Mizzle Smoketree as a GURPS character

Games Fabula Ultima
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Because Mike has expressed an interest in GURPS, I offered to convert a character as a system demo. Who better to convert than my own PC, Miz?

Let’s review who and what Miz is, as a character, setting aside Fabula Ultima rules:

  • I can summon an eldritch being called the Arcanum of the Grimoire, which helps me solve mysteries and lets me speak all languages!,
  • I can also perform ritual magic such as divinations and prophecies,
  • I’m good at studying situations and creatures and figuring out their weaknesses,
  • When we’re in town and staying at an inn or tavern, I can overhear interesting gossip and ask questions about what’s going on,
  • I travel with a creature called an Acorn Pixie, who helps me in combat. The pixie can slow enemies, make ranged attacks, or even heal people!,
  • I carry a thick tome and wear sage’s robes, so I’m not great in physical combat, but I can contribute a little bit. Mostly my pixie will make attacks for me.

Characters start with a certain number of character points (GURPS p. 10). For a “heroic” adventurer, just starting out, 100-200 points is appropriate. Typically, GURPS 4E characters will start around 150 points (p. 487). We’ll target this number as we go.

FabU has four stats: MIG (Might), DEX (Dexterity), Insight (INS), and Willpower (WLP). These almost map onto the GURPS attributes of ST, DX, and IQ. HT (Health) is its own thing, and governs things like Fatigue and disease resistance. In FabU, you can have d6, d8, d10, or d12 in these stats. Let’s make that 9, 10, 13, or 16 in GURPS terms.

ST and HT are 10 points per level. DX and IQ, because they affect skills and other things, are worth more - 20 points per level. Each of these starts at 10, the human average. Attributes are typically written as “AT value [point cost]”, so Miz’s attributes are:

ST 9 [-10]; DX 10 [0]; IQ 13 [60]; HT 10 [0]

GURPS characters have several secondary characteristics, based on these attributes. Some of these can be increased independently.

Miz’s ST 9 gives him basic damage of Thrust (thr) 1d-2 and Swing (sw) 1d-1 (p. 16). This affects his damage done by melee and muscle-powered ranged weapons.

Hit points (HP) is based on ST, as both strength and durability basically correspond to muscle mass. Miz’s low ST would penalize his HP, so let’s bring it up to human baseline by spending 2 points.

Will and Perception both start at IQ by default, and can be raised for 5 points. Miz’s Will isn’t great (his WLP is lower than his INS in Fabula Ultima), but he’s notably perceptive. So we’ll give him Will 12, Perception 14, for a net cost of zero points.

Fatigue points (FP) are used to track exhaustion. They’re also used as energy by spellcasters when using the default magic rules. We’ll leave these at their starting value of 10.

Basic Speed is your reflexes, quickness, and so on. It’s used to compute Move and combat initiative, and starts as (DX+HT)/4. Miz is nothing special here, and his Basic Speed is the standard value of 5. Likewise, we don’t improve Basic Move, which is Basic Speed rounded down.

Miz’s Basic Lift - the value used to track encumbrance - is 16, based on his ST (p. 17).

The game gives the option of Skinny, Overweight, or Fat to affect build, and Dwarfism or Gigantism to affect height. We’re not doing any of that, so Miz has a typical build - somewhere between 5’1" and 5’11", and 105-165 lbs (p. 18).

At age 13 or so, Miz has close-to-adult scores (his ST might increase to 10 as he grows up, for example). He has a size modifier (SM) of 0 (p. 20).

Miz doesn’t otherwise stand out in terms of his social background (p. 22).

This wraps up the fundamentals. Miz has spent 52 of his 150 points so far. We’ll look at Advantages, Disadvantages, Skills, and magic in other posts.

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For Miz’s Arcana binding and ritual magics, we have to figure out a magic system. Thus, we’re going to put all of that off for later, and focus on his other advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages

First, Miz is accompanied by a friendly Acorn Pixie. This is the Ally advantage (p. 36). The cost is based on the point total of the pixie, and the frequency of appearance. “All the time” is 4x, and the point total is based on the fraction of the PC’s own point cost. If we gave the Acorn Pixie a budget of 100 points (including Flight, its Healing ability, and so on), that’s (3 * 4) or 12 points.

