D&D 5E Free 60+ page Guide to Sword & Sorcery for 5E D&D

[xoth.publishing]

* natural healing: do you allow/encourage feats? Two feats are especially good in a game without easy access to Clerics or Healing Potions: Inspired Leader and Healer.

Personally, I allow feats, except the three feats known to cause a lot of problems: Great Weapon Master, Lucky, and Sharpshooter.

The tips about Inspired Leader and Healer are good.

The general philosophy when it comes to healing (as you'll see when you get to the Classes and Sorcery chapters) is that life force (healing) can't just be taken out of thin air, it has to come from somewhere, either by sacrificing your own or someone else's hit points (as the Cultist class can do), or by drawing life out of plants (as Druids can do, either as "preservers" or "defilers").

In this context, personally I allow healing potions as long as they follow this philosophy; essentially healing potions are bottled blood from sacrifice! They are still somewhat rare, and the PCs might feel a bit different about quaffing them down when they learn what it really is...

* Treasure should be spent: IMHO you should definitely mention gold for xp at the very least, if not actively offering a rule for it. That rule was MADE for Sword & Sorcery

I already did mention it, see the third paragraph under "The Tale Is Its Own Reward".

* One final piece of feedback. Note: this subject is highly controversial and I fully understand if you choose to simply ignore it in any reply.

Yeah, I'm not going to comment on this, except to say if a GM and the players want to explore such rules options, then by all means go ahead. As long as it's fun for everybody.

 

[xoth.publishing]

I love your Cultures of Xoth! They are simple, elegant and spot on to drive home the themes of S&S!

I really think you're short-changing yourself by making them essentially optional. We already know all your rules are optional - you could and should integrate Cultures to be a core "Xoth rule" and character build choice. Move that chapter up to the front, and really play up the importance of defining your character as "Savage" or "Decadent".

Thanks, many people seem to like this solution as it avoids undue focus on the races.

Cultures are not intended to be optional, though; see "Summary of Character Creation" on page 8, step 3 (pick your culture). It's placed after step 2 (pick your race) because each race description has notes on which cultures are most common for a given race, so it makes sense to pick a race first.

 

[xoth.publishing]

Like it very much, it gives me some nice ideas for my darksun conversion.

Thanks! Dark Sun, that's a badass sword and sorcery setting, one of my all-time favorite settings from any publisher. Would love to see an illustrated "Player's Guide to Dark Sun for 5E"... ;-)

 

[TheCosmicKid]

My personal observation is that since your game is already targeting a mature audience, it should be able to expect players to meaningfully handle gender differences, as opposed to the current inclusive trend. Don't get me wrong, I like equality in the real world. And I love the stereotype of the 4"10' lithe girl who busts heads as much as the next guy, but S&S is decidedly not a Luc Besson arena

Just as a brutally simplistic example, if the rules should offer "males get +2 to Strength, females get +2 to Charisma", even as an optional suggestion, most players will be nudged to playing "genre-appropriate" characters, that is, most hulking brutes will be male while most bewitching enchantresses will be female.

Note: You still can play a female warrior based on Strength. You can still play a male Bard Courtier based on Charisma. After all, there are no penalties.

But since 5E already offers robust support for the "Dex build", you are likely to end up with a bad-ass woman warrior that looks like Grace Jones or Sandahl Bergman, and not a gender-switched Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sven-Ole Thorsen (the bad guy with the ridoncolous hammer). Which is the point. The only point.

I feel like there are way too many statuesque Amazon heroes in sword & sorcery fiction to make this a good idea even on the grounds of being genre appropriate. Yes, Red Sonja is gorgeous. But she's also really freaking strong.

 

[CapnZapp]

We’re all still getting a link directly to the pdf using S’mon’s link, including the art.

Edit: all's good now

Do you mean ENWorld won't even allow links to nsfw content, even if none of it appears on site? Does this mean the link is disallowed entirely? Why then allow the link as it appears in subsequent posts?

I guess my question is: normally the first post needs to contain the link or you miss out on loads of visitors. What is served by burying the link so only those who browse the entire thread will find it?

(Genuine honest questions. I don't object to ENWorld wanting to stay SFW and PG. Feel free to move this to Meta)

 

[CapnZapp]

By default, under the 5E rules you are instantly killed if brought to (negative your max hit points) from a single attack. As you rise in levels and gain more hit points this chance to be instantly killed will be reduced (unless the monsters you fight deal correspondingly more and more damage).

The intention between the adjustment to the instant death threshold is to make high-level characters more vulnerable (to lower-level opponents). That said, it can be argued that due to 5E's bounded accuracy, low-level opponents (in large numbers) can still be a threat to higher-level characters, so perhaps adjusting the instant death rule is not necessary.

The instant death modification is marked as an optional rule ("discuss with your players before adding this rule..."), but I think I'll rephrase the part about "the default assumed by this book" to make it more clear that this is indeed optional. In other words, use 5E as-is and only modifiy if you find your players are never actually in danger of dying.

Yeah, the instant death rule is more like a rules carry-over from previous editions. It has close to zero impact on the game once you leave the very lowest levels. And low-level characters easily die even without instant death.

