Tuesday, 8 November 2022

Script Compilation: Exploration and Survival

Script Compilation: Exploration and Survival

And now the transcripts for all the videos about exploration and survival in GURPS.

Overland Movement

I have covered many concepts are systems related to combat, supernatural powers, and social interactions in GURPS, but I have not talked about exploration and survival. As usual, there are many ways to play these things out in GURPS – from very abstract to very detailed. The first aspect of exploration is, of course, overland movement – to explore something, you have to get there first!

The primary movement mode of most characters is walking. Hiking rules can be found on page 351 of GURPS Basic Set. If you google “GURPS Hiking”, you undoubtedly will find dozens of forum threads with people arguing about hiking – this is a contentious topic. In short, these rules are way too optimistic, even when taking into account the fact that they assume a full day of hiking under ideal conditions. Even if conditions are not ideal – the rules do modify daily travel distance by roads, terrain, and weather – the numbers are still a bit too high. But that doesn’t meant that the rules are not usable – they are simple, but they are workable. If you hate calculations, consider using the Hiking tool on the GURPS Calculator website – I will link it in the description.
What I find interesting is that not only your Basic Move is important, but also your Hiking skill level and sometimes even Leadership! Hiking is a very important skill in low-tech games, and you should almost always invest at least a point into it. In some situations, Hiking is replaced with Skiing or Skating.
GURPS Basic Set only operates with daily movement rates, but GURPS High-Tech expands these rules slightly to cover hourly travel rate on page 55. On page 69, GURPS High-Tech also talks about how important comfortable footwear is when walking long distances. I’m sure that everyone who has served in the military can relate.

But what if that’s too much detail? What if you want something very simple and straightforward? Then take a look at page 5 of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons. Basically, it just tells the GM to come up with an arbitrary base travel time and them increase or decrease it based on the Hiking, Navigation, Weather Sense, and similar rolls. If traveling is not an important point of your game, there’s nothing wrong with doing it this way.

On the other hand, what if you’re not satisfied with the rules in GURPS Basic Set and want something more detailed? Then look no further than GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures. This is one of those books that are very useful even outside Dungeon Fantasy games. It expands and reworks the hiking rules, turning overland movement into something of a mini-game.
Before you set out, you have to do some homework and prepare. This might involve Area Knowledge rolls to know the terrain types you’re going to encounter, Survival rolls to know the dangers of these terrain types, or even Hidden Lore rolls to know some unusual dangers. If you’re in town, a Research roll can get you maps and other information. The same skills can be helpful to plan a route of your voyage.
These rules use hourly movement rates that are calculated in a more detailed and realistic way than in GURPS Basic Set. There are rules for hiking, sandshoeing, snowshoeing, skating, skiing, riding, operating vehicles, water movement, and even aerial movement. I think that the only movement type not covered it tunneling. Movement can be improved with appropriate skill rolls and a good Navigation or Area Knowledge roll.
Each terrain type has its own travel speed multiplier, a tracking penalty, and a foraging penalty that can be either static or random.
Since the rules use hourly travel time, the book also provides guidelines on how long a group should be travelling per day, depending on the group knowing the Survival skill, needing to camp or forage, and, of course, sleep. When you know this number, it can help you to determine the size of a hex when running a hexcrawl game.
This might sound complex, but it all fits on three pages. I haven’t talked about these rules in much detail here, I’ll leave them to you to read – I just wanted to point you to the right direction – where you can find the basic overland movement rules, the simplest ones, and the most detailed ones.

In addition, I want to point out an interesting article – Low-Tech Transportation from Pyramid #3-95. This one talks in great details about various modes of travel and, most importantly, about how much they cost. How much will it cost to feed your horses, maintain your wagon, or hire porters? How much would you have to pay to travel on a ship? This article answers all these question – be sure to check it out.

Hiking Calculator (Basic Set rules) - http://gurpscalculator.com/Hiking

Outdoorsman Skills

If you’ve played D&D before, you probably know that most of the checks related to outdoors exploration and survival are made with the Survival skill – or Wilderness Lore if you’re playing D&D 3.0. And in GURPS, it actually can be like that too – Survival is a skill that is indeed used very often. In this video, I would like to talk about the Survival skill and other skills that might be useful in the wilderness.

Let’s open up GURPS Basic Set and look through the skill list. The first skill that should be of use is Area Knowledge – it can be rolled against to find landmarks or important sites in an area, and even can be used instead of Navigation to plot the course. This is a skill that, in my opinion, must be on every single character sheet with very few exceptions. Please, put at least a point in knowing your local area!

Outdoors exploration doesn’t always mean travelling through the forest or climbing mountains. Sometimes it requires you to navigate aquatic environments, and this is where Boating will be an important skill, as it will dictate how well you operate your small vessel. For larger vessels, this is replaced with Seamanship.

Camouflage is not the same as Stealth. In the wild, it can be used to conceal your camp or set up an ambush. And both of these applications of this Easy skill can be vital. Even if you did not put any skills into it, it can default to Survival-2.

