Improving Artificers in Dungeon Fantasy

I wasn't very satisfied with the Artificer. It isn't an awful template, but it has a lot of abilities that are costly in terms of points, money, and weight, and it's easy for it not get much benefit from those abilities. The sample Artificer from Mirror of the Fire Demons is an excellent example: despite being a full 250 point PC template with $1200 and 73 lbs in gear, he's not particularly more effective in combat than the 140 point (sans disadvantages) Archer template.

Still, all hope is not lost for the Artificer. There's a solid base there, and a couple of house rules and some additional sample gear could give him a big boost.

Getting Stuff Cheap

Most delvers can get a 20% discount on basic gear by making it themselves with a successful Armoury or Alchemy roll (DF Dungeons p3). Anyone who can make a Flight potion in the field with whatever scraps he found on the dungeon wall should be able to get a better discount when using a proper laboratory. Anyone with the Quick Gadgeteer advantage gets a 50% discount when using the rules for Brewing or Crafting, and can find items worth up to $100 when attempting Scrounging. A Quick Gadgeteer can also make items with special qualities, such as Fine or Dwarven (but not magic enchantments!) or any special order, when using the Crafting rules.

Furthermore, Artificers have a natural affinity for complicated devices, and their labor goes farther when making one. Artificers get an additional 25% discount when they use Crafting to make a complicated mechanical device. All the new items below qualify, as well as all forms of crossbows, portable traps (DF Adventurers p 26), the low-tech flamethrower (DF Clerics p 34), cobweb kites (DF Sages p 12), float coats (DF Sages p 12), dwarven accurizers (DF Sages p 12), universal tool kits (DF Sages p 12), any clocks (DF Treasure Tables p 14), dwarven crankbows (DF Treasure Tables p 32), and the spinning saw (DF Treasure Tables p 33).

Artificers Devices

These fiddly yet useful devices are available to, and can be used by, anyone, but only Artificers can take advantage of them in a practical manner. The need to constantly tinker, modify, and adjust these devices means that they're very likely to malfunction in the hands of an unskilled user.

All artificer devices that are weapons (including melee weapons) have a Malf value (B407) equal to the user's Engineer (Gadgets) skill, at -3 if the user doesn't have the Gadgeteer advantage. They malfunction as TL3 non-revolver firearm, and can explode as springs, cogs, and flywheels turn into deadly shrapnel. The malfunction number is furthered penalized by -2 for every 24 hours that elapses without a Gadgeteer performing an hour of maintenance on the device.

Non-weapon devices can also malfunction. Roll against the user's Engineer (Gadgets) skill, at -3 if the user doesn't have the Gadgeteer advantage, when the device is first used each day, every minute of continuous use thereafter, and when the device is used again after more than 5 minutes elapse. Again, treat the device as a TL3 non-revolver firearm, with a stoppage failure meaning the device works for 1d seconds and then seizes up.

Artificers who intend to make extensive use of artificer devices are advised to take the No Nuisance Rolls (Engineer) perk.

The following devices are examples. Many more items along these lines are certainly possible.

Alchemical Flamethrower: This improved version of the low-tech flamethrower uses stronger materials and a more ingenious mixing mechanism to overcome the limitations of the basic design. It holds 8 pints of a 7:1 mixture of lantern oil and alchemical fire and mixes them in the aerosol chamber. It is a one-handed weapon, as the pumps are self-powered by springs and gears. Treat each shot as standard alchemical fire. It fires in either of two modes: a short ranged jet of flame, or launching a flaming cloud at the ground (as per the second use of alchemical fire) out to 30 yards.

Powered Pistol Crossbow: A repeating pistol crossbow (DF Loadouts p 23) with the lever replaced by an ingenious combinations of cogs, gears, and springs. It reloads itself automatically from the rotating drum, allowing faster and more accurate fire. The increased rate of fire comes at the cost of the reload time, as rewinding the springs takes much more time.

Powered Crankbow: A cog and spring powered crankbow that reloads itself quicker and fires more powerful shots, this weapon is one of the ultimate weapons of artificers. Spring loaded magazines allow it to be reloaded quickly in combat, but loading the magazine with a bolt and winding the springs takes 10 seconds per shot.

LIQUID PROJECTOR (DX-4)
Weapon	Damage	Acc	Range	Weight	RoF	Shots	Cost	ST	Bulk	Rcl
Alchemical Flamethrower: Jet Mode Flame Cloud Launcher	1d bu (5) 1d-1 bu area 2	- 2	10 30	15	Jet 1	8(30i)	$2000	11	-6	-
CROSSBOW (DX-4)
Weapon	Damage	Acc	Range	Weight	RoF	Shots	Cost	ST	Bulk	Rcl
Powered Pistol Crossbow	thr+2 imp	2	x6/x12	7/1	3	6(10i)	$1600	8†	-4	2
Powered Crankbow	thr+5 imp	4	x15/x20	17/3	7	21(3)	$7000	9†	-7	1

Powered Saw: A spinning saw with the cranked handle supplemented by springs and flywheels. It can be used for up to 10 seconds at no FP cost as the flywheels and springs provide the motive power. It takes 2 seconds and 1 FP to recharge it for 1 second of use outside of combat, or it can be driven by the crank in combat as with any other spinning saw. $3600, 7 lbs, other stats as a spinning saw.

Mechanical Door Opener: A mechanical device for silently forcing open doors. It takes one minute and 1 FP to put into place and charge the mechanism, and then it can be activated to do 6dx2 cr to a door, lock, hinge, bar, wall, or other static item. $2000, 6 lbs.

Mechanical Exoskeleton: Unlike other artificer devices, this collection of spring powered arms and legs only needs to check for malfunctions every hour of use, not every minute. It provides the wearer with Lifting ST5 and Striking ST2 for 8 hours, and then needs to be recharged using the attached steam boiler for 8 hours. The exoskeleton fits over armor (or is sometimes built into armor) but provides no additional protection itself. $10,000, 15 lbs.

Advanced Mechanical Exoskeleton: As above, but slightly stronger, with Lifting ST8 and Striking ST4. It also has an overdrive mode that consumes 1 hour of normal use per minute and requires a malfunction roll every minute like any other artificer device. While overdrive is engaged, the exoskeleton provides Lifting ST20 and Striking ST8. Overdrive mode must be engaged for a least a full minute at a time. $50000, 20 lbs.

Design Notes

The Getting Stuff cheap house rule is a straightforward enhancement of the existing rules. It strongly encourages artificers to kit up with fancy gear, but they're reasonably the most gear dependent template. Giving them additional bonuses for complicated gear further incentivizes the artificer as the mad scientist using clockwork weapons. There's a slight disadvantage in that Artificers might want to spend all their time making crossbows and not delving, but delvers should have other reasons for delving than modest levels of greed.

The artificer devices are intended to be primitive super science for artificers only. It's trivially obvious that giving +5 Lifting ST is better for the ST17 barbarian than the ST11 artificer, but "being the guy who makes cool toys that other people use" isn't as exciting as "crazed mad inventor." So while an artificer could make a mechanical exoskeleton for the barbarian, it will almost immediately malfunction and likely explode when the savage wears it.

The powered crankbow is my favorite artificer device, as I think it gives the artificer a unique place in ranged combat. The scout provides consistent, high damage, and accurate ranged fire with a variety of damage types; the mystic knight archer has a slower rate of fire but hits targets behind cover or uses shrapnel to clear out formations; and the artificer with the powered crankbow provides a few seconds of fairly damaging suppression fire, but without the weird effects of the mystic knight.

The Effectiveness of Artificers in Dungeon Fantasy

The artificer is a strange, if early, addition to the Dungeon Fantasy line. The name and the template's signature advantage of Gadgeteer makes most people think of them as clockwork engineers, creating
strange devices to conquer dungeon obstacles, but in practice alchemy and potions are slightly more useful and have more examples in the rules. The template lacks a clear focus, aside from being something of a general purpose problem solver like a wizard and something of a trap finder and door opener like a thief, but without the abilities to safely scout ahead.

I personally think most of the template's weaknesses could be solved by opening up the concept space for their gadgets. The Dwarven Crankbow and the Spinning Saw from Treasure Table 8 are good examples of artificer inspired weapons, but I'd want to crank them up a couple of notches. Letting the artificer have the equivalent of a low caliber sub machine gun gives them a unique way to contribute to combat, for instance.

The Basic Chassis

Artificers have generalist attributes: a little ST and HT, a little more IQ and DX. They're interesting in that regard: they're not high IQ generalists like the Scholar, Wizard, or Cleric, but instead focused gadgeteers who get most of their ability from a cheap, focused talent. I really like this approach, since it helps keep the gadgeteer in his niche.

One of the difficulties for the gadgeteer is their signature abilities require heavy toolkits, and a Basic Lift of 24 lbs just doesn't supply enough lift. Gadgeteers are well advised to buy Lifting ST (it's on the template) and increased Basic Move, since if you have to be encumbered, it helps to be fast to start. The difference between moving 3 yards each second and moving 4 yards each second can be crucial.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Artificers start out with a good set of mandatory Advantages. Quick Gadgeteer is their signature ability, and it should be an impressive ability: 50 points is as much as the wizard spends on Magery and half his spells. Artificers back that up with a focused talent (Alchemy, Armoury, Engineer, Scrounging, Traps) and 3 Gizmos to let them cobble together stuff on the fly. After that, they have another 40 points in discretionary advantages, which generally need to be spent on IQ, Lifting ST, or Wealth. Alternately, 40 points is enough to select a good racial template.

All artificers are Compulsive Inventors, which is slightly annoying since the effects aren't defined anywhere that I'm aware of. They get the usual -45 points in mostly generic delver Disadvantages. Stand outs are Bad Sight and Hard of Hearing, since most delvers don't have physical Disadvantages, and Pyromania, since it's poorly defined in the rules.

Artificers and Race

Artificers want more IQ and more (Lifting) ST or lighter equipment out of their racial selections. All of the races with IQ penalties are general unwise, but Dwarf, Gnome, and Halfling are all good choices. Gnome includes the Widget Worker talent that further increases Armoury, Lockpicking, and Traps, doesn't have a ST penalty, and is large enough to use SM0 weapons with almost no penalty, so it's a solid choice.

Skills

Skill at Alchemy and Engineering basically define the Artificer. They're also decent at Traps and Lockpicking, and decent with a Crossbow. Their melee skills are distinctly second line, but they're no worse than a cleric or druid. Arguably, artificers are going to be lighter armor and slower than a cleric or druid, since more of their money and encumbrance budget needs to go to their gadgets and toolkits, and they're better suited to be ranged combatants than spending all their time trying to trudge into melee.

