The world is hard and seldom fair. All too often, “justice” varies based on your wealth and importance. Swords of the Serpentine guidelines– Collected guidelines Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner used when writing the game. Lots of guidance on clues, which is good but also kind of what I expect from a Gumshoe game. Nice bit on Plot Maps as Dungeons (one of those idea that is always fun, but also works better on paper than in practice) which I’m very curious to see in final layout. 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.

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.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 Beyond my issues with Gumshoe, I probably have only one criticism, and that is that I’m not entirely sure how this r Sorcery is rare and dangerous, and seldom can be trusted. Sorcery corrupts and has a cost. Its rules and origins are little-known. 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. ↩ 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.

Special: You may not possess any ranks of the Investigative ability Liar’s Tell. If you have ranks of Liar’s Tell when you become Drowned, reassign these ranks to other Investigative abilities. 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.”You know what you don’t see too often? Robust and fun social combat systems that lets you defeat a foe without laying a finger on them. You know what we really wanted for this game? It’s worth calling out that magic is an investigative ability, and it’s explicitly more potent than any other. This is because it comes with the cost of corruption — every time you use magic, you either corrupt the world or yourself, and it accrues. Magic is nasty, and I love it, but I also understand why they included optional rules for less potent but also less horrific options. 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 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. There are various tables that help to define the scope and range of magical effects, and how much those effects cost in corruption. In addition, if a Sorcerer dies, they can spend all their remaining corruption in a Death Curse, and treat this curse as if it had been cast using more corruption than the Sorcerer expended upon their death.

Streamlined abilities that power four distinct types of heroes, and which you can mix-and-match across professions to customize your character further Now, because you don’t roll for them, spending points from investigative pools has a different mechanic than from general pools – rather than give a mechanical push, they give more of a narrative push. This may be some specific power or ability that is fueled by the spend, or it might just be an opportunity to get a somewhat better or more interesting effect out of an investigative spend, or otherwise just do something cool. 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. 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 Much more effort than in most other Gumshoe systems has gone into individualizing the player-characters, as part of embedding them in the setting. As well as positioning in fairly familiar iconic archetypes, such as thief or warrior, characters are kitted out with five or so iconic possessions that help define them, as well as a personal "what is best in life?" Conanesque drive. (When I joined in the SotS playtest, I drew up an impoverished son of an ancient noble family who used his flute both to play ancient airs and to cudgel his opponents. I'm determined to give him another outing some day.)

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. That probably seems like a weird thing to focus on when there are other bullets about dark sorceries, mighty thewed warriors and so on. But as a reader of settings, it’s gold to me for a couple of reasons:

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. As a city, it has the things you expect, which is to say, neighborhoods with stuff in them. This is the mandatory city format we have come to expect, and it delivers. Where it gets more interesting are the elements that hold the city together, and I’m going to talk about the five which I think really bring it to life because they are ever-present but also constantly changing based off context. 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 I mentioned the carnivorous birds and the funerary statues. Birds have a lot of cache in the city, in part because Denari was originally a swan spirit who changed with the times and what her worshippers needed. The people in Eversink are more likely to have watch geese than watch dogs. I love the scenarios that spring to mind from that setting detail. 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 AllegiancesWhy GUMSHOE for Swords & Sorcery?– Kevin Kulp on the match of system to setting in Swords of the Serpentine.