Secret of the Black Crag in GURPS, Prep Part 1
I'm back. Why have I been gone? 'Cause life sucks, I was busy, and I wasn't playing RPGs much. I feel like an utter fraud if I'm blogging about RPGs without playing any (If there's anything I'm great at, it's holding myself to standards I'd never hold anyone else to). But I have a cat now, which rocks, and I'm ready to get back into it. So let's do something stupid and run Secret of the Black Crag in GURPS.
Before preparing to run anything in GURPS, I have to prepare to run GURPS. Again. I wrote a whole thing about my ups-and-downs with GURPS and never once mentioned how weird it always feels to run that game. It always feels like you're missing something important, some rule that could produce an interesting outcome or make the game feel more "fair" or something. The Trad blues, I don't know what's up with it, but I decided it was time to up my cheat sheet game.
My first problem was the Skill system. GURPS has a shit ton of skills. If you don't have the skill on your character sheet, you have to roll a core attribute with a penalty decided by the Highest GURPlords Themselves. But because I didn't want to open up GURPS Basic Set every single god damn time a player needs to roll for something they didn't decide to be good at 8 weeks ago, I'd just be making up skill defaults based on vibes. It didn't feel great. So my first course of action was to take a condensed list of skills from LegendSmith and add as many of them as I could fit on a table, with the difficulty to learn and their default rolls. I also made a homebrew table to make up anything else on the fly:
| Modifier | Difficulty |
|---|---|
| -6 | Inscrutable |
| -4 | Non-intuitive |
| -2 | Intuitive |
| 0 | Natural or Adjacent Skill of Stat +1 |
| +1 | Adjacent Skill of Stat+2 |
| +2 | Adjacent Skill of Stat+3 or higher |
This is way more generous than GURPS itself is. But GURPS is lame, so I don't really care.
I also added homebrew rules to gain points of improvement for skills mid-adventure, because fuck Character Points:
At the end of a session, roll IQ for each skill you failed at using during the session. On success, add one point to the skill. Combat checks rolled at a penalty greater than -4 do not count for improvement. If a skill default is rolled during a stressful situation, an improvement check may be attempted at the end of the session whether the roll succeeded or failed. Attributes (ST, DX, IQ, HT), secondary characteristics (Will, Perception, Basic Speed, Basic Move), and certain advantages can be studied as skills at GM discretion. Examples: Combat Reflexes, Languages, Enhanced Defenses, Fit, Weapon Master. During adventure, an appropriate skill improvement may be used to improve an attribute, characteristic, or advantage instead (Athletics to train Basic Speed). The IQ roll may be substituted for a more relevant attribute (ST roll to improve HP, for example).
Any other progression is diegetic.
I also added three more pages stuffed with the following rules: Falling damage, reaction rolls, how reaction rolls affect prices when haggling or selling treasure, light and vision, HP for objects by approximate weight, climbing, swimming, holding your breath, jumping, sprinting, extra effort, travel, travel procedure (determining speed, terrain, weather, fatigue costs, foraging, tracking, camping, getting lost, encounter chances).
Oh, and this rule for especially Heroic games (like this one!):
Heroic Defense: After enemy rolls for damage and before DR and Wound Multiplier is applied, reduce damage per point of FP spent. We never spend our Fatigue Points, and reducing the swinginess of combat just by a bit is usually the right fit for our group. A great appeal of OSR modules to me is that they tend to convert decently to more heroic campaign settings; Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh ran excellently in Pathfinder 2e, for example. This will still keep things nowhere near as superheroic as Pathfinder 2e, though, and I think will strike a good balance of swashbuckling asskicking adventure and "holy shit that's a giant-ass crab we need to stay the fuck out of that thing's way".
The sad news is that I cannot link this fantastic cheat sheet on this page. Steve Jackson Games are very protective of their GURPS stuff, and I'm honestly not sure what has and hasn't already been released by them for free. Even the amazing cheat sheet I added these pages onto had to leave some form-fill sections for you to copy down from your own copy of Basic. If you come track me down and be my best friend I'll loan you a copy of my cheat sheet, but otherwise all I feel confident providing is this taster:
Shoutout to LibreOffice Draw.
Okay, let's actually prep Secret of the Black Crag now.
I noticed skimming through that this is a pretty intricate module. There are a lot of little connecting pieces within the various NPCs and factions, I decided to make a little conspiracy board to get a mental map going, and see where I could maybe patch some holes. After an initial readthrough, here's where I got:
This is very elegant, and more than enough to run a great campaign, but a few points nonetheless:
- As Sheila Velocitree pointed out to me while sharing some very-appreciated resources, advice, etc for running the module, a ton of these hooks are connected to the town, and Rathbone specifically. If players start to beef with Rathbone, they're cutting themselves off from a shit ton of clues. Sheila had the great idea of adding an island of refugees/rebels to the map, and I've decided to do the same with some sort of floating Thriller-Bark-From-One-Piece-esque barge of rebels.
- The pirate encounters are so full of personality, but don't actually have much going on. These are fantastic NPCs so I'd really love to seem them more involved with the campaign. I'm sure the process of running this sandbox will bring great stuff out through The Power of Improv, but a few connections wouldn't hurt. I've highlighted those to come back to.
- All the traitor's in the Traitor's Arch have a "what the hell's with you?" quality, but while Drunk Pete and George Smith have enough implied-or-direct connections for how relatively generic they are, Black Tom is such a what-the-hell. I've highlighted Black Tom to add a connection, maybe make him an infamous legend/folk-tale around Port Fortune or a former crewmate/sore spot for a specific crew.
- I fucking love Cap'n and his little monkeys. But he's just floating on his own and I want him to have a friend. Really, I just want someone who can lay down the fucking hammer on my players if they decide to kill Cap'n. It could be funny if one of the more ruthless figures had a soft spot for these silly simians? Highlighted to revisit as I continue prep.
I think we're in a decent spot! Next steps are to prep the arrival to Port Fortune; will it be action-packed, or mundane? Who will they meet first? How the hell do you convert an OSE statblock to GURPS? These problems for near-future me. It is bedtime.