Equipping Artificers

By the book, artificers need to spend $1600 and carry 30 lbs just in their toolkits if they want to do both Alchemy and Engineering in the field. That's a pretty hefty cost and load for their basic abilities. After that, a single shot crossbow, basic leather armor, and adventuring kit pretty much double that cost and weight.

Serious artificers are going to want something better than a mere crossbow, and as I pointed out earlier, the Dwarven Crankbow is a good starting point. At another  $1750 and 14 lbs, it's neither light nor cheap, but it's the only DF ranged weapon that non-magically provides multiple shots per second and a reasonable magazine. Even so, it's not very impressive, but an artificer should be able to use a gizmo and Fast-Talk (GM) to add a powered crank or something to increase damage, rate of fire, and accuracy in crucial combat.

Even though the artificer is mostly alchemy or technology focused, as much of their equipment should be enchanted as possible. If nothing else, Fortify and Lighten enchantments make their armor much more effective and lighter at a fairly minimal cost.

Artificers in Play

In play, Artificers are a mixed bag, in my experience. If they don't make the most of their gadgeteering abilities, they're no better than a Thief, only slower and without the ability to sneak. Given my previously stated views on the effectiveness of thieves, that's not a good place to be. Artificers need to take advantage of their gadgeteering abilities to be effective.

Quick Gadgeteer and 3 Gizmos is 65 points, more than the Wizard or Cleric spend on their signature abilities, plus another $1000 and 20 lbs of gear to enable it. Gadgeteers should be at least as useful as either of those templates, though in different ways. From crossing chasms with hand cranked bridges to finding hidden treasure with improvised metal detectors to defeating mobs of enemies with alchemical grenades, Artificers should be constantly finding ways to solve problems and overcome obstacles.

Effective gadgeteers pretty much need an agreement between the player and the GM. The player needs to aggressive push for gadget solutions to problems, and the GM needs to provide supplies and be accommodating in making solutions work.

One of the biggest problems with the Artificer is that the existing examples of gadget like gear are terrible. The cobweb kite is $16000 and 8 lb solution to falling great heights - something a wizard can do basically for 3 or less FP with Slow Fall, Levitation, Walk on Air, or any of the Flight spells. The Dwarven Accurizer increases a crossbow's accuracy by 1 but costs $1200 and weighs 14 lbs - enough to buy nearly 50 crossbow bolts with Accuracy +1 on them. The Dwarven Crankbow is 10 times as expensive and twice as heavy as a normal crossbow but has worse accuracy and less damage.

If Artificer gadgets were more equivalent with TL5 or TL6 weapons - light multishot pistols or deadly single shot rifles - then I think artificers would be much better. Fortunately, the quality of an
Artificer's gadgets are defined by the GM, so this is easily solvable in play by a permissive GM.

Imbuments in Play: Other People's Experiences

At the end of my post on my experiences with Imbuements in play, I asked for other people's commentary. Mystic Knight template author Antoni Ten Monrós put a huge pair of comments to the post, and GURPS forum regular Kalazz responded by email. I've decided to promote both their responses to front-page, guest post status since it seemed like a popular topic.

Antoni Ten Monrós

As the author of the Mystic Knight, I do have a lot of data points on Imbuements in play. They may be colored by my biases, by what I put in the campaign, and by what my players like. My game is now at over 600 points after years of weekly sessions, though we started at 300, so that might color my impressions too. I’ll proceed to go imbuement skill by imbuement skill, and give you some highlights:

Overall Categories

• Fatiguing Imbuements - Fatigue damage strikes (Fatiguing, Chilling and Withering, plus Drugged Weapon) can down big monsters with loads of HP but limited Will and FP very fast. Adding more fatigue damage is hard though, so you'll be using an alternate method of downing the foe, instead of collaborating with the party. Works great though, if you can take advantage of some elemental weakness, because doubled FP damage means one hit will take almost everything. 
• Follow-up Imbuements - They require building your character to take advantage of them, but with multishot or multistrike, they can be efficient. Stack a bunch of them with a source of making an attack do multiple hits, and enjoy the fireworks. See the individual entries to get my opinion on each of them, but unless you're using a weapon that does thrust damage (AKA bows and crossbows), it's not an efficient source of damage if you can't make attacks that do multiple hits. 

