Planning and running Sword & Sorcery campaigns

[Yora]

Earlier this year I started a new campaign with a new group, and right now it looks that it will continue for two or three years, as long as I keep the game going regularly. But you never now for sure.
So what I really wanted to do was to make it all a series of mini-campaigns that wrap up nicely every 6 sessions or so. That way new players can join in easily, and it's not a big issues if some drop out at a later point. I've always been a big fan of Sword & Sorcery style fantasy that is more about the experiences of the characters and not so much of big stories that are about saving the world or the whole kingdom from massive destruction. And both these preferences actually go hand in hand quite nicely.

But when starting to plan my campaign, I now realize I still developed the initial idea into a generic old "stop the evil sorcerer from unleashing a terrible force on the land" story, with large armies fighting big battles later on. I think going through with all those things I've in mind, it would take easily 20 to 30 sessions, and I'm just not sure if the campaign will go that long. Also, I think I lost the initial goal of having the PCs react freely in a pseudo-open world where things are happening without their participation.
So it's not straight back to square one (since we already played two sessions and completed the first scenario), but I still think I have to rethink completely how things will continue from this spot on. So far, the only element of continuity is a sealed green box of which the PCs and the players don't know anything. So I still have all the freedom to make it anything I want to. (Hehe, an actual Schrödinger's Box.)

The "what" is something I'll have to come up with myself. But before I start doing that, I think it would be wise to think a lot about the "how".
I want the game to be generally Sword & Sorcery in stil. That means the focus is on the PCs; the reason they get involved in bigger things is because they overlap with their own goals, instead of doing it for their employers/allies; things can get out of hand quickly and violently; and the distinction between good guys and bad guys is blurry at best.

How do you prepare adventures in this style?

I think one important thing is to have complex character backgrounds and motivations. S&S protagonists do things because they want something, not because it benefits the greater good. This is something I think our PCs are still considerably lacking. But there probably are better ways to do this then telling the players (mostly new) to come up with some more background. Any ideas?

--

Common Sword & Sorcery conventions:

Lots of characters who are not fully good or evil.
Heroes follow their personal goals and don't serve the common good.
Heroes play by their own moral rules, but genrally stick to them.
Fights break out suddenly and frequently.
Success is never certain, heroes often lose and have to flee.
Almost everything can be killed, but it usually requires trickery instead of a direct assault.
Betrayal is common.
Magic to resurrect the dead, teleport, or divine the truth and future is not commonly available.
Characters are usually in the mid-level range (in D&D-style games ca. 4th to 12th level).
Heroes are powerful warriors who can take a handful of regular attackers at once, but still have no chance to stand up against a dozen guardsmen once they are surrounded.
With the exception of fictional animals (owlbear, chocobo), true supernatural monsters (manticore, chimera, gorgon) are rare and very dangerous.
Social corruption is endemic. Heroes can remove a particularly vile slave lord or captain of the guard, but they can't purge evil from a town or city.
People are not equal. Slavery and discrimination is common and rarely questioned.
Treasure is often stolen and looted, but then spend just as fast. Most heroes don't have lots of material possessions.
Monsters are usually either mundane (if fictional), or enitrely supernatural. There rarely is a middle ground or "casual magic".
Religions are many and often strange or exotic.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

What I've taken to doing for my one-shot adventure sessions is to tell the players a couple of days before the game roughly what the scenario is going to be, and asking them why their character is going to be involved.

For example: The adventure will be taking place in the castle of Baron Vileness, who is hated by the locals for his harsh taxes and bad behaviour. He often abducts pretty young folk and abuses them. He is said to have vast reserves of treasure and magical artefacts.
Why does your character want to break into the castle, and what are they planning to do there?

This lets the players think up their own characters' motives, which may only overlap with the other characters' motives in that they're both trying to get into Castle Vileness and get something from it.

Armed with the players input, I then tweak the adventure to give them what they want.
You get to steer the players into your adventure, but they control their characters' motivations.

[Talos]

If you have experienced players, you can give them reasons by doing hanis things to them or loved ones or the family business.

