Gamemastering advice on preparing adventures for Sword & Sorcery campaigns

[xoth.publishing]

I'm not sure if it really gets me in the mood for S&S adventure.

I thought we were talking about your players? I kinda assumed that the person running the game would already be "in the mood"...

Not sure I can give any more useful advice... except, as others have mentioned, get together as a group and discuss what kind of game/genre you want to play... and if in doubt, just play a couple of sessions and see if you (as a group) think it's fun.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

What do you think are good ways for gamemasters to write adventures and run them in a way to create a feel of Sword & Sorcery stories?

For me, S&S "feels" like sand-caked blood a the corners of my mouth and the sting of an epic hangover.

Writing an S&S adventure should entail very little, if any, "humanoid monsters" (kobolds, goblins, ogres, etc). Those humanoid monsters get replaced with strange half-men (half-man, half-beast), savage cavemen, cannibal tribes worshipping strange gods, etc.

The other 'monsters' are SIGNIFICANTLY more rare... manticore, giants, dragons, otyugh, basilisk, etc. Those creatures are only encountered in their "lair".

The majority of 'monsters' encountered in the wilderness and ruined cities of ancient civilizations will be of the "giant animal" variety; giant apes, giant snakes, giant frogs, giant scorpions, giant spiders, giant turtles, etc.

Ok. So now we have a feel for what "monsters" are there. What about non-monsters? Well, that would be humans. Other humans...cultures, genetics, religions, etc. There should be very little "mixing" of the human tribes/countries due primarily to the dangers of travel, but also due to distrust of "outsiders" (basically, most people in an S&S world would have various severities of xenophobia). Each country would have certain genetic dispositions (adjustments to stats, ht/wt, hair/eye colour, skin colour, etc). On top of that, each should also have a distinct look and feel to their fashion. Fashion is important in S&S....it starkly contrasts the "Haves" from the "Have Nots". Leading to...

Haves and Have Nots. This is prevalent. So when writing an adventure, the PC's are almost always of the "Have Nots". This means they are seen as tools. Objects. Any adventure involving someone "hiring" them to do something must keep this in mind. The PC's are not "equals" to their employer; they are expendable expenses. If they start to cost more than they are worth, they are fired (or killed, traded, sold, sacrificed, or who knows what). In the S&S world, there is no such thing as "Fair Dealing Laws". You take what you can get, hope for the best, expect the worst.

Themes of the Adventure. Wild lands, ancient ruins and antediluvian caves, caverns and dungeons from other epoch's. Roads are rough and dilapidated at best, decrepit to non-existent at worst. Roads are beset by bandits, savages, and the hunting grounds for huge, fell beasts that strike from the shadows or the air. Roads are deadly. Roads are also much safer than traveling in the wilderness.

Rewards. A S&S adventure should reward the PC's primarily with their lives. After that, scars as opposed to permanent losses of limbs or senses. After that, riches. An adventure should be considered a success if half the party manages to get back to civilization only mostly dead. It's a resounding success if they also have enough treasure to pay for healing and partying/celebrating. The more PC's that live, the more treasure, the more successful...but the standard D&D'ism's of "Going into the dungeon, killing monsters, taking their stuff" shouldn't really be expected. Like, at all.

Death. Yup. Death. S&S is uncaring...no, it is outright hostile. It wants to see you dead. There should almost never be a "fair fight" in an S&S adventure; the PC's should be trying to avoid fights if at all possible, and when they must fight, they should be fighting tooth and nail....because at any second WHAM! Yer ded! Now, 5e is not set up for this sort of brutality. Personally, I'd probably get some rules fixed/created to help with this. For example, at 0 HP you immediately make ONE Death Save; pass or fail. The reason I say one roll is because it's easier than negative HP's to help portray the "left for dead" trope of S&S.

And that's about it. Savage humans, xenophobic civilizations, giant creatures, deadly...everything.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Bilharzia]

How do you pitch a S&S tone without it sounding depressing and nihilistic? When I ran some of what i saw as the core concepts past a few players in our group, the response was either static or "sounds depressing". ....

Reading that, I guess I can see how that would read as drudgery if you're used to default D&Disms and aren't familiar with S&S as a genre. Did I over-sell or under-sell things here? I feel like I didn't make it sound fun. How would you handle this?

Stop pitching or trying to sell anything, most people do not know what they want and so cannot respond to what you are talking about, especially with high level concepts.

Run a one-shot with pregens using an adventure designed to provide the experience you have in mind. You need a tiny bit of context, you need well defined and appealing pregens each with an agenda, at least relevant for this adventure. Use whatever references you think the players will understand from films, games, animation, novels to put the adventure into context.
That is it. See how it goes.

 

[pemerton]

So... show them the video?

Not sure if this would do anything for them, to be honest. What impresses you and your players will not necessarily impress mine. I, for one, only see boring Hollywood cinematic duds with over the top special effects and quick cut edits in that trailer. I'm not sure if it really gets me in the mood for S&S adventure.