Individual Imbuments

• Acid Weapon (Pyramid #3/60) - See Follow-up Imbuements for general comments on imbuements that add damage as a followup. See Corrosive Strike for more details on corrosion damage, but the small amount that this imbuement generates means that you won't reduce DR by a substantial amount with it. However it allows you to get Dissolving Strike and Acid Imbued Soul, for mass DR reduction. 
• Annihilating Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) -  This one isn't used in my games because it destroys loot. 
• Arching Shot (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - The way I read it, this gets around shields, unless they are placed overhead. Given that block is the bane of archers, this is awesome. 
• Bank Shot (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - This is deceptive attack for ranged weapons that doesn't lower your attack skill. You might suffer increased range penalties, but guided weapon fixes that. 
• Binding Shot (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - It's a sure fire way to make someone waste a turn, even if they have the ST to easily escape. Getting it to last more than a single round is challenging, but one round is often all that you need. 
• Blinding Defense (Pyramid #3/4) - On one hand, it looks good on paper. It means that after the first hit, other foes are much less likely to hit you. Couple if with the extremely cheap Blur enchantment for massive penalties to attack rolls. Mind you, in play, I'm guilty of forgetting to apply penalties for blur, and no one has ever taken this imbuement. 
• Blunting Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - One of the best DR multiplying imbuements, and it's because cutting damage is one of the nastiest and most common sorts. If you have heavy enough armor (heavy plate, potentially dwarven heavy plate, plus giant spider silk underneath), you can often become nigh invulnerable against most foes, allowing you to AoA with abandon. 
• Burning Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Good against creatures weak to fire. Useful (though not the best) for ranged attacks when using bodkins against unliving and homogeneous foes. 
• Chilling Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - See Fatiguing Imbuements for my opinion on imbuements that deal FP damage. Other than that, the fact that it does FP damage with the freezing enhancement makes it brutal against fire elemental monsters, as you can easily incapacitate them in one strike. 
• Conic blast (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Should be renamed line blast for all the use it has in DF. Still, it's another way to deal with shield using foes, that would otherwise block your attacks. As an area attack, your only allowed defense is dodge and drop, and that means that most foes will have to either take it like a man, or spend 2 turns getting back up. Also awesome against diffuse foes. 
• Continuing Attack (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Despite being very cool sounding, using it properly requires way too heavy penalties. The main use is against regenerators, using 1 day delay, because the damage can’t be healed until the cycles end. 
• Corrosive Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Corrosion damage is good, but it's hard to do, so you're probably the only source in the fight. One problem you might face is that you destroy valuable loot with this. Still, it might be necessary to win the fight, and if you happen to face high DR foes that do so without the benefit of equipment, such as golems, it might allow the lower damage party members to contribute to the fight. 
• Crippling Blow (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - One of the best imbuement skills. Not only, baseline, you can use it to stun (and stun requires at least 1 turn of do nothing, so it’s possible to stun lock someone, plus for the rest of your attacks, and for any attacks by friends until the target gets a chance to recover, the foe will have crippling defense penalties, that is, -4 to defense and no retreat) but you can also use it to inflict incapacitation conditions, or to just lower HT so consciousness, death and resistance rolls will fail more often. 
• Crushing Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - While it's not the worst transformation imbuement skill, it's not far from it. It also doesn't hurt that one of the best weapon options for mystic knights, the dwarven morning star, already does crushing damage, and the other, the dwarven axe does cutting that is 99.99% of the time better. 
• Cutting Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - The king of the non-FP dealing damage type changing transformation imbuement skills. Don't leave home without it, specially as a ranged attacker. Your bodkins go from sucking against unliving and homogeneous foes to hurting a good deal, and your GM might let you keep the AD (2). I do. 
• Dancing Shield (Pyramid #3/4) - Good if you carry two shields, have a backup weapon for your off hand, want to save a friend, or use a weapon that can be used in either one or two hands, and have higher or at least similar skill two handed. 
• Dancing Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - A gem, but one that requires preparing for it. You need a second weapon, and preferably one that is heavily enchanted because you can’t imbue it while it dances. Of course, with the proper perks, you can imbue it while it dances, and you no longer need to move to where it is to pick it up. Consider that it’s an extra attack, with range equal to your move. 
• Dazzling Display (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Unless you use it to protect yourself from ranged attacks, it's completely useless. Unless you take the -5 penalty to make it not apply to you, or have some form of perception that lets you ignore it (Bright Vision is a good option, as is Dark Vision, depending on how you flavor the obscure.)
• Deafening Display (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Unless you're fighting the hordes of eco-locating things from beyond time and space, skip this one, unless the GM rules that spellcasters are inconvenienced by loud noises and take penalties or need to make concentration rolls to cast. Then it goes from terrible to merely extremely situational. 
• Drugged Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - See Follow-up Imbuements for general comments on imbuements that add damage as a followup. Mind you, unlike other follow-up imbuements, this one is less amenable to combining it with others, since FP and HP damage follow different tracks. Still, it’s one of the best, because FP damage is so nasty. See Fatiguing Imbuements for more details. 
• Electric Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - See Follow-up Imbuements for general comments on imbuements that add damage as a followup. This is a decent one, because electrical damage ensures that against metallic armor, you’ll always get some damage past DR. It does however less damage on the long run.
• Energizing Defense (Pyramid #3/4) - Looks good on paper, doesn't work in play, and is excessively fiddly when someone tries to make it work. It's simple to house rule it into utility: Forget about using it to do anything other than recover HP, FP or ER, make the character decide what he wants to recover when using it, and let him try to convert the stored charges instantly after each attack that creates charges is resolved. 
• Envenomed Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements)-  See Follow-up Imbuements for general comments on imbuements that add damage as a followup. Toxic damage is probably one of the weakest forms of damage, and you'll face many creatures that outright ignore it. Take it only for flavor reasons, because while it's not too bad (unless your GM loves throwing you against undead threat after undead threat - I do), there are better options. Of course, once you've already got the better options, extra damage doesn't hurt. 
• Expand Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - Too fiddly to be useful most of the time, but could come handy to avoid attacks to the chinks.
• Far shot (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Only useful for thrown weapons, yeah. Still, thrown axes dealing ranged swing damage are sick. 
• Fatiguing Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - See Fatiguing Imbuements for my opinion on imbuements that deal FP damage. It rates slightly lower than the Chilling Strike and Withering Strike because you can never take advantage of elemental vulnerabilities. Still, the difference is marginal, and given that the cost is the same (because you should take Imbue 3 with your starting points every single time) there's no real reason to take it. 
• Fireproof Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - Not one of the best DR multiplying defensive imbuements, but fire is common enough. But when you've got a spare point and are in a fire themed dungeon, facing fire drakes, etc.
• Forceful Blow (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Sounds cool, could be potentially awesome on paper, doesn't work in game. Most foes are either not really inconvenienced by being thrown bank one yard (because realistically, you're not going to do enough damage for more than that), are too strong for more than that, or will die anyway if you hit them hard enough for knockback to matter. That is, if you're using crushing damage, and the only weapons that does crushing damage and are worth using are flails, morning stars and kusaris, and you should be changing the damage type to cutting anyway. 
• Fulminating Strike (Pyramid #3/60) - Despite the damage penalty, the fact that it treats metalic DR as 1, plus the fact that it comes with a stun only crippling blow for free could make it worth using. I made it because there was a spot that needed filling and because I love electrical damage, but it pales when compared to Cutting Strike. 
• Ghostly Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) -  It might be because for semi-insubstantial foes that have Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) instead of insubstantial (see flaming skulls), I let this make the attacks do full damage, or because I love having undead in my games, but my players don't leave home without this. 
• Guided weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Awesome, though given the absurd skill levels of the weapon master/heroic archer scout/mystic knight in my games, it's getting less use lately. Ignoring range penalties is awesome, but not that much when you're fighting at a distance where the other characters can contribute. 
• Healthful Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - Protects against horrid skulls and toxifiers, and that's really it. Situational but if your GM likes those monsters and his homebrewed versions, it might be worth using. 
• Homing Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Guided Weapon's dumb brother. Never takes this, as not only doesn't use an attack maneuver to attack (so you don't benefit from extra attacks), but you also need to aim first, and low tech weapon accuracy is so bad it will have much worse chance to hit than Guided. Also, given how similar 1/2 D and Max ranges are for muscle powered ranged weapons, Guided has no drawback. 
• Impaling Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - The damage penalty makes it inferior to Cutting, but if you can take the penalty to remove it, it can lead to swing impaling attacks that don't get stuck, can target vitals, eyes and chinks in armor, and just sound awesome. 
• Impenetrable Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - An imbuement using archer will want this to win any ranged battles. Anyone else can probably skip it. 
• Incendiary Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - See Follow-up Imbuements for general comments on imbuements that add damage as a followup. This one is quite good, but the real gem is increasing the flammability class and combining it with Burning Strike to make anything burn. Burn, baby Burn! 
• Insulated Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - Unless electrical attacks are real prevalent in your games, this is a waste of points. 
• Lighten Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - Looks cool on paper, but it's WAY too fiddly to use at the table (recalculate your encumbrance every round? Are you nuts?) Also, delvers tend to gravitate to an encumbrance level that doesn't bother them too much, so this really has limited uses. 
• Multi-Shot (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - This thing is so powerful that I even made official a Kromm forum clarification that nerfs it slightly, while adding an extra note to make swing doing ranged attacks (thrown maces, throwing axes and specially slings) even worse
• Multistrike (Pyramid #3/60) - Mainly useful to power up follow-up imbuements in melee. The fact that the base damage is halved unless you take a hefty penalty means that you're going to need Penetrating Strike to get through armor and deliver those follow-ups. Use an enchanted weapon with Flaming Weapon/Icy Weapon/Electric Weapon for extra follow-up fun. 
• Nullifying Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - It bears mentioning that this stacks with other DR multiplying imbuements, so when you know you're facing, let's say, magical fire, you can end up with quadruple DR with 2 unmodified rolls. Other than that, however, it's too situational. 
• Padded Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - The weakest of the three physical damage DR multiplying imbuements, it's still leaps and bounds better than the elemental ones. Might come handy, especially given that crushing damage tends to come in bigger doses than cutting or impaling. 
• Penetrating Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - This, and the relatively cheap armor divisor enchantments have made me include a very cheap enchantment to provide hardened, priced exactly as the Fortify enchantment.
• Piercing Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - This is the poor Man's Impaling Strike. If you want to target vitals, eyes or chinks with swing crushing or swing cutting attacks, it's better than Impaling Strike. Otherwise, it's not worth using. 
• Project Blow (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) -  I do not allow ranged imbuements, with the exception of Far Shot, apply to this either. This leads to people not taking it, so I might change it so that you can not use melee exclusive imbuements with it instead. 
• Reinforce Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - Given how cheap Penetrating Weapon enchantments are, this can often be necessary. Mind you, published monsters don't often have armor divisors, preferring huge damage instead, something that I find weird because armor divisors can serve to hurt the heavily armored delvers while not splattering the wizard. 
• Reinforce Shield (Pyramid #3/13) - Not useful in DF as it doesn't use the shield damage rules, but if you use them, it's necessary, especially if you use low tech shields. Also, it greatly increases the cover DR of Widen Shield. 
• Reinforce Weapon (Pyramid #3/13) - Mainly useful for unarmed Imbuement users, who do not want to get their hands hurt when striking DR, being parried with a weapon, or touching creatures with damaging auras, it's not that useful for armed delvers. Of course, if your GM is cruel and makes you face creatures with cosmic auras of decay, you'll love it. 
• Resilient Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - There are, AFAIK, no ablative or semi-ablative armors worth using. That is, they aren't even worth using if they were not ablative or semi-ablative, so why are you using this? 
• Restorative Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - Fatigue damage sucks, so why not take this? It is also a requirement for Frost Imbued Soul, and that will let you down foes with FP damage faster than your GM can scream "Nerf!" 
• Returning Weapon (Pyramid #3/13) - Awesome to abuse thrown weapons (specially thrown axes). I nerfed Multishot with swing dealing muscle powered ranged weapons because it was too ridiculous. 
• Rigid Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - If blunt trauma mattered with low tech armors, this might have a use. Sadly, low tech armor DR is too low for blunt trauma to be anything but risible, so this Imbuement follows suit. 
• Shattershot (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Not too shabby by itself, but combine it with multishot, and you can turn a mob of monsters into hamburger meat in no time. That led to me nerfing the combination, not really for it being overly effective (though it probably is) but for the sheer amount of rolling needed when you've got 10 monsters and attacks with RoF 5. I make it so only the first arrow shatters. It's still a much better AOE effect against non-diffuse foes than shockwave. 
• Shockwave (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - As with explosion damage in general, this is something that is slightly misunderstood. In melee, it's use is for dealing with swarms and other diffuse foes, and for when you're surrounded. Remember that the floor doesn't dodge, and that you can rapid strike. With ranged attacks, it serves to make use of the internal explosions rules if you aim for an open mouth. Taking penalties to upgrade this to explosion 2 or 3 is very worthwhile. 
• Sovereign Armor (Pyramid #3/4) - If you are facing foes that deal corrosion damage, you'll want this to avoid having your gear destroyed. It is also a prerequisite for Acid Imbued Soul. Take Acid Imbued Soul, Dissolving Strike, and use both Acid Weapon and Corrosive Strike, and laugh at any foe with DR. Your party members will have you though, as you'll be destroying loot left and right. 
• Spiritual Defense (Pyramid #3/4) - Flaming skulls and their reskins can hurt in numbers. Ghosts can really ruin your day. With this, your armor will often give you 100% protection against them. What's not to like?
• Stabilized Shot (Pyramid #3/60) - Given that with my changes since Rcl for a composite bow is 4, and you'll want this to truly abuse Multishot. If you want to use the cheese that is multishot thrown axes or multishot slings, you'll also want it. For attacks with low Rcl, such as the coveted Three Arrow Bow (the dream weapon of every Imbuement using archer), it can also provide Very Rapid Fire, meaning that you'll most often hit with every single arrow. 
• Stealthy Attack (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Low/No Signature is often tricky to use, because the rules are so spread out. To simplify, I say that if the target doesn't notice the attack, it works as if it came from an invisible opponent. This means that the first time per combat you use it, it allows no defense! Subsequent uses "only" impose a -4 penalty to defend. Don't leave home without it, if using these rules. 
• Strike of Negation (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Works better on paper than in game, but it can really help when it does work. Once you get your ST damage high enough (often with the help of per dice bonuses from sources such as tempered glass weapons and weapon master), you'll negate magic items and buffing spells with some reliability. The best way to use it is to have 2+attacks per round though, and use the option that allows you to use it after one of your attacks hits. Grab the Dispelling Strike powerup if you really want to use it though. 
• Stupefying Blow (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Crippling Blow's mental brother. Not as good, because combat reflexes means that mental stun is unlikely to stick for more than one round, but having both means that targets need both high HT and wigh Will to avoid being stun-locked. The effects you can afflict by taking penalties are nice, though. Lowered Will, Daze or Hallucinating are your best choices. 
• Subtle Defense (Pyramid #3/4) - So your armor becomes invisible for one round? It doesn't sound great. The real gold is using it with a (large) shield, preferably one enchanted with Deflect, to gain massive DB bonuses. 
• Sudden Death (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - I don't even allow it in my DF games, not because it's too strong (it is not) but because while it sounds good, it's a trap. Useless in actual play. 
• Supreme Control (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Slightly better than Sudden Death, but not by much. It's only use is IMHO when trying to use Crippling Blow or Stupefying Blow to incapacitate a foe you want to capture alive. Attacking the target's legs does the same thing, and requires no special traits. If you wanted to take foes alive, you would have made a Justicar right? leave this to those weird Justicar/Mystic Knights that might have a use for it. 
• Telescopic Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) -  Don't forget you can also use it when in close combat to cancel those crippling penalties for using too big weapons. Never leave home without it. 
• Thunderous Defense (Pyramid #3/4) - If Deafening Display is bad, this is worse. Avoid it. 
• Toxic Strike (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - It's only use is when facing foes with vulnerabilities. It's not good for ranged attacks because it means that you no longer get the huge bonuses from vitals or brain hits. The foes that are resistant to piercing attacks are often also immune to it (wizardly constructs, undead, etc). Don't take it unless you want to take the cheap Poison Imbued Soul. 
• Traumatic Blow (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - This is no good. You've got Penetrating Strike and Fulminating Strike to deal with armor, why would you want this? Avoid it. 
• Underwater Strike (Pyramid #3/36) - Necessary if your GM like underwater adventures, useless otherwise. 
• Vampiric Weapon (Power-Ups 1: Imbuements) - Awesome in the hands of a melee fighter, almost useless otherwise. I also make it slightly worse by making non-living beings (constructs, undead, spirits, elementals, some demons) immune to it. At least in my games, no matter what, you're going to eventually get hit and take damage, and in combat healing is hard to come by in GURPS. In combat healing that doesn't cost you actions? You might not use it every attack, but when you use it, it is a life saver. 
• Vengeful Defense (Pyramid #3/4) - Much better than Restorative Armor. The armor version is sort of Ok, but the shield version can be devastating against high damage foes. Recommended to anyone who has a shield and uses imbuements. 
• Widen shield (Pyramid #3/4) - Awesome, and you can position yourself to protect friends behind you. I would use the shield cover DR though, even if not using the shield damage rules, because the shield explicitly provides cover. I do not require block rolls if the shield is made bigger than 1 yard.