In the above example: one of the young people stolen and is being abused could be a favorite simbling or other family member. This could work expecially well if some of the PC's are friends or know each other. I need a favore kind of thing.

Or perhaps make them feel violated in some harsh way to motivate them. maybe find out that your father has been pimping mom out to the Baron to pay for his debt to the evil Baron, but he has taken aliking to the sister so he is asking for more payment when the PC's find out about everything and in their investigation dad was set up from the get go because of something valuable on the property he owns or has access to.

[Thrudd]

Altair's method is a good one for episodic adventures. Give a paragraph or two about the scenario they are about to embark on, based on the information the characters could have gathered. Let each player decide their characters' motive for being involved (and which character will be going if they have more than one, this format is a good one for letting players play different characters). You can also give an opportunity to let them select gear and supplies they would want to bring specific to the expedition. The session can start as they are on their way to the adventure location, or already having arrived. Sometimes this may require adding elements the players come up with that you had not planned, such as a missing or kidnapped person they are looking for, or an employer who has paid them to find something.
There is always the in-character roleplay method, as well, where you have them play out talking to townsfolk and gathering rumors. They will hear about each of the adventures you have prepared, and can decide where they want to go and how to prepare for it.


I don't think it is necessary to have complex backgrounds or motivations. Sometimes too detailed a background can actually be a hindrance, if it is not in accordance with the direction of the game overall, as the character cannot reasonably be motivated to participate in all the adventures without obvious contrivance.
The personalities and motivations of the characters will develop over time as they are played. How the players react to the situations they find themselves in defines the characters more than anything the player might invent about their background. For instance, we learn about Conan's personality and motives not through extensive background exposition, but through his behavior in the course of the adventures he finds himself on.
You do need to give the players some sort of guideline regarding what type of adventures the game focuses on, and ask them to create characters that have reason to participate in those adventures. For instance, if the game is largely about seeking out lost treasures and magic from the ruins, the characters all need to want to do that for one reason or another. You can't have a character who only cares about protecting their family and managing the farm, except for a one-shot adventure where their family is in peril. You end up having to constantly put the world in danger in order to keep characters like that adventuring, and it can feel very contrived.

So you should design adventures around a general theme, such as treasure hunting, or gathering information about lost technology, or investigating the supernatural, or being in the service of some leader who can ask them to do anything. The players can then create characters which are motivated to participate in whatever you might come up with. As long as you stick to the general theme you've established, it should be easy for all the players to see why their characters would be involved in every adventure. If a player decides their character would no longer want to participate in this sort of adventure, they can retire them and start a new one, bringing the original one out of retirement if a specific adventure warrants it. For instance, if the premise demands that the players all be loyal to their tribal leader and do whatever they are asked, a character who decides to leave the tribe will need to be retired.

[Yora]

Thanks for your replies. Let's continue this were we last where:

What elements do you usually find in Sword & Sorcery, that are not common in fantasy in general? What things make S&S feel different from other generic fantasy stories?

Lots of characters who are not fully good or evil.
Heroes follow their personal goals and don't serve the common good.
Fights break out suddenly and frequently.
Success is never certain, heroes often lose and have to flee.
Betrayal is common.
Magic to resurrect the dead, teleport, or divine the truth and future is not commonly available.
Characters are usually in the mid-level range (in D&D-style games ca. 4th to 12th level).
Heroes are powerful warriors who can take a handful of regular attackers at once, but still have no chance to stand up against a dozen guardsmen once they are surrounded.
With the exception of fictional animals (owlbear, chocobo), true supernatural monsters (manticore, chimera, gorgon) are rare and very dangerous.
Social corruption is endemic. Heroes can remove a particularly vile slave lord or captain of the guard, but they can't purge evil from a town or city..

Do you think you can add anything to this list, or have any comments on the items that are on it so far?

[D-naras]

The heroes usually have a code they follow. This doesn't neccesarily make them lawful or good, but they will stick with their code in spite of the total corruption of the rest of the world. Those that break their codes don't last.
Civilisation makes you weak and corrupted.
If it bleeds, you can kill it.

