Sword and sorcery games tend to appeal to the old school side of the role playing game audience. Source material like Howard’s Conan and Leiber’s Fafhrd greatly influenced Dungeons & Dragons and loom large in the minds of fans who have been in the hobby a long time. While heroic fantasy is arguably the most popular at the moment, there is always an audience for tales of mighty thews, blasphemous sorcery and getting away with the score over saving the day.
Defy The Gods, from designer Chrys Sellers, looks at this classic genre from a new perspective. Its PbtA design looks to emulate the beats of those classic stories with more modern rules. We spoke with Sellers shortly after the Kickstarter for the game launched.
“This project took a while because it started with a lot of casting about, almost blindly,” said Sellers.” I wanted things. My brother was dying, so I wanted to make a game that drank deep of life, that took characters and their players on a wild ride before the end. I wanted the limitless field of possibility that comes with an unknown world. And I was bored with the bog-standard Western European medieval setting of other fantasy adventures. All these led me to sword & sorcery, which has a joyfully embodied, “carnal” (as Marc Majcher told me) feeling; which sits in a lightly sketched-in world, usually before our written history; and whose world is often located more easterly, southerly, and historically earlier than Tolkienish high fantasy—though that also carries with it lots of Orientalism, which I learned about along the way and did my best to root out.”
Defy The Gods looks to focus on the emotional journey of its characters. There are classic archetypes like The Sword and The Sorcerer but their journeys are unique that overlap with the group rather than the more episodic nature of some of these games. Yes, Conan won and lost fortunes but he also brooded a lot.
“My favorite PbtA games have always been emotionally rich character stories—often using their genre’s tropes to explore interpersonal drama. Masks: A New Generation comes to mind. They also steer me, through their mechanics, toward deeply meaningful moments that I never would’ve stumbled on if I was just dungeon-delving. So, I knew I wanted an interpersonal dimension to the adventure.”
Often, these games make magic an unknowable force to the players in a quest to concentrate on the down and dirty aspects of the ancient world. Many of the playbooks incorporate a little bit of magic. The Sorcerer, for example, lets players channel that energy at the risk of losing control.
“Their magic system is wild,” said Sellers. “You roll a bunch of dice and look for patterns in them, like a haruspex. If you can match a pattern to a spell you know, you can cast that spell. If you match more than one, you get to choose. But if you can’t match any spells, chaotic energy blows back on you. So you never know exactly what’ll happen before you roll. You’re risking severely changing the course of the story and your character’s part in it.”
There are more dangers than unpredictable magic and giant poisonous snakes in the game. The moves take inspiration from games like Monsterhearts and Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Heroes in ancient tales often fell in love recklessly and while they might be able to tear apart monsters bare handed, their hearts were often broken. Sellers also found inspiration in modern film.
“I rewatched Princess Mononoke,” said Sellers. “I saw how much it has in common with classic sword & sorcery—barbarian swordsman coming to a singular city-state, body horror, gods and god-killers, out-of-control magic—and also how much richer that all is because of the remarkably sweet romance at its core.”
Being able to romance the gods as part of these epic stories invites characters to explore relationships they might not otherwise in real life. What do the gods care about genders when they fall in love with mortals?
“This is a self-consciously queer game,” said Sellers. “with characters who resonate with queer themes as much as with sword & sorcery archetypes. Not a lot of sword & sorcery stories have queer characters (although we have more to choose from every year!). But what I found while writing is that sword & sorcery characters and queer characters have a lot in common. Both are often outsiders fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds. Conan refuses to bow to kings, gods, or those who find his ways strange. Queer people, too, have to face tyrants, other people’s ideas of God, and intolerance of how we live our lives. However, for all that sword & sorcery loves the weird—the exotic, decadent, and sorcerous—it often portrays these things as sources of conflict—to reinforce the familiar, (barbarically) simple, and physically sound. I’m trying to show a different way of looking at ‘weird’.”
Defy The Gods is on Kickstarter from now through July 10, 2025. Backers are currently expected to receive rewards in late 2025 or early 2026.
