Other D&D Variant Are there any sword & sorcery variants for 5e?

[vivsavage]

I'm talking about the genre of S&S as represented by the stories of Conan, Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, and so on. I don't mean official variants of those IPs, but games that evoke the traditions of those works. A great example of a variant ruleset for S&S of years past is the Conan RPG put out by Mongoose for 3e in 2003. It made many rule additions to the existing 3e core that really worked in service of the setting. Is there a S&S variant for 5e, regarding of whether it has a campaign setting? I'm thinking of creating one of my own, but I don't want to duplicate something.

 

[Mannahnin]

Xoth Publishing used to advertise theirs here quite regularly.

D&D 5E (2014) Thread 'Free 60+ page Guide to Sword & Sorcery for 5E D&D'

Sep 19, 2019

The Player's Guide to the World of Xoth is a free PDF with more than 60 pages of sword and sorcery material for fifth edition that allows you to play in adventures inspired by the stories of Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Venture in the footsteps of Conan the Cimmerian, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, Imaro of Nyumbani, and other fabled thieves, reavers and slayers!

Packed with all-new, all-original artwork especially commissioned for this book, it contains chapters on the Races, Cultures, Classes, Swords, Sorcery, Cults, Lands, and Legends of Xoth (although you and your GM can...

• xoth.publishing
• Replies: 441
• Forum: *Dungeons & Dragons

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[Autumnal]

Beowulf does it well.

 

[vivsavage]

Xoth Publishing used to advertise theirs here quite regularly.

I just checked it out. Really good job by those folks.

 

[GothmogIV]

Xoth is really good. I think you have to strip out a lot of 5e to get a sword&sorcery vibe. I recently ran a Hyboria campaign using DCC and we had a blast.

 

[Ahndrostalgan]

While not the S&S vibe, the Cubicle 7 version of Lord of the Rings 5e (not the new one by Free League) is an interesting take on the low-fantasy aspects/potential for 5e.

I think S&S for 5e, or almost any system, is far, far more about the setting and the way the DM handles NPCs and adventure hooks than it is the rules. For rules, you can’t allow level progression past single-digit levels in 5e and maintain a S&S vibe, and you have to clamp down on orc and elves and magic items, and maybe using much spellcasting period, but those are simply handled by placing “limits” rather than “modifications” to the base 5e rules.

 

[GothmogIV]

We played the 5e version of LotR and had a lot of fun with it, but the amount of baseline 5e that has to be stripped out is enormous. No wizards. No clerics. Three possible races. No subclasses. The action economy is the same, but the types of bonus actions that are available are greatly reduced. I think--my opinion--you'd have to do a lot of subtracting to make an S&S-style game with 5e regardless of setting. People do it for sure, but my suggestion is to try a different system. When I ran the sword&sorcery Hyboria game, I used a lot of DCC Lankhmar content, for example, because it fit well with what I was trying to do: only humans, limited classes, low-magic, etc.