It is difficult to travel without a map, and many places in the wild just do not have any maps made for them. However, you can fix it by using the Cartography skill. This will make future voyages in that place easier, and you probably will be able to sell your map to other explorers! Do not forget that you are likely not the only person interested in exploring the land.

Climbing is an important skill. How many times have you been in a situation when the GM asks you “Roll Climbing, if you have it”, and then you nervously check your character sheet, find no Climbing, and only then find out that it defaults to DX-5. Climbing mountains, trees, escaping from pit traps or gorges – this skill is very useful. If your character wants to be an outdoorsman, he really should put a couple of points into it. You won’t regret it, I promise.

There are many ways to forage, and I will devote an entire video to foraging, but Fishing is one of the easiest ones. This is a Perception-based Easy difficulty skill, and improvised equipment imposes merely a -2 penalty. Obviously, you can fish anywhere where water is available – a river, a sea, a lake, and if you are playing in an underwater game, you can fish everywhere. Fishing does not cover just fish, but it also covers crustaceans, mollusks, and other seafood. It can also be used to dive for pearls!

Herb Lore is a natural substitution for Alchemy. While this is not a strictly necessary outdoorsman skill, if your party has an herbalist or a druid with this skill, you could benefit from all the weird plants that you might find outside.

As I said in the previous video, Hiking is one of the most important skills for overland movement. If you do not have a cart or a wagon, this is what you’re going to roll against to move faster. If you are playing in an exploration-heavy game, then your GM is probably keeping track of the passage of time – and getting somewhere faster means that you get fewer random encounters, spend fewer rations and water, have to make fewer camping rolls, and have fewer chances to get lost. Hiking is important. For swimming characters, this is replaced with Swimming, for flying characters, this is replaced with Flying, and in arctic environments you might also replace it with Skiing or Skating in some situations.

Meteorology, known on low TLs as Weather Sense, can be an important skill. Predicting weather can help you avoid unfavorable travel and, possibly, combat conditions – you really do not want to get caught off guard during a heavy rain at night. In fantasy games, it becomes even more important, as sometimes supernatural weather effects can be very severe – with a Weather Sense roll you can avoid a rain of fire, or a sandstorm that would flay you alive.

GURPS Basic Set says it right in the description – the Naturalist skill is crucial for fantasy druids and rangers. It represents practical, not scientific knowledge of everything related to nature. It is a Hard skill, but it can be used instead of Biology, Geology, Meteorology, and even Poisons in some cases. Locating a cave, determining if a plant is poisonous or animal is dangerous – all that can be done with a Naturalist roll. You also use this skill to find suitable herbs for Herb Lore or Pharmacy (Herbal), and this is important too. You must specialize by planet type, but you’re probably playing on an Earth-like world. However, in D&D-style games, there might be specialties for other types of planets if spelljamming is a thing, and different planes of existence.

To explore something, you have to find that something, and finding your way is usually done with the Navigation skill. Without Navigation, you can get lost and, possibly, stumble upon something dangerous or run out of supplies. Sure, you can still find something to explore, but that’ll be accidental exploration. You must specialize. Navigation (Sea) is used on water and under water. Navigation (Land) is what you’re probably going to have on your character sheet. And Navigation (Air) is required if you’re playing a bird or have an airship.

The next skill is Observation. This is useful when you’re standing watch while your companions are asleep, when you’re on a lookout for an ambush, or when you’re playing a flying character who would like to find something interesting from the bird’s eye view. It can also serve as a complementary skill roll when making maps with Cartography.

Not everyone travels on foot, so you might need to learn the Riding skill. Or, if you’re handling a wagon or a cart, Teamster.

Tracking is another skill that is crucial to fantasy rangers. Unlike in D&D, where Track is a feat, Tracking is a skill in GURPS that anyone can learn. You can use it to track game or other people, or to cover your own tracks to avoid detection, and this can be vital to your party.

Finally, we have Survival. This is an essential skill for any outdoorsman. Survival covers things like finding safe food and water, avoiding hazards, building shelter, etc. And you can do it for yourself and up to 10 other people! So, usually, you only need one character with Survival in your group, but a bit of redundancy never hurts. Also, I do not know if mounts and beasts of burden count as people for the purpose of this skill. Roll Survival once per day. If you succeed, you live safely. If you fail, you inflict 2d-4 injury, not damage, to yourself and anyone in your care. This can represent food poisoning and damage from various natural hazards. You can also roll against Survival to find a direction to a mountain pass, flowing water, or a similar landscape feature. Finally, you can use it to set up traps for wild animals.
This is all said in the skill’s description, but these rules are altered if you are using GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures. I will talk about them in more detail in other videos.
Despite being quite broad, Survival is an Average difficulty skill, probably because you have to specialize by planet type and terrain type. Land-dwellers may choose from Arctic, Desert, Island/Beach, Jungle, Mountain, Plains, Swampland, and Woodlands. Aquatic beings may take any of Bank, Deep Ocean Vent, Fresh-Water Lake, Open Ocean, Reef, River/Stream, Salt-Water Sea, and Tropical Lagoon. Speaking of different planets, GURPS Space says that you use aquatic specialties for gas giant environments. I’ve always been curious about how such environments would look like. There could also be more exotic specialties. For example, Underdark sounds like an appropriate specialty for many fantasy games. Different planes of existence should also have their own specialties or even lists of specialties. For example, Paraelemental Plane of Ice could have a specialty for the surface regions and a specialty for the icy cavern systems.

