Simplified portage rules for Dungeon Fantasy

Simple Rules

 

Animal	ST	Wt(lbs)	Feed/day	Load(lbs)	Pull(lbs)
Donkey	15	500	11.25	270	675
Pony/Small Mule	18	800	18	390	975
Work Horse	20	1100	24.75	480	1200
Mule	22	1400	31.5	580	1450
Draft Horse	25	2000	45	750	1875
Ox	27	2500	42	875	2185
Camel	22	1400	31.5	580	1450
Elephant	45	12000	180	2430	6075
Other Herbivore	ST	Weight	1.5-2.25/100lbs/day	BL×6	BL×15
Omnivore/Carnivore	ST	Weight	0.75-1.25/100lbs/day	BL×6	BL×15

 

Horses, ponies, mules, etc. can travel as fast as a human on foot for long distances; oxen, elephants, and most other animals will cut long-distance travel speeds in half. Feed for herbivores costs $0.75/lb, and they can graze without costing anything in most places when not required to travel (for example, while waiting outsidde the dungeon).

With the ratios above, one donkey can carry 24 days worth of food, whereas one draft horse can carry 16 and 2/3rds days of food, which means that for a dungeon three days away, you will want at least one feed donkey per eight donkeys (including himself), but one feed draft horse to every five draft horses, give or take.

Wagons will generally take up a fourth of the gross pulled weight. Thus, a one-horse wagon weighs 300lbs and has a payload of 900lbs. Sledges count double for encumbrance, except over ice and snow (and special desert sledges over sand, if they exist in your game).

Renting a beast costs %1 of purchase price per week, a number I pulled out of thin air, probably with a deposit. A wagon costs roughly $100/200lbs of cargo space, cheaper for ox-carts, more expensive for more exotic wagons (like an elephant-wain), and probably rents for roughly %0.5 of purchase price per week, or a %5 one-time fee, which are also random feel-good numbers.

"Advanced" Rules

 

Travel rates

A mixed party of people on foot, on horseback, and/or with a wagon will move at the regular hiking rates on B351, but with no chance to get the extra %20 for Hiking skill (but see below). This assumes 10 hours of movement at Move MPH and 2 hours on each side for starting and stopping. (If the party wants to go longer, see Extra Effort, below.) Any combat or other similar encounter will take roughly an hour to resolve, what with stripping the bodies, getting the horses calmed and moving again, etc. Alternatively, while it may not take an hour to get on the road again, people probably stop earlier in the day due to fatigue. Season to taste.

 

Terrain, weather and wagons

Any terrain worse than "Bad" or any weather worse than ankle-deep snow will stop a wagon. Generally, any combination of factors that would reduce movement by more than half is impassible to wagons. Specifically, mountains and bogs are impassible, unless there's a road, which overrides terrain quality as per B351, and will probably take a very circuitous route.

Terrain, weather and animals

Ponies and mules are commonly known* to be better at picking their routes in bad terrain than horses. Specifically, people bring mules and ponies into bogs or over mountains, not horses. To simulate this, optionally give ponies and mules a +4 to skill rolls for travel to offset penalties due to terrain. (See below.)
Camels and donkeys/mules are commonly known* to do better in deserts than other animals. To simulate this, optionally give camels and mules a +4 to skill roles for travel to offset penalties due to terrain. Also, camels count as having snowshoes for reducing movement rate modifiers (sand and snow are never more than ankle-deep, which reduces movement by a factor of 2).

Skills and their uses

 

 Hiking: As per the Basic Set. However, remember that the slowest member of a party determines overland speed, unless people want to separate. Assign penalties due to terrain up to -5 (for very difficult terrain, like the Himalayas). (Otherwise assume a simple failure and 100% land-speed.) Any critical failure is a hiking mishap of some kind - turned ankle, blisters, extra marching because the map was read wrong, etc. Assess 1d6 injury and 1d6 fatigue loss to a random hiker.

