Guilds of Alnwich: The Fellowship

The Fellowship

Rank: Criminal Rank 0-3.

In Charge: Thieves.

In the Ranks: Agents, brutes, cutpurses, innkeepers, and killers.

On the Payroll: Physical types (barbarians, guards, knights, scouts, swashbucklers) and some magic users (apprentices, clerics, initiates, and wizards).

Influencing the AR: Streetwise.

The Fellowship is a criminal organization that deals in just about anything illegal in Alnwich. Their main source of income is from smuggling furs out of Alnwich, but they also smuggle goods in at reduced prices, steal from the Royal Mercantile Good any chance they get, and run any number of racketeering and gambling rings in town.

The Fellowship has ties to a number of other organizations in town, although none will admit it. Among these are the Fisker Clan, the Dahlgaards, and the Wardens. They form important components of their logistics network. If any of these connections were severed, it would disadvantage the Fellowship greatly in the near term, but they could probably do without any of them, if need be.

Dungeon Stocking Update and Program

I just finished writing a quick python program to spam my stocking method as much as I need, and after several runs, I've further tweaked the percentages I developed in my last post. As it turns out, I didn't plan for enough empty rooms. I won't claim to have arrived at the following numbers by any analytical method; I just plugged numbers in and hit run until the results looked good. Still, the initial analysis did get me in the ballpark.

Stocking the Megadungeon

Today, I am going to work out just how I stock my dungeon. I’ve been drawing like mad, and I think I should probably start filling in some room content before pushing too deep. That way I can do a second pass on the map and add in more details, modify rooms where appropriate, and generally polish the bits players are likely to see early on.

Holy Diver

5 / 7 / 9 / 11 / 13 / 14 / 16 / 18 / 20 / 22

Power: Body Control.

Prerequisites: Body Awareness 1.

You are an exceptional diver. You can withstand pressures to depth of about 500 feet. Every level after the first doubles the length of time you can hold your breath, too – in and out of the water. Your swimming speed is unaffected, and you can still drown – it just takes longer.

Enhanced Skills: +2 to Breath Control, Running, Swimming, and rolls to suddenly hold your breath.

Statistics: Pressure Support 1 (PM, -10%) [5]. Further levels add levels Breath-Holding (PM, -10%) at a price of [1.8/level], rounded up.

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Courser

A fast, hardy warhorse lighter than a destrier, but cheaper and more agile. These are the most common dedicated warhorses on the battlefield. Coursers weigh about 1,160 pounds.

Horsing Around

Today I'm going to talk about horses a little. There's a reason I started posting them among the first "common monsters" players should be familiar with, and I'll get to that. I also want to point out how they will differ from horses in Basic Set, and which version the players should expect to encounter (take a wild guess).

Colossal Monstrous Moth

Monstrous moths are strange creatures of unearthly beauty and grotesque size. They usually inhabit forests and large caverns where they can fly out of reach of prey while stunning them with their beauty and cooking them with their burning beams of light. When not hunting, they can shed light at will, and are often seen dancing in the night sky like the aurora.

Sumpter

A work pony used to pull plows, chariots, carts, and to turn mills. These are the most common horses in the countryside. Sumpters weigh about 925 lbs.

Alternate Monster Stat Block

When gaming, it’s important for a GM to have information organized in a way that makes sense to him or her and is easily parsed. The standard GURPS Dungeon Fantasy monster stat block is enormously better than the in-line stat blocks presented for animals in GURPS Basic Set, but I still find it a cluttered mess when a monster has a lot of traits. That’s why I’ve developed my own stat block that I use for monsters.

Weather in Alnwich

Work on overland travel times has created the need to know what the weather is like around Alnwich throughout the year. I’ve seen this handled a couple of ways throughout the years, ranging from GM fiat to intricate tables that nearly require a meteorology degree to parse. Today, I’ll examine these different options, settle on one, and then develop it to fruition.

Water Strider

13 points

Power: Body Mastery.

Prerequisites: Body Awareness 4; Cat’s Step 4; Inner Balance.

Activation Cost: 1 FP to activate; 1 FP per 2 minutes to maintain.

Your step is so light that you can even walk on water as if it were solid ground. In fact, any liquid will bear your weight, but just because you don’t fall in doesn’t mean caustic or otherwise harmful liquids won’t still affect you normally! You also ignore up to -2 in penalties to DX-based skills due to slippery or wet surfaces.

One Entrance Finished!

I think I can honestly say that I have enough mapped around the main entrance that players cannot get through it in less than a few sessions. This includes an entire castle and manor, the grounds, and its dungeons. Next, I'll move to another surface area, map what's relevant - not an entire castle, this time! - and draw a few levels down from there. This should start to be interesting, since the next levels below the next entrance do link up elsewhere. I'm curious to see how these maps grow as the mapping progresses.

Meanwhile, I continue to work on stocking the first set of maps and putting together adequate room descriptions. I'm also working on elements of Town and the overland journey to the dungeon. Things feel like they are coming together right now, so I'm going to ride this progress as far as I can! And if I hit a wall, I'll just repeat my mantra: Just keep mapping . . .

Guilds of Alnwich: The Fisker Clan

Last night, I made my first organization using GRUPS Dungeon Fantasy 17 - Guilds, and thought I'd share it with you for comment and critique. They are centered in Town and have already begun to speak to some of the local politics that might exist. I'm a little leery of letting such setting fluff get out of hand lest that become more interesting than killing monsters, but I think it definitely gives a lot more depth to the setting. And since these organizations will both enable dungeon crawling and reward it, I'm going to continue making and including them.

As I make more, I'll post them as worked examples. I am rolling the Who They Are section into the initial description to avoid redundancy. The rest follows the format presented in Guilds.

Overland Design: Travel Times

Last night, I broke out Excel and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16 - Wilderness Adventures, and started figuring out the geographic scale and layout of the land between Town and Dungeon. This was an interesting process that required me to look up vehicle speeds in GURPS Low Tech, since Dungeon Fantasy doesn't really concern itself with that sort of thing, which is kind of surprising. You do need a way to haul your loot home, after all.

Wolverine’s Vigor

5 / 14 / 23 / 32

Power: Body Mastery.

Prerequisites: HT 12; Body Awareness 1.

You heal faster than normal. At first level, you gain a +5 bonus to all rolls to recover lost HP or overcome crippling injuries, and at second level, healing rolls recover 2 HP instead of just one. At third level, you recover an additional 1 HP every twelve hours, beyond any other healing. At fourth level, you even recover from unconsciousness 60 times faster than usual: treat hours as minutes, minutes as seconds, and seconds as a 1 second of mental stun.