Kalazz

I have seen Imbuements used a ton, as they are Godogma’s very most favorite magic system ever in the entire wide world of RPG magic systems (I think), and it would be quicker and easier to count the GURPS characters he has made that don’t use imbuements as opposed to the ones that do (I am sure Godogma will kill me now). I have also made several Imbueists myself, and Starslayer has also played them, as have some others in our merry band.

A huge thing to note about being an Imbueist though is that Imbues by themselves are well, kinda useless. They buff and tweak something that already exists. So what exists is as important as what imbues your throwing on top of it. What is good for someone wielding a BAR is different from what is good for someone wielding a bow or a broadsword.

Enhancement Skills

• Annihilating Weapon - I have only rarely used this myself, as I seem to only rarely face enemies who rely on parry a lot. Also, it tends to be unhealthy for enemy weapons, and if the enemy is using a weapon I want to loot it! However, it has been used to good effect by PCs in my games, either to destroy weapons or to force enemies to use their lousy defenses. It is especially handy defensively used to obliterate enemies weapons/limbs on a parry!
• Arching Shot - I haven’t seen or seen used this one much at all. But after reading about it in the blog here, it sounds awesome. This must be corrected.
• Bank Shot - Never used it or seen it used. Sounds like it might be amusing, or might just be tedious. Lowering enemy defenses is always a nice thing. 
• Conic Blast - It sounds cool, but have never used it. Most ranged attacks seem more prone to relying on multiple hits or well placed hits to do damage, so a cone seems questionable. I could see it being useful for a high damage, high ROF perhaps though, like the M2HB imbueist.
• Continuing Attack - I don’t see the use of this one. I want my enemy dead now, not, days from now. If you have high enough skill could be handy I suppose. 
• Crippling Blow - I haven’t used this much myself (I don’t want to mess around with status effects, I want to make things dead directly through HP obliteration), but, I have seen PCs use it and it can definitely make a mess of targets. When the targets survive long enough to get status effected instead of just atomized. 
• Dancing Weapon - I haven’t used this one very much, but, it is situationally handy on occasion. It requires extra weapons and again, why fuss with launching other weapons to attack foes instead of just whacking away yourself? I can see its uses though and probably should use it more. 
• Drugged Weapon - FP damage can be King, but, this is hardly the way to do it, since FP and HP damage stacks poorly. I’ve never seen it used. 
• Electric Weapon - I’ve never seen it used. Might be handy vs robots or such. Followup damage is extra damage so not a bad thing. 
• Envenomed Weapon - I’ve never seen it used. Follow up damage is nice. However, very few things are extra vulnerable to toxic, and I could see the DM ruling many things as immune to it (you envenomed the stone golem? Riiight). 
• Far Shot - Rarely used, but very awesome when it is. Great for any ranged fighter due to potential for awesome. Combine with Guided Shot to reach out and touch someone from very very very far away! 
• Forceful Blow - I’ve never seen this used. Knockback may be nice and all, but, I’d rather try to get at those HP directly. With the right terrain could be very amusing. 
• Ghostly Weapon - If you think you will be fighting ghosties or such, don’t leave home without it. If you don’t think so, it isn’t worth much. 
• Guided Weapon - I’ve seen used a ton! A bread and butter ranged skill, used for putting single shots in someone’s eye from a mile away (with Far Shot above!), since all the skill not going to get past range can go to somewhere else useful. Less useful at closer range and other times when you want to cut loose on full auto, or against homogenous etc foes where there isn’t the option to hit the eye or vitals and need lots of hits. 
• Homing Weapon - Never seen it used. It requires Aim. Who wants to Aim? People use Guided instead (and Far Shot if there ½ D isn’t enough for Guided). 
• Incendiary Weapon - I’ve seen this used a lot, especially with shotguns. I am dubious how effective it is, but it is definitely popular. I think because the idea is to get LOTS of followup from lots of pellets, or because shotgun fireballs look cool? A lot of things are weak to fire so that helps. 
• Multi-Shot - The Bread and Butter, be all, end all of the Mystic Archer type to fling arrows downrange by the bushel basket and try to negate enemies defense (sure, make your block or dodge by X to get past them all), shred HP (more hits, more HP go bye), or to even hit at all (ROF can add + to hit!), this is the #1 most use archer imbuement in the book, and I’ve seen it a ton and used it a ton. Note, I have been using the ruling that Bow Rcl = 1, and I imagine it will be less useful using the ½ bulk rule I’ve seen a few times on forum. Feel free to combine with other imbues such as shattershot for extra fun if your DM doesn’t kill you for ludicrous amounts of dice rolling.
• Penetrating Strike - Boring but super effective. Is probably overall the #1 most used imbue, since everyone uses it be they meleeist, gunslinger, archer or whatever. Getting past armor is key to slaying HP. 
• Project Blow - I’ve used this myself but have never seen anyone’s PC use it in a game I’ve run. It seems like a good way to get a single ranged attack in in a fight, but, never seems terribly effective. I think I just like the cool anime flashiness more than any GURPS use. I often use with Shockwave so can be explosive! 
• Shattershot - Exceptionally effective when combined with Multi-Shot, especially since close does count with shrapnel! However, it will make people want to kill you OOC when you loose a ROF 14 BAR + Multi-Shot barrage downrange and the game stops for hours as you roll out where shots landed and what the shrapnel did. I suspect if I could get Maptools to work and use a handy Maptools macro it might work better. I think I have an Excel shrapnel tool laying around if anyone is interested. People love to take Shattershot, but they are very hesitant to use it because of the agonizing time it takes to resolve shrapnel attacks. Consider, 5 arrows exploding near 10 orks, that is 50 shrapnel attacks to resolve. Each of which may have 0-3 shrapnel hits, each of which needs random hit location and damage roll. UGH! Just shoot them directly instead okay? 
• Shockwave - This one is situationally cool and I have seen it used and used it. It is handy to try and weaken a group of foes by flinging a single shot (for full damage) at the center one and thus clipping its friends, or as a substitute for whirlwind attack if you are surrounded. It also is exceptionally useful if you are facing Diffuse enemies! For these reasons it is often taken. I like using it with Project Blow for sheer cool factor. 
• Stealthy Attack - I haven’t used it, but I have had players use it. I don’t like stealth and like flashy flash stuff. My players love being ninjas, so they like it. 
• Stupefying Blow - Haven’t seen it used, but could be handy maybe. I’d rather try to just blast HP myself. 
• Sudden Death - I don’t really get the point of this one. 
• Supreme Control - I am not really sure I see much of a use for this one either. 
• Telescoping Weapon - I have never seen this one used, but after reading the original blog entry I feel inclined to try it. I am very sad it caps at reach 4 though, so no telescoping lances! Very sad. 
• Traumatic Blow - I’m not sure I could see where this could be useful. I’ve never seen it. 

Transformation Skills

• Binding Shot - Awesome skill! Very good for ranged people who want to take targets alive. High raw damage is semi necessary. Or if you don’t have the raw damage, can at least keep enemy busy breaking free while your friends pummel it. Very nice! I’ve used it a ton. 
• Burning Strike - Vampires and many other critters do not like burning damage. This lets you do burning damage. This is very useful and everyone takes it. Also it looks very cool. It also is why I might ban imbuements if I ever run Monster Hunters, as I’ve seen what Burning Strike + BARs does to vampires and their ilk. 
• Chilling Strike - FP damage can be King, but oddly, I’ve never seen this one used. People take Fatiguing Strike instead. Corrosive Strike Half damage and destroys the loot? PASS! 
• Crushing Strike - Aside from a few oddball critters, few things are weak to crushing. So this is not very popular. Mystic Archer types like carrying a cornucopia of blunt arrows in case they need crushing anyway. 
• Cutting Strike - One of the bread and butter moves of the gunslinging imbueist, as this negates the big problem of guns (lousy vs homogenous and unliving) and instead targets their weak point (cutting!). Meleeists often are wielding Sw Cutting to start, and Archers carry cutting arrow cornucopias. Almost all gunslinger imbueists have this one. 
• Dazzling Display - Never seen it used or used it. It sounds very cool and flashy, but, I want to hurt things in their HP. Also I am very hazy as to how exactly obscure actually works. 
• Deafening Display - I haven’t seen or used it either. Also, maybe because I’m used to comics, but this doesn’t even sound as fun as Dazzling. 
• Fatiguing Strike - FP Damage can be King! Imagine a beefy beastie like a T-Rex with ST 34 and 14 HT (or something much beefier), that’s a lot of HP to chisel through and then its going to make its HT checks to keep in the fight a long time. Or you just buzzsaw its 14 FP down to ‘you fall, no HT check allowed range’ and its over and done with. I used this once in one of Starslayer’s games to flatten a big bad boss monster in casual fashion. It isn’t seen very often likely due to shear unsportingness of it I expect. 
• Impaling Strike - Impaling is nice, but Mystic Archers already do Impaling, the pi of guns is the same x3 vs vitals as impaling if can called shot vitals, or the tempting cutting may well be good enough or better than impaling at -1 per die. And if you can eat the -5 for impaling at straight level, you can pull cutting at -0 FP. Meleeists do Sw Cutting usually, which competes favorably with Sw -1 per die Impaling also. So, while it seems cool, am rather dubious its worth it. Haven’t seen it used either. Piercing Strike Piercing just isn’t a fun damage type, so why bother? 
• Strike of Negation - This one is fun! As long as you are a meleeist who can hit like a truck. I have fond memories of dispelling a boss zombie psion in a single blow! I always take it, but rarely have used it. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else use it. But it is cool! 
• Toxic Strike - Meh. Its cool feature is it leaves no marks. But we like Mark Langsdorf so we don’t want to lose him. Also, I like flashy blindingly obvious things, not sneaky slink stuff! And Toxic just isn’t a fun damage type. Never seen it used. 
• Vampiric Weapon - The Bread and Butter mainstay move of the Meleeist! You heal as you fight, making you a real terror to actually fell and making you low maintenance as far as healing is concerned. Also, high ST helps you hit harder so you do more damage for more healing, and high HP (if you trip the threshholds) make you heal better, win win! I haven’t seen a meleeist who didn’t take this, it is the absolute core move as far as I’ve seen. 
• One fun fun fun build I like to call the ‘Blood Ramjet’: One Beefy Meleeist Imbueist with a good amount of HP. Take the ‘Spend HP for Imbue’ perk from Pyramid, take the ‘spend HP for Extra Effort’ perk from somewhere (its supposedly for vampires, but, I don’t see why other people can’t tear their bodies up with extra effort, and it matches nicely with ED Strain damage). Live dangerously by spending buckets of HP for Imbues and Extra Effort as you become an offensive juggernaut, using Vampiric Strike to keep healing. It is wildly risky and only dubiously effective due to its risk, but awesomely fun! 
• Withering Strike - I’ve never seen this used, but sounds like Indiana Jones and Holy Grail styled fun! FP damage is King. 