But that is a good thing. You (or at least I ) want heroes to act suitably heroic, which means going at full speed from their first hp to their last.

I hope you see that my suggested alternative rule means there is no incentive for heroes to slow down, take it cautious because the threat of "instadeath" is always there. The probability is small, but it is there for both the 109 hp hero as well as the 9 hp hero.

(Of course a 9 hp hero will still feel much more vulnerable. The point is: we're not adding a rule that makes you even more vulnerable than you already are, because that seems to be at odds with the real reason we're adding a stronger sudden death rule)

The secret is: thanks to Fate Points (or Doom Points or whatever you want to call them), the way sudden death can strike at any time, even when you are at full hp, this benefits characters, since they can now insta-kill regular mooks that can't insta-kill them. As you know, there are no real mooks in 5E - even monsters of moderate level have heaps of hit points. But not so many that a six-fold maximized strike won't take them all away at once.

I guess my vision of S&S isn't about carefully counting your remaining hit points. It's more about stoically charging full steam ahead and just trusting to Crom that the Great White Ape will run out of hit points before you do!

But good luck and thanks for listening!

 

[CapnZapp]

Thanks, many people seem to like this solution as it avoids undue focus on the races.

Cultures are not intended to be optional, though; see "Summary of Character Creation" on page 8, step 3 (pick your culture). It's placed after step 2 (pick your race) because each race description has notes on which cultures are most common for a given race, so it makes sense to pick a race first.

I guess I'm nitpicking the word "can" in "The following broad cultural archetypes can be used to further distinguish between characters who would otherwise have the same racial abilities."

I would totally ask players to choose culture first, since that is your #1 defining trait (whether you're a Barbarian, proud but uneducated, or some pampered but cunning citizen from a crumbling empire) and then list suggested races under each culture. (So the two chapters reference each other)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Do you mean ENWorld won't even allow links to nsfw content, even if none of it appears on site? Does this mean the link is disallowed entirely? Why then allow the link as it appears in subsequent posts?

I guess my question is: normally the first post needs to contain the link or you miss out on loads of visitors. What is served by burying the link so only those who browse the entire thread will find it?

(Genuine honest questions. I don't object to ENWorld wanting to stay SFW and PG. Feel free to move this to Meta)

No. The NSFW tag for a legit gaming product is good enough, according to the owner himself.

That the link wasn’t edited out of quotes along with the original quote would be sloppiness.

The point of the note was that reposting the link after it had been removed by a moderator was...risky. But the boss is letting it pass.

 

[CapnZapp]

I feel like there are way too many statuesque Amazon heroes in sword & sorcery fiction to make this a good idea even on the grounds of being genre appropriate. Yes, Red Sonja is gorgeous. But she's also really freaking strong.

Well, she's always brought up in these cases. To me, she's an exception, and an impossible one - not the rule.

Spoiler: Skip this if you're triggered by retrograde gender politics...

...even if we're just discussing them in the context of a specifically retrograde fantasy genre!

Without any mechanical guidance, my experience is that D&D drives players that want to be absolute combat monsters into a strength build (certainly if the RAW feats are enabled), male or female. And I don't buy that your female character just happens to have 20 Strength while still looking not like Schwarzenegger with boobs but like Red Sonja. That's having the cake while eating it.

In fantasy it is absolutely the right thing to ignore real life physics. In a world of dragons and fireballs, who am I to argue your 16-year old 90 pound girl can't kick the naughty word out of zombies or umber hulks? But I happen to believe that S&S is improved by at least giving the nod to real-life gender limitations. In my S&S, women are from Venus, men are from Mars (sometimes they're on Mars but from Earth, but I digress). Women are not a match for men in physical contests. We're using the way 5E boosts Dexterity to still allow fierce bad-ass women warriors but still.

You're supposed to have to choose.

Maximum strength? Sure. Wielding a hammer bigger than a sofa? Of course. If your muscles are bigger than tree trunks! And since my business isn't how your junk looks like, I guess you could technically be any gender you like, but everybody will just assume you are a man, since you look like one. Remember: you're not just a body builder. You're a freakishly huge bundle of testosterone-driven muscle.

Want to look womanly, seductive and alluring? Sure. Still want to be a bad-ass fighter? Of course. Choose the Dex build and max your Charisma. And not Strength and Con.

Do note that just because males get +2 Strength does not mean you can't still roll up a female warrior with an hour-glass figure with Strength 18. It just means that you can't get one with Strength 20.

In the same vein, the only way to truly maximize diplomacy and seduction is to create a voluptuous Venus of a woman. (Even though you could create an intense and brooding charmer of a man with just 1 point less).

I fully understand not everyone shares these ideas.

 

[michaeljpastor]

Great stuff, but I have a big gripe -

None of what you list as races are races. They're ethnicities. There is only one human race, and what we call race is a social construct created by, well, racists.

Given that D&D actually does have contextually "real" races, it also avoids confusion of two concepts using the same word. You changed clerics to cultists, when you could have kept the name. Please consider doing the same for an outmoded concept.