Explore the Winding Streets & Canals of Swords of the Serpentine!

The city of Eversink, in Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner's upcoming GUMSHOE-powered Swords of the Serpentine fantasy RPG (you can preorder it now) is full of canals, tiny streets, and tall buildings. Cartogrpaher Jérôme Huguenin created the map below!

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[Fenris-77]

Yup, you now have my money. I am very excite. Now I just need some players...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This is 1000% my thing. Hell yes. I have been meaning to check out more gumshoe based stuff to add some more narrative control mechanics to our 5e game, as well, because a lot of my group very strongly wants to only play with 1 game system regardless of the campaign. What I’ve seen looks like a port shouldn’t even be that hard, and the ppl in my group that do like trying new systems will love this.

 

[Numidius]

You'd think, right? I actually wrote a blog post about it here talking about it. The trick was realizing the Investigative ability spends are nothing more than nuggets of exciting narrative control, and then using those to make a combat system that feels fun and epic.

Glad to hear that. I'm currently running Trail of Cthulhu and first thing I did was ditching completely the combat system being too fiddly compared to the flow of everything else.

 

[Fenris-77]

I'll give this an enthusiastic two thumbs up, and then another entirely unexpected third thumb because it's just that good. Bravo sir.

 

[Nullzone]

This game was written by more than just Kevin Kulp and you would do well to fully and properly credit ALL of the designers when you do posts like this. Especially when they're literally written ON THE COVER.

 

[Piratecat]

Hey folks. My co-author Emily Dresner (@multiplexer) gets equal or greater credit on Swords of the Serpentine, including the glorious setting design. It's her baby as much as it is mine, and credits should acknowledge that.

Thanks.

- Kevin

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Emily's Dungeonomics columns are pure gold, folks.

Dungeonomics — Critical Hits

critical-hits.com

 

[Aldarc]

Despite my lack of familiarity with the GumShoe engine, I have definitely been intrigued by this. Not a big fan of magical corruption mechanics, so that would probably be the first thing that I changed if I got into this.

 

[Morrus]

This game was written by more than just Kevin Kulp and you would do well to fully and properly credit ALL of the designers when you do posts like this. Especially when they're literally written ON THE COVER.

Good point! It was mainly because I nabbed the image from Kevin's Twitter feed and was busy making sure I got the cartographer's name correct.

 

[Morrus]

We (as in me, and my podcast co-host Peter) played a short one-hour demo of the game which Kevin ran for us. We had a great time! The podcast of that is embedded up there above if folks want to get a sense of how it works.