Conclusions

I don't think any of the three of us had wildly different views on the value of the various skills, except perhaps I valued Annihilating Weapon a bit more (what is wrong with destroying loot? Some loot isn't worth lugging back home!) and Multi-shot a bit less, though the last one is just because my character isn't good with his bow - a primary ranged attacker gets a lot out of Multishot.

I realized after I put this post together that it might have been more interesting to intersperse Antoni's and Kalazz's comments all Point-Counterpoint style, but I'm not willing to do it now. Sorry. Maybe next time. 

Thanks to Antoni and Kalazz for contributing
this article!

Imbuement Skills in Play So Far

Sometime real soon now I hope to write an article on the effectiveness of Mystic Knights in Dungeon Fantasy. I've only seen one Mystic Knight in play, so I don't feel I have as good a grasp of the template as I do with knights, swashbucklers, or other templates that I've played a couple of times and seen a couple of different people play.

I do have some experience with some Imbuement skills, based on playing Shiba, my semi-sorta Mystic Knight. Here's a preliminary evaluation, based on my experience so far.

Very Often Useful

These are Imbuments I find myself using the most, and that I'm moving toward thinking that just about every Mystic Knight should have.

• Arching Shot - Arching shot eliminates penalties for cover that isn't overhead cover. Allies standing between the Mystic Knight and target are cover. It is amazingly worth 1FP to be able to make an attack from a bad position and not have to worry about missing the target and accidentally clobbering an ally instead. The -2 to the target's defense is just a happy bonus at that point.
• Guided Weapon - Removing the range penalties for a ranged attack is huge. Shiba uses a bow as his primary ranged weapon, and while he's no where near as good a shot at close range as the delving band's scout, Shiba is a better shot past about 50 yards. This might be less useful for short ranged Mystic Knights (axe throwers, for instance) but 1 FP for an effective +5 to hit at 15 yards is a good deal.
• Penetrating Strike - Armor Divisors are a good thing.
• Telescoping Weapon - I almost didn't take this for Shiba, but I'm glad I accidentally did and didn't fix the mistake. In any game with a lot of detailed combat, the ability to extend or retract reach by 2 hexes is amazing. With this and the Sacrificial Parry perk, I can also defend for allies within 4-5 yards, which means I can defend the relative squishes without needing to be close enough to invite area effect attacks.
• Widen Shield - Shiba doesn't use this because he has an artifact shield that blocks area attacks, but if he didn't have that shield, this would be his most commonly used defensive imbuement. Usually, the only way to defend against an area attack is a Retreat, and if the defender is deep within the area attack, there might not be a safe place to retreat. Widen Shield lets the defender block instead, without having to give up precious ground. Any Mystic Knight with a shield should take this imbument.

Sometimes Useful

These are Imbuements that I've used, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped I would.

• Annihilating Weapon - It took literally 10 sessions before I had a chance to use this. It isn't useful if most of your foes are attacking unarmed. However, the ability to literally disarm karatekas and other "armed" unarmed attackers is just great, as well as forcing mooks to dodge instead of using their superior parry and having their weapons destroyed.
• Bank Shot - I can see how this would be useful, but Arching Shot is more generally useful in my opinion. If I had to go for one or the other, I'd go with Arching Shot. 
• Far Shot - Archers and crossbowmen generally have plenty of range and don't need this enhancement. Thrown weapon users often have limited weapon ranges, and multiplying a thrown axe range by 2 or 5 is pretty useful, especially when combined with Guided Shot to remove the ranged penalties.
• Ghostly Weapon  - This is a lifesaver if there are a lot of insubstantial foes, and not useful otherwise. I still wish I had taken it.
• Scattershot -1d of fragmentation damage is too little against anyone with armor; 2d of fragmentation damage occurs in a 10 yard radius and means that you might accidentally hit friendlies. The couple of times I've used it, the bad guys were too scattered for it to be effective. However, as a fight opener against a bunch of clustered enemies at range, fragmentation damage is amazing so this imbuement is worth the investment.
• Multishot - Any high skill ranged attacker (like a Scout/Mystic Archer) should definitely take this imbuement and turn all their attacks into machine guns. My character only has Bow-14 so I haven't picked this up yet.
• Shockwave and Conic Blast - Area effect damage is amazing against diffuse foes, but the melee version of Shockwave can hit allies so it's less useful. The rapid fall-off in damage makes Shockwave ineffective against foes that are more than a yard or so apart; Conic Blast is hard to make wide enough to hit more than a single line of foes. But still, area effect damage for 1FP beats anything that the wizard has to offer.

Seems Like They Should Be Useful but Aren't

These imbuments have been disappointments in my experience.

• Blinding Defense - Blinding defense has two problems: the Obscure affects the user when used against melee attacks, and either way, it only lasts until the user's next turn. I spent 10 sessions waiting to use this against a missile weapon, and when I finally got a chance to do so, I was next in the initiative order and the blindness ended immediately.
• Vampiric Weapon - My character has good enough defenses that he almost never gets hurt, so I haven't had a chance to use this much. If I had another +5 skill and a couple levels of Energy Reserve, recovering spent ER would be useful but I don't. I'd have done better to spend the points that I spent on this on Bank Shot or Ghostly Weapon.
• Project Blow - With the short half-damage range, long recovery time, and a ruling from my GM that I can't use Ranged only imbuements on it, Project Blow tends to come a poor second to Telescoping Blow. There's usually a decent target within 4 yards, so Project Blow only extends my effective reach by +6 yards.

Not Useful

There's a bunch of Imbuements that I've never used or considered purchasing. Most of the Transformation Imbues, for instance, don't seem that useful. Or at least the drawbacks (reduced or halved damage) are severe enough that the minor benefits aren't worth it. Most of the various defensive imbuements also don't appeal to me; I may be missing something there but I always think, "there are better ways to spend my points."

Other Views

I'm hoping that other people have a different view of Imbuements, and can provide some insight from their perspective. So if you've played an Imbuement heavy character in a Dungeon Fantasy game, please share your thoughts in the comments.

And a Little Advertising

There's a new GURPS blog called Spiderweb in the Corner. I know that my link traffic is a lot less than Peter's or Doug's, but I think every bit helps for a new blogger hoping for some attention. So go check it out, please, all 70 of you =)

The Effectiveness of Swashbucklers in Dungeon Fantasy

The swashbuckler is one of my favorite DF templates. A swashbuckler has a clear and useful role in a delving band, and the template does a good job of enabling that role. Although the template lacks a little out of combat utility, with 60 free advantage points, a swashbuckler can be customized with an entire different lens.

In play, swashbucklers are very combat focused. They deal a lot of damage with their attacks, especially against foes that have vulnerable parts, but they also have good defenses against most attacks. Their big weakness in combat is their generally low DR, which makes them vulnerable to aura and area attacks. Out of combat, the base template doesn't have many ways to contribute, but since all swashbucklers have Luck, they can always try something and hope.

The Basic Chassis

Swashbucklers have high DX, moderate HT, and low ST and IQ. They have a high Basic Speed and Move. All this nicely suits their role as fast, mobile melee combatant, though most swashbucklers are going to want more ST (or at least more Striking ST, but generally more ST).

Advantages and Disadvantages

All swashbucklers get a very effective starting package of advantages: Combat Reflexes, Enhanced Parry, Luck, and Weapon Master. These, combined with their high weapon skill with fencing weapons, means that swashbucklers have very solid Parries, even against repeated attacks. The mandatory Luck provides protection against enemy critical hits and friendly critical misses. The lack of High Pain Threshold is a bit of a weakness for a primary combatant, but most swashbucklers don't expect to get hit in a fight.

On the disadvantage side, swashbucklers are not required to have Overconfidence and Impulsive, but almost every player takes them. The rest of the disadvantages are a mix of Codes of Honor, dubiously sane Vows, and various mental issues that reinforce the concept of the swashbuckler as a rake, a rogue, and a party animal.

One of the great strengths of the swashbuckler template is 60 points in optional advantages. Obvious choices from the template include more ST and DX, Extra Attack, and Ambidexterity (a lot of swashbucklers fight Florentine-style with two rapiers). Extra Luck is another good choice. Rapier Wit is also an option, but most swashbucklers don't have a high enough Public Speaking to reliably make use of it. The only possibly mandatory advantage is 2 points in total of extra ST or Striking ST, so as to get an effective ST of 13 for damage purposes and an extra +2 damage for swung weapons.

Expanding the Swashbuckler with a Lens

Another option for the swashbuckler is to spend 50 of those optional advantage points on a lens, which can expand the swashbuckler's combat or non-combat options. I think that swashbucklers lensing into thieves make for more enjoyable thieves than the straight Thief template, as well as giving the swashbuckler interesting things to do out of combat. The various spell-casting lenses aren't particularly potent, but a low skill spellcaster can do stuff out of combat. Swashbuckler-Bard is an obvious combination, especially for people who want to play a more charismatic, seductive swashbuckler.

The various combat templates are less satisfactory. Swashbuckler-Scout solves the issue of the swashbuckler not having good ranged combat options, but is also involves careful juggling of weapons to decide whether to engage with the bow or the sword. Swashbuckler-Martial Artist ends up spending a lot of points on the mostly redundant Weapon Master/Trained by a Master combination, and there are easier ways for a swashbuckler to learn Power Blow.

Swashbucklers and Race

A third option for some of those advantage points is to add a racial template. Cat-Folk is an obvious choice, providing a bunch of benefits such as Night Vision 5 and DX+1 at the low price of 25 points (since both swashbucklers and Cat-Folk have Combat Reflexes, swashbucklers get a 15 point reduction on the price of the Cat-Folk template). Coleopteran is another great, if expensive, choice: the innate DR is higher than most swashbucklers get through gear, the lack of armor means more weight can be devoted to weapons or gear without providing encumbrance penalties, and multiple arms means that a coleopteran swashbucker can carry two edged-rapiers and a shield while still have a hand free to hold a crossbow or main-gauche. Gargoyle is an unorthodox choice, but flight is always a good ability for melee types. Most races make good, or at least decent, swashbucklers.