I should also mention two skills that few probably even know about – Bone Carving and Flint Knapping. They can be found in GURPS Lands out of Time. They are TL0 variants of some other skills, and both of them definitely could work in a D&D-style game about survival. It’s better to be a barbarian with a bone spear for hunting and fishing than a barbarian with nothing on your hands.

You should note that I have covered only the most important outdoors skills, but many other skills can be used to great effect in the wilderness. Animal Handling and Mimicry can help you tame or scare off a wild animal. Bow, Blowpipe, Bolas, Crossbow, and other ranged weapon skills can help you with hunting. Machinist and Armoury can help you create tools from natural materials. Cooking can help you cook a great meal, and so on. Exploration and survival definitely can devolve into spamming Survival rolls, but if you simply look at the skill list, you will see that you can have much more detail and make many of these skills matter. GURPS is often criticized for having too many skills, but personally I find that to be an upside – I really like this granularity.

Foraging

So, you have decided to have an outdoors adventure, become an explorer, or just stay outside the city walls for several days. If you’re a living being, then you probably have to eat and drink to survive. An ordinary human needs three meals per day. GURPS Basic Set has traveler’s rations on page 288 – each ration costs $2 and weight 0.5 lb. You also need two quarts of water per day in temperate climates, 3 quarts in hot climates, and 5 quarts in the heat of the desert. The wineskin on page 288 holds 8 pounds or 4 quarts of water and the canteen holds 2 pounds or one quart of water. GURPS Low-Tech has more detailed container tables. Starvation makes you lose FP, while dehydration can cause FP and HP loss. Daily food and water requirements scale with SM – these adjustments can be found on pages 62-64 of GURPS Bio-Tech. These rules are realistic, if you want something simpler – just scale the rations like any other gear.
If you cannot afford this much food and water, or if you simply cannot carry this much, you will have to resort to foraging. As usual, GURPS has multiple rulesets for that, depending on how detailed you want to treat it.
The basic rules for foraging are described on page 427 of GURPS Basic Set. When traveling, each character can forage on the move. There are two types of foraging – gathering and hunting. Gathering requires a successful Survival or Naturalist roll to collect enough plants, berries, and mushrooms for one meal. Critical failure may mean poisoning yourself or your friends. Hunting requires a successful roll with a missile weapon skill or Fishing, if near water, and results in two meals worth of meat. Each forager can roll once for gathering and once for hunting per day.
Alternatively, the party can stop for a day and have each character make five rolls for gathering and five rolls for hunting to replenish supplies. These rules are quite simple, and probably are enough for games that do not focus on survival. They do not say anything about finding water, however.

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons provides a very simplified way that should work for games that really do not want to focus on travelling and survival. If you are camping outside of the town, you can make a single weekly Survival roll not to starve. When traveling, roll Fishing, Survival, or Naturalist once per trip – success collects just half the necessary food.
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures suggests a more granular approach. Each character can make one skill roll per hour dedicated to foraging instead of travel. Each terrain type has a foraging modifier that I mentioned in the video on overland travel – they apply here. Taking extra time gives a bonus: +1 for two hours, +2 for four, +3 for eight, or +4 for a day spent not traveling at all. Experts can try once per half hour at -5.
Critical success finds two meals, success gives one, failure yields nothing, and critical failure means 1 HP lost. The book also has rules for gathering food for mounts and beasts of burden, which is very nice.
There are four types of foraging rolls now:
1. Fishing. Obviously, it is possible only near water.
2. Gathering. Just like in the Basic Set, this is done with Survival or Naturalist skills.
3. Hunting. Roll against any ranged-weapon skill at -4 plus the weapon’s Accuracy. For missile weapons, each roll costs one piece of ammunition; thrown weapons are recovered on any roll but a critical failure. Alternatively, heroes can try Spear to hunt up close, but critical failure costs 1d HP due to mauling! When traveling by water, the GM may allow hunting with Thrown Weapon (Harpoon). Whatever the skill, success catches game.
4. Trapping: On land, a Survival roll, or a Traps roll at -5, captures small game.
The book suggests not tracking water supplies, and treating each meal gained via foraging as having enough water to meet survival needs. In deserts, however, the GM may require each character to make one additional daily Survival roll to find water.
If you do want to track water supplies, then consider using rules from GURPS After the End 2: The New World. Locating water requires a Prospecting or Survival roll, at +10 in most climates or no modifier in the desert. Success finds (margin of success) + 1 pints, or an effectively unlimited amount on success by 10+. If fresh water is nearby (e.g., a river or lake), don’t bother rolling; just assume that water isn’t an issue. Additional rolls might be required to find safe water in a despoiled environment.
The same book has similar rules for foraging for food, but slightly altered – the amount of food found it different, and complementary skill rolls are given. I would definitely use these complementary skill rolls.

