Swords of The Serpentine - Hardcover Role Playing Game Book, Pelgrane Press

Product Information

In some Gumshoe games, part of character creation is making sure that the key investigative abilities are spread out amongst the players. Swords of the Serpentine is less worried about this, in part because of the heavy focus on action scenes in addition to investigation, and because the way investigative spends are presented tend to be broader and more improvisational. Doing Stuff

Special Abilities: Infection, Hivemind, Monstrous Ability (cost 3), Regenerate (half of health damage inflicted), Strength, Summoning (cost 3 – other Drowned) Ideas for Dungeon World Moves, from Rob Donoghue – Troy Press on Dungeon World: The Tale of Old Dogan That means anytime I see a fantasy city with conspiracies, factions, ancient magical secrets, quirky rulers, and messed up laws, it’s going to catch my attention. I love Waterdeep, Camorr, Karnaca, Sigil, Doskvol, Avalon, and countless others because of the weirdness, wonders, and treachery that I encountered in Lankhmar. Chapter Eleven: Corpse Astray (example adventure about family, betrayal, body snatching, and revenge) In many Gumshoe games, investigative pools don’t refresh until you are done with a game session, and general ability pools usually require characters to take a significant narrative break from the investigation to refresh. Because Swords of the Serpentine wants characters to keep pushing forward and to have plenty of action scenes, different adversary categories grant refresh tokens that can be spent to refill a pool before the end of the scene where they are generated. In addition to combat, overcoming traps, decoding riddles, and other milestones in the investigation may also generate refresh tokens. GM Tools

Sovereign

The sidebars that appear throughout the game discuss the reasoning behind the various design decisions, as well as some of the changes made from the playtest version to the final product. These are very conversational segments that make designer intent clear. While some other Gumshoe games have similar sidebars, I think these are much more relaxed in tone. If you are familiar with the designer notes in 13th Age, these have a familiar feel to them. Gumshoe by Way of Swords and Sorcery

I should note, when I say I don’t like Gumshoe, this is what I mean, because I genuinely love everything else about it. Specifically, the combination of hidden difficulty number and a limited pool creates a combination that I personally dislike in play, because it triggers all my opportunity/cost calculations in really unhealthy ways. This doesn’t make it bad, it just makes is something that rubs me the wrong way with great vigor. ↩ Instead of rolling for different abilities, sometimes a character can propose that they spend X amount of one of their pools to declare that something happens. This must make sense for the pool being spent. For example, someone with Servility might say that they blend into a crowd and are unnoticed, instead of making a Stealth test. Someone with City’s Secrets might propose they spend X amount of their pool to find a shortcut to a location to arrive there before a rival band, instead of rolling the dice to race them. Chapter Eight: GM Advice (examining tropes of the genre, how to structure mysteries, and allow for player improvisation and shared world building) Short form, I have a Blades in the Dark game that is going quite well, but the players REALLY like planning and more normal “walking around” play than the normal Job model. I took a look at SotS out of curiosity that it might be a better match. Didn’t really pan out, at least as written, but it was worth the read. The Drowned don’t have their own culture, but they do have a shared understanding; you always feel loved, and you never feel lonely or alone. When you wish you may mentally exchange understanding with any and all other members of the hivemind. While this doesn’t go as far as exchanging words or recognizing specific identities, you know roughly where they are located and their current emotional state and intent. You recognize other Drowned on sight.Guidance on NPCs and Monsters also. This is all fine, but it’s one of those areas where the size of the combat system really shows its head — the ratio of combat guidance to anything else is skewed really heavily in favor of combat, and it feels like lost opportunity.

In the comments below, let us know if there are aspects of swords & sorcery in your own game that you’d add or change on this list. There’s a section dedicated to sports, as there should be, and the city’s signature sports are Eel Ball (sort of water-polo in small boats) and Profit Taking (two players start with similar resources and see who has the most value by day’s end). Again, sports are one of those things which bring life into a city. Created by the disease wetlung, the Drowned are humans who can be puppeteered and possessed by Colony, an underwater fungal hivemind somewhere beneath the city. They can instantly communicate with each other when Colony wishes and use this hivemind communication to focus on and efficiently eliminate one enemy at a time. The Drowned seek to put themselves in positions of influence and power, all the better to promote the fungal intelligence’s inscrutable plans. Reduce your foe’s Morale to 0 (or -12, depending on the importance of the enemy) and you defeat them. You’ll also get to describe the consequence, whether that’s surrender, swooning, fleeing, or just giving you what you want. Mind you, a defeated and humiliated foe probably has a long and bitter memory for revenge, and repeated rivals or enemies make for fun games. Social Investigative Abilities Why GUMSHOE for Swords & Sorcery?– Kevin Kulp on the match of system to setting in Swords of the Serpentine.Play one of the Drowned if you accidentally got infected, if you want bizarre fungal powers, if being an autonomous part of a hivemind sounds fun to you, and if the idea of the cordyceps fungus (search the internet for “cordyceps zombie fungi”) is more fascinating than horrifying. Designer Notes: The Drowned It really is thematic to Sword and Sorcery fiction that the people that are driven by greed and selfishness often end up being worse than the person that initially was the villain, and that sorcery often unleashes a dangerous monstrosity way beyond what any of the antagonists really wanted. This is a solid introduction both to the rules and to the tropes of the genre. Much more interesting to me are investigative abilities. For these, the rating may have story meaning, but the most important thing is the simple binary — do you have the ability or not? These abilities aren’t rolled, and instead are used as avenues to give the players all the information they need to proceed forward in the game. That is, when the players are in a scene, and there is some question regarding next steps, the GM is mindful of the things they might know, and leans on the investigative abilities to find the correct avenue to get that information in the player’s hands. 5 This is the sixth in our series on non-human heroes which has so far covered the spider-like Arakene, the Considerata (humans whose souls are contractually linked to gods), Constructs, Intelligent Animals, and Unsleeping Advisors (secret undead). This month’s Ancestry is inspired by the cordyceps fungus, The Last of Us, and terrifying hiveminds. Be sure to read the previously published rules on Non-Human Heroes if you haven’t already.. The Drowned

That foundation of commerce folds into the expectation of law. Certainly, law’s job is to provide an environment where commerce can safely be plied, but its priorities are also shaped by that emphasis. The very worse crimes in the city are things like counterfeiting and fraud, with things like murder, or even theft, coming as sloppy seconds. The idea is that these things (and the corruption of sorcery, which is also super illegal) are existential threats to the city, and everything else is mere inconvenience.

At fledgling power, we have is a Conan who is more thief than warrior. He’s adept at breaking and entering, good in a fight (especially if he fights unconventionally) but without tactical mastery. He’s young, and only knows how to relate to others through posturing and insults.