Learning GURPS 10: Taking Dungeon Fantasy Back To School

Most folk know that my day job is being a secondary school teacher in the UK (that’s High School for the American reader) and that I host a weekly “Old School Roleplay” club for the students. In short, in every school I have worked in, I’ve created a club and generally had a lot of success in generating new players and fresh Dungeon Masters.

At the tail end of 2017, I introduced a new group of neophyte players to the hobby… and I used GURPS Dungeon Fantasy to do it because I was imminently expecting the boxed set roleplaying game of the same name.

This was a specific change from my general approach of using an edition of Dungeons & Dragons to introduce them to the hobby. We had a blast – in fact, one of the most enjoyable games I have ever run – and they wanted more. Not having yet received the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy roleplaying game (DFRPG), I bottled writing a second adventure and plumped for switching to D&D. That was a mistake.

This post is how I intend to set about correcting that mistake by using GURPS DFRPG to both broaden their experience of roleplaying and also recruit some new players. The plan involves a using the box-set materials, building a mega-dungeon, and learning to play GURPS while remaining true to some old school values.

Spotting A Niche: Megadungeon

There are three DMs running Dungeons & Dragons at the club, and one extra DM who just ran out of adventure. There are a few newer players who are now floating around looking for a game. Invoking Rule One of my Teacher’s Guide to running a school roleplaying club, I am going to step back up!

This is Year Four at this school. There are established games going on. There have been a few forays into other systems, although Dungeons & Dragons (5e) has remained the staple. The time has come for something a little bit different: a longer-term ongoing campaign which can handle drop-in players, newbies, and the curious onlooker.

As Peter V. Dell’Orto notes in his excellent post entitled, “How Mega Is My Dungeon“:

You need to be able to go back to this place over and over. It’s not a question of “can’t be cleared out” but rather of “supports continuous play.” You should be able to use the megadungeon as the basis for many sessions.

…doesn’t matter if one group of players or one group of PCs do all of the adventuring. It’s nice if the dungeon can handle more groups, but that’s just a subset of repeated play, above. It shouldn’t matter if it’s the same group or not.

This insight is what galvanised the usefulness of the mega-dungeon for my purposes: I can create a single location with a high level of repeated play and cumulative play value but also allow the players to come or go over time. Does a player not show this week? Doesn’t really matter because the approach to play is about short expeditions into the dungeon and people developing a shared sense of the place over time.

Let’s be honest: I’ve wanted to have a go at this mega-dungeon thing for a long time. I’ve just not noticed the opportunity to offer such a game on a regular basis that was staring me in the face. On top of providing an outlet for players at school to come and play, and for new players to join in, I also get to have a good time creating and running it.

Taking Whitegrave To School

A couple of days ago I was playing the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy RPG solo and re-imagining the setting of Whitegrave, my town on the river which was built as a collaboration between the Dwarf King and the Mannish Jarl. Having begun to read “I Smell A Rat”, the introductory adventure in the DFRPG box-set, I want to define Whitegrave as the town in that adventure. That gives us a great introductory adventure ready to go on Tuesday night… something that I need as the new half-term looms.

On top of that, however, I can use the follow-up adventure, “Against the Rat-Men” to buy myself some time to write the first three levels of the mega-dungeon. I get to take a pad of hexed mapping paper to work and add some rooms to the map day-by-day. I can take time to stock those maps as the half-term proceeds. By the time we get to the last term, after Easter, I’ll be in a position to send the adventurers to the mega-dungeon. Along the way, I hope to have either established a core group of players or recruited some new faces (or both).

The advantage of taking this approach is that I get to develop my initial setting idea through play while also using the materials I got in the DFRPG boxed-set. I get to learn how to run a good game of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy while my players get to learn how to play. Along the way, I get to build and prepare a cool mega-dungeon that I can use for the long-term.

Year on year, I can potentially keep a campaign running which has room for fluctuating players and the possible high-turnover of characters. I have come to realise that the mega-dungeon approach offers the DM a relatively easy life: certainly players can go off and do other things in the setting, but what is guaranteed is that there is a ready-made session on standby every week. THAT is worth its weight in gold!

Keeping It Old School

While I don’t want to spill words on defining “Old School”, I want to remain true to the spirit of the dungeon-based hobby that began in 1974. Having read Jon Peterson’s excellent, “Playing At The World” it’s fair to say that I was inspired to go back and play around with Original Dungeons & Dragons. From this experience, I want to remain true to the guidance and some of the flavour from that era and through the 1980s.

In the last six months, I’ve read the first 30 issues of “Alarums & Excursions“, the best-known fanzine for D&D that contains so much insight into how the game was played back in the beginning. I’m also a huge fan of David Hargrave, the author of “The Arduin Grimoire“, and his attitude of embracing the fantastic by remembering to “take a troll to lunch”. My aim is to bring that “old school” goodness and spirit to the table.

One reason to use GURPS is that the system can model anything I need or want to throw at it long-term. I don’t need to write new rules for the system… I just need to apply the various options to create what I need. To be sure, at the beginning, I aim to stick to what’s in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG box so that I can learn how things work. That said, I already know that if I want a Hargrave-inspired Techno to show up with a laser pistol, GURPS has things covered.

Game on!

Precis – How a school teacher is using the Dungeon Fantasy RPG to inspire and recruit new players. The plan involves a using the box-set materials, building a mega-dungeon, and learning to play GURPS while remaining true to some old school values.