Packing: Rather than a caravan moving at %80 if it doesn't have a packer with skill 15+, the person with the highest Packing skill rolls daily. Success grants +10% movement; success by 5 grants +25% movement. Alternatively, each +1 the roll was made by grants +5% movement. Any failure by 5 or more results in some baggage mishap - lost cargo from poor knots, a hurt animal due to chafing, etc. Any critical failure means catastrophe - an animal broke a leg or sank into a swamp, or multiple beasts lost their baggage in a river, etc. Assign up to -10 due to terrain - it's more difficult to get horses over the Himalayas than people.

Riding: If people are on horseback, treat Riding like Hiking above. If a critical failure is rolled, assign fatigue and injury both to a random rider and his horse.

Teamster: You only need this skill if you have a wagon. If you only have a wagon and no beasts of burden, you only need this; else, you need both this skill and Packing (see above). This skill doesn't provide any benefit - it's a skill tax for using a wagon. Roll once a day. Failure means driving the wagon takes 1-3 hours longer than it otherwise would - players may choose to stop early or push on to make up lost time. Critical failure behaves as described in the skill on B225. In addition, there is a 1 in 6 chance of lost baggage - around half of that in the wagon in the first place. (You decided to ford the river instead of caulking the wagon and floating it.)

 

Fatigue

Moving overland is fatiguing. At the end of the hike each night, assess 3 hours worth of hiking fatigue as per B426. Halve this if the person has the Fit advantage; quarter it for Very Fit Yes, this means that your average ST 10 human will take 9FP from hiking in temperate weather. (Remember fatigue from weather and wearing armor, as well.) Don't add any fatigue assessed because they stopped in the middle of the journey to do something else (see B426), unless that fatigue should last (e.g. fatigue from illness). Any fatigue in excess of available FP comes off as injury - yes, you can kill yourself hiking.

Extra Effort: Rather than a flat 2 FP at the end of the day, Extra Effort costs 1 FP per +%5 distance covered. You can also use this with Packing, Riding, or Teamster, substituting a contest of wills between the beast with the strongest will and the designated driver/packer instead of minuses to the Will Roll. Yes, you can kill your horses this way.

 

 Miscellaneous

 Water: These rules assume the terrain you are travelling through will have sufficient water, so all you need to bring is foodstuffs. If this is not the case, animals also need a half-gallon of water per 100 lbs per day at 4 lbs per half-gallon. (Water's free, except at desert wells.) Camels can go without water for two weeks, and then begin to suffer fatigue and injury (see B426) at half the listed rate. Also, treat the listed amounts on that page as units to be multiplied by water requirements rather than absolute values.

Running out of food: If the party doesn't have enough food to keep the pack animals fed, the animals can forage to offset the difference. (It's up to you as GM to determine how well this works for omnivores or carnivores.) See B427. However, ruminants take a long time to get fed; slash travel distances in half in good, grass-filled terrain for horses and the like. Oxen and elephants will need to spend all day eating. If the terrain is less favorable to rumination (swamps, high mountains), multiply the time taken by 1.5-2, or more for especially bleak places. With little enough grass, the party is better off stashing their spoils, butchering the horses, and hiking to civilization to procure more supplies. Camels can go without food for a month, and then begin to suffer fatigue and injury at half the listed rate.

  Notes

These rules are very simplified, and probably wrong as far as realism is concerned. I wanted something I could use to decide quickly how long it would take to move from place to place, and a system that involved meaningful choices for the players, not a dissertation on the vicissitudes of low-tech travel.


This system does not sync up well with the stats for the wagon in the Basic Set, of which I could make neither heads nor tails, given what I understand about how much a horse can carry vs. its ST in GURPS terms. In all cases I have assumed that a horse is capable of carrying heavy encumbrance for a workday, which is convenient because a) it doesn't slow people down and b) it passes the sniff test for me, since horses will refuse to carry too much weight in my extremely-limited experience.

Further, my hiking rules are different from those in High Tech, which calls for a movement speed equal to Move/2 miles per hour. That book also claims that the rules in the Basic Set involve 16 hours of hiking at this pace, which is patently absurd; ideal terrain and no encumbrance involves hiking Move x 10 miles, which at a speed of Move/2 MPH, would be 20 hours of hiking.** So, instead, I came at the problem from two different angles; first, ten hours of actual movement, eight hours of sleep, and four hours to break camp, eat, make camp, etc. made sense to me for people who aren't hustling. Second, I went to the Vehicle rules and found the canonical ruling that speed in mph = 2×move, and that Cruising Speed for vehicles was usually %60-%70 Top Speed. I moved that down to %50 for ease of calculation and rationalized it away.

