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

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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. Lastly, the core pitch for SotS is Sword & Sandal urban adventure 2, which is a mixed bag for me. I’ve never been much of a Conan guy, but I love Lankhmar to my very bones, so a lot was going to depend on the specifics.

I’m talking a lot about the skills and crunchy bits, but it’s worth noting that these are arguably all a bit secondary to defining a character compared to the big three: Adjectives, Drives and Gear. Gear: worn chain armor, great sword, smoldering blue gaze, panther-like demeanor, full skin of wine, urge for adventure, and still a full and endless supply of disdain for the soft and the civilized. Gear: Loincloth, well-honed sword, stolen dagger, rope and grappling hook that need only survive this one adventure, empty coin purse, empty skin of wine, empty belly, but a full and endless supply of disdain for the soft and the civilized. Standard 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.

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Words of the Serpentine: Finishing the Book– Kevin Kulp on reviewing the print proofs and the home stretch. And yet, there are still LOTS of contracts written and lots of business done, which in turn demands people to do it. Government legitimacy flows from the handful of rulers selected by the goddess, but then distributed through delegation upon delegation, until it reaches the point where the state of committees and official bodies of law in the city can be as much a matter of improvisation as any legality. For players who love bloviating and paperwork, this is an absolute delight. Wealth is handled interestingly. To reflect the idea that character fortunes will go up and down, it’s a value that’s set at the start of a game. Technically, it’s a 1-5 rating, but practically it’s a -2 to +2 rating, with -2 being “super broke” and +2 being “rolling in it”. In addition to giving some fictional framing, any rating other than zero turn into an investigative ability that works like an allegiance with wealth or poverty. Having the Drowned as Allies means that the fungal hivemind considers you trustworthy and useful (even if you aren’t! The Drowned are notoriously bad at noticing when someone lies to them). It will try to keep you safe, will attempt to convince you to willingly join the hivemind, and will expect you to keep its existence a secret. Use your allegiance to gain information from any of Colony’s infected drones, or to learn about Eversink’s history within the past few centuries. 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.

Sorcery is another way that Swords of the Serpentine diverges from other Gumshoe games. While there are some other supernatural abilities, like Spirit Sight or Prophesy, these are supernatural means of gathering or learning information, like other investigative abilities. Sorcery requires points of Corruption, and that means that Sorcery is never really a good thing, and at best is a necessary evil, and the character delves into the secrets of the ancient Serpentine empire for power, or forms a bond with demons or minor godlings to tap into their powers. In the alternate rules section, there is also an alternative to corruption, which is Thaumaturgy. Sorcery remains a combat skill, but instead of spending corruption, the character spends Thaumaturgy points. Thaumaturgists don’t get to use curses or set wards. They still choose spheres, but those spheres are more “scientific” applications of magic, like alchemy, mesmerism, and poisoncraft. A Thaumaturgist may not wave their hand and make a wall disappear or blow up, but they can still stare into someone’s soul and do morale damage or fling an alchemically treated stone at a foe to cause a thunderclap to injure them. Making Your Character As always in Swords of the Serpentine, you should be able to know a character just by reading their Adjectives, Drives (or “what three things are best in life?”), and Gear. Fledgling

Sample Hero – The Drowned

As in other GUMSHOE games, you can also spend Social Investigative abilities to manipulate the supporting characters around you. Want people to trust you so you run a scam? Spend a point of Trustworthy. Want people to ignore you while you slip into their mansion? Spend a point of Servility. You get the idea. In Swords of the Serpentine, following sword & sorcery-style clues while roleplaying your character propels you headlong into mysteries and adventures filled with danger and forbidden knowledge. A clue may let you find lost and sunken treasure, ancient jungle ruins, the lost key to a sorcerous trap, or the identity of a charming murderer. Cities like this have been used for all kinds of RPGs with different focuses over the years. From dungeon crawling, level-based games, heist focused games, and games with gritty, exacting rules. When I heard that the Gumshoe system, which has its roots in mysteries and investigations, was going to be applied to the genre with Swords of the Serpentine, I knew I was going to be taking a closer look. Disclaimer Having the Drowned as Enemies means that Colony considers you an enemy and a threat. It will tirelessly work to infect you, exile you, or kill you – whatever it needs to do to eliminate you as a threat. Expect danger from anyone, because other than an examination with Leechcraft there’s no easy way to tell who is infected. There’s a section on the rest of the world, and it’s fine. Nothing wrong with that, but to my mind its primary job is to provide a list of exciting sounding names of far off places to refer to while in Eversink. It accomplishes this admirably.

