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

£13.495
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Swords of The Serpentine - Hardcover Role Playing Game Book, Pelgrane Press

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

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Price: £13.495
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Streamlined abilities that power four distinct types of heroes, and which you can mix-and-match across professions to customize your character further In the quote from The Hobbit that opens this article, Smaug is using a Morale-based Maneuver to convince Bilbo to show himself. Eversink is, literally, a port city that keeps sinking into the ground, with new buildings being built upwards to outpace the sinking. The primary religion of the city is the worship of the goddess Denari, whose religion is based on commerce. Also, the city is technically her body, which means that her worshippers don’t look kindly on anyone spreading corruption (the magical kind) in the city, as she is metaphysically pushed out of those areas tainted with it.

If you are familiar with the Gumshoe system, a lot of this will feel familiar. If you are familiar with TimeWatch, it’s really familiar. But there are some quirks unique to this version of the system. In general, here are the basics: One of my favorite ways to utilize these pool spends comes from examples in Laws and Traditions, where a character can spend points from this pool to declare obscure laws that people have forgotten are on the books. I won’t go into too much detail, but this reminds me of the great “the police can’t arrest you at a waffle house until you have finished your meal” law that my group came up with in a Monster of the Week game.Chapter Nine: The City of Eversink (the districts and factions of the city, including ongoing plots and drives)

The boundaries of kingdoms are fluid and are seldom set in stone. They vary based on the actions of the strong. You only know how to physically reach Colony if it specifically summons you, and that’s rare. When Colony nudges you with a request, you may refuse at the cost of 1 Morale damage. If Colony insists or attempts to possess you fully, you may resist at the cost of 6 Morale damage. If this defeats you, special circumstances occur (SotS p. 87).

Drives (what is best in life?): To crush your enemies, to rule your conquered nations, and to put your enemies to the sword The Eversink Post Office– Emily Dresner with an article about The Great and Distinguished Eversink Guild of Letter Deliverers (aka the Post Office). Investigative abilities: Servility 2, Trustworthy 2; Ancestry (Drowned) 5, Felonious Intent 1, Scurrilous Rumors 1 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

There are also magic items. They are, by and large, colorful and fun. Well, something like fun, but a bit darker.After all that? You might have fun skimming the blog posts here at https://pelgranepress.com/category/products/swords-of-the-serpentine/; there you’ll find a number of free SotS resources for the game. Also head to the free SotS tools (including a hero generator and adversary generator) by contributing author Matt Breen, found at http://monstar.co.nz/matt/sotstools/ Social combat that targets your enemy’s morale, letting you defeat some foes through wit, guile, and threats There is reasonable space for discussion regarding whether this is a push system (GM finds ways to get info to the players) or a pull system (Players get info only if they ask the right question) but from my read, SotS comes down on the push side of the equation – players have plenty of opportunities to be clever without needing to outsmart the GM at cooperation. ↩

I also wanted to note that this book carries on a Pelgrane Press tradition. It uses “She/Her” pronouns for the Gamemaster, and while I get that this was much more inclusive when the practice started, “They/Them” really is my preferred way to go on this. City of the SerpentineGear is the most interesting of all. This is player defined, and is a list of 5 or more “iconic” items the character bears (and there’s a small mechanical bump for having them all on you). But what’s delightful is that these are truly freeform — they might be “My grandfather’s sword” but could just as easily be “My unwavering and poorly considered belief in the goodness of man”. I suppose one might call these descriptors, but framing these as gear is a lovely tough. 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. Sometimes, though, you want to manipulate people socially without spending an Investigative point – and that brings us to Maneuvers. Maneuvers 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



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