR is overall a bit higher than in Ultra-Tech, but so is weight. Using this armor in your games will make characters safer on battlefields (note that you can also add trauma plates). I'll post the tables here, maybe you'll find them useful.

How to: Rogue Talents

How to: Rogue Talents

I've received a request to create some power-ups for the roguish type of characters. Since the class features of the D&D rogue are translated into Danger Sense, targeting vitals, and the Traps skill, I'll have to come up with something new, possibly taking inspiration from the rogue talents of the Pathfinder rogue.

Sorcery: Alternative Colleges

Sorcery: Alternative Colleges

GURPS Magic divides its hundreds of spells into 24 colleges of magic, which is a lot. GURPS Thaumatology has an entire section devoted to alternative college framework, because what works for one game might not work for the other. It even suggests making different college trees for different spellcasting traditions - that might add a lot of flavor. In this post, I'll tell you what colleges are changed in my games, and what colleges are added.

Sorcery: Baleful Polymorph and Animal Spell Rework

Sorcery: Baleful Polymorph and Animal Spell Rework

In my last post I divulged my thoughts on all the Animal spells I have in the grimoire here and found out that many of them are absolutely useless. That's a beneficial effect of posts like these - to find problems and think of way of fixing them (I'll have to edit the overview post too). So, that's what I decided to do:

    - Specialized (Animal) Control spells lose Independent, +70% but also lose Suggestion, -40%. This way they retain the duration of the general Animal Control, but allow for a more direct control of the victim. They also became significantly cheaper, and now I can see them being situationally useful. Isn't that great?

    - Specialized Repel (Animal) spells have their duration decreased from 50 minutes to 30 seconds, and become non-selective. This makes them 8 points cheaper than the general Repel Animals spell, making them a viable choice in situations where you have not enough levels of Sorcerous Empowerment to get the general Repel Animals spell.

    - A new spell - Baleful Polymorph.

Sorcery Spells Overview: Animal

Sorcery Spells Overview: Animal

I got some positive feedback about the previous sorcery spell overview post, so I decided to make another one. This time, I'm going to cover Animal spells. If you're playing a DF or D&D-style game, then these spells are only available to druids and priests of nature deities. In the first case, the spells will be slightly cheaper.

Monster: Polluted Water Elemental

Monster: Polluted Water Elemental

A water elemental variant from one of the D&D adventures.

Monster: Frogling

Monster: Frogling

One D&D book that I've only opened probably once before today is the Book of Challenges. I thought that it does not contain anything new, but from among the encounters I noticed a monster that I've never seen before - the frogling. A tiny bipedal frog-like humanoid. This elemental being explodes upon death, creating a toxic cloud.

Sorcery: Maho-Tsukai

Sorcery: Maho-Tsukai

I found a prestige class hidden at the very end of Oriental Adventures for D&D 3.0. Maho-tsukai is a blood mage with oriental flavor. As written, it works differently from the blood magic tradition that I've made before, so let's adapt it to GURPS too.

Lens/Monster: Sepulchral Thief

Lens/Monster: Sepulchral Thief

The sepulchral thief is the roguish counterpart of the lich. Should be used as a lens. And this is it - Cityscape monsters are done.

Monster: Siege Golem

Monster: Siege Golem

The siege golem, while being practical and cool-looking, doesn't really provide much in terms of interesting abilities (like most golems).

Monster: Pest Swarm

Monster: Pest Swarm

Cityscape has a new monster - pest swarm. Basically, this is a rat-and-bug swarm and nothing else.