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

Product Information

Quests tend to be small, personal, and centered around self-interest and small groups instead of saving a nation or the world. Powerful allegiances that give you influence in one or more factions across the city, but which can earn you equally powerful enemies… In most GUMSHOE games, you have one defense pool (usually Stability) which measures how well you can keep it together when everything around you is going to Hell. Swords of the Serpentine has Morale; a high Morale usually means you’re stubborn, confident, and relatively self-assured. Overcoming someone’s Morale is handy because it defeats them without leaving a corpse, and you’re not going to get tried for murder if you just clashed with someone socially important. Ideas for Dungeon World Moves, from Rob Donoghue – Troy Press on Dungeon World: The Tale of Old Dogan Disclaimer: I was involved in the playtesting of this game, and loved the crap out of it even then. The final product bears out all of my hopes - and some of my reservations. Of those, more anon, but I've tried to be as objective as I can in the following review.

If you have an investigative ability with any ranks, you gain a clue whenever you are in the right place at the right time, without rolling or spending anything 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 Adversary – The Drowned

The way that the city's structure and story is woven into the setting and gameplay is illustrated by the Adversaries section. Each major faction in the city is detailed with an army list of commanders and minions, fully statted, so that any run-in with the City Watch or the Church of Denari can be immediately fleshed out with a complete cast of opponents. The corollary is that this is not a wilderness setting: the whole world where Eversink resides is detailed, with plenty of hints as to where you can take your characters for wilderness hex-crawling, but the action is clearly geared to Eversink itself. The spirit of the setting is closer to Early Renaissance with fireballs replacing firearms than medieval knights and castles, although there is some guidance for recreating Eversink as a steampunk setting if you want to shift the technological development needle. Out-of-the-box Eversink is such a rich and stimulating setting, though, that I doubt too many people will bother. In fact, I expect that, as with many Pelgrane products, gamers who aren't enamoured of Gumshoe will buy the book anyway for the superlative setting detail. Because all of these spends must be justified within the context of the pool from which the points are spent, Sorcery becomes very flexible in the game. While Sorcerers have a limited number of Spheres that they can use to help limit their power, it’s still wide open to do things like proposing spends that teleport or destroy walls that are in the way, for example. Magic! Social Combat in Swords of the Serpentine– Kevin Kulp explains the robust and fun social combat systems in Swords of the Serpentine that let you defeat a foe without laying a finger on them. Characters can have five or more pieces of minor, iconic gear that define your character. While these might be temporarily lost, you always end up with these items (or ones just like it) in your possession without needing to spend wealth or favors to get more.

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. Defenses – Health: Health Threshold 4, Armor 2 (chain, assuming he’s bothering to wear a shirt at all), Health 10 For comparison, a sovereign Hero has about 16 adventures worth of experience over a standard Hero, and a standard Hero has about 17 adventures more experience than a fledgling Hero. That’s enough of a power and capability difference to feel like you’re at very different stages of the Hero’s career. A fun scenario might be to run three adventures: one at standard level to showcase a threat or problem, then one at fledgling level to show how the threat or problem originated, and finally one at sovereign level to let your Heroes crush the threat once and for all. The city was founded by refugees that signed a pact with a local minor god, and both the city and the goddess have grown in power, although the contract was signed so long ago that people have forgotten what all it entails. Even beggars in the city aren’t allowed to beg without selling something, which means they often sell stones that carry the “blessings of the goddess.”Because the genre can get violent and gruesome, and because various sections mention violence to animals and children, disease, and physical maladies, there are a few places where the text might get intense for those that have an aversion to those elements. Given some of the tropes included in the setting, I wish there were a little bit more room devoted to safety tools, especially when part of the safety discussion that is included is essentially search terms. Special Abilities: Infection, Hivemind, Monstrous Ability (cost 3), Regenerate (half of health damage inflicted), Strength, Summoning (cost 3 – other Drowned) The reason these are all related is that they are all rooted in contracts and agreements, which are the metaphysical and metaphorical foundation of the city. Trade and commerce are forms of worship. This has interesting implications, like the beggars selling stones or the fact that churches are run like banks. Literally – churches are big-time moneylenders, but the vig takes the form of acts of devotion rather than more cash. This idea that everything can be (and should be) bought and sold in a fair and open way is foundational to almost all interactions in the city.