Dinosaur Hunter: Bare Minimum Template

Vaulting onto a dinosaur takes a lot of
different skills.

I can't think of much to write this week, so I thought maybe I'll just air a work in progress and having it out in the open will help me thing better. In any case, my intent is to make a setting where fighting dinosaurs feels right, with a measure of cinematicness but not too much. The feeling I get when looking at the RAW in the Basic Set, and only that, a T-Rex is just a big bag of hit points that can be dropped in a few hits to the (thanks to SM difference) easily targeted skull. So I need to borrow rules from here and there to make it actually into a meaningfully different challenge when fighting against things several times one's own size that is bigger than "more HP and damage."
In any case, to manage expectations, my own, and potential players, I turn to the tool of building templates. They spell out what I think is important to know and communicate my expectations of what kind of adventures a player will have. This is an early, brittle, and inflexible draft, but coloring in the lines once, even if crudely, gives me a place to hang my hat and try to build up.

Opinions: Dungeon Fantasy 1 - Occupational Template

The foreshortening on the top
right sword is weirding me out.

Today, I'm going to look at the character templates from Dungeon Fantasy 1 and looking at them, but rather than the perspective of rating writing and clarity, I am going to be looking at them from a position on my subjective opinions of fun, usability, and difficulty. Without further ado, let's dive in.

Campaign Preparation: Smoke on the Water - Warrior

Something something
amputation

Finally, of my minimum four-man band, the most straightforward character, the warrior/hunter kinda dealy. I think this should be fairly straightforward so let's get this show on the road without further ado.

Campaign Preparation: Smoke on the Water - Big Man

It's apparently a real thing. Don't let
anyone say GURPS never taught
Pesudo Boo nothing.

So, it is a bit of a curiosity to me, but an interesting thing. When I looked at the occupations in the back of Low-Tech Companion 3, I stumbled across the Big Man occupation, and it seemed like a really good fit for the position of the party face in my TL0~1 campaign. Let's go about working out how to construct a master negotiator for this game.

Campaign Preparation: Smoke on the Water - Artisan

This guy looks massively talented.

Yesterday, I made a template for a magic user which is probably one of the most difficult classes to get right. Today, I am going to work on the other pretty difficult template, the Artisan. This template requires a lot of different skills to make a lot of different things, and that means I need to carefully utilize tools that get a lot of bang for buck with a point budget that doesn't allow for the easy shortcut of "just get a lot of DX." Let's see how this goes.

Campaign Preparation: Smoke on the Water - Shaman/Witch

It's magic, bucko.

So, I've gotten an idea in my head for a more serious campaign after this somewhat farcical introductory adventure/campaign I'm running wraps up. Something a bit less "fight and take" with more political maneuvering, but I wanted to play with a bit of an interesting angle. The thought that came to me was a super low tech level game. I still like magic, so we'll throw that in too, but otherwise I want a less cinematic and combat oriented game.
For no particular reason, today, I start off planning by focusing on a professional template that require a lot of attention because it encompasses great detail but I want to keep point values low: a magic user. Let's see if I can manage to make an economically viable version that won't take too much flexibility from my players.

Racial Template: Shapeshifter

The clothes make it easier.

I've kinda wanted to play a shape shifting focused character for a while, but I always find it prohibitively expensive. The other day though, I took a closer look at the Wildcard installment of Power-Ups at the behest of a reader, and found a solution to this tangentially related problem: wildcard advantages. This is the mechanic that will allow me to build up a character that can turn into a bajillion things without doing all sorts of beancounting or spending a brajillion points. Though, after thinking about it, I think I'll use morph instead, but put in the closing notes how many points one or the other saves (spoiler: it depends) Let's see how this goes.

Racial Template: Cactus-Folk

You thought I'd use some cactus guy
from a video game that is really
popular, didn't you? Well, you are right.