Felonious Intent represents the hivemind’s ability to watch or remember an individual from multiple angles over an extended time, and to draw conclusions based on their past behavior Outside of co-creating Dungeons & Dragons, the next biggest contribution Gygax may have made to fantasy gaming is Appendix N. I’m not going to defend Gygax’s taste in fantasy as being definitive by any means, but Appendix N introduced the concept of mapping your inspirational media. In my case, Appendix N introduced me to Fritz Leiber and the city of Lankhmar. More than about anything on the list, the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories fired my imagination. As noted before, the whole city is sinking, at various speeds. Importantly, it’s the buildings that are sinking, not the land, not the roads, not the canals. Just the buildings. This is weird enough in its own right, but it’s important to note that people are aware of this and do all kinds of crazy people-like stuff to deal with this, whether it’s shoring up the walls as things sink to create super-basements, to lifting a building on supports to build a new bottom floor rather than let a treasure sink. That this allows easy justification of all manner of subterranean adventures is delightful, but it ALSO means that the city has incentive to build up, so you get something that’s very vertical and difficult to navigate in places, which is pretty much ideal for a city of adventure. The sly and clever villain is not necessarily puissant in combat. That, of course, is why they hire protection.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. Honestly, that’s a fairly small thing, and not really much of a ding in an otherwise really solid product. Trying to think about who I wouldn’t recommend this too, and the list is shorter than I’d originally thought. There are people for whom the Gumshoe system just brings along too much stuff, and they’re going to get less out of this. Transitioning from D&D will probably be a bit too much of a leap — there’s enough combat crunch to feel familiar, but the differences in tone (and especially the differences in magic) may make it a bridge too far unless those changes are explicitly what one is looking for. The Drowned are surprisingly strong, mostly because the fungus that controls them has little concern about ripping apart an infected’s muscles after they’ve revealed themselves. Sample Allegiances

Also, it might all just be a giant scam, or a might be a mix of real and scams. It’s not like the goddess is providing paperwork. ↩ Gear: Ledgers, ink, and quills; daily diary; fragile spectacles; a high and often tremulous voice; unremarkable clothing; doting and proud parents; a sharpened letter-opener; a constant murmur of assurance in his head; quiet shame over your unremarkable life to date; quiet pride that you finally seems to be bulking up with muscle. Sample Adversary – The Drowned Drowned Elder However, that’s not the extent of the split. Allegiances are another kind of investigative ability, representing relationships and social connections. They work like investigative abilities — you can get information from a friend, after all — and you can spend pool to call in favors. One interesting twist in the system is that it supports many maneuvers (disarms and whatnot) but does so in a fairly elegant way. Someone on the receiving end of a maneuver has the option of going along with it, or taking more damage. This brings some nice depth to an otherwise very straightforward system, and it also mitigates a lot of the potential problems that come with social combat systems and their use as coercion. You can spend points from your investigative pool to get extra context on clues, or to add narrative benefits to the scenario that are relevant to the ability

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Oh, right, this does include the best rule ever for travel montages. Ask a player what bad thing happened. Ask a second player how it got worse. Ask a third player how it was resolved and what the consequences were. Simple, efficient, empowering and makes travel feel like it matters. The Eversink Post Office– Emily Dresner with an article about The Great and Distinguished Eversink Guild of Letter Deliverers (aka the Post Office). Chapter Eight: GM Advice (examining tropes of the genre, how to structure mysteries, and allow for player improvisation and shared world building)