A bestiary and enemies book for the Dungeon Fantasy RPG (Powered by GURPS).
I'm going to fanboy for a moment, so forgive me. Doug Cole is one of the rare Kickstarter producers that dots his "I's" and crosses his "T's", and then double checks himself before launching his page. The writing and editing are high quality and the art is simply to die for. Although I don't currently run GURPS or Dungeon Fantasy, I'm a backer of the Nordlond Bestiary and Enemies Book Kickstarter and intend to convert on the fly, as needed, for Continual Light.
Whether riffing off Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or the more genre-appropriate Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, there’s no question that a giant book of creatures is a boon to gamers wanting to keep campaigns fresh and exciting.
For a long time, the classic big book of monsters has been hard to come by as a fully supported work for Powered by GURPS games.
No longer.
The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is purposefully generic: It is Powered by GURPS, after all. The Norðlond setting is not generic, borrowing from the literary tradition of the Viking culture. The sagas of looting, pillaging, and raiding for wealth and fame made a natural match for a game with a tag-line of “Smash Evil for Fun and Profit.”
Even with that in mind, the monsters here can be—and should be—repurposed and transplanted to other campaigns. Many of them are thinly disguised transplants from other cosmologies anyway: The nautamaðr is clearly based on the Minotaur; the Blóðughúfa, or “bloody hat” is the redcap, a fixture of Northumbrian folklore, perhaps derived or parallel to the Irish fear dearg, meaning “red man,” said to wear a red coat and cap. Animals—normal, giant, and dire—don’t require any work to move between campaigns. Much as the player characters pillage loot, GMs should pillage the worked examples here to make their lives easier when running games in any campaign.
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ReplyDeleteI was close. I think it was CastingWords.