[Yora]

If it bleeds, you can kill it.
As a character mindset, this is certainly true. But what would that mean for a GM?
I think in Sword & Sorcery, even more so than in generic fantasy, having to run from a monster that is just too powerful and terrible is a common thing. S&S heroes seem to be on the run more than anyone else, except maybe for the Fellowship of the Ring, which was ludicrously outnumbered by at least 10 to 1 pretty much all the time. S&S monster are a lot harder to kill than usually.
However, I think the original Predator quote was more implying that the crerature could be ambushed and outsmarted after it became obvious that they had no chance of killing it conventionally.

Using trickery to defeat an overwhelming foe certainly is a big aspect of Sword & Sorcery.

[D-naras]

That's a Conan quote actually. I guess, you can either use it as a signal to players that they have a fighting chance against a horrible monster. And using trickery can make the monster bloody faster, so it works there.

Other themes of S&S

Gold is the usual driving force for heroes and it's spent exceedingly fast. Not for fancy magic items or villas and such, rather, for booze and company.
Lots and lots of lengthy travels. It's not unusual to trote the global searching for that one girl you were hired to bring back from the slavers.
Also, slavers. They provide easy villains, plot hooks and supply the evil sorcerers with their sacrificial victims.

[Yora]

It is? I didn,t know that. :smallbiggrin:

Often slavery seems to be very common and not regarded as something overly terrible. Serfs are so dependent on their lords that actual slavery doesn't have to be much different. Which is for field workers and house servants. Working in the mine and on galleys is the fate for captured enemies and criminals. Seeing slaves shouldn't be anything outrageous, even for the most valorous heroes.
Raiders who burn and loot villages and sell any survivors to shady slave traders are a different story altogether. Those are the most despicable types of villains.

Speaking of which: Weird cultist everywhere!
Not necessarily all evil, but temples that worship exotic gods and have strange rituals are all over the place.

[D-naras]

Raiders who burn and loot villages and sell any survivors to shady slave traders are a different story altogether. Those are the most despicable types of villains.

Those are the ones I mean! (The slavers, not the raiders)



Speaking of which: Weird cultist everywhere!
Not necessarily all evil, but temples that worship exotic gods and have strange rituals are all over the place.

Cultists have to be reclusive to work IMO. Otherwise their are not a cult but a religion. Cave-dwelling cultists of Whatevra must be a thing though.

[Yora]

Crazy swamp and cave cults are of course a big thing. But in addition there tend to be lots of public mystery cults in the cities as well. Instead of being established churches, you get your doomsday prophets and enlightened masters as well, who have their small or medium sized followerships who serve them and make them rich. Or acetic monks caring for the poor in the name of some obscure deity. Figuring out to what group a specific cult belongs is the difficult part.

Here is another point I just remembered: People are not equal. Sword & Sorcery settings are about as unfree and unequal as it gets. Neither players or PCs have to like it or agree with it, but discrimination should be encountered at every corner. Not so much racism, as this is a quite modern concept, but discrimination of culture and tribal allegiance. A lord can consider a fellow ruler from a faraway land as an equal, but have nothing but contempt for every member of a neighboring tribe or a lower class of people from his own realm. Color of skin or even different species does not define a relationship, but shared culture and values.
Minority characters are not only allowed, but actually encouraged by the genre. Navigating the prejudices they encounter everywhere and gaining peoples trust or forcing their submission is a big deal in Sword & Sorcery.

[Thrudd]

