This isn't how Power Items, Power Enchanted, Power Reserve, or Spell Enchanted Items work... in general.

So if your House Rules modify those rules, can you explain how so I can figure exactly what needs to be done to bring the staff into compliance (if that is even possible with how little money he has at the moment)?

In reply to Jareth Mooncalled (msg # 17):

Ok, i went with uses magic, can be recharged. Will review psi.

Edit: I reviewed DF17: the device  had been previously  designated a power item for its enchantments, and needs Active recharge. As you now have a psi ability, you CAN have a seperate psi power reserve, which would recharge passively.
This message was last edited by the GM at 14:07, Sun 11 Dec 2016.

I really hate that DF used the term Power Item instead of coming with something different.

For those who do not know, a quick break-down of the difference between a Power Item and a Powered (Enchantment) Item.  Hence forth I'll refer to DF 1 Power Items as Personal Power Items to limit confusion.


In GURPS Magic the only way to make a "power item", ie a Self Powered Item that reduces the FP cost for casting the spell that is Enchanted on it:  You use the Power Enchantment, it reduces the FP cost to cast and maintain the spell(s).  That is all.

Now 3e had a few other variants that came out in the 3e Magic Items books, which have been used in DF 8 Treasure Tables:  Dedicated Reserve ($40/pt), Regenerating ($80/pt), Rechargeable ($100/pt), Powered ($10k-$80k for 1-4 pts).

Dedicated - Must be recharged in town like a Personal Power Item.  $5 a point recharged.
Regenerating - These recharge themselves at a rate of 1 FP per day.  They cannot be recharged any other way.
Rechargeable - While exposed to/immersed in the stuff that recharges it (blood, fire, gold, Sanctity, Unholiness, rain, sunlight, seawater, the tears of maiden, etc), it recharges 1 FP per minute.  They cannot be recharged any other way.
Powered - This is the standard Power Enchantment from GURPS Magic Enchantment Spells.


In DF 1 a new type of Power Items was introduced:  A spellcaster's Personal Power Item.   As most spellcasters in this game know, this gives them a limit external source of FP which can only be recharged in town for $5 per FP.  This costs the Spellcaster nothing to own, it's one of their items, usuaully the most valuable as it's pool is determined by it's mundane value.

DF 14 Psi added the Psionic Personal Power Item.  It functions the same, the difference being it recharges passively at 1FP per day.

In DF 18, Power Items this was expanded into 5 types:  Caster, Psionic, Heroic, Scholarly, and Endurance.

Caster covers the standard flavors of casters as per DF:  Demonic, Magical (Bard, Wizard, Elementalist), Necromantic, and Sacred (Cleric, Druid, Summoner).  If you combine two or more casting "proffesions" (IE Driud and Cleric, or Necromancer and Wizard) you need Personal Power Items that cover each proffession if you wish to be able to draw upon that Power Item for casting.  So a Cleric/Driud draws from the same Power Item source, but the Necro/Wizard needs two separate Power Items, as Magic and Deathliness are two seperate power sources.*

* No, I don't know why Summoners and Druids get lumped in with Cleric as being "Sacred" and Bards and Elementalists are "Magic", but Demonologists and Necros get the shaft.

Psionic covers Psis and is spent powering Psionic abilities.

Heroic and Scholarly are used by the respective professions; Heroic: Knights, Scouts, Martial Artists, Swashbucklers, and occasionally Barbarians; Scholarly: Scholars and Artificers.  Heroic can be can be used to pay for "Heroic" abilities such as Botte Segrete, Breaking Blow, Flying Leap, Hand of Death, Power Blow, etc, and also for Extra Effort in Combat.  Scholarly is used for FP expenditures associated with Book-Learned Wisdom, the Scholar's Wild Talent, casting spells from scrolls, or any FP spent on long tasks like study, alchemy, or gadgeteering.

Endurance Personal Power items can be used to cover FP costs for any mundane expenditure of FP such as lost sleep, starvation, marching, end of combat fatigue, Extra Effort (combat and noncombat).  Basically any non-supernatural or non-special ability FP loss.

Recharging:
Caster and Endurance Items can only be recharged in Town by spending $5/FP.

Heroic, Psi, and Scholarly Items recharge at 1FP/day when the user is doing what the item requires (Psis sleep for 2 hours, Chi Mastery and Ninjas train for 1d hours, other heroes just have to have it equipped/worn/sheathed for 16 hours a day, Scholars read/study for 2 hours... and presumably Artificers would tinker or something).


Note for anyone seeing Endurance or Heroic item and thinking "Hey, my character should totes have one and since Personal Power Items don't cost extra monies..." read this next bit carefully:  Endurance Items cost $1k more to be "ritually prepared" into a Personal Power Item and Heroic items must be a Weapon, Shield, or piece of Armor that is significant to the character.


So Gorgath's Doomrazor is probably a Heroic Item.  Azrael's dagger, probably not (but then Azrael's leather armor probably costs more than his dagger anyway).

Also no one item can be a Personal Power item for more than one source of Power.

So Jareth's Staff can either be a Psi Personal Power Item or an Endurance Personal Power Item, not both.  And it can't be any other type of Personal Power Item as he has no access to any other type of Power Source (no Magery, Chi, Holiness, Weapon Master, TBaM, Unholiness, Rage, Book-Learned Wisdom, etc).








That's what it was designated as from the start, expecting he'd eventually (in a year or two) have something to spend the Psi Power Item FP on.

As noted above, it can't be any other type Personal Power item and he didn't spend any money to make it any type of Enchanted Power Source.

Though... looking over the way I listed out the cost for the Staff I can see how that could have been confusing.  I should have listed the "Power Factor" separately... not in the list of costs.  He didn't spend an additional $1,005.00, that's just the "mundane" value of the staff for figuring out it's FP pool as a Personal Power Item.

