GURPS PDF Challenge 2021: DF 23: Twists

 This is the last PDF unlocked by moolah.  The other one needed to be unlocked with total backers.

This has one chapter, Strands in the Braid, but the one chapter is pretty cleanly broken into three parts to the point that I thought it had three chapters.

• Lords and Ladies: Titles and Status in DF
• Demons and Darkness: Horror DF
• Sufficiently Advanced: So I heard you wanted guns?

It's a good book. It tackles the things it needs to tackle in a very DF way, and you'll walk away with more knowledge of how GURPS works, and how to expand your DF game. I think you're better off having it than not having it.  That said, I get the sense a lot of people had higher hopes for this than it could match.  It will not give you courtly games out of the box, or DF Monster Hunters, or DF: Galtar.  It will point you in the right direction to make those yourself! But you'll still have to make them yourself, you'll just have a little more guidance in doing so.  I think that's going to disappoint some DF fans.  I found it okay, but I have very high proficiency levels with GURPS that a lot of people in the DF community don't (as DF is often a gateway into GURPS). I still think its worth getting, as I said, but modify your expectations.

Lords and Ladies

Broadly speaking, this points you towards Guilds, which is the right thing to do (though it should be noted a lot of this material is similar to what's already in Guilds), and suggests Status-As-Rank and a means of Pulling Rank, but in social contexts. This is what I did in Psi-wars, and I think it works well enough.  It also lets players buy status, which is yet another thing to soak up money, and I think it fits the premise well-enough: if you amass a great fortune via dungeon crawling, at some point we expect to see your character in finery in some king's court.  It also adds Followers in what looks to my eye like a shout out to classic D&D, though it should be noted that these allies don't come free.  It's more of a guideline as to what you might have, though I find some of the numbers tossed around... interesting. Like, okay, at Status 7, and it emphasizes that NPCs (especially kings) might have, more, caps out at 30 retainers and 2000 goons.  Alright, but how do I dungeon delve at that point? Do I send my vast armies in ahead of me and then wait for them to clean up?

I don't think that's the intention of this work, but this creates some interesting derived values. How large is an army in DF? Well, a PC "King" caps out at around the aforementioned 2000 and 30 retainers.  The goons are worth no more than a "guard," a bargain henchman worth 62 points. How much is a retainer worth? Well, up to your point value.  How much are you worth? Well, according to Twists, at least 400 points.  So, 30 "9 or less" allies will run you about 150 points if each bought individually without buying them as an Ally Group, and about 50 points if they're bought as a group.  And then the Goons are less than 25% of your value, so one each, but they have a multiplier of x20, so they cost you about 20 points. Then the book suggests at most "Very Wealthy" which is another 30 points, and then, of course, Status 7 [35]. So between 135 and 235 points of your 400 points is "It's good to be King," which means that much of your character isn't  delver, it's just these traits. 

At Status 4 [20], which requires at least 250 points, it still recommends Very Wealthy [30], you can have up to 10 retainers [30 and 50 points] and 200 goons [14], which means a minimum of close to 100 points is necessary to play a "maxed out" Status 4 character, leaving you a mere 150 points to define the rest of your character with, which suggests to me that you could have a "True Noble" character template if you wanted. I seem to remember an aristocrat template in a pyramid article, or perhaps in Swashbucklers; I'd have to see how it lines up.

But we come back to the interesting derived values for DF.  See, as much as I bellyache about it, a lot of people refuse to listen to sense, and insist on running DF-as-Fantasy.  And as much as I complain about it, this is hardly the worst way to  do it, and I think Twists shows why.  We know what a generic soldier looks like: the Guard Template.  We have other henchmen that give us a sense of what other retainers might look like, and now we have a sense of scale: if you're fighting an Status 2 "Cavalier" (according to Guilds), then he's around 150 points, and has around 50 guards at his disposal and about 5 minions of roughly his caliber.  Seems like an interesting, broad-range encounter, no? Of course, the book firmly  asserts that "NPCs can have bigger armies" but we've got gradation levels now, we've got a sense of scale.  People are going to use it that way.  Between this, Strongholds and "Social Adventures" GMs will realize they have the means to abandon the dungeon and go conquering the countryside or liberating damsels from, er, actual dungeons and defeating wicked barons, or becoming tangled up in politics.  But that raises a different problem, in that Social Adventures is a few throwaway paragraphs suggesting that you read Social Engineering and Mass Combat.

All in all, this is an interesting section, though I think you should really pair it with Henchmen, Guilds and, um, the rest of GURPS if you want to get the most out of it. I'll talk a bit more about that at the end. However, one thing I'm going to ding it on: there's no list of titles. Okay, this is discussing rank and status, and you can grab the rank titles from Guilds and use those as your titles, I guess. But the Courtly titles are.. assuming you're in a court, and they're sort of weird (Cavalier? Emir? No Earl, Marquis or Duke?). If there's anything players will want to know, it's what is the Status of a Duke? They'll want to buy a level of status and know what name should be associated with it, you know, the title.  Give us a list of titles, and if that's too Eurocentric for you, give us several lists of titles.  

Demons and Darkness

Hey B-Dog! I heard you like horror!