Finally, there’s GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics. This book has an entire chapter devoted to finding food. Rules for gathering are similar to those in Dungeon Fantasy 16, but a bit more detailed. Rules for fishing are similar too, but again, more detailed and granular. Rules for hunting and trapping, however, have been greatly expanded, covering different hunting techniques for different kinds of animals, rules for butchering, and many more. Simplified hunting rules can also be found in GURPS After the End 2: The New World. GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 even has rules for whaling!

So, as you can see, you have many options. If you do not want to track anything, just require a weekly Survival roll. If you want something more detailed, then use the rules from the Basic Set. If you want even more detail, consider GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16 and GURPS After the End 2. And if you want the highest level of detail, use GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3. Personally, I use rules from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16, as they appeal to me the most. 

Camping

If you are travelling long distances in the wild, you will have to stop to get some rest eventually. If you open GURPS Basic Set to check the camping rules you will not find anything! Yes, the Basic Set does not have everything.

The most abstract rules for camping can be found in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons. If you are using these rules, then camping requires no special skill, but the party is still expected to post watches. Should a nighttime encounter happen, the GM will determine randomly whose watch was interrupted, and will secretly roll a quick contest of Perception or Observation against the enemy’s Stealth, if applicable. Even if the watchman succeeds and alerts the rest of the party, those who were asleep start combat lying down. Otherwise, everyone is asleep or stunned. Combat Reflexes help immensely here, otherwise you’re in for a very tough situation. The book also has rules for using Camouflage to conceal your camp and for using Traps to set simple noise-makers when camping in a dungeon. And that’s it – it’s quick and simple.

If you want something more detailed, I suggest reading GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures. Now, to find a campsite, you have to make a Survival roll, at -2 if you do not have group basics. A campsite can provide three benefits: comfort, concealment, and line of sight. If you critically succeed on your Survival roll, you claim all three. If you succeed normally, you can claim two of them. If you fail – you can claim one. If you critically fail – you do not get any benefits.
If you do not pick Comfort, then you get bitten by bugs, get cold or wet, or have an uncomfortable night for some other reason. This causes you to lose 1 FP or 2 FP in arctic or mountainous terrain, and these FP cannot be recovered until you rest at a campsite that did claim the comfort benefit. If you do not have anything to sleep on, such as a bedroll, then you must spend two benefits to claim comfort!
If you chose to claim concealment, anyone trying to raid your camp will get -1 to Vision rolls to detect it, and your party gets +1 to Camouflage to remain hidden.
If you chose line of sight, your party gets +1 to Perception or Observation, and if the intruders are trying to sneak, they get -1 to Stealth instead.

Even if you have found a campsite, you have to prepare shelter. Without shelter, the night makes you lose FP as if you did not claim comfort when picking the campsite. If you actually did not claim comfort, then this is cumulative! The book provides rules for pitching tents, finding holes and caves, building igloos and lean-tos, and using vehicles as shelter. Many of them require additional rolls against Survival or Prospecting.
The book also expands the rules for posting watches, allowing you to use Traps or Survival to set up noise-makers outdoors, and providing rules for being on watch when controlling a vehicle.

If you are using these detailed rules, travelling without a character with the appropriate Survival skill is miserable. If you end up in a situation when you do not have access to Survival, consider finding a hireling who will do these things for you.
Since most people tend to camp at night, Night Vision makes you an excellent watchman, and Infravision becomes even better, because warmblooded creatures stand out against the cool night air even more than they would during the day. If your party has a ranger or a druid that has an animal companion, consider training the animal to watch for intruders – many animals are better at perceiving things in the dark than normal people.
As you can see, you can do well with just handwaiving the camping, or using the rules from Dungeon Fantasy 16. I really like these rules, I think that they are the most elegant camping rules I’ve seen in a roleplaying system, so I highly recommend you to check them out. 

Weather

Have you ever played a game where one of the players suddenly asks the GM one of the following questions: “What is the weather like?” or “What even is the current season?” And then the entire table sits there in silence, because very often people just do not track such things and do not even think about them. For many games, this is absolutely okay, but if you are running a game that is set mostly outdoors and that is focused on exploration, weather can add a lot of detail and significantly affect not only your progress, but also your combat performance. What seemed to be a nice dirt road at first turns into a treacherous muddy and slippery battlefield after a rain, and a windstorm might make ranged combat all but impossible! So, let’s talk about the weather and how GURPS treat it.

