I run a game with a steampunk airship crew, skirting the edges of the law and of solvency in a newly minted Empire in what was once a high fantasy world. They’d bounced between a few jobs and had made a few friends, but I wanted to introduce a fellow airship smuggler as a contact for later down the line. I wanted them to be memorable, friendly, but not necessarily trustworthy; and of questionable judgment - so they could fill whatever role I might need later! So I introduced them to Captain Borda, an Orcish smuggler.

The crew had been making their way generally north following another plotline, doing odd jobs along the way to help defray fuel costs. This stop marked their entry into the Badlands, where the orcs, ogres, goblins, and other less savory races were pushed during the Empire’s expansion across the continent. Johnny, the crew’s halfling Face, had heard about a quick & easy job for a transport like theirs whose crew understood discretion. The crew, familiar with how these things go, was immediately on guard - but decided to at least hear the offer. Captain Borda asked to meet them at a local tavern; everyone decided to come along (4 PCs, and Johnny the DMPC).

They arrived a few hours after dark at the Broken Banner, which turned out to be a large, busy establishment serving the locals. None of the crew are greenskins - a few are from other minority races (and get occasional flak from NPCS for it), but they all clearly didn’t belong here. After talking their way past the bouncers and checking their weapons at the door, they got a view of the main floor of the tavern - and it was packed! All the local races were represented - orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, a few ogres, even a troll were crammed in around a dozen tables and booths. A local band was playing a slow, moody piece in Orcish (we checked at this point if anyone knew the language; nobody decided they should). After a moment’s searching, and being eyeballed thoroughly in turn by some of the other patrons, Captain Borda recognized Johnny from across the room, and waved them enthusiastically to his table.

The crew made their way cautiously through the crowd to Borda’s table, on the far side away from the doors and next to an open space where the band was playing. Aside from some rough jostling that they ignored, they made it safely to the table. The captain greeted them warmly: “You’re just in time! The band just started, these guys are amazing!” He got them settled around the table, waved to the bartender to send drinks over, and started inquiring about their ship while the brooding, gravelly voiceof the singer chanted on.

After a minute or two of this, the tavern was rent by a crashing blast of sound, accompanied by what was recognizably an Orcish battle cry. On cue, most of the patrons leapt from their seats and stormed towards them!

The crew had one second to react before the first of the patrons reached them (this is in GURPS, so a combat round is one second). Johnny moved to the backline, the dragon-blooded captain moved to grab Captain Borda as a potential hostage, the dwarf engineer grabbed a chair as a makeshift club, the four-armed coleopteran (beetle-person) braced to meet the charge, and the satyr… asked to make a general Perception check.

She rolled three 1s - a critical success!

She noticed that Captain Borda was shaking, and suppressing a mirthful grin. And, since it was the strongest crit you can roll, she also realized the other customers were actually running to the open space next to them. She seized one of the arms of the coleopteran, stopping him just long enough to let the customers reach the dance floor, where they started dancing violently, joyfully pushing and shoving each other to the now raucous beat. At this point, Captain Borda burst out laughing, and answered their glares with “What? Never seen a mosh pit?!”

The players groaned, and most of them ended up joining the mosh. They even talked little Johnny into jumping in, once they noticed goblins in the crowd. They couldn’t talk the poor dwarf into joining in, though!

Once their business was concluded, the crew’s captain also spotted Borda getting quietly chewed out by the bartender. It sounded like the bartender did not share Borda's sense of humor, he caught phrases like “safety of my customers” and “dignity of our people”! Borda snuck a wink at them when he realized they were watching. The job turned out to be genuine as well - an honest misdirection of an Imperial interceptor who had been chasing Borda, for which they received a portion of the take.

Hello! I'm looking for a way to copy a set of rollable tables from one system to another. Specifically, I'd like to grab a bunch of the oracles from the "Ironsworn & Starforged" system over to a GURPS game I'm running; to help with generating content on the fly.

The rollable tables I'm looking at are pretty basic, but extensive - the ones I'm after are mostly roll a d100 for a textual result. I'm able to go through and individually import the table (from a compendium), export it to my file system, switch game systems, and import it there without issue; but I'm looking at a few dozen or more tables that I want to do this with! I'm hoping there's an easier way. They're all nicely bundled in a compendium; but I suspect that's part of the issue - is there a way to move a compendium from one system to another? Or another way to move rollable tables en masse?