Miz has a piece of Signature Gear (p. 85) in the form of his journal. This is essentially “plot armor” for equipment, meaning that he can’t so easily be deprived of it. This costs 1 point.

Miz should probably have a Talent (p. 89) as a librarian and traveler, but we’ll cover that when we get to skills.

Disadvantages

Many disadvantages’ point values are affected by self-control roll needed to avoid being affected by them (p. 121). The default self-control roll is 12, so unless we specify, disadvantages where it’s relevant are bought at that level.

First, Miz is absolutely Curious (p. 129). He loves learning new things and going new places and he will push the Big Red Button if he thinks it’ll do something interesting. This is worth -5 points.

Miz is not a good liar - he’s too focused on the truth. We’ll also give him Easy to Read (p. 134), for -10 points.

Miz is on the road to make up for a mistake of his, but in a sense him running away to satisfy his own curiosity makes him guilty about abandoning a home that needed him to become a librarian. Anything else that happens to his friends will make it worse… Thus, he has the Guilt Complex disadvantage (p. 137), worth -5 points.

Miz’s youth gives him Social Stigma (Minor) (p. 155), for -5 points.

We could assign more disadvantages to Miz, but this is probably good enough for now.

Quirks

All Quirks are worth -1 point, but must be roleplayed. We’ll give Miz the following quirks:

  • Congenial (likes company, works well with others, miserable when alone)
  • Distinctive feature (bright blue hair and eyes)
  • Wants to try everything at least once. Everything.
  • Will not stop talking about something he’s read
  • Reluctant to admit when he needs help

This brings Miz’s point total to 35, of his allotted 150. Next up - Skills!

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Skills have a controlling attribute, almost always DX or IQ. For reference, his DX is 10 and his IQ is 13. Some skills can also default to other skills. For example, if you’re a master of the Longsword, you can still use a Shortsword better than an amateur.

The point cost of a skill depends on its difficulty, and how high or low it is relative to its controlling attribute. Skills are rated as “Easy”, “Average”, “Hard”, or sometimes “Very Hard”. Point costs are found on p. 170. A skill level of 12 is considered professional, and 15 is considered expert. Point costs follow a 1-2-4-plus-four progression, where 1 point is stat-0 for Easy, stat-1 for Average, stat-2 for Hard, and stat-3 for Very Hard.

Some skills also have a Tech Level (TL). Medieval or typical low fantasy is TL3, the Renaissance is TL4, steam power is TL5, and late 19th or early 20th century is TL6. The presence of reliable firearms strongly suggests that we’re in at least TL5.

Miz’s skills are grouped into three general areas: library and academic skills, travel and survival skills, and interaction skills. While his magic might have skills, I’m considering that separately. Let’s build a list of possible skill in each of these areas.

  • Library and academics: Expert Skill (Natural Philosophy), Hidden Lore (Arcana), Literature, Research/TL
  • Travel and survival: Climbing, Cooking, First Aid/TL, Fishing, Hiking, Naturalist, Navigation/TL, Stealth, Survival (Plains, Woodlands)
  • Interaction: Diplomacy, Observation
  • Other: Melee Weapon (Knife)

Some skills deserve extra explanation.

  • Natural Philosophy is normally for societies in TL1-4; science begins to differentiate at TL5 past the point where a single skill can really capture it. But since we’re going with “general knowledge of the natural world”, it seems appropriate here. He isn’t a scientist, after all.
  • Survival normally requires a specialization, meaning each relevant biome is its own skill - Survival (Woodlands), Survival (Plains), and so on.

Skills are typically written as “Skill/TL (Specialization)-SkillLevel [Point Cost]”, e.g. “Research/TL5-12 [4]”.

Looking at the skills he chose, and looking back at Talent (p. 89), it makes sense that we’d take the “Outdoorsman” talent. One level would cost 10 points, but give us a +1 to several skills we already took, and make learning new ones go faster. We add this as an advantage, and update some of our skill levels accordingly.

