Monster: Arrowhawk

Monster: Arrowhawk

Here's another entry in the D&D monsters series. Arrowhawks are very agile birds from the Plane of Air. They are intelligent and can project rays of electricity. Nothing too interesting, but not too mundane as well. Personally, I've never seen this monster in use.

Martial Arts: The Sublime Way

Martial Arts: The Sublime Way

Tome of Battle for D&D 3.5 was released quite late, but was an amazing supplement. It provided three new martial classes, a whole new maneuver system, and was fun overall. Probably one of the best things written by WotC. In Pathfinder there was no such thing until a 3rd-party publisher Dreamscarred Press released their own "conversion" of the system, called Path of War. While I think that Tome of Battle is in all ways superior to Path of War, I decided to convert every single discipline from the Tome of Battle, Path of War, Path of War Expanded, and Lords of the Night (the last three all from Dreamscarred Press) into martial arts styles for GURPS. I didn't convert every single maneuver, of course, but just attempted to capture the feel of every discipline.

Magic: Shadow Magic and Incarnum Update

Magic: Shadow Magic and Incarnum Update

A few days ago I noticed a glaring mistake in my incarnum conversion - you can freely switch soulmelds on a particular chakra. Now I've edited the post, corrected the mistake, making switching the soulmelds on and off take 1 minute, and fixed some minor mistakes and miscalculations.

I've already covered the shadow magic conversion to Sorcery, but what if you wanted to give the shadowcasters more of a scholarly feel, using spells as skills, like in GURPS Magic? Here's my attempt.

Magic: Ritual Magic Paths, Part 2

Magic: Ritual Magic Paths, Part 2

And here is the second half of the paths. Strangely, this website doesn't let me do it all in one post. Perhaps there's a character limit?

Magic: Ritual Magic Paths, Part 1

Magic: Ritual Magic Paths, Part 1

Ritual Magic is presented in GURPS Magic and expanded upon in GURPS Thaumatology. Basically, each college is a separate skill that defaults to the core Ritual Magic skill, and every spell is a technique that defaults to its college skill with a penalty equal to the spell's prerequisite count. This may sound confusing, especially if you are aware of all the other magic systems. Ritual magic, ritual path magic, path/book magic, oh boy! Ritual magic looks like a nice concept, especially if you want to differentiate two magical traditions while keeping the mechanics almost identical. This way you can have scholarly wizards who study spells normally and clerics that use ritual magic representing their more general and less "scientific" grasp of magical powers. It feels like some prerequisite counts should be deliberately altered to prevent ritual mages from abusing their powers, so this system might need some fine tuning. I wish it got some more attention from the writers. If you're used to Dungeons and Dragons, I feel that you can represent clerical magic using ritual magic very well, making each divine domain a separate path.

Monster: Aranea

Monster: Aranea

Next up is this interesting monster. I feel like the araneas get too little attention. Come on, they are intelligent man-sized shapeshifting spiders with sorcerous powers! Personally, I like this monster, but I have never had a chance to use it and have never seen it used. It appeared first in Monster Manual and has never been expanded upon. One thing I had doubts about is the aranea's anatomical oddity - its brain is contained in the hump on its back, and I wasn't sure how to stat it. After thinking for a bit, I just decided to make it a feature.

Treasure: Wand of Fireball

Treasure: Wand of Fireball

Here's another piece of fantasy treasure piles - a wand of fireball. Here I present three power variations, and each variation is build either as a Sorcery item or a Metatronic Generator. You can find the Fireball spell in Pyramid #3-63. Here and in the previous post we see a trend - on lower TLs metatronic generators are cheaper than Sorcery items, even when the spell-less variation is used, and on higher TLs metatronic generators are much more expensive.