How much do you allow mages to pump up their missile spells when using the default GURPS magic-as-skills system? Particularly with casting level 15+ (enough to get a discount) and a few levels of Magery? The GURPS FAQ 4.3.3 here mentions that the total cost of the full charging time is discounted once - so at casting level 15 you can charge a 1 die fireball for 1 second for free, but you cannot cast a free 3 dice fireball by spending 3 seconds charging it - that would instead cost 2 energy points.

But what about the upper end? GURPS Basic Set page 240 says you can “invest one or more points of energy in the spell, to a maximum number of energy points equal to your Magery level”. Suppose a PC with Fireball-15 and Magery 2 spends 1 second creating a 2 dice fireball. This has cost them 1 energy point. Does this mean they could instead spent 1 second investing 2 energy points (their maximum Magery) into a 3 dice (discounted price) fireball? I saw this idea posted on the GURPS wiki here, but I haven’t found anything discussing this idea elsewhere.

Peter V. Dell'Orto has mentioned that even allowing the discount to apply to each charging turn hasn't wrecked his game, so I'm not worried about the balance component of 1-2 extra dice of damage; I'm just curious what other GMs would permit at their table.

Ironsworn (and it's sci-fi successor, Starforged) are products of the recent surge in solo gaming. I really like how they tie several simple moves and mechanics together to create unexpected storylines and exciting campaigns. However, it's not a particularly crunchy system. GURPS, of course, can be; but has no real system of its own for less GM-centric play (the closest I've seen is The Collaborative Gamer's work, which doesn't really stretch beyond individual adventures). So, I thought I'd try wrapping the crunchy GURPS ruleset inside a nice Starforged move system!

My approach has been to keep most of the Ironsworn/Starforged moves intact; but resolve the move rolls using GURPS rules based on a full-fledged GURPS character. I've detailed the changes I've made to the Starforged system here.

I documented a brief playthrough using this system, a bit of which will be posted in the comments as an example of this system in use. The world I'm using is based on GURPS: After the End, with elements from GURPS: Lands Out of Time and GURPS: Reign of Steel. Think Mad Max with dinosaurs and robots! I'm using mostly the Starforged versions of the moves, with Ironsworn and other oracles to better fit the setting.

So, the whole big trick to using GURPS successfully is to ruthlessly cut down the rules you're using to just the ones that are useful to your campaign, right? So how are the rest of you sharing with your players which rules apply in a given game? Or do you share them at all? I'm running a game right now which has taken a "generic" Dungeon Fantasy world with all the races and magic options and everything, run it forward a few hundred years with generally low mana, low sanctity, etc; and advanced technology up to a steampunk style setting. I'm running it as a high adventure campaign, so some Action components are in, and we've got automatons and artificers and such, so weird science and metatronic generators are included. And since the players are managing an airship that's perpetually about to go broke, I'm looking to the After the End scrounging and invention rules. I've also supplemented all this with various other Pyramid articles.

So I've got around a dozen or so rules sources, on top of the Basic Set. Now, I knew when I was setting this up that there'd be a lot of splicing sources together (that's part of the fun!); but I didn't think through how tricky this would be for my players to work out. Right now I've got versions of the PDFs edited down to just the salient details, but I'd love a better way to present a cleaner, unified ruleset for them. Has anyone else run into this? Or have you found it best to just hide the sausage making from them?

(I wrote this both to have more #GURPS content on Lemmy, and to help drive community engagement. So, there's a wall of text for content, and there's a TL;DR at the end for engagement! :D)

I've become enamoured with running Eberron in GURPS lately, and I recently came across this scene from Arcane, where the Firelights board a drug smuggling airship (first minute or so; mild spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew4SLG_XR-Q. I love how they portray the Firelights gang fighting in close quarters, and I'd like to come up with a similar martial arts style (or more than one, depending on what I find) that centers around using the Flying Carpet spell or enchantment. But before I can do that, I'd like to nail down some more details about how flying carpets might work.

The Flying Carpet spell is defined in GURPS Magic p146 (and is reviewed at https://gurps4e.fandom.com/wiki/Flying_Carpet). It transforms any object a person could reasonably stand or sit on or in (carpet, broom, cauldron, towel, chair...) into a flying vehicle with Move equal to the caster's effective level (so at least Move 15 for an enchanted version). It uses the Pilot (Contragravity) spell to pilot it, but can handle up to 1G turns without skill rolls. A combination of magic and automatic maneuvering keeps the occupants on board normally, though fighting or other strenuous activity requires a DX roll to stay aboard (modified at GM's discretion). Aside from this roll, combatants are otherwise treated as being on the ground - Flying Carpet specifically provides a stable platform, without sharp banking, folding, etc. Flying Carpet costs 1 point per square foot, which supports "about" 25 pounds; and half that cost to maintain. It takes 5 seconds to cast and lasts 10 minutes - you can cast the spell easily before combat, but that becomes a long casting time in combat! The spell may also be made permanent for 200 times the casting cost.

