Castle Whiterock: Garreth speaks

Dungeon Fantasy Whiterock

by Zuljita, aka Garreth

In April of 2018, Dripton ran session 1 of Dungeon Fantasy Whiterock. A hundred sessions later, he ran his last session in on June 26, 2020. I meant to write a retrospective when that campaign ended, but my life changed radically around that time and my priorities had to change. A month or so later, Kalzazz decided he wasn’t done with the game and decided to run it primarily as a GM, but kept his character as a participant in the story, albeit much less active. I’m going to set out to do a two-part retrospective, first on Dripton's game and Kalzazz’s continuation, and another part on the content produced by Dungeon Crawl Classics. I’m going to try to keep spoilers to that last section. If you hope to play in this dungeon in future, I’d avoid reading that.

Dripton’s game

From the get-go Dripton was an attentive and intensely prepared GM, his preparation meant we (almost?) never ran off the edge of the map, and he was always ready to run. I don’t know that we missed even one scheduled game session in the 100 we played. He characterized the monsters and the NPCs very well and never gave us too much of an impression of being railroaded. The most heavy handed leading he did in the whole game was two points: session 1, when he used an NPC to get us started on the path to the dungeon, and session 98 or 99 when he had Chauntessa give us the final quest.  

We had a lot of back and forth over character points, which in the end, was part of what caused the game to break down. In retrospect, I think possibly the way to fix this would be to give just one point per session in terms of “attendance points” and put a much greater emphasis on milestones, e.g., “Level 1 cleared” being worth 10-15 points, “NPC rescued” 3 points, “Entered Secret Zone” 2 points.  Then the rewards for moving slow and finding every piece of treasure(which we absolutely did) are mitigated somewhat.

Wizards in GURPS are far more broad and consistent than their D20 counterparts, who are flashier and more explosive. That core difference makes a lot of other things change. That’s especially true with a wizard who’s comfortable taking a back seat in most combats to provide broad passive bonuses to the whole party.  

A few spells in particular stick out as problematic in conversion in their own ways: 

Bless does a whole lot.  The cost for keeping the whole party blessed is -1 per member to spellcasting.  We handled this pretty easily and the long term duration meant we kept the benefits between sessions even when the caster wasn’t around. I think I’d like to rewrite bless for DF to make it more immediate, less powerful, and less long lasting, with an eye towards how the spell works in D&D.

Great Haste is a force multiplier. It more than doubles the power of a melee fighter. It starts feeling powerful, and ends feeling insane. Dripton ended up capping players at 3 attacks per second. The players didn’t take that change very well. I think in hindsight, if we’d had that as a restriction from the get-go, or been allowed to adjust existing characters around the new speed limit, it would have gone over much better.  

Mass Daze ended up being absurdly powerful, both in terms of wrecking large groups of enemies and in terms of allowing a wizard to affect larger SM monsters. I think I’d adjust all the “mass” spells to have some caveats around that sort of scaling. Daze in particular ends up being “save or die” in GURPS because of how easy it is to take advantage of a defenseless opponent.

Buff spells that can be maintained indefinitely (Darkvision, Keen senses, Flight, Haste) feel overpowered.  I’d like to adjust that somehow as well. I fear that ends up looking like a complete overhaul of the magic system. I suspect that might be what’s required to make the two systems assumptions work well together. I feel like Incantation is almost there, but, needs a bit more tweaking and a much more robust list of available spells.

Dripton had a few “save for half damage” effects that he translated over unchanged, which I felt at the time wasn’t in the spirit of the system. Looking back, I’m increasingly comfortable with making sure players just take some damage, and communicating to players that they need to plan accordingly.

Kal’s continuation

Kalzazz took up the torch on 8/24/20 and ran for 70+ sessions. His approach to GMing is far more improvisational. Where Dripton took maps and stripped out square grids and added hexes, Kalzazz just told us to treat the squares more or less the same as hexes. Very few monsters had statblocks from this time forward.

Kal kept us on a pretty steady diet of 2 cp for attendance and 1 for a written recap, which Demented Avenger provided. We ended the game up 216 points from where Dripton left us, with Kal granting 100 more points as a reward for adventure conclusion. He also let us break the attack cap Dripton had set. If we keep using these characters, they are going to be even bigger and scarier than they were when they took on Sihouette and Benthos. Which is an interesting balance problem.  

On the balance front, both Zaber and I ended up continuing on mostly as a duo with occasional guest characters. This left some core competencies uncovered (spellcasting), so I took on a wizard ally to fill in the passive-ish spellcasting we were accustomed to with Seep. Zaber took on the wolverine we’d gotten from a bag of tricks as an ally who became a true combat monster, doing more raw damage per attack than Garreth by the end. Kal pulled no punches, if your active defenses fell through, you were probably going to take more than 50 damage. We had to resurrect Polly once, Bleu once and Logan was already Unkillable, but was reduced to recovering in his bag for a week once.

Kal kept trying to invite other players to the game who often lacked a lot of context for why we were still soldiering on with this game. Mostly, they seemed to struggle to find a place in the game or a place for the game in their schedule and drifted on. Sometimes the pacing struggled in terms of getting anything meaningful done in a 2 hour session, which I think was a shared issue between the players and the GM. There were also some interesting shifts in tone where Dripton had been much more serious and the game got a little sillier under Kalzazz’s direction.

Looking back on what Kal did, there are things I might have done differently, like preparing more of the monsters with stat blocks and changing the grid to a hex, but all of that would likely have kept me from running the game at the cadence that allowed us to finish in 3 years time. I’m glad we finished and I owe Kal a great debt for letting me see the end of this campaign.

To be continued …