Leprechauns and pixies make for less optimum swashbucklers, as those races many advantages don't make up for the massive reduction in damage that their sizes impose. It's not impossible, but there are generally better options - even if a swashbuckling pixie has numerous literary antecedents. Minotaurs are another bad choice for swashbuckers: swashbucklers depend on their parries and dodges for defense, and don't have the HP and DR necessary to survive while going berserk.

Skills

Every swashbuckler has at least skill-18 in at least one fencing weapon: usually Saber or Rapier, and possibly higher depending on how important the swashbuckler thinks a shield is. Two weapon swashbucklers are really popular, since it maximizes the Weapon Master and Enhanced Parry advantages, but I think that swashbucklers are generally better served by learning how to use a shield and having a defense against arrows. For ranged weapons, swashbucklers get thrown knives, which are horrible. There's almost no point in using them.

Swashbucklers also get Jumping, Acrobatics, and Stealth, making them good escorts for a thief or scout who is scouting ahead for the delving band. They have the usual choices for background skills, including First Aid, Carousing, and Hiking. With their attributes, swashbucklers should focus on DX based background skills, not the IQ choices.

Swashbuckler Skills or Swashbuckler!

For most templates, the choice of going with the Wildcard skill over a rash of skills is easy: the Wildcard gives a higher average skill level for almost all secondary and background skills and only a slightly lower level for primary skills. And if the game is using the Destiny Point rules from PU5: Impulse Buys, it's an even easier choice. Swashbucklers are the exception: giving up 3-5 levels of their sword skill in exchange for slightly better levels of skill at Acrobatics is probably not an advantage for a template so focused on a single weapon.

Equipping Swashbucklers

Although most of the sample swashbucklers in SJ Games sources use small-swords or non-edged rapiers, the true munchkin shells out the big dollars for the edged-rapier: the combination of impaling or cutting damage, flexible reach 1 or 2, and fencing parries is well worth the base cost of $900. The hard decision is whether to buy one or two of the things, and whether to buy a cheap one to start out. The savings for a cheap sword are impressive, and the risk of breakage is pretty low, but a swashbuckler has a lot of advantages and skills tied to their sword, and having them break is painful. It's also generally not affordable to add many qualities to the starting sword: a Balanced, Fine Rapier costs $9000(!), which is 18 points of Signature Gear - which is 18 points that could be better spent elsewhere.

Swashbucklers are generally not particularly strong and are penalized by encumbrance. Other than their weapons, they want to carry as little weight as possible. They generally can't afford the weight of the heavier armors, leaving them in DR2 Heavy Leather (or DR3 Fortified and Lightened Heavy Leather for games with inexpensive enchanted items) at best. There's a temptation to not wear armor and rely on their blades and speed for defense, but I believe that any DR is better than no DR, even if it's just a suit of Light Leather.

Swashbucklers in Play

Swashbucklers are murderous in combat, especially against the usual range of starting foes in DF. Against typical orcs and ogres, a swashbuckler can Rapid Strike and reasonably expect to get a hit in every turn, and usually do enough damage between Weapon Master and targeted attacks to the vitals to take out the target. They can be less effective against constructs and spirits, but those are usually boss monsters in beginning DF play. By the time that creatures with high DR and good skills are common foes, most swashbucklers have improved swords and skills and can still contribute.

Outside of combat, swashbucklers have less to do. They lack even the weapon identification skills of knights, and don't have enough Perception to scout reliably by themselves. They make acceptable escorts for Thieves or Scouts who are scouting ahead, and depending on the lens chosen (if any), they can pick up a lot of out-of-combat utility.

The Effectiveness of Druids in Dungeon Fantasy

The druid is another archetype with a varied history in role-playing games. At the apex of the concept's power, you have the D&D3e version of a shapeshifting warrior spellcaster, who can heal and harm with magic and goes into battle with a summoned bear ally, his personal bear companion, and himself shapeshifted into a bear (or at the higher levels, some kind of carnivorous dinosaur). At the lower end, AD&D2e's druid was a second rate cleric with worse access to spells, limited healing ability, no special abilities against undead or demons, annoying armor and weapon restrictions, and limited and inconsequential shapeshifting to make up for it.

The Dungeon Fantasy druid is closer to the latter than the former: something like a cleric, but generally weaker. The druid isn't all bad, and has a place in some delving bands, but it could be a more powerful template. The druid has a unique role as the only spellcaster with access to plant and animal spells, but generally those spells aren't very good. The druid can also have animal allies and shapeshift into animal forms (either through the Shapeshift spell or as an Advantage), but normal or even slightly enhanced animals aren't good combat challenges in Dungeon Fantasy, so it's debatable if those abilities are really worthwhile. Finally, the druid has excellent nature skills, and can be very helpful for delving bands that lack Scouts. However, most delving bands are going to want to have a Scout, since the Scout is a great archetype that helps solve a lot of challenges.

The Basic Chassis

Druids have similar attributes to clerics, but with more HT and less ST. They're at best secondary melee combatants, with indifferent combat skills and damage. They have a high IQ and matching Perception and Will, though they have less use for that Will than a Cleric. Nothing really stands out here: Druids are solid but not exceptional.

Skillwise, druids focus on nature skills. The Herb Lore skill allows a druid to very cheaply brew healing potions in town - trading the versatility of the wizard's Alchemy skill for a much deeper discount on some of the most important potions in the game. Naturalist and various Hidden Lore skills let a druid identify quite a few monster threats, including many that are likely to be encountered by beginning delvers. Naturalist also lets a druid eat for cheap in the wild, reducing the cost and weight of rations on long trips.

Advantages and Disadvantages

All druids have Druidic Investiture 3, which allows for a decent range of animal and plant focused spellcasting, Green Thumb 1, and 40 more points in optional druidic advantages. Druidic abilities focus mostly on animal or nature spirit Allies or the potentially useful Speak with Animal (or Speak with Plant) ability to turn local critters into scouts and informants. Their mundane advantage choices include various talents to make the druid better at dealing with plants, animals, or healing, or better attributes or spellcasting. They can also shapeshift into animal forms, but with even a decent wardog or boar costing 127 points, combat shapeshifting is very much out of budget for beginning druids. Non-combat scouting forms such as hawks, owls, or rats are much more feasible at the start of the game.

On the disadvantage size, druids are nature loving hippies, and their recommended disadvantages show that. Sense of Duty (Nature) is an obvious choice, but can be crippling with its requirement that the druid not defend the rest of the delving band from wild animal attacks until the druid herself is attacked.  One traditional limitation of druids - a vow or geas against using metal armor and weapons - is strangely absent, but is easy enough to add back in.

Animal Companions and Nature Spirits

Druids have a wide range of animal companions and spirit allies available (from DF5: Allies). Most of the actual animals use unarmed attacks and that prevent them from being truly useful allies in combat: a bear may have a 3d+1 cu bite attack, and that's enough to impress even the barbarian or the knight, but a lowly goblin with a spear can parry that attack and do heavy damage. Combat animal allies either need to have strikers (Boar) or use weapons (Gorilla, Chimp) or be diffuse (Insect Swarm). Utility allies such as the Hound, the Stallion, or the various familiars aren't expected to go into combat, and so their poor combat performance isn't an issue.

Druidic Servitors are also available. The basic servitor chassis provides a decent but not amazing ally, modified by the choice of divine elements. The base Nature element is required for druidic servitors and isn't that impressive, but Doubled Nature provides Speak with Plants and Speak with Animals, so a druid can get a decent henchmen and a pair of useful advantages on the cheap less expensive. None of the first level nature elements are particularly interesting for most delvers, but the Life element provides Faith Healing, which coupled with cheap healing potions means the Druid can provide healing support for the delving band. Servitors can use weapons and armor, so while they may be more expensive to equip, any Servitor can also be an acceptable second-line combat in a way that an Anaconda animal companion really can't.

Druid Skills or Druid!

Druid! isn't a particularly amazing Wildcard skill, but converting 24 points of skills at the IQ-2 to the IQ range into a single Wildcard at IQ level is a no-brainer if the GM allows it. If nothing else, it improves the druid's effective skills in every nature related Hidden Lore and all types of Survival. It's a great to have a druid to know what berries/cacti/kelp to eat, whether you're in the 100 Acre Woods, the Deserts of Desolation, or fighting sauhagin at the bottom of the Marinas Trench.

Spells

Druids have spells, but they're nothing to write home about. In a clear case of niche protection, only druids can learn spells from the Animal or Plant colleges - but who else would want to? Animal spells tend to be weak but expensive: controlling a bear or a horse can cost 10 FP, plus 5 FP per minute to maintain. Shapeshifting is versatile, but expensive, and requires a different VH spell for each animal form. Plant spells have limited utility outside overgrown forests and jungles, and almost no combat utility: no one fears Rain of Nuts.

There is one nifty trick for healing out of the Plant college: a druid who knows Plant Form Other and Heal Plant can turn his allies into saplings and then heal them all at once with a single area casting of Heal Plant. This isn't useful for combat healing (minimal casting time: 90 seconds), but when the minotaur berserker is at -4xHP and the cleric needs 4 days to heal him, Heal Plant gets him back on his feet.

Druids and Race

None of the standard races bring anything useful to the table for druids. Elves get Magery 0, but druids don't need it; Fauns have Animal Empathy but a lot of other baggage for 20 points. One decent choice is Pixie: since a druid isn't much of a melee combatant anyway, the low ST is less of a problem, and if you intend to fight by throwing lightning bolts and sending a swarm of bees against your foes, then increased DX and Dodge are definite improvements.

As a house rule, Chandley on the forums came up with a Treant racial template that is tailor-made for druids, if a bit unorthodox. For 0 points, the ability to get Druidic Investiture 12, some natural DR and Injury Tolerance, and a bonus to IQ is probably worth being a hidebound nature-loving tree, especially if you were already planning to be a nature-loving hippie.

Equipping Druids

Druids are much like clerics in that they have a fair bit of stuff to carry and not a lot of ST to carry it with. Any band with a druid in it should be well-stocked with healing potions, and it's in everyone interests to buy potions from the druid at 75% of list price (with the druid pocketing 25% of the base cost as profit).