What is weather? We can split up weather into three simplified components – temperature, wind, and precipitation. Let’s start with temperature. Each character has a temperature comfort zone within which he suffers no ill effects due to heat or cold. For ordinary humans, this zone is 55 degrees wide and falls between 35 degrees and 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In Celsius, this is roughly equivalent to 2 to 32 degrees. Shifting this comfort zone, but keeping its width the same, is a 0-point feature. You can extend it with the Temperature Tolerance advantage. Damage Resistance against cold or fire does not help you with that.
Cold and heat are actually quite different, mechanically speaking, so let’s take a look at the rules. GURPS Basic Set has rules for cold on page 430. In freezing temperatures, you have to make a HT or HT-based Survival (Arctic) roll every 30 minutes or lose 1 FP. As usual, once your FP reaches 0, you start to lose HP in addition to losing FP. So, keep in mind that cold is deadly. I have seen my share of drunks passing out outside in winter and freezing.
The time interval can become significantly shorter in windy conditions, and the effective temperature can be lower due to the wind chill factor. Your roll is also modified for clothing and every 10 degrees below the bottom border of the comfort zone. If you have gotten your clothes wet, you get another harsh penalty. If you have the Feathers perk, then this penalty is reduced. There are also rules for thermal shock that come into play when you are suddenly immersed in icy waters.
Heat is described on page 434 of GURPS Basic Set. It works not the same as cold. First, in ordinary hot weather, you do not actually lose FP if you stay in the shade and do not move around much. However, if you are active in temperatures in the top 10 degrees of your comfort zone or above, then you must roll against HT or HT-based Survival (Desert) every 30 minutes or lose 1 FP. Critical failure means you got a heatstroke and lost 1d FP. As usual, once you run out of FP, you also lose HP. This roll is penalized for encumbrance and extra heat. In addition, at temperatures up to 30 degrees over your comfort zone, you lose an extra 1 FP whenever you lose FP to exertion or dehydration. At temperatures up to 60 degrees over your comfort zone, this becomes an extra 2 FP. If you remember my video about foraging, you also might remember that your water requirements are increased in hot environments. This is not mentioned in the heat section, for some reason.
Also, if you spend a day full of sun on unprotected skin, you will take 1d-3 damage due to sunburn. Darker-skinned individuals are not in much danger. Albinos take 1d damage per 30 minutes. Armor prevents sunburn, as do such perks as Fur, Scales, and Feathers. There are also rules for your skin catching fire in intense heat and for climate-controlled armor suits, but they are very unlikely to come up in a low-tech fantasy game.

So, this is it. The rules are sufficiently detailed, but aren’t very complex – both heat and cold would take up less than a single page. I have used them, and they worked fine for me, but there is another alternative – GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures. Now, both heat and cold rules take up only half a page!
For the most part, they work the same way, but there are some differences. Now, instead of rolling every 30 minutes, you make one daily roll to see how terrible you feel. Failure means spending that day down as many FP as the margin. That’s how the hero is faring at any given moment during the day, and not cumulative between days. Instead of extending the comfort zone, Temperature Tolerance now provides a bonus to the HT roll. This greatly reduces bookkeeping and time spent on rolling against HT or Survival, but still makes HT, Survival, and Temperature Tolerance important. I think that this is a quite elegant alternative to the basic rules. One thing that also differs from the Basic Set is that you can roll against Survival (Desert or Jungle) in hot climates, not just Survival (Desert). Sunburn has been slightly simplified as well.

That’s all we’ve got for temperature. Let’s talk about wind. Even though I have seen some GMs keep track of temperature, I have never in my entire life seen a GM use wind. Wind can be important, and sometimes you should also know the wind speed. For example, let’s look through GURPS Basic Set and see what is affected by wind. First, we have Flight with Lighter than Air that is affected by wind speed. The Air version of Vibration Sense is affected by wind. Area attacks with the Drifting enhancement are affected by wind, and those are used often in fantasy games. Blowpipe use is penalized by wind. Disguise (Animals) is affected by wind direction. Wind also affects flying movement. I have already mentioned that wind may decrease the effective ambient temperature. Wind affects water and aerial vehicles. Interestingly enough, nothing is said about wind affecting Smell rolls, even in GURPS Powers: Enhanced Senses. But anyway, in most of these cases, the text just says “it is affected by wind,” but doesn’t specify how. Some GMs might be okay with improvising effect, but some GMs would like to know the exact numbers.
So, where can we find the mechanical effects of wind? GURPS Magic has an entire college of Weather spells and has the Beaufort Scale box. But this doesn’t really give us anything. Fortunately, we also have a relatively obscure book – GURPS Disasters: Hurricane. This book has the Beaufort Wind Scale expanded with game mechanical effects. As you can see, strong winds impose harsh penalties! If you look through the book, you will also find rules on wind affecting hearing and vision, including Night Vision. What this book does not explain is how these wind effects scale with size or ST or the victim. If you remember D&D rules, wind affects creatures of different sizes differently. It’s natural to assume that large creatures are more difficult to blow away. Maybe something like “Subtract your SM from the Beaufort Scale” to find the effects wind has on you will be fine, maybe not.
What else do we have? GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures keeps things abstract, combining effects of precipitation and wind into nasty weather effects. Aside from penalizing overland movement and rolls for Survival and Tracking, no concrete effects are given. The book suggests penalizing Vision rolls during sandstorms, for example.

