GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: DF 22: Gates

In the home stretch now! Only two left to go after this.

This has an actual chapter structure!

• Gates and the Campaign: How to use Gates in a DF Campaign
• Gate Rules: The metaphysics and game mechanics of Gates
• Sample Destinations: Some places the gates could lead.

All in all this book was better than I expected. I went into it with some trepidation, as I've not had an especially good experience with GURPS and portal realms. This largely seems a working of Portal Realms material into DF and it covers what it needs to.  I walked away concluding that I probably wouldn't use Gates in a DF game, but more thoughtful about thinking about gates in Psi-Wars.  It's a very niche product, and I doubt most DF games would use it, but if you're interested in portals, it's actually a very good companion to Portal Realms, and I'm glad I have it.

Into the Gates

So, our first chapter explains what a Gate is and what sorts they are.  

As an side, I found Time Portals especially thought-provoking.  Dell'Orto points out that time travel is essentially useless in the dungeon fantasy genre and I spent a lot of time thinking about that, because it's one of those surprisingly insightful points about genre that you don't think about.  The fantasy genre is often "stuck in time." You might imagine if you went back in time, instead of being in a monster-beset kingdom with a good king and an imperiled princess, you'd end up in a monster-beset kingdom with a different good king and a different imperiled princess.

You could fix this, of course.  You could argue that TL changes. You could create moments in history that the characters could explore, but you'd have to explain those moments in history, and you'd have to make them feel distinct.  There's value to that, of course, but at some point you're not playing Dungeon Fantasy anymore, but you are instead broadening out to a more generic fantasy, with DF as the foundation from which you're springing, which is hardly something I object to. You should want to branch out!  But he's absolutely right not to do it here.  In fact, the oft-forgotten GURPS Fantasy has a whole chapter on how to do this, if you're interested.

Then we get into the sort of structures we tend to find in these things, such as the "City of Gates" vs "The portable gate" and things to look out for in both.  It also goes into why you'd go into one.  I'll come back to that point though.

Then in Gate Rules, we discuss the physics of gates, how to tackle PC exploitation of gates, and how magic might impact them.

Finally, we get a collection of realms you could visit.

There's a quick aside here to "Jester Gates" which are joke-realms that act like "Bonus stages." You don't know what you're going to get, and gameplay will fundamentally differ.

So Where Are We Now?

I have fairly mixed feelings about this book.  First, as a Dungeon Fantasy book, I don't think I'd ever use it, and if I used portals, I wouldn't need this book, with one exception and I'll come back to that.

Okay, so, I tend to see the DF genre as about overcoming dungeons.  The characters in dungeon fantasy are dungeon-delving machines.  They may have personality and they may have ties to the world, but the bulk of their design is "how do I kill monsters and take their stuff?" How you got your quest, who is involved, and the context around the dungeon crawl is fluff; it can be interesting fluff, but it's not the meat of what the game is about.  So I don't really care that much about how I get to the dungeon.  If I go to one dungeon via a long trek, and then another via a portal, okay, sure. But I don't need a book for that.

What makes portals interesting is that they allow for genre bending elements. Like you might have one world that is a world of talking animals and cartoonish monsters, and another world that is Dark Souls with the runes scratched off.  As these are so obviously thematically different, you might connect them with a portal.  But exploring the tension between the two isn't something I'd expect in a Dungeon Fantasy game.

The exception to this is the little shout-out to Jester Gates, which I think I would use. I would design a specific dungeon that fit the themes of my setting and world, and then I might sprinkle "Bonus challenges" that the PCs could optionally take on.  The fact that they're (literally) gated behind a portal means that the weird and unusual nature or the highly specific rules make sense.  This represents a really good use of a portal.

I could also see something like trying to play on the tension of unusual physics.  For example, if you have a gates between an ice world and a fire world all within one room, and you have a fight ranging between the two, or you need to engage in puzzle solving across multiple worlds using gates, I think that would make good use of the theme/genre/rule bending, but the book doesn't cover this that much, and I think you'd be better off covering a specific example in an adventure rather than talking about generalized portal puzzles.

So I'm left with using this as a more generic fantasy tool, and the book even hints at it. For example, it frets about people using the gates to be merchants and creates weird limitations that makes this especially difficult to do.  But can you imagine a campaign where you were playing interdimensional fantasy merchants, trying to navigate through various portal realms and ancient Gate Cities created by a lost civilization while trying to deal with the pecularities of various gates? That... sounds cool.  It's not DF, but it's the sort of thing this book would let you do. But then why is this stuff in here? Shouldn't it be in a more generic book? Don't we have a generic book for this in Portal Realms? So why does this exist?

Well, I sat down and reread Portal Realms alongside this, and it gets into a lot of stuff that Gates doesn't, and Gates gets into a lot of things that Portal Realms doesn't.  In fact, the more I read the two side by side, the more I realized that if I ran a Portal Game, I'd want to use Gates as a companion to Portal Realms.  Then it clicked: Gates is to Portal Realms what Wilderness Adventures is to... well, you know, going on Wilderness Adventures: this is a generically useful book that focuses intently on making it useful for DF.

Based on that would I recommend it? Well, it's still pretty niche, but it's also only like $3. It's competently written, it's got some interesting ideas, and I suspect I'd reference it if I was exploring its niche.  Which I may well do in Psi-Wars as portal travel and strange physics that lets you travel from world to world is absolutely a thing there.  So, yes, a tentative recommend.