Since the typical druid isn't strong enough to wield a full-sized axe, a cheap sword or hatchet is a better choice. The usual trade-offs exist: a good thrusting broadsword is $600, the same as a Fine Balanced hatchet, so do you want the utility of thrusting damage or a slightly better chance to hit? Or on the low end, a cheap shortsword is $160 but a decent hatchet is $40, and they both do about the same damage. Highly expensive items, like a Balanced Fine broadsword, make good power items and high powered druids need a lot of power to cast and maintain the better shapeshifting spells.

A druid with a Servitor or animal companion should also consider spending money to equip the ally: a Hound with barding will last longer in combat than a Hound without.

Druids in Play

Druids are most useful on nature oriented adventures where their animal and plant related abilities can be used to the max, especially in delving bands that don't have Barbarians or Scouts. Similarly, they can be great healers for bands without Clerics.

The biggest problem with being the animal specialist is that most animals just aren't a threat to most delving bands. Even the big, bad, ST65 King of the Apes is in bad shape when the band's Knight hits him 3-4 times. Creatures like dire wolves and giant rats need to outnumber the delvers 5 or more to be anything more than a nuisance. And it's hard to deny charges of "not pulling your own weight" if your biggest specialty is dealing with nuisances.

Improving Druids

Part of the reason that druids are so weak is that shapeshifting is so expensive for what it gets: 180 points to turn into a hound that is a weaker combatant than a 180 point henchmen is not exactly a bargain. Similarly, the Shapeshifting spell is enormously draining: spending 10 FP to turn into a bear is probably not as decisive as the wizard spending 9 FP on a big Grease or Glue spell. Fixing the cost of the Shapeshifting advantage is too much to get into here, but the costs of the Shapeshifting spell should probably be scaled with the character's CP total, much like allies are. If Shapeshifting cost 1 FP per 1/5th of your point total that the new form cost (which matches the 1 FP per 20 points suggested in the spell for the original 100 point characters in GURPS Fantasy 1e), then cheap animal forms like Boar or Anaconda would only cost 3 FP and the bigger animal forms would only cost 4 FP.

On a similar vein, upgrading the power of the animal forms really helps. Turning into a bear is a so-so spell, but turning into a allosauraus is reasonably impressive. I let the druid in one of my campaigns combine his animal forms with elemental forms: a Bear with Body of Stone is a DR8, Homogeneous terror on the battlefield for 7 FP casting cost for a 250 point druid.

Scaling and empowering the Shapeshifting spell like this powers up druids. Does it bring them to the dreaded level of the D&D Druidzilla? I don't think it does: a Stone Bear is a reasonably impressive combatant, but a basic Knight has nearly as much DR, a lot more skill, and better weapons. The druid still spends a lot of FP to turn into that Stone Bear, and between the IQ penalty, the muteness, and the clumsy hands, the druid isn't going to be casting any spells while in beast form.

The Effectiveness of Thieves in Dungeon Fantasy

The Thief template in Dungeon Fantasy isn't very good. Since it is descended from a long line of thief implementations that aren't very good, at least it stays true to its roots.

Historically, creating a separate thief role was one of the more controversial decisions in the early development of D&D. Separating out a bunch of important functions, such as sneaking around and scouting ahead, into a separate class implied that the wizards, clerics, and fighting men of the day couldn't sneak and scout. The fact that beginning thieves were terrible at sneaking, scouting, and fighting didn't help matters either: what's the point of bringing along a dedicated scout who only has a 1 in 4 chance of avoiding detection and has no chance to survive being detected? Adding abilities to (unreliably) find traps and (infrequently) open locked doors didn't help much, and created a dilemma for adventure designers: add traps and locked doors so as to justify the thief, and thereby force the PCs to bring one along, or ditch all that stuff and let the thief PC be a weak second line fighter and waste of resources?

Dungeon Fantasy hasn't really resolved the question of whether or not to include traps and locked doors, though it leans towards always including them. But a delving band has other options than taking along a pure Thief: Artificers and racial Dwarfs and Gnomes can disable traps and locks; Wizards and Clerics can use Lockmaster and See Secrets to open doors and find traps; Dungeon Demolishers can blow up locked doors or trapped passages; or Barbarians can rip open locked, trapped chests and use their massive HT and HP to soak any bad effects. So while delving bands need to bring along someone to deal with traps, it doesn't have to be a Thief.

GURPS also resolves the question of whether fighting men can sneak and scout: does the fighting man in question have useful levels of Stealth and Observation? Given that Knights have low Perception, and that encumbrance penalizes Stealth, the answer is generally "no." But the Scout has a high Perception, good to great skill in Stealth, is generally lightly encumbered, and has a decent Trap skill. Almost indisputably, a Scout makes a better scout inside or outside of dungeon than a Thief: better Perception to notice things, Tracking skill to figure out what kind of monster is ahead before seeing it, a very useful combat skill (that can be used while running away) to fight off monsters after being discovered.

So that's the Thief in a nutshell: a template that has two main utility functions, both of which can be replicated better by other templates. In combat, the Thief has some of the melee skill of the Knight, but not the strength and armor, or acts as a weak, unskilled ranged combatant.

That's the effectiveness of thieves. The next bit is just some follow-up and background.

The Basic Chassis

The Thief needs lots of good attributes for his role: good DX, obviously, and a decent IQ and a high Perception. He also needs a good Basic Speed to get adequate defenses when Dodging, and a decent Basic Move. High ST isn't necessary, but it helps with encumbrance to keep that Basic Speed, Dodge, and Move high. As written, the Thief Basic Speed is a bit low at 6.00, but his other stats are mostly decent. Investing in improved HT increases survivability, both directly and by increasing Basic Speed and Dodge.

Advantage Selection

All Thieves have Perfect Balance, which eats up a lot of points with a cost of 15. My experience is that Perfect Balanced is overpriced for what you get, but Thieves should try to stage all their fights on narrow and slippery ledges to leverage the advantage and justify the cost. Flexibility and High Manual Dexterity are thieves' other mandatory advantages, and these two are generally worth the cost.

Thieves get another 30 points in advantage selection, which quickly get split a lot of different ways. Night Vision is almost mandatory, Luck is helpful, and Danger Sense is an obvious choice for someone who goes around sticking his hands into potential traps. For combat, Thieves also have access to Combat Reflexes and Surprise Striking ST. Getting bonus damage when stabbing people from behind is great, but it's also expensive with most Thief weapons use the thrust damage table.

Skills

GURPS has a lot of thiefly skills, and Thieves unsurprisingly get them all: Filch, Pickpocket, Traps, Lockpicking, Holout, Smuggling... The utility of some of these skills in play can be minimal, and its a bit painful to have to buy both Filch (to shoplift unattended items) and Pickpocket (to take things from people's pockets).

Combat wise, Thieves use light blades such as rapiers and shortswords, but not very well. They also have a wide variety of ranged weapons, but none of them are very good: crossbows are single shot impaling weapons, bows are hard to use with Heroic Archer and high levels of skill, and slings do low damage. A lot of Thief players go for the throwing knife, but that isn't really a viable strategy for fighting anything more dangerous than giant rats.

Thief skills or Thief!

Thief! is one of the great wildcard skills and any Thief who has the opportunity should take it. A straight thief spends can get Thief!+2 for 48 points, which gives them better skill at almost every thief skill than they got by buying the skills separately. The sting of having Filch goes away if you get every other thief skill at a higher level along with it.

In games using Wildcard Destiny points (from MH1: Champions or Powerups 5: Impulse Buys), Thief! is even better. Disarming the Fatal Apocalypse Deadfull (normally a roll at -10 with failure by 5 or more triggering it) just isn't that big a deal when you can auto-succeed on any thief related roll 4 times per session. This is one of the few places that a Thief is better than a Scout, because Scout! specifically doesn't cover disarming traps.

Thieves and Race

Half-Elf is an excellent choice for Thieves, since racial Magery lets them detect magical traps with a Perception roll and lets them use Mage Light to have a light source that non-mages can't see. Gnomes have a very useful racial Talent in Widget Worker, and Halflings have a host of advantages that make them a traditional Thief race, but in both cases, combat ability drops off with low ST and size.

An unorthodox but highly successful race for Thieves is Leprechaun. Thieves start with high enough IQ that Leprechaun charms are affordable, and Winged Knife with Ridiculous Luck makes throwing knives into people's eyes into an almost viable strategy. Ridiculous Luck is also generally useful when trying to disarm Fatal Apocalypse Deadfalls. The downside to being a Leprechaun is that with only 4 HP, failing to disarm a trap is usually fatal.

Equipping Thieves

Thieves want a lot of stuff: spider silk cord and grapnels, high quality lock picks, and a trap-finding kit are almost basic necessities. They need some kind of blade, which is expensive, though which one to choose isn't obvious: edged rapiers are hideously expensive and hard to use in close combat but provide Reach; sabers are less expensive and better for close combat but still provide swing/cutting damage; short swords are the cheapest but can't be used to get a fencing parry. I often favor a main-gauche or long knife: accept that the Thief isn't a front-line fighter and get a blade that is cheap enough to get Balanced or Fine from starting points.

Poisons are an obvious purchase, but can become expensive and heavy rather quickly.

It's debatable how much armor Thieves want. Heavy Leather with Fortify +1 and Lighten +1 provides DR3 for 15 lbs, which is generally affordable and enough to ward off lesser foes. Anything more than that quickly becomes too expensive and heavy.

Thieves in Play

Thieves have a lot of utility: scouting, trap-finding, lockpicking. Most of that utility can be better done by a Scout or a Wizard. Still, a wizard's FP tends to get pulled a lot of different ways, while a Thief can try to open a lock at any time.

In combat, Thieves really have one good option: hide at the beginning of combat, get behind a foe with a vital or vulnerable spot of some kind, and make a Telegraphed attack to that spot. Against humanoid foes, this can be good for a kill. Against undead, constructs, elementals, demons without vital organs, Elder Things, and Floating Electric Jellies, Thieves don't really have any good options.

Verdict

As written, any delving band that already has a Scout and a Wizard is not going to need a Thief, and should take a different utility guy: a Bard or Shaman for diplomatic skills, or a Holy Warrior or Swashbuckler for more combat utility.

Should there be a place for thieves? The early literature is full of thief type characters, but Conan and the Grey Mouser are not straight thieves by any means. Only Bilbo Baggins is well-modeled by the thief template. If your delving band already includes 11 other guys, then splitting out another share to get a thief probably isn't a bad deal. Otherwise, I'm not entirely sad that thieves aren't a good template.