That’s it for wind, now let’s talk about precipitation. In this case, we have even fewer rules. As I just mentioned, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16 lumps it together with wind. The only additional rules that I managed to find can be found in the Emerald Hell article from Pyramid #3-95. It gives us a table with various precipitation effects and how they affect Vision. But… what is a range increment? The article does not explain it! The only hint is the attack example in the Jungle Combat section that seems to imply that you get -1 to Vision per range increment. That sounds reasonable, but I’m still not 100% sure if I understood it correctly. Anyway, the article itself is great and I will come back to it in a later video in the series. And there’s nothing else about rain. However, GURPS Ultra-Tech has rules for lasers interacting with fog, but this is unlikely to be relevant in fantasy games.
The Hail spell description in GURPS Magic says that hail forces spellcasters to roll against Will every second or lose concentration. Particularly large hailstones can deal minor damage too.
Speaking of precipitation, it seems that I forgot something – clouds! Cloudy weather may obscure the sky, making Navigation difficult. Will it affect vision? It depends on which illumination table you use – GURPS has multiple different ones. The most recent one, the one from GURPS Template Toolkit 2: Races – says that even a very overcast day does not impose a Vision penalty. However, clouds will affect Vision at night, and this can be important.

That’s it for the effects of weather, but how do you, as a GM, determine it? Most RPG systems have random weather generation tables and GURPS… doesn’t really have one. There are rules for generating weather randomly in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures, but they are very abstract – weather can be Good, Normal, Bad, or Very Bad – there’s no data about temperature, weather, and precipitation. Another option is using tables for other systems – I bet there are many online tools available for that, so you should be able to find something without much trouble. Finally, there’s a much simpler way. Just Google current weather in a place that’s similar to where the characters are. You will get not only the current weather, but also a weather forecast! This can be important if your party has somebody with the Weather Sense skill or the Predict Weather spell. You also get some additional information, such as sunset and sunrise time.

