The potential for irony abounds in any discussion of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the first installment of which Steve Jackson Games released around Christmas of last year as a PDF original supplement on their e-store e23. To begin with, there’s the irony that after thirty years, we’re three-quarters of the way back around to The Fantasy Trip, Steve Jackson’s first multi-book simplification of Dungeons & Dragons. In fine epicyclic fashion, though, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is a multi-book simplification of GURPS for the purposes of playing games very much like Dungeons & Dragons. (Dungeons & Dragons, meanwhile, is moving around that same wheel, with its multi-book new edition a beautifully elegant, souped-up version of Blue-Book-era D&D “kick in the door and go” dungeon fantasy, likewise of thirty years ago.) But rather than reinvent GURPS for graph-paper delving, in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, GURPS Line Editor Sean “Dr. Kromm” Punch presents, rather, a set of comprehensive “house rules” for a GURPS game with the same goals that Tom Moldvay had in 1980. Which, it bears repeating, are the same goals possessed by an overwhelming proportion of the RPG player base – including me, one Sunday a month, given that I’m playing in a D&D 4e campaign.

Having addressed Genre, we move from the Universal to the RPSpecifics: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy comes in four books (so far). GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers (31 pages, PDF, $7.95) is the basic “Player’s Handbook,” featuring GURPS templates for 11 “classes” (barbarian to wizard, although if you play a wizard, you’ll need GURPS Magic, too), a few rules fillips, and a bunch of delving gear in GURPS terms. Even the streamlined list of dungeon-focused skills holds 100-odd entries; the suggestion of further collapsing them into single-descriptor class skills (Over the Edge- or Risus-style) is welcome. (Had it been me, I might have tried doing the book with just the skills in GURPS Lite; as it is, players will still need access to the main GURPS Basic Set.) GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons (31 pages, PDF, $7.95) is the real winner, a “Dungeon Master’s Guide” to quick decision-making and sound rules calls in GURPS for most anything you want to do in a dungeon. Comprehensive, fair-minded, and clever, it’s the equal of the best GURPS genre books, but with a lot more crunch than most. It doesn’t quite achieve the plug-n-play utility of the original DMG, but then the current DMG doesn’t quite achieve that either. It doubles as an abbreviated “Monster Manual,” with 19 monsters from the standard (dire wolf) to the weird (ambulatory mushroom-men). No dragons, though. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 3: The Next Level (44 pages, PDF, $7.95) adds templates for 37 races optimized (like the “classes”) for dungeon-bashing, and some excellently focused rules and guidelines for character advancement and experience awards. It also adds 20 pages of lenses for “multi-class” characters, which seems a bit much of a muchness, although we get templates for Evil Clerics and Anti-Paladins (or “Unholy Warriors”), so that’s pretty good. Finally, GURPS Fantasy 4: Sages (17 pages, PDF, 4.95) adds two classes: Artificer and Sage, plus yet more multi-class lenses, plus some excellent rules for tomes and books. Again, had it been me, I would probably have released a “Dungeon Bestiary” instead, but it’s good for what it is.

What it is, or rather what all four are, is also an interesting sign-post on the road. To begin with, it’s a high-profile electronic product from a company that was among the first to embrace the Net (an argument can be made that the Daily Illuminator is the world’s oldest blog) but that has done relatively little electronic publishing (compared to other companies) until recently (e23 only started in 2005). More specifically, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is an emulator, a filter to put over GURPS to get a specific feel, one most typical of another game. Given GURPS’ origins as a gladiatorial combat game – and the overwhelming popularity of that play mode — it’s odd that such a filter has taken so long. According to the e23 “What’s Hot” page, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers has sold 830 copies in a little over eight months: not bad for an e-book (it’s the third-best selling book ever at e23), but nonetheless perhaps indicative of: the way that assumptions about play style can shape marketing (“We don’t sell to people who play dungeon games”), the power (positive and negative) of branding (“GURPS isn’t for me and my dungeon game, it’s for Something Else”), and hopefully, the eventual erosion of such artificial distinctions in the more fluid world of the Web, where decisions to cross brand lines impose a lower cost on both the publisher and consumer.