The Effectiveness of Clerics in Dungeon Fantasy

The Cleric has a long but varied history in fantasy role-playing. Generally, a Cleric is an armed and armored fighting priest, a necessary component of the delving band for his ability to heal wounds in the field and cast various utility spells, but not liked by many players who don't want to play a support role. There are a lot of variations, from the over powered fighting spellcasters of D&D 3rd edition to the non-magical priests of GURPS Banestorm. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy puts the Cleric somewhere in the middle of the range: not as strong, armored, or deadly in melee as the Knight; a generally weaker spellcaster than the Wizard, though with some unique strengths and spells; but nevertheless a valuable and arguably vital part of the delving band. I personally find Clerics somewhat unsatisfying to play, but it's hard to see where to improve the archetype without stealing niche from others.

The Basic Chassis

Clerics have decent attributes across the board, with 12 for all physical abilities and 14 for all mental abilities. They're a primarily mental/social focused class, but they don't come off as big brains like Wizards or eagle-eyed masters of perception like Scouts (though they are, attribute-wise). Their physical abilities are adequate, but most Clerics are too weak to pile on heavy armor, too clumsy to be reliably sneaky, and not nearly resistant enough to poison and other environmental hazards.

Cleric's primary skill set involves non-magical healing, Exorcism, and melee combat. As melee combatants, they're solid but not impressive: average skill 14 isn't enough to reliably get hits against dangerous opponents nor to defend against them, and ST 12 doesn't do very much damage. It can be humbling to see the rapid-striking Swashbuckler or Weapon Mastered Knight still have a better effective skill than the Cleric while doing much, much more damage. That said, Exorcism is a life saving skill in the face of curses, possessions, and other threats of the delving experience, and Clerics have the Willpower and related advantages to be successful exorcists.

Their secondary skills are mostly focused on religion and healing, making Clerics useful for identifying demons and undead on the one hand, and scoring a little extra cash by recovering bits from dead monsters. Stealth and Climbing are background skills for them, and combined with a low DX and generally medium-heavy armor means that Clerics should leave the scouting to someone else. They have some abilities as public speakers, but don't generally have the advantages and skills to be an effective public face for the delving band.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Unsurprisingly, every Cleric has Clerical Investment, and they also have 30 points in Power Investiture, which is a leveled talent that lets them learn spells from limited lists without prerequisites. Between IQ 14 and Power Investiture 3, every starting cleric is a decent spell caster.

Clerics also get 25 points in "Holy" advantages: things like supernatural Allies, Faith Healing, and Truth Faith (Turning). True Faith is the big winner here, since Will + Power Investiture + equipment bonuses starts at 17 and can easily go over 20 for a starting Cleric, and the ability to force every undead monster to stay at least 5 yards away from the Cleric is enormously helpful against a monster type that is generally focused on melee hordes. Not every Cleric takes Truth Faith, but it's a common and solid choice. Faith Healing is another good option, but most Clerics can use magic for healing and don't need Faith Healing on top of that.

There's another 20 points worth of optional advantages that can also be used for more Holy abilities, to pick up more Power Investiture, or for more mundane abilities like extra ST or DX. None of the suggested optional advantages are really noticeable, and more Power Investiture or more Holy abilities are usually the way to go.

Clerics have to pick a 10 point disadvantage such as Honesty or Vow (No Edged Weapons) that represents their Pact with their deity. As long as they adhere to the disadvantage, they can use their Holy powers, even in areas with no sanctity. That rule has been confusing to every group I've every played in, since Cleric spells are affected by Sanctity, but as written, Powers are only affected by the Pact disadvantage. Which is actually very helpful for Clerics, since they can do things such as heal with Faith Healing or turn undead with True Faith, even in the middle of the high unholy temples of the Black God of Undeath. It's an important rule, and easy to get wrong.

The rest of the Cleric disadvantage list is focused on "good" disadvantages, such as Compulsive Generosity or Vow (Vegetarianism). Nothing particularly stands out, but it does push the Cleric towards being something of a goody-two-shoes. It's possible to play a sleazy Cleric of the God of Thieves off the base list, but it can be some work. Fortunately, there are variant Cleric lenses for people who want that sort of thing.

Cleric Skills or Cleric!

Cleric! is one of the weaker wildcard skills. It mostly deals with the cleric's knowledge role, covering skills like Theology and Hidden Lore (Undead). One of its big advantages is that it covers Exorcism, and thus Destiny Points (for games using those rules) can be spent on those tricky and difficult contests. The other advantage is that most of a Cleric's knowledge skills are already at the same level as the Cleric would get with Cleric!, so there's not the same sort of breadth or depth question that Knights and Swashbucklers have to worry about.

Spells

Arguably, spells are the real reason to play a Cleric. Of the original archetypes, only Clerics get the versatile and inexpensive Major Healing, and starting Clerics can buy it with their initial level of Power Investiture. The rest of the spells are a grab bag of general buffing and utility, but Command, Continual Light, Cure Disease, Purify Air, Recover Energy, Resist Fire, and Watchdog are all solid choices for some of a Cleric's twenty starting spells. Higher levels of Power Investiture are worth more for the skill bonus to all Cleric spells than for the extra spells available, though Dispel Magic, Divination, Gift of Tongues/Letters, Instant Restoration, and Regeneration are all useful. The last two, especially, can turn a disastrous fight into a merely expensive one, if the Cleric has a Power Item large enough to cast either of these fairly expensive spells.

The biggest problem with the Cleric spells is not what is on it, but what isn't. While Clerics don't suffer for the crippling overspecialization problem of the various summoners, they're still well confined to the healing and support role, and much of their support is purely defensive with the various Resist (thing) spells. They don't have much in the way of offense or battlefield control, and they lack the general purpose "screw with the GM spells" that wizards get, such as Shape Earth, Apportation, History, Trace, Invisibility, or Flight.  

Clerics and Race

There's no race that's especially well suited for Clerics, though any race without an IQ penalty is playable. Dwarven Clerics are a good choice for more combat focused Clerics, since Pickaxe Penchant is a cost effective way to become a better melee combat while being able to hurl axes at range. Dark One Clerics seem like a good idea from a superficially munchkin, but it's spending 20 points for a minor bonus to secondary skills and better power items. These are good things to have, but probably not worth the cost, and the other advantages such as High Manual Dexterity will rarely come up. On the high end, Celestial is conceptually appealing but practically no better than spending 75 points on the equivalent set of attributes and advantages, and while Infernal provides a better set of racial disadvantages, the absolute requirement to buy off the Weakness to areas with High Holy Sanctity means that's its really more of a 95 point template, only available in the most high powered games.

Variant Clerics

Clerics are a unique template, in that they're the only template to have an entire book devoted to its variations. DF 7: Clerics provides the first formal reference to the Good-Evil, Bunny-Squid morality axis implied in the DF works, and also provided 15 variant Clerics for Gods of the City, Death, Fire, Storms, and so on. The variants get slightly different skill lists, advantages, and disadvantages options, and they also get massively different spell lists.

I'm not generally a fan of the variant Clerics, since they tend to move spells that I consider essential or at least very important to Power Investiture levels I generally don't want to buy, in exchange for making a spell I would have been able to buy normally available slightly earlier. Still, they do give a Cleric of the appropriate deity type a lot of flavor, and in the right campaign, they can be especially powerful: a Cleric of a God of Storms on a sea-going campaign, for instance. Each one needs to be judged on their individual merits for the campaign and the tastes of their player; on the whole, I'd rate them all as slightly weaker than the basic Cleric but situationally more powerful.

Equipping Clerics

Clerics tend to equip much like Knights, but with less strength, so their armor tends to be somewhat inferior to conserve weight. The basic choice of axe, mace, sword, or flail remains, with the normal trade-offs: cheap swords are versatile but fragile, basic axes are inexpensive but dull, fully kitted out axes are much cheaper and nearly as good as expensive swords. I generally favor the Dwarven, Balanced, Fine axe for around $1500, especially for Dwarven clerics. Expensive weapons also double nicely as power items, so if there are points available to trade Points for Money, there's no reason to not make the axe Silver-coated, Spiked, Hammer-headed, Holy, and Ornate. For about $2500, it's already a 13 point Power Item, helpful for getting off those important spells such as Great Healing or Restoration.

Blessed or High Holy Symbols are other good choices for gear (a High Holy Symbol makes a good Power Item, too). On the less exciting side, potion belts stocked with healing potions or cheap Holy Water (see DF2 p 3) are another item competing for scarce dollars. A lot of Clerics buy surgery kits, since they would like to cut up monsters for loot, but at $300 and 15 lbs, it's not an investment that I've seen pay off very often unless there's a Barbarian or Half-Ogre in the delving band to tote the thing.

Clerics are often constrained by weight more than dollar amount: the need for decent armor, a weapon or two, a shield, potions, and healing kits can easily put the Cleric into the dread medium or heavy encumbrance. Whenever possible, Clerics should try to distribute the load by passing equipment to stronger members of the band. Clerics don't act as scouts, and instead are in the center of the band like a wizard, so not having their stuff immediately on hand is less of a disadvantage.

Clerics in Play

Providing healing is a vital role, so Clerics are a necessary part of most delving bands. They also have a lot of utility in identifying and removing curses and unholy stuff, as well as figuring out which dark temple the band has wandered into this time. A cleric's player usually has something to do, even if it isn't always superbly interesting, when out of combat.

In combat, Clerics have to accept that they're second tier combatants at best. They don't have the ranged abilities of a Scout or archery focused Mystic Knight, nor the straightforward melee mayhem of a Knight or Swashbuckler. Even the Barbarian hits harder and straighter than the Cleric, though the Cleric is marginally better than the Bard, Druid, or Thief. Generally, the Cleric wants to fight as part of the battleline, but not the focus of it. On the side where they can be protected by the Knight or Swashbuckler while still helping keep the Scout and Wizard out of trouble is a good spot. In larger delving bands, a Cleric with a pole arm is happy to be in the second rank, with the ability to cast buffing or healing spells on the front line, attack past them, or Concentrate on Truth Faith, as appropriate.

In Summary

Clerics are a good, but not great, archetype, and one best suited to the kind of player who likes being in the support role more than being in the spotlight. It's not an easy class by any means, since playing one does require understanding the GURPS Magic system and juggling trade-offs. Even something as apparently simple as True Faith (Turning) can become complicated, since the power lasts a few seconds after the Cleric stops concentrating and that means undead can be repelled even as the Cleric attempts a quick healing.

It would be nice to buff the Cleric by adding more combat abilities or more spells, but each option either pushes them into the Knight's or Wizard's niche. Without Trained by a Master or Weapon Master, the Cleric is never going to be a first tier melee combatant, and without a better spell selection like the Wizard's, they're never going to be a general utility caster.