I feel like there are not enough plant people templates, which is weird. If you want to play a topsy-turvy pastiche of anachronistic fantasy hodgepodge, then a few plant people ought to be in order, right? I mean, they even got so many interesting pros and cons, so it seems almost natural. Let's see what happens when we try to make a plant people, specifically, a cactus.

Racial Template: Walrus-Folk

Some art from an obscure
game I never played.

I like when players choose unique races for their characters. I think though that there aren't enough incentives oftentimes to choose a race... but maybe that's just Dungeon Fantasy where almost anyone can eventually do anything anyway if they try hard enough.
With that observation out of the way, and despite it, today I write up a Walrus-Folk template for Dungeon Fantasy. Let's go bravely into this darkness.

Racial Template: Fishmen

Don't zoom in.

Fishmen, kinda a horror thing? Sometimes a fantasy thing? I think Dark Souls 2 made it a dark fantasy thing, and Castlevania made it a gothic action thing? So let's see if we can't make it a Dungeon Fantasy thing.

Racial Template: Avian

Finding a decent example was
unusually difficult.

The other half of what was promised, an avian template. There aren't as many good models for an avian racial template in GURPS (that I can find) as there are for Bunny-Folk to rip off borrow from for designing this template, so a lot of it is pretty unique, but I can still try to fish for support somewhere, and maybe try being creative for a change!

Racial Template: Bunny-Folk

I just finished watching this.
Gave me some ideas, but worried
about running a campaign in this
setting.

I am not sure if this was a tongue in cheek request by one of my new players or not, but I said just write out anything for a background assuming typical fantasy races and whatever my setting background prompt and requirements specified. He said he wants either a "ninja samurai rabbit or wizard eagle-man." Those classes all exist in Dungeon Fantasy, but the races don't. However, they come pretty close to races that already exist, so I decided to template them for giggles. I mean, after all, they are not uncommon tropes, right?

Template: My Master, Right or Wrong

Not the most famous reference,
probably, but it is the one that
jumped out at me first.

My brother and I were discussing tropes when talking about backstory and the like, when the hypercompetent sidekick character for the incompetent bad guy came up. TVTropes calls it My Master, Right or Wrong, because the guy is usually loyal regardless of the consequences, and has to do with moress in a time where loyalty and obligation were considered among the utmost virtues. So this character is usually a shining knight or samurai or other honorable warrior type who is shown to be a master at his craft. Let's take a look at how to potentially put together a character package to describe someone in this situation.

Racial Template: Kobold (Cutebold)

For clarification,
these are the
Dwarf Fortress
variety Kobolds, and
I'm pretty sure this is
drawn by this guy.

Woah! lookee at this fount of overflowing creativity! Hey everyone, I'm subverting tropes and expectations by painting a traditionally bad race in a good light, (alternatively, hey everyone! Look who's jumping on a two year old band wagon that isn't even the current hotness!)
With all that self deprecation, meta, and lampshade hanging out of the way, I decided to make a racial template for a traditionally monstrous race that has kinda memetically evolved into something else. Instead of conniving trapster tricksters, these are ineffective but intelligent miners with an earnest artist soul and a desire to be loved. Let's cobble together a template that I feel exemplifies this iteration of a kobold.

CER: Monster Templates - Haunted Cake! Cake Powers! And Encounter Punter Bundt!

Tweet tweet
Yawn
IT'S MY... BIRTHDAY!
I LOVE BIRTHDAY PARTIES!
CAKES! PRESENTS!

Today's my birthday, so let's be wacky. Cake monsters! Puns! I mean, this stuff writes itself, probably!
Let's see what we can come up with!

Template: Dungeon Fantasy Style Cleric - Divine Favor Edition.

I like Divine Favor because it is based on Powers, meaning it is easy to customize. This is a very quick thought on converting the Cleric template from Dungeon Fantasy 1 from a version that uses the vanilla Magic-as-skills system to one that uses Powers.