Pull loads were achieved by the formula given in the table, BL×15. This comes from B353. My sources (below) said that a horse can pull a draft of one-tenth its body-weight for eight hours a day regularly, and that a wagon's draft is somewhere between %10-6, which was a nice confluence, since if that rule didn't exist, the rules for carts would allow you to move a truly absurd amount of stuff. In particular, the rule that a four-wheeled conveyance divides encumbrance weight by 20 fails the realism test, hard.

Camels I eyeballed. The Basic Set gives them Reduced Consumption 3, whereas Wikipedia claims that dromedary camels can, in a pinch, go six months without water and other sources say 1 week to a month without food. However, when given the chance, they'll eat and drink enough to make up the difference.

Generally, these rules are designed to be easy to play while passing the plausibility test for a bunch of guys with little to no professional experience.

Sources

Care and feeding: Horse Sense by S. E. Mortimer, an excellent Pyramid Article that also happens to be a free sample, run quickly by GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3: Daily Life and Economics for agreement(ish)

Wagon drafts and horse loads: Tiller International: Estimating Wagon Draft and Wagon Teamster, a guy who decided to sell his house, buy an RV and some horses, convert the RV into a horse-drawn carriage, and travel the United States.

Stats: B459-60, though I checked against Animalia in GURPS as well.


*By us armchair philosophers, at any rate.

**Should I submit an erratum, perhaps?

Happenings in Hommlet

I made this very simple relationship map as a quick-and-dirty explanation of how various different people in Hommlet connect with one another. It doesn't include everyone, just everyone I thought might be interesting to put on such a map. (For example, the braumeister and cabinet-maker aren't on this map; they're just subsumed under 'Townsfolk'.)

I'm using it as a loose who-gets-involved indicator. So, if Burne gets in trouble somehow, natural responders might be the Badgers, Rufus, the clerics of Cuthbert, and the village elder (and through him the militia or other townspeople).

There are some things not shown on the map, too. For example, Black Jay is the villager whose wife and child were killed while he was away during 'the wars', which I'm spontaneously deciding means they were killed by agents of the Temple during a raid from the Moathouse while he was away - the wars being, specifically, the one of Veluna against the Temple. Thus, if he finds out the traders are active agents of the temple, he's liable to gird himself and go burn them out, by himself if he must. However, seeing these relationships mapped out visually like this does make it easier to both represent the individuals in Hommlet with better veracity and to draw up a loose timeline of happenings.

Here's what will happen in Hommlet if the PCs don't interfere somehow (say, by raiding the Moathouse):

• The traders and their agent will continue feeding information to the Temple fairly unimpeded.
• At the same time, the agent will try to use his inside status as a member of the laborers (not pictured, whoops!) to compromise the building of Burne's castle somehow, probably by weakening the foundations or including a backdoor somewhere.
• Within about a month, the traders will begin recruiting bandits and river pirates as laborers to work on the castle. Once there are enough, they will start using the abandoned secret room under the inn again for covert meetings.
• Around this time, Gundigroot will notice something fishy is going on and the druid Laroo will start spending more time in the Inn.
• The militia will get a bit edgy as well, with all the lowbrow strangers filtering in and spending a lot of time in the Welcome Wench.
• After another month or so, a mysterious fire will catch in the Church of St. Cuthbert, razing it with only one survivor, who dies under the ministrations of the druid after spending a few nights in a fever-dream about 'evil in the flames'.
• The militia will institute a curfew and begin patrolling the village. Burne's Badgers will tighten security around the castle. The two will not get along.
• Nira will pack up and leave town.
• Spuignor will sign on with Burne.
• Fumok will disappear (off to Nulb or the temple, I imagine)

By this point, the village is still playable, but it becomes somewhat harder. Villagers are less inclined to trust strangers, and the Temple's influence is growing faster than ever. I could go further, but I don't see the point - almost certainly, the players will do something to keep anything beyond point 2 (possibly point zero) from happening. This is just a tool to make sure the village doesn't become stale.

