Blog or Treat!

Tremble, mortals – the GURPS Blogosphere is doing a Halloween special!

Recently some of the regular GURPS bloggers, including me, have been getting together behind the scenes in order to co-ordinate our efforts.  (A bit.  No-one wants too much co-ordination, I think!  But a little extra co-ordination seems like it could be nice).

This has been largely at the instigation of GURPS author Christopher R. Rice (of Ravens N’ Pennies fame) – so a big thanks to Christopher for herding the cats.

We’re starting small, with a “Halloween Special,” tentatively entitled “Blog or Treat”.

Thus this week you’ll see many GURPS bloggers posting something Halloween-related.  Look out for future co-ordinated efforts in the months to come.

I thought perhaps I’d collect all the “Blog or Treat” posts here, just to give anyone dropping by an easy reference point.  No doubt some of the others bloggers involved will do so too – the more the merrier, I say!

So here they are, in no particular order:

• At the risk of self-mockery, Ravens N’ Pennies has introduced us to a very frightening monster from Cherokee legend, The Raven Mocker.  Plus, as a bonus, two new Halloween-themed spells for Dungeon Fantasy Incanters.  Sweet!
• Over at Game Geekery, the Mook has made some great suggestions regarding running Halloween-themed one-shots to introduce people to GURPS.  That’s a damned good idea.  Plus he’s given you some quick Horror adventure generation tables, just to get you started.  As a huge proponent of random adventure generation tables, I can only endorse this!
• Let’s GURPS has quite an extensive review of GURPS Horror.  The short version: he really likes it.  He also has no less than eight (!) other Halloween-related posts: a monster called the Rag and Bone Man, a mask that turns the wearer into a vampire, a half-spider (“Drider”) racial template for Dungeon Fantasy, an amusing Jack-O-Lantern racial template, a martial arts style specifically for skeletons together with a Skeleton racial template for Dungeon Fantasy PCs, an overview of GURPS’ rules for dressing up, and some rules for candy-based abilities. That’s a ridiculous quantity of fun stuff.
• Octopus Carnival has given us GURPS stats for two excellent monsters: a fearsome Snake-Maned Lion, as well as The Grim Reaper itself (hence the image above).  I can definitely imagine using either of these at the table.
• Further Up the Spire has some interesting alternative rules for Fright Checks.  Hmm… I wonder if one could combine them with Peter Dell’Orto’s alternative rules for fright checks, to make a fully tricked out uber-alternative Fright Check rule?  Now, if only I could manage to find Peter’s rules… My Search Fu appears to be failing me.  Further Up the Spire also has a fairly extensive set of new rules to replace the Ally advantage – the connection to Halloween is, as he says, somewhat dubious, but there are definitely some vampires and demons towards the end, so I say it counts.
• On the other hand, if you want to dial down the complexity on Fright checks, rather than dialing it up, you might want to check out Just Roll 3d6’s new  simplified rule for Fright Checks.  For the record, I think the rule he offers  – which is basically just “make a Will roll at a penalty that sounds right to the GM, and then have the GM narrate the results” – is very intuitive; so intuitive, in fact, that I suspect many people do this in play all the time without even thinking about it.
• Over at Of Paper Men and Plastic Monsters, the estimable Sir Pudding has inscribed a truly evil magical glyph that converts the victim into a Madness Dossier cultist… while also, fiendishly, changing the timeline so that the victim has always been a cultist.  As RocketRobby says in the comments, “that’s straight-up evil.”  Sir Puddding has also posted a nasty monster: SCP -106:”The Old Man”, with a variant for monster hunters included.  Sweet.
• The Literate Programmer has offered us a pretty fearsome monster: The Pack Hound (which is creepier than it sounds…).  Particularly cool: he’s given us stats for it at three different levels of power (“Realistic”, “Cinematic”, and over-the-top “Monster Hunters”).  That’s a lot more work for him, but makes the monster a lot more useful for the rest of us.  Nice!
• GURB has a very extensive write-up for an unseelie (and unsavory) species of psychic vampires, The Sorrowful Ones.  Lots of flavor here.
• Speaking of flavor, Worlds Beyond Earth has also offered us a very evocative monster: the Remembrance Thief.  Cunningly, he’s left it open as to whether the creature counts as a demon, a vampire, or a faerie.  That’ll keep those monster hunters guessing.
• Discworld Adventures has a very amusing post about the kind of monsters that Discworld children dress up as while trick-or-treating.  If that’s not an original idea of a post, I don’t know what is.

That’s it so far, but I suspect there will be further terrors to come in the next few days.  So lock your doors, and keep your chainsaw handy…

LATER EDIT: Indeed there were more terrors to come!  I’ve updated the list above to reflect all the “Blog or Treat” posts to date.

EDIT: In all my excitement about other people’s Halloween contributions, I totally forgot to post my own!  Foolish.  So here it is:

• At The Collaborative Gamer, we have a bunch of tables for generating giant spiders in GURPS.