With all that said, here’s what we took:

Climbing-10 [2]; Cooking-12 [1]; Diplomacy-13; Expert Skill (Natural Philosophy)-13 [4]; First Aid/TL5-13 [1]; Fishing-15 [1]; Hidden Lore (Arcana)-13 [2]; Hiking-10 [2]; Literature-12 [2]; Melee Weapon (Knife)-10 [1]; Naturalist-13 [2]; Navigation/TL5-14 [2]; Observation-15 [4]; Research/TL5-12 [1]; Stealth-11 [4]; Survival (Plains)-14 [1]; Survival (Woodland)-14 [1]

Miz has spent 35 points on skills. A general rule of thumb is a limit of (your age * 2) points for skills, but he’s been learning a lot by immersion. This brings his total point value to 80, out of 150.

4

We have one big area left for Miz - magic! With the understanding that we can always readjust things as we go, we have about 70 points left.

What do we need to get done in these 70 points? Miz needs to be able to summon the Arcanum of the Grimoire - and potentially new arcana, as we discover them - and do ritual magic within each Arcanum’s domains.

I want the Arcana to feel momentous - summoning one takes 40 MP out of Miz’s 58 in Fabula Ultima, and it can do amazing stuff like “answer any one question truthfully” and “speak any language”. The ritual magic is also very open-ended - you don’t get a lot of limits on what you can do, other than the limits of domain.

GURPS comes with a default magic system which is built around the concept of learned spells that cost energy to cast - it’s quick and practical and is a good drop-in for a lot of fantasy magic, but it’s not what we’re looking for. So we have two options: look through GURPS Thaumatology (the sourcebook for alternative magic systems), or build an Arcanum out of existing advantages and modifiers.

Chapters 3-6 cover the big alternatives to standard GURPS magic. These include things like spirit-assisted magic, material magic (herbs, alchemy, “mana organs”, and the like), “paths and books” that offer a few key abilities, symbol magic (e.g. runestones), and syntactic magic (e.g. words of power).

One version of syntactic magic jumps out at us immediately: Syntactic Magic (Realms and Powers), on Thaumatology p. 188. The idea here is that there are “realms”, e.g. Fire, and you buy an advantage and skill combo giving you a broad ability to manipulate it.

Thaumatology talks about how to divide up the universe on pp. 179-180. We can see examples on p. 185. Based on these divisions (e.g. “Fire” and “Sound”), we could call each Arcanum its own Realm. These are the Forge (fire, heat, metal), Frost (cold, ice, silence), the Gate (space, travel, void), the Grimoire (knowledge, revelations, understanding), the Oak (earth, plants, poison), the Sky (fog, rain, storms), the Sword (conquest, heroism, leadership), the Tower (judgment, protection, sacrifice), and the Wheel (destiny, speed, time).

Total mastery of a Realm costs 60 points, and you divide Realms up by “levels” of mastery. The suggested levels are “detection and measurement”, “control and suppression”, and “creation and destruction” (Thaumatology p. 188). Each level therefore costs 20 points. In addition, each Realm skill is an IQ/Very Hard skill.

We’ll give Miz the first level of the Grimoire Realm for 20 points. Next, we’ll buy the Realm skill: Realm (The Grimoire)-16 [20].

How about energy costs? We could invoke another rule like threshold casting to offset the cost of such magic - or we could buy Miz’s Fatigue up. “Extra Fatigue” on p. 50 of Thaumatology sounds right - it’s a pool of extra FP, but for magic only, and isn’t exhausted if the caster loses Fatigue from other sources. It costs 3 points per level. We’ll buy Extra Fatigue 10 for 30 points.

This brings us to a total of 70 points, which was our remaining budget for the character!

5

Let’s do a sanity check - can Miz do the things he’s done so far in the game?

The first meaningful thing he did was perform a divination spell on the defeated wolves. This is a working (Thaumatology p. 191) involving one realm: the Grimoire. This means his Realm skill of 16 is appropriate.

The base energy cost for Realm-based magic is twice the level of the highest-level Realm involved, plus any other Realms’ levels. This is a level 1 effect (detection and measurement), so the base cost is 2.

Realm workings apply parameter effects (Thaumatology p. 181). These can either impact the skill roll or the energy cost. There’s only one parameter in play: Range and Familiarity. As an information working, the book suggests allowing the standard GURPS long-distance modifiers (p. 241).

The monastery might be between 10 and 30 miles away at most, giving us either a -5 skill penalty or costing 5 energy points. This is well within Miz’s scope. Similarly, his later divination about the location of the book would have similar modifiers and give similar results.

To study creatures like the shroomkin, Miz would use skills like Naturalist.