What you are describing so far sounds like Howard's Hyperborea/Conan stories almost exactly. While that is certainly a great setting for Sword and Sorcery, I don't think the S&S genre as a whole is necessarily limited to this. I consider "Tales of the Dying Earth" as S&S as well. Some of the protagonist characters in these stories have noble motives in varying degree (Turjan, Guyal of Sfere) while others are completely selfish and immoral (Mazirian, Liane the Wayfarer, Cugel the Clever).
I think the term S&S is only meaningful as a sub-genre relative to other fantasy sub-genres. Where high fantasy is about conflict between supernatural absolutes of good and evil which are always distinct, S&S is about the known vs. the unknown. Civilized vs uncivilized, familiar vs alien. While the protagonists may have motives that could seen as moral or immoral, they always find themselves facing the unknown, which tends to be dangerous and often incomprehensible. They must always find themselves leaving the comfort of the familiar. Monsters are scary and alien, magic is mysterious and dangerous. Foreign/alien civilizations have strange mores and customs which even someone considered immoral in their own culture may find frightening, confusing, or disgusting.
The story need not literally take place away from civilization in all cases, but it must include elements of the unknown, outside the characters' comfort zone. Dark magic, alien cults, a sorcerer's compound, strange, dangerous, eldritch creatures hidden from sight, people involved with forces that should not be meddled with.

Regarding cults, I feel like cult vs religion is really only a matter of scale and cultural endorsement. A religion is embraced by the entire culture or endorsed by the rulers. A cult is a smaller movement that has never been fully accepted or a newer movement that does not yet have the support of tradition. They don't necessarily have to keep themselves secret. Take the Cult of Seth in the first Conan movie, they were building their "accursed towers" in every city in Zamora. Of course, their disturbing rituals were not performed in view of the public, which is why they belong in a Conan story. The best cults for S&S stories are the ones which have strange practices that disturb the mores of civilized folk. They deal with alien gods with incomprehensible motives or are threatening to the protagonists' civilization. Sometimes these will be hidden or part of some lost or alien civilization, which is exactly why they are featured in the stories: because of their unknown and dangerous aspects. But there is no reason their existence couldn't be known, they might even have a presence within civilization, as in the movie.

[Yora]

Very good point: Magic and Monsters are truly "supernatural". Shamans might be "clean", but still dealing with really scary stuff. Seeing actual magic in action should be an extraordinary event for the common folk.

[Yora]

I combined all the other aspects you mentioned into a full list in the first post. If anyone has more to add, say so and I'll add them to the list.

What good sources and materials for Sword & Sorcery do you know about and can recommend?

Adventurer, Conqueror, King: An OSR game based on BECMI D&D, but it's not a direct clone and instead tries to modernize the game based on new standards that have become comon in the last decades. For example modifiers for ability scores are the same for each ability, thieves no longer use d100s but d20s for their skills, and high armor class is better than low. While there are character classes, the game strongly encourages making your own custom classes to best reflect the setting and there are no separate races. Instead you got elven spellsword, dwarven craftpriest, and human explorer classes. I've only read over it briefly and never played it, but it looks as good as it's considerable reputation, and as the name implies make a big deal about establishing your stronghold and domain.

Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea: My current game of choice. Based quite closely on 1st Edition AD&D, but does a great job of cleaning up the terrible mess that was the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, and puts all the rules in a sensible order and explains them in ways that are easy to understand. It also includes some simplifications, but still retains negative armor class, which is the one big minus point for me. However, conversion to BAB is very easy, as the new attack bonus for each class and level is actually already in each class description table. The other downside is the lack of nonhuman races, since the last of the six chapters deals with the Hyperborea setting, in which these don't exist. Minor nuisance, since you can simply take the races from any other OSR game that has them, but the rest of the system is good enough to make up for that.
Even though it has swords and sorcerers in the name, the game still uses standard D&D spellcasting instead of replacing it with something new and more appropriate, which I consider a big missed opportunity. Since it's the same system as all the other retroclones, this isn't actually a minus point when picking an OSR game.

Conan d20: A more or less typical OGL game that takes the 3rd Edition D&D rules and customizes them to the Hyborian Age. It has it's own list of about a dozen new classes, as well as it's own magic system. There are some minor rules like Honor, a more elaborate system of defending against attacks, and more detailed armor system, but otherweise it's pretty standard d20 with six ability scores, skills, feats, character levels, and so on.
I'd say it does a pretty good job of adapting the d20 system for a Conan game. The only problem I see with it, that it is an adaptation of the d20 system. Personally, I feel that a Sword & Sorcery game should be fast and you make cool things up as you go, and the d20 system is pretty much the opposite of all that. Still, if you enjoy d20 games and want more than just using standard 3rd Edition D&D, it's a really good game.

