The Elder Scrolls: GURPS - Tools

Introduction

Characters

Magic

Religion

Alchemy and Enchantment

Monsters

Adventures: Elsweyr (Skooma)

Tools

Character names

If you're struggling for character names, you may find my Excel spreadsheet of random character names useful. I made it using Tamriel Rebuilt's Name Generator, which I understand uses code from the Morrowind CD. This could be useful for players and GMs.

GURPS Character Assistant file

It can be a lot of effort making a GURPS character, and it's easy to miss a couple of bonuses or miscount the points spent. Luckily, there's a VERY good program, GURPS Character Assistant 4, which has powerful support for plugins, datafiles and add-ins. It's Windows-only, although apparently runs perfectly on Linux using Wine.

Here is my datafile, which includes templates for the ten standard races and thirteen birthsigns:

Generic NPCs

This is a quick cheat-sheet summary of a typical NPC of each race. If the player characters go looking for a random Nord, say, you can use this to give you an idea of his or her basic abilities.

Moons and Lunacy

In the Elder Scrolls universe, there are two moons, Masser and Secunda. The moons are artifacts of the God of Magic, and have a direct effect on the world. This is most obvious in terms of the Khajiit - the phases of the moons when a Khajiit is born determines which of several very different "breeds" that individual will grow up to be.

Interestingly, GURPS includes the disadvantage "Lunacy". One of my players took this, and given my background in astrophysics, rather than just take the disadvantage as it stands in the book, I invented separate rules for both moons, and created an Excel spreadsheet to determine the phases of the moons.

I'm not aware of any particular part of lore that says how long the phases last, so I made it up myself, and assumed that Secunda orbits Masser. My original spreadsheet assumed that the phases of the two moons would always be the same, and that the variation resulted from Secunda orbiting Masser; this would be true in a similar real system, but is not in fact true in the Elder Scrolls universe, so now the spreadsheet allows both moons to change phase separately.

House Prices

How much does it cost to build a house? This turned out to be a much more complicated question than I thought.

The main GURPS books don't cover it, so I made a (guess what) Excel spreadsheet. This is based on GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 ch.6. The spreadsheet should be simple enough to figure out. The spreadsheet is protected with a blank password, just to avoid accidents.

I actually used this originally for a GURPS: Pirates game. It should work for anything up to TL4, although you'll have to make some changes if you want to build, for example, a Redoran crab-house, or a Telvanni mushroom tower. The spreadsheet assumes that you're building from materials nearby, ie you don't have to spend money and time importing exotic materials.