Environments

When you are running a game focused on exploration, one of the most important things is the environment that the characters explore. In some cases, character might travel through many different terrain types, but some games can be focused on one specific terrain type. Both approaches have their own merits – the first one is more diverse, and the second one allows the GM and the players really emphasize the special features of that particular terrain type.
The Survival skill description lists the following common land terrain types: Arctic, Desert, Island/Beach, Jungle, Mountain, Plains, Swampland, and Woodlands. It also has a list of aquatic specialties and suggests some more exotic terrain types.
So, where do you find the terrain rules in GURPS? There are no environmental supplements, like in D&D 3.5, so whatever rules you’ve got you’ll have to compile from GURPS Basic Set, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures, and other sources. DF16 has plenty of environmental hazards and other rules, but I will emphasize something that I love about GURPS in this video – you are not limited to just GURPS splatbooks. Remember I mentioned D&D 3.5 environmental books? You can give them a read and easily adapt the rules or concepts from them for your GURPS game. DF16 mostly focuses on grounded rules that are more-or-less realistic, while all the D&D supplements can give you many ideas for fantastical environments that will definitely be memorable. So, before I get to the actual environments, I want to show you some D&D books that can enhance your exploration game.
The first and the oldest book I’d like to recommend is AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide. This book has everything about exploration and survival for your AD&D game. While most of the mechanics already have their GURPS counterparts, this book is nonetheless an interesting read. What I like the most about it is that it describes how Infravision works in conjunction with different temperatures and clothing. If you'd like to know more about Infravision, I highly recommend the Sight in the Darkness article from Dragon Magazine #211. It talks about Infravision in much more detail than any GURPS supplement does.
If you’d like to know how to build your wilderness areas, I highly recommend AD&D World Builder’s Guidebook. This is an extremely well-written worldbuilding book. I used it to create my own campaign setting, and I believe that this book is much better than almost anything written on this topic nowadays.
If you’d like something written for a modern D&D edition, then an unusual suggestion would be… the Book of Vile Darkness. First, I know that D&D 3.0 is not modern anymore, but it is to me. Second, it has a short chapter on evil weather – such supernatural weather conditions can add some flavor to tainted places of your campaign setting. Technically, you do not really need this book – I have converted these weather effects in one of my blogposts – the link is in the description.
Then we have the environmental books – Frostburn, Sandstorm, and Stormwrack. They can give you a lot of ideas for arctic, desert, and aquatic environments, respectively. These three books are among my favorite D&D 3.5 supplements. Yet again, I have converted all the weather conditions and environmental hazards on my blog – links are in the description. Some people consider Cityscape and Dungeonscape to be environmental books as well. But instead of Dungeonscape, I would like to point out the supplement called Underdark. While it is made with Forgotten Realms in mind, it has a lot, and I mean a lot of useful information for running underground games. If you combine it with GURPS Underground Adventures and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons, I’m sure you won’t be able to find anything these books lack.
Pathfinder RPG has a book about wilderness too – Ultimate Wilderness. What intrigues me the most about it are the exploration rules. They are a bit gamey, but I think they would work great in a hexcrawl game. Check this book out. I think that the exploration rules are available on the SRD website for free. I think they should be easy to adapt to GURPS.
Finally, I’d like to plug two third-party supplements for D&D 3.0. The first one is Wildscape by Fantasy Flight Games. This one talks about wilderness games and every environment type in great detail, and also suggests some supernatural variants of the environments. For example, a desert composed of metallic particles or bone dust. The mere presence of such terrain in your world will excite the imagination of your players. What could have caused a desert of bone dust to appear? Was there an ancient war that lasted for centuries in this place?
The second supplement is Wilds by Alderac Entertainment Group. This book yet again discusses everything about exploration and survival, and has chapters devoted entirely to specific terrain types. It’s a great read! This company, generally speaking, produced poor D&D rules, but also is a treasure trove of interesting ideas to adapt to your GURPS games.
With books out of the way, let’s talk about the environments. This time, I will not just provide my own thoughts – most of the work is already done, but not by me. Mailanka, who is the most prolific GURPS blogger, has a series of posts on his blog about different terrain types. While they are written in the context of his Psi-Wars setting, they definitely work for fantasy games. So, let’s look over these posts and see what they’ve got in store. I will link all of them in the description – give them a read!
The first terrain type is Arctic. Obviously, you will have to familiarize yourself with the Cold rules. Because of the cold, you’re probably going to find many creatures with thick fur in the arctic, and whatever people live there will try to stay in shelter and go outside wearing a lot of clothes. Foraging is difficult – the average Foraging modifier is -4, and Tracking is difficult as well because of snowfalls quickly concealing any signs of passage. Mechanically complex gear might freeze up in such conditions.
Most arctic environments are deserts, so you will likely to encounter wind. Wind not only will obscure vision with all the snow around you, and will also lower the effective temperature even further. Snowfalls also penalize vision, and blizzards make vision very difficult.
Snow is difficult terrain that makes movement slower and penalizes most actions, unless you have the appropriate Sure-Footed perk or the Terrain Adaptation advantage. Ice makes things even worse, because you really do not want to slip and fall in combat. Personally, I think that rules for slipping on ice are not harsh enough – people in real life often break limbs when they slip on ice. I would suggest treating this as a fall that deals 1d-4 damage to a random hit location if standing or 1d-2 damage if running – just like the rules for bolas and lasso suggest. Alternatively, you can treat it as thrust-2 damage, like Fantastic Dungeon Grappling does for damaging throws. But in any case, it is absolutely fine to just keep things as is.
GURPS does not have rules for snow glare or snow blindness, so it was very nice to see Mailanka come up with some. This will make such traits as Protected Vision or Robust Vision more important even without vision-based attacks. It might seem counterintuitive, but it’s also possible to get sunburned in the arctic due to ultraviolet light.
Typical arctic hazards are snow avalanches, sinkholes, and thin ice. Frostburn for D&D 3.5 has several new varieties of supernatural snow and blizzards.
I remember running a D&D get set in an arctic environment, and I was planning to run a similar GURPS game, but it never happened – maybe someday in the future. Settlements in such environments usually are small, as there’s not enough food to feed a large population. However, if a large settlement does arise, you could end up in a situation where a drastic change of pace or setting can happen. For example, the characters may adventure outdoors during the warm season, but once the blizzards become regular, travelling becomes all but impossible. This can be played out as a long period of downtime, when characters can study skills, craft equipment, get jobs, or enchant magic items, or it could serve as an opportunity to shift the game from being focused on exploration to being focused on social interaction and other urban activities.
Arctic environments also let you use skills that you probably wouldn’t get a chance to use otherwise, such as Skiing or Skating. You also get some relatively exotic vehicles of choice, such as dogsleds or even wind-powered ice skidders. Fantasy monsters of the arctic often are large and primordial, such as mammoths, linnorms, huge whales or worms. It is also often home to various unique undead creatures that arise from those who freeze to death. Archmages or liches might choose such isolated environments to avoid being bothered by others. Humanoids are often primitive – this is where you can have various barbarian tribes and even caveman cultures. You could also emphasize the use of nonmetallic materials, such as bone, teeth, and horns – GURPS Low-Tech has rules for weapons and armor from such materials.
Overall, I really like the arctic environment, and I believe that it definitely not as boring as it might seem to some people.

The next environment is on the opposite side of the temperature spectrum – Desert. Temperature doesn’t really have anything to do with deserts – a desert is any arid environment. There are cold, temperate, and hot deserts, but people usually think about hot deserts. So, you might want to familiarize yourself with the Heat rules and, of course, sunburn. Sun can also produce glare. However, many deserts also get very cold at night, so you might want to get familiar with the Cold rules as well.
Water consumption is increased in hot climates, and even further increased in hot deserts. Finding water, however, could be a problem – the Survival or Prospecting roll to find water does not take the +10 bonus in the desert. Foraging is difficult too, as there’s not much vegetation.
Another problem is sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not all deserts are sandy, however. Loose sand counts as bad footing that penalizes attacks and defenses. Tracking rolls also take a -2 penalty. Heat and sand also may negatively affect your equipment, especially if it is mechanically complex. If the weather is windy, and wind is common in deserts, then you are bound to have some vision penalties due to all the dust and sand in the air.
There are other environmental hazards typical for deserts, such as sinkholes, stinging plants, swarms of insects, quicksand, and tornadoes. Sandstorm for D&D 3.5 also has many other hazards that can make your desert more fantastic.
I have run a GURPS game set in a desert not long ago. It was about dwarven merchants travelling between oasis cities on dune sailers – sandy variants of the wind sailers from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy-Tech 1.