Elmo, Ranger of Verbobonc

Elmo is a drunken lout the PCs find about town in Hommlet who's interested in adventure!

Okay, so not really. Really, he's a 4th-level ranger in Hommlet on orders from the Viscount of Verbobonc 'for the purpose of observing newcomers, to insinuate himself in their expeditions'. Using Collective Restraint's level guide for GURPS, I built him off 210 points.

Here's his statblock in T1:

Elmo: AC 1 (equipped) or 8; Level 4 Ranger
(HD 5); hp 41; #AT 1; D 5-12 (battle axe)
or 6-9 (dagger) each including magic and
strength bonuses); XP 375
S 18/43 I 15 W 16 D 16 Co 17 Ch 11

and also:

 If employed, he
dons his own mail (see below) in place of that
given (or under a lighter type), and uses his
own magical battle axe as well.
Elmo's valuables are hidden in a lead-
lined oaken chest buried in the dirt floor of
the barn: chain mail +1, shield +2, battle
axe +1, 100 sp, 50 gp, 10 pp, and and small
pearls worth 100 gp each. The lead will foil
all attempts at magical detection. He also
owns a longbow with two score arrows,
half of them silver-tipped, though he does
not bring this weapon on adventures.

This guy is serious! Look at those stats! Also, as someone who never played AD&D, it was at first a surprise to me that he'd leave his bow at home. After all, rangers are ranged weapon folks, right? Of course I was wrong, and pleasantly so; rangers in 1st edition seem much closer to the source material, being fighters with some wilderness experience. Here's the character sheet.

Update: It has been asked what Elmo's role would be in my game. Really, I should have included a piece on that here without prompting, but it slipped my mind.

Elmo will try to latch onto the PCs and go adventuring with them, attempting to make himself attractive first as a hireling, then as a cut-rate fellow adventurer. He'll go so far as to take only a half-share of the treasure, if need be, to induce them to take him...which should make the players suspicious, but what's a King's spy going to do? At any rate, if they don't take him along, he'll shadow them into the dungeon, coming forward to aid them if they look like they need it and are worth aiding, or making their lives difficult if they seem likely to be working for the Temple.

Specifically, he could become a thorn in their collective side if they ally themselves with Lareth, or if they seem too willing to work for the traders. Also, he offers a way to help the party come to grips with the deeper plots surrounding the village, especially if he goes adventuring with them - an observant party will quickly see through his ruse of incompetence once actually in the dungeon.

Laying the Foundations

I fully expect this whole renovation metaphor to play out very quickly.

Before getting into the mechanics of porting the modules from the old ruleset to new, there are a number of decisions to be made. Dungeon Fantasy embodies different assumptions about play than AD&D. Specifically, Dungeon Fantasy intentionally abstracts away town time and really anything that isn't directly dungeon delving itself, assumes competence out of the box, and the tone is at least a little silly.

Town: The Temple of Elemental Evil has three of these, actually. There's Hommlet, Nulb, and Verbobonc, the last of which is the nearest large city at half a week to a week away. Verbobonc is the easiest; it's outside the scope of the adventure, and it's large enough to have anything the adventurers might want, so I'll just use the DF rules straight - I've no interest in fleshing out a large city. Furthermore, it's large enough I can just assume that most things desired are available, which isn't the case with either of the two villages. That gives the party an incentive to go there, but it's far enough away that they won't want to stay there, since a week across open country is expensive and potentially dangerous. (The area is mostly lawful, but with the resurgence of the temple, the Prince is seeing an upswing in complaints about banditry and roving bands of demihumans.)

Once the party gets to Nulb, they have a choice as to where to stay. That means that I need to differentiate the two somehow, in a way that doesn't make one clearly the better choice. Nulb isn't treated with the same level of detail as Hommlet, either; mostly because by the time the PCs have moved on, they have a large dungeon to focus on, shifting away from town adventure.