In a broad-magic world like Eberron, it seems completely reasonable that items with these enchantments would be accessible enough to accomodate fighting styles built around them - and in fact, Aundaire in particular is known to have used Skystaff squadrons throughout most of the Last War. Just from the list of example items the spell might be applied to, I can think of three form factors that might have very different styles:

• The broom, which in Eberron has had its bristles removed and is renamed into a Skystaff. It also presumably gains a seat and handles, and the user rides it like a bicycle. This lets the user keep a lower profile, granting a defensive posture bonus but also penalizing normal attacks (without training). The most interesting thing here though is that it's a staff - which seems like it would pair nicely with an Eberron wandslinger's staff enchantment! Combining these would make the Skystaff into an airborne fighter - a flying vehicle whose pilot can cast offensive spells out of the front as if from a mounted weapon.

• The cauldron. By itself, this would let an occupant sit inside a well protected space and zip about the battlefield. But if you add in a Hideaway enchantment to allow a little more internal space, an Earth Vision or Wizard Eye enchantment for visibility, and poke a wand with a Staff enchantment out through the lid; you've now got a flying mage-tank! For bonus points, carve a face into the front of the cauldron for a mini-MODOK! Or, y'know, use an illusion shell to look like a beholder or something.

• A towel, rug, or other open platform. This trades off the more protected profile for a full range of combat movement for the user, as in the video above. The carpet flyer will be using speed for protection; and therefore wants a high spell level along with the ability to use acrobatic feats, elevated dodge, etc. This option best fits more of a Swashbuckler style of character.

However, before I start building Flying Carpet fighting styles, I think the following needs explored and clarified:

Say you're zipping through a busy battlefield, spot a troll, and decide to smack them in the face with your cauldron. Say they're sturdier than you thought - what happens? Ramming uses the Slam calculation to determine damage to the target and the vehicle. If the target rolls less damage, it needs to make a DX roll to stay up; if it rolls less than half the damage the vehicle did, it falls down automatically. But what happens if the vehicle rolls less damage than the target? It can't easily fall as long as the pilot stays aboard. Should the check to stay aboard be penalized as the vehicle tumbles for a moment, or even failed automatically if the target rolls a lot of damage? It seems reasonable that certain techniques could help with these rolls, but I'm not clear what the consequences of failure to slam are yet. I'd also really like a way to streamline this whole process - there's easily six rolls that need to be made if you try to knock someone over (to-hit, dodge, damage vs damage, loser's DX roll to not fall, occupant roll to stay aboard). I'm tempted to at least declare a flat damage value (3.5 times the dice count).

I'm also still trying to resolve a few seemingly contradictory statements in the spell description: The Flying Carpet "does not bank sharply, fold, or bend", but "specifically provides a stable, level platform". This seems at odds with the earlier statement that "the carpet keeps its riders safe through a combination of magic and deft maneuvering". It ALSO "can handle 1G turns without skill rolls being necessary". 1G of acceleration from a standstill moves you about 5 yards in 1 second - this would look rather odd without any banking, to say nothing of broomstick riders not leaning into turns! I'm thinking these statements together suggest that the vehicle does gently sway and shift to keep occupants comfortably in place, but cannot be made to change its profile for gameplay impacting reasons - it can't tilt on its side to maneuver through a narrow gap, it can't kick up an edge to smack a too-close foe, and it can't roll to put itself between you and wandfire (though you can hang off the side). How do you envision the Flying Carpet enchantment maneuvering?

This leads into my third question - why are there DX rolls to stay mounted in combat? I don't recall any other 4th edition mechanic that works like this; usually there's a penalty or cap to other rolls instead (maybe it's a leftover from 3rd edition? Magic has a lot of these). At the moment I'm debating between treating it more like ordinary mounted combat (penalties to skills, with techniques to buy them off); or just providing a technique to boost the DX roll, and allowing it to be ignored altogether with a perk if it's over SL 16 (Supers defines such a perk). I could also treat it as a variable "bad footing", which might also be reduced with a technique.

TL;DR:

• What other objects would be interesting to have Flying Carpet cast on them?
• What happens when a hoverboard, flying cauldron, etc. rams something heavy enough to take the hit? How might this be handled?
• How do you resolve the tension between it shifting to keep you aboard, and not being able to sharply bank?
• Do we really need the DX roll each combat turn, or is there a better way?