The next biome is Island/Beach. Islands can be very different – from frozen islands in the arctic seas to tropical reef islands. I assume that this Survival specialty covers the interface area where both land and water come together, and if you get further away from the water, you have to use a different Survival specialty.
The only common thing between all the different islands is the presence of water. You are likely to interact with water somehow, be it swimming, boating, or sailing. If you’d like to know more about rules for underwater activities, then check out Pyramid #3-26.
Food is often abundant – Foraging rolls take no penalty, but sand and waves make tracking more difficult. Sand can be an issue, just like in a desert, but there’s not as much of it on the beach. Most of the other hazards are related to sand, water, and wind. Mailanka lists freak wave, lightning strike, quicksand, and tornado.
Islands, in my opinion, are distinct not because of the environment, but because of the isolated ecosystem. If you do not know where to place some very weird creature you found in one of the Monster Manuals, just put it on an island – it will fit right in. I remember reading a fascinating blogpost about generating island ecosystems. It was based around generating an encounter table for a normal ecosystem, then randomly choosing which entries to remove, and then choosing which of the remaining creatures would adapt to fill the ecological niche created by the creatures that have died out. I would post a link to this post if I had it. Maybe you know what I’m talking about.

The next terrain type is Jungle. Jungles are thick, hot, and wet. Traditionally, this is where many diseases and poisons can be encountered, so make sure that characters who have purchased resistance to these maladies actually feel the effect. In the jungles, it is difficult to move because of uneven and slippery terrain. However, this is also a good place to show off some unusual movement modes, such as climbing, brachiating, or even tunneling. Mailanka suggests the following hazards: falling tree, quicksand, sinkhole, stinging plants, and swarm. But if you want a much more complete overview of the jungles, I highly recommend reading the Emerald Hell article from Pyramid #3-95. It’s an interesting read and incorporating rules from this article definitely will make a game in the jungle feel very different from any other game.

Next up are the Mountains. This type of terrain comes up often in fantasy games. How many times have you had to go into the mountains to explore an abandoned mine or a dwarven stronghold. Isolated temples and monasteries, dragon lairs, giant castles – all this can be found in the mountains. Vegetation is sparse, so foraging is difficult, and so is tracking. Movement is penalized as well due to most surfaces being uneven and sometimes slippery too – rain happens in the mountains! Fog also is a normal occurrence, as is snow very high up in the mountains. This is also the only mundane place where altitude sickness might come into play, so you might want to get familiar with the rules.
The following hazards are appropriate to mountainous terrain – falling rocks, avalanches, lava flows, and lightning strikes. I do not really have anything to add here.

The next terrain type is the Plains. At the first glance, it might seem that it’s the most boring terrain type. I guess “plain” would be a better word than boring. GURPS does not have hills as a separate terrain type, so your plains might feature uneven terrain. Foraging, tracking, and movement are usually easy on the plains, but since there’s nothing to break up wind and help with other weather, plains can become awful after a heavy rainstorm. If you want to emphasize the special features of plains, try to play up the openness – you have nowhere to hide, making camps an attractive choice for raiders. Also, this is where you can introduce mounted combat, because normal mounts are the most effective in this terrain.
Aside from bad weather, you might encounter fires, lightning strikes, stampedes, stinging plants, swarms, and tornadoes on the plains. You might want to take a look at some of the books I mentioned in the beginning of the video – there might be more ideas there.

Then we have the Swampland. This is a very difficult terrain type, probably on par with the jungles. There are many complications and obstacles in the swamps. First of all, you have a lot of water – it can be shallow, but sometimes it is deep enough to drown. Everything is muddy and slippery, so it is possible to slip and fall into the water. Fantasy swamps are often home to various monsters that lurk in these waters, such as giant frogs or lizardmen.
Rain or fog can further impede movement and vision. Tracking is heavily penalized in the swampland – you get -4! Foraging, however, is not difficult. Fantasy swamps often contain various herbs that are useful for herbalists and alchemists.
Other hazards that can be encountered in the swampland are mud flows, quicksands, swarms of biting insects, or stinging plants. Typically, swamp waters are also diseased. Fantasy swamps can also be acidic or exude toxic fumes.

Finally, we have the Woodlands. Just like the plains, it’s a relatively mundane terrain type for most people. However, forests come in different types – coniferous forests and rainforests, thin forests and dense forests. Overland travel speed depends on the thickness of the forest. Foraging and tracking usually are not penalized.
Dense undergrowth might provide movement and combat penalties, and the same can be said for roots that stick out of the ground. Sinkholes, falling trees, stinging plants, and forest fires can be additional hazards. Rain and fog are common, but wind is broken up by the trees.
Even though forests seem mundane, they do not have to be. You can have primordial forests where entire buildings can be constructed on the branches, you can have diabolically influenced forests that mislead the travelers or celestial forests that provide respite. Check out some of the books I’ve mentioned at the start of the video, they have many ideas that can make forests more distinct.


Mailanka’s Environmental Post Series:

My own environmental posts:

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