It’s less clear what skill he’d use to study a demon like Saevis! In such a case, the GM might have called for an Occultism check. Occultism defaults to IQ-5, meaning Miz would have to roll an 8 or less for any kind of success. Perhaps his divination to find the journal gave him the information he needed.

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Let’s build out Miz’s Acorn Pixie companion.

GURPS 3rd edition’s “Fantasy Folk” has a racial package for the “Ellylon”, who are tiny winged pixies. We won’t use everything there, but we’ll use it to get a sense of starting stat values.

Ellylon have ST -5 and DX +3. Because HP used to be based on Health in 3rd edition, we’ll ignore the Reduced Hit Points. We’re also forced into making a hard choice here - is the Acorn Pixie sapient or not? We’ll say yes, but give it an IQ of 8 - well above even a trained monkey, but below a typical human being. We settle for a spread like this: ST 5, DX 12, IQ 8, HT 12. We also buy up its HP a bit, to 7, and Perception to 10. The net point total for attributes is -16.

The pixie has a Size Modifier of -5 - somewhere between 7 and 10 inches in size. This is not an advantage or disadvantage as such - for everything being small lets the pixie do, there’s another thing it can’t do.

We’ll charge 4 points for the pixie to be able to speak the common tongue, in addition to a free “pixish” language of its own. This is a reverse from Fabula Ultima, where Miz’s magic is what translated for the pixie, but we can make this allowance so the pixie has more agency.

Point total before we look at advantages, disadvantages, and skills is -12 points.

The pixie’s key things are: “Sharp Needle”, a ranged barb attack; “Entangle”, an attack that inflicts slow; “Heal”; and winged flight.

Let’s build these one at a time.

Sharp Needle

We want to treat this more or less like a bow in terms of damage. A short bow does thr imp (thrusting impaling) damage, with a range modifier of x10/x15 (that is based on ST), an Acc of 1, a RoF (rate of fire) of 1, and Shots 1(2) (meaning it can be fired and then must be reloaded). A human shooting that bow with ST 10 would be doing 1d-2 imp, with a 1/2D of 100 yards and a Max of 150 yards.

The Innate Attack advantage (p. 61) can give us all these things. It starts with 1/2D 10, Max 100, Acc 3, RoF 1. It does 1d damage per level, and the cost per level depends on damage type. Impaling is 8 points/level. Buying this down to 1d-2 makes this 0.4 dice, meaning it’s 4 points per level.

Increased Range (p. 106) lets us increase 1/2D to 50 yards for 10% - a 5x multiple, halved because it only affects one of the two range values. This brings our total point cost to 5 points (4 * 1.1). Not terribly expensive for a built-in bow that never runs out of ammo!

Entangle

In general, “debuff another character” is the Affliction advantage. This is 10 points per level; each level makes it harder for the target to resist the effect. We want 3 levels, meaning that if we hit (and get through armor), the target must roll HT-2 or be affected.

Specific afflictions are listed on p. 428. “Drunk” looks good, playing off the idea of acorn liquor we introduced in Miz’s origin story. This is a +20% enhancement.

We also want to add Increased Range, again for a +10% enhancement. This brings the total cost to 39 points (30 * 1.3).

Heal

This is the Healing advantage (p. 59), costing 30 points.

Winged Flight

This is the Flight advantage (p. 56), with the “Small Wings” limitation (-10%), for a total cost of 36 points.

To give the pixie a slightly more magical element, let’s also give it the Doesn’t Eat or Drink advantage, for 10 points.

For disadvantages, we’ll give the pixie Clueless (p. 126) for -10 points, Jealousy (p. 140) for -10 points, and Short Attention Span (p. 153) for -10 points. Roughly speaking, the pixie can be treated sort of like a highly intelligent cat - it gets possessive of its human, it doesn’t really understand even ordinary things people take for granted, and it’s easily distracted.

Cost after advantages and disadvantages is 68 points.

The acorn pixie only needs a few key skills: Innate Attack for its Sharp Needle and Entangle attacks, skills for avoiding notice, and maybe some other nature-focused skills.

We’ll take these skills:Camouflage-10 [4]; Dancing-14 [4]; Flight-13 [4]; Innate Attack (Projectile)-15 [8]; Stealth-14 [8]; Survival (Woodland)-11 [4]

This brings the pixie to 100 points - just where they should be.

