Dahlia's Diversions for Peculiar Parties

Bite-sized roleplaying games for any occasion!

In 2023, a dusty box was uncovered in the Deep Archives at Steve Jackson Games. On it, a note: "TO PUBLISH. WE PROMISED." Inside, we found a stack of games, all annotated in the same careful script and accompanied by a mysterious letter.

Dahlia's Diversions for Peculiar Parties comprises eight independently-created games, presenting a true sampler of indie RPG zines with something for everyone. Each can be played with little to no preparation – perfect for entertaining surprise guests or livening up a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Whether you're a storygame connoisseur, a dedicated dungeon crawler looking to branch out, or a total beginner, you have a seat at Dahlia's table.

10 PDFs (totaling 41 pages) in a single Zip file. Stock #30-1754, $20.00.

GURPS Power-Ups 11: Roll Your Own Skills

Learn The Skill Of Creating Skills

GURPS has a lot of skills. That isn't a surprise for a generic game that lets you create any character you want for any setting you can imagine! Yet "any" sometimes means you need even more skills – and when you do, it can be a lot of work to make sure that they're consistent with the many existing ones.

Roll Your Own Skills simplifies this task, doing for ordinary skills what GURPS Power-Ups 7: Wildcard Skills does for wildcards. It offers advice on concept and naming; thinking through prerequisites, specialties, tasks, and other details; and determining controlling attributes, difficulties, and defaults that are in line with canonical skills. It's less a system than a list of lists of things to remember, all with pointers to examples in the Basic Set and easily overlooked rules that hinge on skills' specific properties.

17-page PDF. Stock #37-0168, $6.00.

GURPS Magical Styles: Modern Magic

Magic For Our Times

Games often take it as read that magic is for fantasy campaigns. To enter our world, it must either be intertwined with historical beliefs, thus painting the past as a subtle fantasy setting, or be a sinister force that empowers occult-horror villains. But what about less horrific magic in the present – the sort that suits villains motivated by greed and politics rather than the supernatural, and that even heroes might wield?

GURPS Magical Styles: Modern Magic explores possibilities loosely inspired by present-day practices, real and fictional, without automatically assuming that magic is fantastic, old-fashioned, or evil. It offers five styles built on the GURPS Thaumatology: Magical Styles framework:

• The Librarian's Art is the most traditional, based on accumulated magical knowledge in present-day libraries. There, magically gifted scholars and bibliophiles learn it . . . mostly to help them curate even better collections of writings.
• Magical Demagoguery is the most villainous. It assumes that power-hungry politicians and other rabble-rousers sometimes harness the magic of the mob to gain not immortality or other extraordinary power, but plain old money and influence.
• Punk Magic is the most unpredictable – a riff on "Chaos Magic" in which those who reject order and authority might gain a view of dirty, everyday reality that includes magic, a force as anarchic as its wielders.
• Rock and Roll Magic is the most blatant, being an answer to the question, "What if musicians whose lyrics, album art, stage shows, and public image evoke the occult aren't making it all up?" The flash, smoke, and noise might conceal or even be magic!
• Trenchcoat Magic is the most heroic. While some practitioners are selfish, most use their powers to solve occult mysteries and thwart supernatural villains before the whole world learns about magic the hard way.

These styles not only have alternative spell lists, but also come with new spells, strange secret materials, and more Magic Perks. There's no shortage of advice, either – especially on how to fit these approaches into the campaign, what their likely origins are, and how they interact with each other and the schools of magic in GURPS Magical Styles: Horror Magic and GURPS Magical Styles: Traditional Styles.

The world is more magical than you know!

26-page PDF. Stock #37-1761, $7.00.