GURPS: Fighters of Thaarl

A couple of weeks ago, I came up with an idea for the school gaming club which has evolved into something I call “The Dungeons of Thaarl“. Yeah. cheesy name but it makes me smile.

You can hear about the evolution of this idea in two of my Roleplay Rescue podcast episodes entitled “Simple Dungeoneering, Part One” – in which I talk about how I am using the GURPS character creation system for a simple game – and “Simple Dungeoneering, Part Two“. The latter is the more detailed look at how I am handling setting up this new dungeoneering game.

Enter The Fighting Pit

If I want to introduce you to GURPS as a game system, there’s no easier way than to introduce you to the fighting pit. I aim to run a fighting pit league at school.

Players will come along, create a fighter, enter the pit, and battle other fighters run by other players, or creatures run by me, or (optionally) other fighters or creatures run by other players who are playing as monster-wranglers. This will then lead towards those fighters being challenged to enter a deathtrap dungeon, filled with treasure, all for glory and the joy of adventure.

Because I want an open table and I only have one and a half hours per session, this approach is ideal: two simple game structures – combat and dungeon-crawling – in short, action-packed play sessions. Anyone can show up each week and play. Job’s a good ‘un.

What’s the quickest way to get a character to the gaming table? While the Fourth Edition of GURPS does not have random character generation, I am stealing the idea from Man-to-Man and GURPS 1st Edition anyway. No, the characters won’t be balanced. But they will be measurably comparable because GURPS uses character points to give a guide to the relative power-level of a character.

While the players will be rolling and making some choices, I will – as Arena Referee – be able to count up each character’s total and present this as a Fighter Rating. And just as Man-to-Man awards experience based on relative Fighter Ratings, I can do the same in the league. It’s genius!

To facilitate this, I wanted to share my home-brewed Quick Reference Tables for creating characters in this campaign.

Quick Random Fighters

Here’s how we’ll roll up a character: players roll 3d6 for four Attributes – Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Health. Any score lower than 7 counts as a 7.

Next they pick two weapons. Or one weapon and a shield. For these skills, you roll 1D-3 and add the value to your DX to gain a skill level. If you roll zero or less, you count the skill bonus as zero. Weapons on offer will be Axe, Mace, Broadsword, Large Knife, Shortsword, Spear, or Quarterstaff. That’s seven choices – an optimum choice set for beginners.

On top of this, you get to roll 2d6 and gain that many skills from a random table:

I’ve customised these to fit the premise of a dungeon adventure game in a fantasy world. Again, the skill bonus of each skill is rolled: 1D-3 per skill, minimum of +0 applied to the relevant attribute the skill is linked to.

Finally, you roll 3d6 on an Advantage Table and 3d6 again on a Disadvantage Table. Each table has entries from 3-18, one different outcome for each value rolled:

After that, the players pick up the weapons and/or shield they are trained in. They choose some armour from three different options – all of them are light and cheap starting kits – and then they dive into the arena.

When it comes time to graduate to the dungeon game, the players will be offered one of three starting equipment packs for free before they enter the dungeon’s portal.

So far, we’ve had one session and created some WILDLY diverse characters! One fighter is around 170pts while, at the other extreme, another is about -178pts. Wow! That said, the guys were having fun… so we’ll see how it pans out once they enter the Dungeons proper.

Game on!