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With a few days to think about it, I wanted to revisit what we did here. First, I want to present a couple of alternatives. Second, I might have made a mistake, and I want to address that. I’ll demonstrate the mistake by referring to one of the alternatives.

GURPS Magic

We could have bought Miz traditional GURPS Magic spells.

Magic has certain breakpoints. One of those is a skill level of 15 with a spell, which reduces Fatigue costs by 1. This can make a big difference, since many spells have a maintenance cost of 1, and a 1-point reduction makes the difference between “maintaining spells for a few minutes” and “maintaining indefinitely”.

Because of this, it’s common to build mages with IQ 14 and Magery 3. Spells are IQ/Hard skills, Magery adds to skill, and buying a Hard skill at stat-2 costs 1 point. Thus, spending 1 point on a spell at these breakpoints gives you a skill of (14 + 3 - 2) or 15, our breakpoint.

The IQ and Magery would have cost Miz a net 55 points (20 for IQ, 35 for Magery). That would have left us a budget of 15 points for spells. What would he need to take in order to do what he does?

The Communication and Empathy spell GIft of Tongues (Magic p. 46) gives speech and understanding of any language. The prerequisite chain for this spell starts with Borrow Language and three languages at Accented or better. Borrow Language requires Lend Language, which in turn requires 3 other Communication and Empathy spells. We could pick any three, such as Sense Foes, Sense Emotion, and Persuasion. This would cost us 7 points, plus the cost of the languages (4 points per language at Accented).

Why 7 points? Five of the spells are IQ/Hard skills, as almost all spells are. Gift of Tongues is IQ/Very Hard, indicated by the “(VH)” after the name in GURPS Magic, and would cost us 2 points to buy at 15.

Raising IQ, which would be the equivalent of the Insight boost, is the Wisdom spell (Magic p.135). This requires any six Mind Control spells. Since we bought Sense Emotion, that unlocks Fear (p. 134). So we could take Fear, Bravery, Foolishness, Daze, Forgetfulness, and Sleep. The total cost here would be 7 points.

There’s general Divination spells, and a whole class of Knowledge spells, that we’d need to take, to represent his ritual magic.

As we can see, this gives Miz a lot more magic than he has otherwise exhibited. It’s also a little pricier than what we took - 84 points - and that is without divination! We could just barely cover it by rounding out Miz’s budget for disadvantages. But the biggest objection is that it doesn’t represent how Miz works as a character.

Arcana as Advantages

You can represent some kinds of magic as advantages with modifiers. For example, I could buy IQ +1, which costs 20 points, and apply limitations like “Costs Fatigue” and “Preparation Required” to lower the cost.

There’s no “Omniglot” advantage as such, meaning I can’t really price out the ability to use every language. Online sources estimate this at between 30 and 45 points, so I could add the same kind of limitations.

I’d still need a solution to the ritual magic question.

I mention this option mostly as a benchmark: if I bought the specific things as advantages, would it cost about the same as what I paid for the magic? In this case, no - see the “mistake” section below for why. But thinking about this is how I realized my mistake.

Modular Abilities

Modular Abilities (GURPS Characters p. 71) is a powerful, flexible advantage that lets you acquire skills or mental advantages - or more! It has equivalents in other point-buy systems, such as the Hero System’s Variable Power Pool.

GURPS Thaumatology provides details on using this with spells (p. 56). Thaumatology advises ignoring prerequisites as long as the wizard’s grimoire has them. In our case, the “grimoire” is “the arcana the caster has bound”, so Miz would still be limited to preparing spells from known domains. Perfect.

Thus, the breakdown works like this:

A Modular Abilities (Super-memorization) slot costs 5 points to buy, then costs 3 points per point of abilities. A “slot” holds a single skill, such as a spell. We’d want to hold Very Hard spells, which cost 2 points to learn at base level, but maybe we only need one of those. So total cost would be (5+6) + (5+3), or 19 points.

The Spells Only limitation (p. 71) limits us to magic spells and is worth -20%. This is 16 points. We’d also want to buy the IQ and Magery mentioned earlier for another 55 points, bringing the cost of this option to 71 points - comparable to what we paid.