The most fascinating part about this chapter is how little advice it actually gives. I've often felt that DF already had all the makings of a horror scenario, and this chapter is a long laundry list of references, as though to say "See? You had horror the whole time!" It lists particular monsters (that were already part of DF), some suggested modifiers (that were already part of DF), points to explicitly DF magic styles, and suggests sticking to the already published DF rules.

It does suggest using Horror's rules on corruption, Monster Hunter on Fright Checks, and to trim down the easy resurrections, then it offers some basic advice on how to spook up your dungeons.

This chapter is fine, though in a sense it's pretty unnecessary as objectively all these things existed and all it really does is show you that fact and point you towards a few things.  I don't actually disagree with this approach; one of my big complaints with the DF line is that it seems to assume (I suspect based on how people actually react to the DF line) that you need everything spoon fed to you directly, and it's refreshing to see a supplement sigh with exasperation and point out that it already spoon fed this to you here, here and here.  Sometimes, though, we need that.

That said, this is mostly about turning your dungeon into Darker Dungeons (some references to Sanity would have been nice, though I'm pretty sure they already exist in a Pyramid somewhere) or Diablo.  To me, though, making the dragon into a DEMON DRAGON BLARGAGARG isn't really the definition of horror. I would expect more investigation, invincible monsters that need you to know their specific weakness to defeat, and so on.  I would expect the horror to follow you back home, so after you kill the DEMON DRAGON BLARAGARG a curse might follow you home and begin to haunt you and kill your loved ones until you figure out what's going on. But at that point it ceases to be DF and starts to become Fantasy Monster Hunters, and I'll talk about that in a bit too.

Sufficiently Advanced

I'm not really sure what to make of this chapter.  It's definitely not how to run an Ultra-Tech dungeon crawl, though it seems to offer some advice that you could let you better convert some of the DF monsters into something that feels more appropriate to sci-fi, which is useful to me, and it alludes to using these rules for a fantasy knock-off of After the End, which would be fun. It seems to mutter about allowing guns in DF in a sidebar.  I think it amounts to "Buy HT for [5] and then pay double for your musket" which is probably the best element of the chapter. 

The rest seems to be about "So you want to run an adventure where fantasy characters stumble across a spaceship that they think is full of gods or demons or whatever, and they get laser "wands." How do you handle that?" and in that case, I either feel like the advice should either be "Woah, don't do that" or "Here's a full 10+ pages on how to run an ultra-tech dungeon crawl a la Elderborn or something." This sort of goes halvesies and essentially just says things like "PCs can look at Ultra-Tech but not use it.  You can reskin things to look more like Ultra-Tech if you want."

Conclusion

I don't really know how I feel about the Twist books.  I think I like this one better than the Action twist book, because Action is meant to be a pretty broad genre and should legitimately think about a lot of the topics it just brushes past, while I can see DF being sufficiently narrow that you can afford to give pretty narrow advice, and I think this does a decent job of that.

But I also think that these twists come from somewhere, and that somewhere are incessant questions on how to do X in DF.  Now, my answer has always been "You don't want to run DF anymore, you want to use DF as a basis to run a broader genre." My big complaint about DF is not that people insist on using it for things other than dungeon crawling. DF exists to narrow GURPS down to just dungeon crawling, and all the rest of GURPS exists if you want to broaden things back out.  Like if you want to have Mass Combat, for example, you don't need DF: Mass Combat, you just use Mass Combat. But a certain segment of the DF audience seems to get scared if asked to go outside their walled garden and insists on having the DF label slapped on things (this is my core objection to Ring Fort too: not that Ring Fort is bad, but that it needed the DF label slapped on it lest people lift their noses at it)

I think Twists does an admirable job at answering these questions in a DF way: if you run these rules in a DF game, they won't take you out of dungeons, for the most part.  But they'll start to point you in directions that DF doesn't handle well out of the box: Lords and Ladies starts to point towards Fantasy Action, Demons and Darkness starts to point to DF Monster Hunters, and Sufficiently Advanced starts to point you towards DF After the End.  This is not a problem, and this is fine: if you begin to realize that base DF isn't enough for your Lords and Ladies, follow the advice of Lords and Ladies and integrate Social Engineering and Mass Combat.  Start to look in Action for some additional advice and realize that your game is fundamentally changing and that's okay.

But on the other hand, I think a lot of people are going to look at this book and be disappointed.  It isn't enough for them to run these things out of the box.  They may see the references to other books as a cop-out.  My gut says they're wrong, but maybe they're not.  Maybe this needed triple the word count and a deeper dive on how to integrate these broader sort of fantasy games into the DF framework.  I'd personally rather not see that happen, but I've also noticed in my own work that many GURPS supplements tend to underestimate the amount of work necessary to get a particular game off the ground, and that the readers are often as well-versed in GURPS and improvising as the author is, which is often not the case. Time and time again, I've rolled my eyes at the DF community for demanding a particular thing, and then when they get it, I read it and realize that their complaints had more validity than I realized and find the book indispensible. So maybe this book isn't enough for you or your game. Maybe we do need more.

So my gut says "This is plenty of material for you to work with" but my gut is often wrong on these things.  I'd also say that you're better off with it than without it, but it might disappoint you, because it still leaves a lot of homework for you to do.  I say dive into the rest of the GURPS line and you'll find the answers you seek, but I'm not sure how many people this is aimed at will find that it a satisfying book.