GURPS BrOSR Progress Update

GURPS BrOSR Progress Update

You may know that my current project is to make GURPS compatible with the BrOSR playstyle. It may seem like a fool’s errand to some, but it isn’t to me. I haven’t posted anything in a relatively long while, mostly due to life getting busy, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve been idling on this front. I’d like to tell you about what’s been done and what still needs to be done. So, here’s my progress report.

First, quick character generation. I am aware of the Delvers to Grow supplement, but I went with a different approach were you roll your stats, loadouts, and skills. Characters will be unequal, but I don’t really care. So far, I’ve only done the fighter class this way, so I cannot say that this branch of the project is finished – but at least there’s a template that I can use for other classes. Speaking of that, I went through all my setting documents, especially the parts about magic, and did some serious clean up.

I consolidated all rules for weather and combined them with a GURPSified weather generation procedure from ACKS II Judges Journal. I even wrote a program that generates weather in a single click, and tried it out in a game successfully. I liked it, my players liked it. If you don’t use weather in your games… why?

Weather is very important in wilderness exploration. To make such exploration work smoother, I adapted the ACKS II wilderness exploration procedure to GURPS. Such expeditions will inevitably cause random encounters. Since the rules for random encounters in GURPS are subpar, I adapted the entire random encounter procedure from ACKS II and devised rules for wilderness random encounter distance based on ACKS II and GURPS Mass Combat. I tried out the exploration procedure, random encounter tables, weather, and encounter distance rules in an actual game, and they seem to work well.

But what about the dungeons? We already know that timekeeping is very important, and GURPS doesn’t make it easy with its one-second turns. I explored this topic and found a way to reintroduce 10-minute turns and 1-minute rounds and also adapted the dungeon delving procedure from ACKS II. I tried them out in an actual game and received some very positive feedback. Speaking of that, I also gave Appendix A random dungeon generation a shot, and it works wonderfully.

There’s also the sea voyage procedure that I adapted from ACKS II. I haven’t playtested it yet, but I do not see why it shouldn’t work. Any expedition requires you to buy supplies, and this is something that is surprisingly unintuitive in GURPS. I delved deeply into this topic, so now I just have to set clear costs for supplies for my games.

Finally, I found a way to plug a hole in the rules that… didn’t actually really exist. I was upset about there being no way to resolve a combat abstractly in a few rolls, but I ran some tests and apparently GURPS Mass Combat can work well for any kind of combat. You do need to adjust some things, but nothing major. In addition, you can use BR from ACKS II instead TS from GURPS Mass Combat, and the system only becomes better thanks to that. I found a relatively simple way of converting GURPS stats into ACKS Battle Ratings. This realization was a huge step forward.

But did you know that now there’s another deranged person who is doing some very heavy lifting in the same direction? Say hello to a new blog – Axioms of an Addled Antillectual. The host worked out the conversion rate between GURPS $ and ACKS II gp, and it wasn’t 1 gp = $100 like I used to believe. It’s 1 gp = $40. In addition, he tackled something I was dreading – Gold-as-XP progression. Give the posts a read! My involvement in the economics was the adaptation of the Market Class rules from ACKS II. I haven’t tested them yet, however, but I will.

That’s the fundamental stuff that was done. There are some less important things that have to be mentioned. If you want random generation to work, and the game to work in general, you need content. I wrote up a crapton of spells for wizards and other spellcasters, repriced the entire list of alchemical items, started working on the second volume of GURPS Monstrous Compendium, and backported the new mass combat statistics into the first volume.

Now, that was a lot of work, but I only spent a few months on it. There’s still work to be done But what’s left? Actually, not that much. First, the treasure generation rules have to be reworked. Well, more like created, not reworked. I will probably adapt the classical Treasure Types from ACKS II and tie them somehow to GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 8: Treasure Tables. I’m still thinking about how to do it. Then, I will need to write up the training rules, expanding what we’ve got in GURPS Social Engineering: Back to School. And… if I do that, I will have everything I need to start a game.

However, there is still a hefty list of stuff that is not required at the start, but should become useful further down the line. In the slop department, I will have to write more spells, more monsters, more martial arts, reprice poisons, consolidate gear lists, write premade chi abilities for monks, and eventually start working on enchanted items. What’s more important is that I also have to write more random generators for other character “classes.”

Some other procedures from ACKS II should be adapted. Abstract dungeon exploration and wilderness exploration will require me to deal with the treasure conundrum first. Mercantile ventures and hijinks shouldn’t be too difficult.

Finally, there’s some mental prepwork that has to be done. People recommend reading Appendix N literature. I’ve already found Three Hearts and Three Lions on my bookshelf and gave it a read, and I may read some more stuff in the near future. Aside from that, I have to run a Braunstein – I have a scenario in mind, and to actually run it, I just have to wait until life becomes a bit less busy. And only then I will consider myself ready to run a proper BrOSR game or die trying. Perhaps, I’ll run a solo game in the meantime or something like that.