An advantage of this alternative is that it makes it easy to adjudicate effects - just look up the effects of the spell Miz is trying to cast. The drawback is that if there isn’t a straightforward spell equivalent, it’s hard to adjudicate how to handle a novel application of an arcanum’s power!

Another outcome of this approach is that it costs Miz nothing to gain new Arcana - which is how it works in Fabula Ultima. He just effectively expands his menu of possible spells as he encounters them. For example, Miz would pull spells from the Communication and Empathy, Mind Control (with limitations), and Knowledge colleges of GURPS Magic, all as part of the Arcanum of the Grimoire’s portfolio of domains. He’d gain access to the Heat/Fire and Making & Breaking colleges if he made a pact with the Arcanum of the Forge.

The Mistake

I bought Miz with one level of the Grimoie Realm. However, reading the text, I might have needed to buy a second one. I’m basing that on this text:

The magician can manipulate anything that falls within the Realm – and manipulation includes suppression or diversion. However, he can’t create it from nothing, or make it vanish completely. For example, Thought/2 might grant the ability to instill the target with interest in a topic, or to inspire him to avoid it, and may suppress thought enough to leave the victim dazed or asleep – but it couldn’t render him entirely comatose.

It sounds like things like “speaking languages” and “raising IQ” would fall into this level. Since those are core parts of summoning the Arcanum of the Grimoire, it feels like that would be important to take.

This is a simple enough correction - we take points that we’d spent on Extra Fatigue and allocate them to the Realm.

This way of handling things means Miz would be saving up his points for new Arcana, which I was kind of fine with - mastery over aspects of reality is a big deal!

Conclusions

The best approach here really depends on how we envision Arcana. If they’re big powerful cosmic forces, Realms magic is still appropriate. But it’s neat to see the Modular Abilities take, where he’s a limited spellcaster and doesn’t need to study to gain new spells, with Arcana less like semi-divine entities and more like spiritual teachers or mentors in the ways of the world.

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If Miz was built on 200 points, instead of 150, he might have more room for his mundane stuff. Alternatively we could make him more “cinematic” as a character - a little more larger-than-life.

We’ve sort of alluded to modifiers on advantages (and disadvantages). Let’s talk about those first. “Modifiers” are things that affect the cost and nature of an advantage or disadvantage. “Enhancements” are positive; “limitations” are negative. You sum the cost of every modifier, and apply that as a percentage increase or decrease in the cost of the thing you bought.

For example, the Acorn Pixie has Flight. This is an advantage that costs 40 points. It’s modified by the limitation “Small Wings”, worth -10%. This means the cost of the advantage is (100% - 10%), or 90% of 40 points, or 36 points.

If I bought an attack whose base cost is 20 points, with Increased Range x2 for +10% and Limited Uses (3/day) for -20%, the net cost would be (100 + 10 - 20) or 90% of 20 points, or 18 points.

How about some advantages?

We could give Miz some advantages that represent his general binding with Arcana. Examples include Blessing (p. 40), Channeling (p. 41), or Intuition (p. 63), depending on the specific benefit we want. As an alternative to Magery, we could also buy Power Investiture (p. 77), which is basically “clerical Magery” and unlocks spellcasting.

Something we could give to any Fabula Ultima character, not just Miz, is the Gizmos advantage (p. 57). This is 5 points per gizmo, and essentially says you can produce a small, useful item some number of times per session. This is the default in other systems, like Megalos and Fabula Ultima (IP) or Blades in the Dark (Load), but can let characters feel more prepared than the players were.

A fun option is an advantage I’d call “Book Nerd”. It’s built on Wild Talent (p. 99), letting Miz attempt a roll against any skill in the game once per session, if you don’t know it (if you do know it, just roll that skill). We’d take two modifiers listed alongside the advantage itself: Retention +25% and Focused (Mental skills) -20%, for a net cost of 21 points. This would represent Miz’s deep history of reading, and his ability to recall details from that.

A cinematic option for skills is Wildcard skills (p. 175). These are DX/Very Hard or IQ/Very Hard to begin with, cost triple, and may require an Unusual Background advantage - but they cover every conceivable skill in their area. The sidebar in the book gives examples; we might take wildcard skills like “Academics!”. Buying this at IQ level would cost 8 points (for a Very Hard skill) times 3, or 24 points - but would let Miz roll his IQ for any relevant skill check, from Research to History to Literature to Geography.