The flavor of the two should certainly be different; the module makes this clear. Nulb will be dangerous, with brigands even possibly assaulting the PCs in the streets, if they come back weak and loaded down with treasure. It's a hive a scum and villainy. Why would the PCs ever stay there instead of Hommlet, where not only is it safer, but they're already well-liked by this point?

First, Nulb is a much better place to pick up hirelings. The only hirelings available in Hommlet are some adventurer-types who want far too much coin, a limited number of laborers, and one priest from the temple of St. Cuthbert who I'm throwing in as a backup healer if the party wants to take him along. (I firmly believe no one should be forced to play a cleric if no one wants to.) In contrast, in Nulb you can find the entire gamut of hirelings available in DF 15 - Henchmen (which I picked up yesterday and highly recommend for anyone who actually wants the sort of game where PCs hire people).

Second, Nulb is closer to the dungeon, being only half a day's journey over relatively safe ground from the Temple of Elemental Evil. From Hommlet, you travel for a day and a half, and you either cut through a rather dangerous forest or go through Nulb anyhow.

Third, you can get some things in Nulb you can't get in Hommlet. In Hommlet, there's no potionsmaster. There's a druid, to whom you can go for 'natural' potions (like monster drool poison and antivenin) - if he likes you - and there's a mage who will sell various small magical consumables, but no potions. Since Nulb is larger, I'm willing to abstract away buying most mundane goods, even those of quality (though you may have to wait a week in town if you order something particularly rare). Weapons and armor, in specific, are available, being mentioned by name in the module. In addition, if you need strong clerical magic, Nulb is the place to go, since the main priest of the Temple of St. Cuthbert in Hommlet is away. Also, sponsorship is easier to get here, and Nulb offers some training options not possible in Hommlet (clerics, holy warriors, thieves

Finally, Nulb is the only place for PCs to pick up rumours about the dungeon. People in Hommlet don't know much about the Temple, and they don't want to know.

One way in which Nulb is not going to be different is cost of living, which will be $150/week for each PC (plus cost of hirelings). In Verbobonc this is standard. In Hommlet, the Inn of the Welcome Wench is both the only gig in town and specifically mentioned as expensive. In Nulb, the food and lodging are cheap, but the extra money goes toward garnering rumours, being scalped for non-food sundries (cleaning your clothes, caring for your horses, etc.) and hiring guards to watch your stuff while you're asleep or paying protection money to some of the bandit gangs. If PCs think to ask, they can skimp on this, getting by on $100/week instead of the full cost, but they won't get a rumour and the chances of being attacked and robbed while in town will be substantially higher.

Hommlet at first will be much like written in the book, because T1 is in large part about the town adventure of finding the place the PCs need to go, feeling out the local politics, and inserting themselves successfully into the village. In short, for a little while Hommlet is the site of the adventure, and should be detailed as such. However, once PCs get to/through the Moathouse and/or resolve the tensions in the village, I want to largely abstract it away as a distraction from the dungeon.

Hommlet offers several advantages over Nulb. It's basically safe, with little to no chance of people being assaulted in town, and random encounters happening nearby only on a lower chance (6 or less instead of 9-12 or less, I'm thinking), and not all being bad besides. There's a temple, traders, money-changer, druid, and wizard's keep, along with various craftsmen, meaning most mundane needs and some magical ones (including healing and charging power items) can be taken care of. Some templates can only get training in Hommlet. Finally, what hirelings that can be found here are likely to be more reliable than those in Nulb.

A last note about training: T1 and T2 are very specific about the people that are in Hommlet and Nulb, and T1 is very specific about those that aren't in Hommlet. To that end, the two also differ in what PCs can find training in the two places.

Hommlet: Barbarian, Druid, Knight, Scout, Wizard

Nulb: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Holy Warrior, Knight, Scout, Thief

Yes, this will create some tension in where people want to spend their weeks. This is intentional. However, I don't want this to be crippling, either, so I'm ruling that you can still spend points in your template when you spend time in a town without a teacher, but not for new spells or primary skills (ones you already have are fine), nor power-ups or primary abilities you don't already have points in. Thus a Knight couldn't learn a new weapon, but he could train with the one he has, and a druid couldn't purchase a new animal companion, but he could improve spells he already has or dump more points into Power Investiture.