I was looking at the staff as a magic item and the reserve was for its use. If you need to power its spells with your own reserve, then that makes it an iffy item. Jareth is a squib, and his staff helped conceal that, but iy you want it to be a psi item, you will need to drop $1000 to have it "formatted" and attuned, probably  by purchasing piwdered  chacral semiprecious  stones, meditatibg with them on your bidy and then rubbing them onto the staff.

So you do have House Rules concerning that.  Okay.

In reply to Jareth Mooncalled (msg # 19):

This is sounding like original D&D, where something in book 3 changed what was written in Book 1 or 2... totally confusing and mostly unusable. GMs resorted to the "I Said" or "I Rule" routines to make the game system playable.

Sure.  Except the books I used when making the character (DF 1-16) were all in print and nothing has changed in regard to those rules.*


The "House Rule" comment is in regards to Personal Power Items (aside from Endurance Items) requiring more money to become Power Items.  As per DF 1, 14, & 18, they don't... so if they do, we need to know that.

DF 1 has no rules on how to take a piece of loot and make it a Personal Power item.
DF 14 says a Psi just designates it as a Power Item, and it is.  It infers that this is how the rules work for Spellcaster Personal Power Items as well.
DF 18 adds some rules to 'bond' to a new Personal Power Item, but the are free ($0) and simple.



* Though I did forget a conversation I've had since with the Narrator (what it's been a year).  I found it in PMs and am addressing it there.  Also see the next note, one "rule" did changed, but ti didn't effect any of my characters:

DF 18 clarifies that a multipower Spellcaster (say a Cleric/Wizard) cannot use the same Personal Power Item to power both types of spells, they need two separate Power Items.  Apparently this was not the case previous to DF 18...

I think I'll stick with my bow.  At least there's no question on a Cornucopia quiver...

necromantic question: mummies. can they retain their mental skills, unlike zombies and skeletons? say a wealthy, but unscrupulous land owner wants undead agricultural workers. that's a mental skill, so to scythe down his grain, feed his animals, etc. he'd have to have mummies, right? skeletons or zombies wouldn't be able to handle it, even if they were peasants in their living days?

Agricultural work is largely repetitive labor that can be handled by machines so Zombies or whatever would work fine.

In fact that's one of the features of the zomi myth in Haiti, drugged and mindless plantation workers.

Depends on the genre...

In standard GURPS Fantasy the only difference between a mummy and a zombie is measure of dampness.  The only difference between mummies/zombies and skeletons is a measure of flesh.

All three use the same Necromantic Spell, a mummy is just starts as (or becomes) a desiccated corpse and a skeleton is one where the flesh has rotted off.


In Northport?  Unknown.  I know most bog-standard D&D (and D&D ripoffs) like to make Mummies self-willed (and often they are reskinned Liches, ie spellcasters, just without all the Lich special powers and defenses).

i've read in Gurps magic that mummies and mummification is a skill that's useful, because the preservation process, keeps the brain in working order... curious how it works in Northport.

In reply to Chye Isuel (msg # 28):

Almost anything animated with the Zombie spell is an
Automoton, and I still have GURPS  Undead, which makes Mummies almost ludicrous  with unkillable and other high power advsntages, with the suggestion that they could be
upgraded by buying off some limiting disads.
I ruled long ago (I was playing  a sentient undead in another game) that a critical success  on a Zombie roll, (or a critical failure {modded by wierdness magnet} on Raise Dead
could result in a willfull undead person. This happened in
Northport, in the person of Caville the wayfarer, and now
there are official  rules for such half dead people.

Dagon and his mummies are carriovers from 2002 when I ran
this setting in 3e over on playbyweb.net, and I   figured
they had a -2 IQ modifier and disturbing voice, why not let
them speak, even if they had no mental skills. So they emoted
 a bit, and responded to command, admittedly  with some
grumbling, but this was a special effect, and had no other
impact on the game. They could (badly) deliver spoken
messages, although they had to make IQ rolls to get it close
 to correct.

Is that a Twerking Demon in post 165 of The Ninja's lair?   ;-)   A Miley Cyrus demon!!

Worth noting that in Egyptian (historical) mummification, the brain was the only major organ that was not preserved in the canopic jars.  Rather, since it had no known function, it was hooked out through the nose and discarded.  It wouldn't have taken well to dehydration anyway; it's got the highest water content of any tissue in the human body, as I recall it.

"Whatya mean it ha' no use?  It cools t'e body's red humours of course!"

In reply to Oly (msg # 30):

Twitching! Ducking autocorrect!

I am doing OT, and may not answer folks before tomorrow. How did I go from 6 to 7 threads?

A few months after you said "I need to reduce the number of threads 'cause it's getting out of hand" you added two more.

Oh wait, was that rhetorical?   ;)

As a semi-side note:  I've been contemplating starting up a PbP here as well.... I'm just not sure what to run.  I've got like 6 different games in 4 different settings I've got ideas for.

In reply to Jareth Mooncalled (msg # 35):

You can go to the GURPs lounge game,

link to another game

and discuss the ideas, where you will find a wider audience that may be interested in participating. Better chance of getting them going!

they believed it was useless, they thought the man's heart carried the soul, i think i've read.

In reply to Chye Isuel (msg # 37):

Seems that a lot of folk still do consider it pretty useless...some things don't change!

A lot of folk are arguments in favor of the "useless" theory.  Half of them drive around Winston-Salem any given day...

In reply to Ardenas Barehand (msg # 39):

Unless Winston-Salem has a population of a couple of billion, a lot less than half of them are there, lol!

There is a difference between useless and unused...  I believe most of those you speak of have the second form, not the first.