Conan is also the one S&S game I know, that has a full monster book released. Most of the beasts inside are nothing spectacular though, and the majority are basically generic variants of apes, ghouls, and beast men.

Crypts & Things: I don't personally know much about the game, other than it's a Sword & Sorcery adaptation of Swords & Wizardry, which in turn is based on Original Dungeons & Dragons. I've seen it recommended in many places, but can't say much more about it.

Dragon Age RPG: While the books are written with the Dragon Age setting in mind and large sections of them are descriptions of the world of Thedas, the rules are actually a very nice generic, lowish-magic Fantasy RPG. In complexity it's similar to original D&D, if maybe not even simpler, which I consider a big plus. It's still class and level based, which is something that seems quite rate outside of D&D. I quite like it, since it allows for quick character creation and players don't need a lot of rules to make the character their want and have fun with it. Supposedly there are plans to publish it as a generic Fantasy RPG seperate from the Dragon Age setting, but updates about that are very few and not saying much.

What I personally would really love to see, are some books that adress the gamemastering and worldbuilding aspect of sword & sorcery adventures and campaigns. But these seem to be very rare and far between in general, not just for S&S.

[Yora]

Copied from another forum, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on this:

I think one thing that seems to happening a lot in Sword & Sorcery stories, and a lot more than in other types of fantasy, is that things go completely and horribly wrong. Both in the form of conspiracy and betrayal, but also accidents and really unfortunate coincidences.
One of the recent masters of this style would probably be Tarantino, whose most popular movie is even called "Pulp Fiction", which happens to be the origin of the Sword & Sorcery genre.

Here's some ideas I have so far. Most are based on the assumption that PCs can defeat 3 or 4 soldiers at once, but not a dozen; there is no resurrection; no (or barely any) teleportation; and no reliable ways to see the future or divine the truth.
Usually PCs can kill guards and villains however they want and then simply tell the guards they uncovered an evil plot, and the guards will just belive that and let them go. But since S&S is rarely about clearing honest society of unsavory elements, such situations should be a lot more complicated. A guard captain, who is going to be corrupt to some degree anyway, probably won't hear any lame excuses from foreigners and vagabonds who just killed a powerful politician or merchant of the cities upper class. If PCs happen to kill someone important who had powerful friends, they need to hide the deed and their involvement, even if they were justified.
The PCs are send to do a job, but they were really just meant to be a distraction or a sacrifice, which they only find out once the trap has closed.
The PCs infiltrate a building or fortress while nobody is home or an important passage unguarded. But when they are already a far distance inside, that turns out to not actually be the case, making the way out a lot more problematic.
The heroes break into a palace, but find signs that someone else is breaking in at the same time, which could make things a lot more complicated. Or they want to assassinate someone, but when they reach the target, he's already dead.
The PCs successfully manage to escape from a dungeon or mansion, but the guards are not giving up the chase and keep coming after them for a considerable amount of time. Even if they make it back to their hideout, the guards could start searching houses and getting informations from neighbors who saw the PCs entering.
The PCs ambush and kill a group of enemies. But it turns out they got the wrong people.
The PCs do something in great secret, but some unrelated bystanders walk in and see the whole thing.
Walking down the street or entering a tavern, the heroes run into one of the villains lieutenants by pure chance.
The PCs have agreed to trade their hostage for something from their opponents in return. Then the hostage unexpectedly dies just before the exchange.
Allies of the PCs arrive in a moment where they really can use the help. But that's when the allies switch sides or reveal their true allegiance.
The PCs are supposed to either deliver or pick up a very important item and time is of the essence. But their contact never shows up.
A boat is supposed to pick up the PCs after a daring raid, or someone is to meet them with horses waiting outside the city gate. Again, their method of escape is nowhere to be found.
The PCs break into a dungeon or palace to steal an item. But when they make it to the chamber, the pedestal is empty.
The PCs have aquired a special item that allows them to defeat a monster or do something very important. But at the moment of truth, it doesn't seem to do anything.