My Dungeon Fantasy Rules: Combat, Magic, and Dungeon Procedures

     In this post, I will go over the rules for combat (which are few), the rules for magic (which are many), and rules for actually doing the "dungeon" part of "dungeon crawling". My dungeon crawling procedures are based on Charles Saeger's dungeon crawling procedures, found here. This post was suggested by a commenter on one of my posts; that could be you! If you have suggestions, let me know.

Basedstein: Introduction

     Yes, I caved for the BrOSR stuff and am setting up a Braunstein. I had been following Eggplant's Eggstein and used some materials he had posted on his blog and his substack, which I shamelessly copied a lot of. Anyways, now that it is almost ready, I can talk about what my plans are and how they differed from what Eggplant was doing in his game:

1. Weekly Orders!  Eggplant's game had daily orders, and I ran a test with daily orders, but that got to be too much too quickly; I have no clue how Eggplant ran almost three months of daily orders. Orders get processed before my game on Sundays.
2. Expanded Economics. Every settlement requires materials, be that tools, wood, grain, or anything else they might demand. This means that you will need to handle an intricate economic system while trading with other players to keep everything in check. Run out of a resource and things could go bad, especially if it is food.
3. Simplified Military. Military actions are going to be pretty simple for this game. Battles are going to be resolved closer to a Kriegsspiel-esque system, with battles being reported back to the respective leaders after the fact.
4. Adventurers. Every lord gets a number of adventurers, which are similar to how Gygax had his adventurers operate, being a group of expert scouts and specialists. They're pretty much the fantasy Green Berets. Their actions are also kind of treated like a Kriegsspiel scenario for orders, but is really closer to a group of NPCs ran by me moving through a short lair or dungeon and figuring out what they find, who gets injured or dies, and what the total income is for the lord. 
5. No Victory Condition. The game has to end eventually, and I believe that there could be a natural conclusion which would stop the need for players to play as the leaders of every fiefdom, but there isn't a written out "victory condition". You don't win, but rather, you see if your regime survives against all odds! These odds are written out at the start of the game, but will slowly change as you progress. 

    And that's about it for the most major changes. I am using GOSS and SEEN along with his systems for writing out and resolving orders, which I believe come from UMBROS. This is, of course, set in Anglica, which is the setting for the Dungeon Crawls I have been running. They will get some tidbits of what is going on, maybe getting one or two GOSS reports each week without needing to carouse for rumors, which will get shared here at the end of recap posts.

My Dungeon Fantasy Rules: Resurrection

     I want to preface this post by saying I know using Character Points as a metric for anything is quite meta. It can produce weird results and at times just be a plain bad metric for things, but for this specific case, I have not had many issues with it. Now, let me explain how I run resurrection in my games.

    To start, players can get resurrected as many times as they want. Whatever, it is your gp, who am I to tell you how to spend it (though, that can be my job as the GM at times). However, there are some baseline restrictions and other things that happen when you get resurrected:

1. Upon resurrection, you must roll against HT+2 to see if you survive the resurrection. On a failure, the character is permanently dead and may only be resurrected from a Wish (or Great Wish) spell. 
2. On a successful resurrection, you STILL lose one level of HT! This doesn't detract from your racial maximum and may be bought back as normal.
3. Resurrection costs a number of gp equal to your character point total when that character died, with a minimum cost of 50 gp. (Yes, I know, a tenth of you just groaned at using character points as a metric. Whatever. It is my game and my rules.) 

    Additionally, players cannot actually learn the resurrection spell! They can find scrolls of resurrection or NPCs to resurrect them, but it is a spell they cannot possess. There are also some further clarifications, which I must state:

1. A PC who reaches -5×HP via corrosion may never be resurrected; they are turned into goop!
2. A PC who is decapitated makes their HT+2 roll at flat HT instead of HT+2.
3. Disintegrated PCs, as stated in GURPS Magic, may not be resurrected.

    Finally, I want to talk about the reasoning behind this, which is a frankly gamey one. Of course this makes the table-top roleplaying game feel more like a video game, which is somewhat the point: these mechanics were taken mostly from Wizardry I. However, there is a good setting reason I am including them, being that the amount of accumulated experience, power, and skills that a character has acquired makes a more powerful spirit, which is harder to call upon and restore into a body than a "normal" spirit. Yes, that seems lame, but I think that it is a fine justification for this. 

    Also, it makes death stay scary. It also accentuates one of my favorite parts of TTRPGs (and life, in general): the finality of it. If a character dies, they might be dead forever, no matter what you try to do. Of course, you can always go get a Ring of Wish (I say that like it is easy!) Your character is a person in this world, and in real life, when people die, they (most of the time) stay dead. Make the most of this character before they are gone, then sing their feats in the party until nobody remembers their name!