BrOSR Game Preparations
I've been rambling about BrOSR for quite a while already, mostly about how such games could work in GURPS, and what is required to run one. At this point, between existing GURPS books, my own blogposts, and posts by the Addled Antillectual, there isn't that much left to do. Right now, I'm running a faction in a D&D 5e Braunstein game - the Shattered Skies (the sequel to Drakonheim) - and it's been a great experience. While I am enjoying the game, I'm also taking notes and studying the way Serious DM is running the game, because this is extremely important to me, as I'm planning to run something similar in the future, but on a lower scale (probably within 2 or 3 months from now). In the meantime, I found an in-person GURPS group in my backwater for whom I ran a short conventional game to familiarize the players with the system. And now we are preparing to play an in-person BrOSR-style GURPS game. This forced me to come down from the hypothetical scenarios that the system would need to cover and think about what I really need to at least start. Starting is the most important thing - I should be able to patch any holes as we go along. This is doubly important because aside from the aforementioned short conventional game I ran, I have no experience running GURPS in person. Thus, I decided to document my preparation process, because it might be helpful to others (yes, you) and to myself as well. It's very likely that I will get some things wrong, but I'll learn from my own mistakes.
The first thing I thought about is "where?" I had to choose the region of my campaign setting that would fit the desired campaign. The main criterion was being relatively far from the core of civilization, so that the players would be able to explore the wilderness, dungeons, and potentially establish their own domains. It still shouldn't be too uncivilized, as then there'd be problems with supplies, gear, henchmen, hirelings, and teachers. I chose four different regions and let the players vote. The majority voted for a rather exotic region populated by four main races - barbaric humans, dark dwarves, fainil, and glimmerfolk. The dark dwarves are not duergars nor the Krynnish dark dwarves, but dwarves that renounced Moradin as the head of their pantheon and shifted culturally to become less conservative and more inventive; as the result they possess firearms more advanced than gonnes, and similar comparably high-tech inventions. Glimmerfolk are xenophobic planetouched that appeared in Dragon Magazine #321 (they, I guess, take the niche of elves in this region). Fainil are winged drow-tanar'ri hybrids from Dragon Magazine #244. The fact that the main cultures in the region aren't very fond of each other makes potential conflict ripe. However, it also limits character generation options (at least at the start) - the starting characters will have to either be of one race or a mix of humans and dwarves (we went with the latter option).
I will need a map, won't I? How big of a map and of what scale? Since I'm going to be using some mechanics and procedures borrowed from ACKS II, I will use the 1.5-mi and 6-mile hexes, and since I'm going to be playing in person, I will simply download and print out the templates from the Autarch's website. ACKS uses different terrain types than D&D, and I like them more. However, I'll have to come up with a map key for my scribbles to denote said terrain types. Instead of using Appendix B to create the terrain, I will use AD&D 2e World Builder's Guidebook - that should do the trick.
What GURPS lacks, surprisingly, is exploration procedures. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures does have rules for overland movement, navigation, etc. but there are no rules for clearing the wilderness (this is something you must do to establish a domain), placing lairs and other points of interest, and some other stuff.
To find out how many lairs there are per hex, we can consult pages 68-69 of ACKS II JJ. (A sidenote: the table there seems to have no values for Grassland (Savannah) and Mountains (Volcanic). Perhaps this was fixed in errata). Rules for Searching the Wild (p. RR274), however, will need to be GURPSified. Here's what I propose:
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Searching the Wild
If the Judge has mapped out the 6-mile hex in detail, he can use the small scale map to adjudicate the search process. Otherwise, the following abstract system can be used: Each hour that the adventurers spend searching a hex, the Judge makes a roll against the target value derived from the table below. If anyone in the group has Tracking at Per+2 or higher, add +2. If the roll succeeds, the party discovers a dungeon entrance, lair, ruin, or other point of interest, if at least one is present. (If more than one lair is present, the Judge will decide which one the adventurers find.) If the roll fails, the party learns nothing.
Expedition Movement Target Value for the Search Roll
23 miles per day or less 7
24-59 miles per day 8
60-95 miles per day 9
96-119 miles per day 10
120-143 miles per day 11
144-179 miles per day 12
180-191 miles per day 13
192 miles per day or more 14
If the party is airborne, when searching clear, grass, scrub, hills, barren, desert, or mountain terrain, they roll once per 30 minutes instead of once per hour. However, when searching forest, jungle, or swamp terrain, they suffer a -4 penalty to the target value due to the canopy of foliage.
While searching a region, the party triggers one random encounter roll per hour. The party can split up, with each subgroup making its own search roll, but both groups trigger random encounters separately.
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Done. This looks fine, but it will need testing in play. Now, speaking of random encounters - I will need random encounter tables, that's for sure. This is actually more difficult than it sounds. For example, ACKS II divides random encounters into civilized and monster, and each terrain-based monster encounter table also has four rarity columns, which is something I like. However, if I were to adopt this approach, I would be limited to only a specific number of entries in each table, as if I were to add anything beyond that, I'd mess up the probabilities. Thus, I had to develop an approach that combines ACKS II random encounter tables with the way Serious DM does them in his game: first, you roll the creature type, and then you roll on the terrain-based creature type subtable. This way, the probabilities remain static, but I can gradually fill out the generic encounter tables. However, in the meantime I simply devised less extensive, regional encounter tables that do not use this approach.
Another important aspect that I will need to cover is enchantment. While in the past I've been using sorcerous enchantment, not long ago I understood that it's rather flawed for what I have in mind, and thus I've been reworking it. I got most of the mechanics done, but I don't have a compendium of magic items yet. However, I should be able to use D&D items without much difficulty for now.
I drew a map by hand using the ACKS template and created a document with notes about what lairs and special features are in what hex (I know that ACKS II JJ says that you don't have to do it in advance, but I wanted to try out the lair placement procedure).
Next up, I wrote up the character generation restrictions. While initially I wanted to try out the full mudcore 62-point start, I decided to give more power to the first batch of characters and started at 130/-30. This still isn't much, but the players are still new to the system. One of the players even exhibited the wish to generate his character randomly, and what we got was a surprisingly playable-looking crafting-focused cleric.
Aside from the character restrictions, I had to clearly define what rules we are using. However, we might have to adjust things as we go (but I hope we won't have to do that), because this is our first game using this methodology and we are experimenting with the system trying to see what works and what doesn't.
I think that's all I currently need, and I will definitely be posting AARs once we actually start playing.
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