I didn't think the video was especially S&S. It featured a lot of army scenes, but may FRPGs struggle to handle PCs as leaders of warbands (eg in classic D&D the approach to this is head to the sandtable and break out the wargame rules). And it showed a lot of fighting with fantastically huge creatures - hydras and the like - which I would tend to associate with Greek myth and D&D play.

I think the way to run S&S is just to do it. Get the players to build PCs; frame a starting scene; and see what happens.

Nothing in this thread has made me depart from my recommendation of Burning Wheel as a good system for this.

EDIT: Ninja'd a bit by @Bilharzia.

 

[xoth.publishing]

I didn't think the video was especially S&S. It featured a lot of army scenes

There is a battle in Hour of the Dragon.
There is a battle in The Scarlet Citadel.
There is a battle in A Witch Shall be Born.
There is a battle in The People of the Black Circle.
There is a battle in Black Colossus.
There is (an offstage) battle in The Slithering Shadow.
There is (an offstage) battle in Red Nails.

And it showed a lot of fighting with fantastically huge creatures - hydras and the like - which I would tend to associate with Greek myth and D&D play.

There are no fantastically huge creatures in the Howard stories, but there are plenty of colossal creatures in the Conan comics by Marvel, so in the "extended Conan universe" if you will.

I think the way to run S&S is just to do it. Get the players to build PCs; frame a starting scene; and see what happens.

Agreed!

 

[Aldarc]

I thought we were talking about your players? I kinda assumed that the person running the game would already be "in the mood"...

We were, but does the video actually reflect what I want from a S&S game or my own mood? Or is it a mood-killer?

 

[Yora]

Fascinating to come back to this thread one year later. Who was that idiot asking all these stupid questions? Oh, that's me.

At the end of the original discussion here, I had decided to shelve the whole idea of running a Sword & Sorcery campaign and went to seek my fortune on other shores, looking into Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number, without having Sword & Sorcery on my mind. But in the process I cam across the amazing site All Dead Generations, which finally made me understand how dungeons are supposed to be fun to play in, and supposed to as a gameplay structure. (Specifically in the D&D editions of the 70s and early 80s.) Super condensed, it's all about XP for treasure, limited resources, and random encounters.
Another eye-opening experience was playing the videogame Kenshi, which isn't specifically Sword & Sorcery because it has no magic, but otherwise it's basically straight up Dark Sun. With wind and biodiesel generators for electic lights, and a touch of Clark Ashton Smith. This game has no plot or quests. Only a hunger meter and lots of bandits and monsters roaming the wastes.

My big problem with finding ways to make Sword & Sorcery work as a campaign has always been figuring out a way to approach character motivation in a way that feels true to the style and I trust to keep players engaged throghout a longer running campaign. I now think it's probably much better to approach this issue not from the perspective of a story, but as a game structure. And specifically looking at mechanical push and pull factors.

In Classic D&D (pre-Dragonlance), all the dungeon crawling and wilderness exploration revolves around the core mechanic "Making it out of a dungeon with loot gives you XP". PCs don't actually get stronger through the possession of gold like some kind of mystical dragon. The amount of treasure they carry out of a dungeon is merely a convenient unit to track the amount of dangers the characters overcame during the adventure. You can quantify the challenge of monsters that are fought and defeated by assigning them XP values, but it's not really possible to quantify any other challenges or puzzles that way, or monsters that are circumvented by means other than fighting. XP for the value of treasure carried out of the dungeon is very easy to quantify and enables players to have control over the speed of their characters' advancement without relying purely on the grace of the GM.
This is a pull factor. You're dangling a reward in front of the players in the form of XP for their characters with a very clear but also extremely open task: "Get treasure". No questions asked how and where they get it.

And on the other hand you have for example in Kenshi the need to constantly get more food for your characters while you're in an inescapeable wasteland where you can't forage for berries or mushrooms. A situation you also have in the Dark Sun setting for D&D, which I think is the best campaign setting ever made for D&D. In Dark Sun, you always need water. (Kenshi ignores water and only tracks food to not make the game excessively difficult.) And water in Dark Sun is only found in the city states of the sorcerer kings and in a few oases out in the wastes. But unfortunately, the city states are under the control of the sorcerer kings and full with their templar guards, who are both very powerful and also hostile to PCs. And if the oases out in the desert are not controlled by templars as well, they draw in all kinds of bandits, slavers, and monsters. Staying in the cities and oases for too long will mean getting found by very dangerous enemies. Stying out in the wastes means you'll die once your water runs out.
Which is fantastic game design. The PCs always have to move. They can't sit around on their butts waiting for some interesting plot hook to come their way. Water and enemies (or food and enemies in Kenshi) are both pull and push factors.

I think for ongoing campaigns, this might be a pretty important factor in creating a sustainable gameplay structure. There needs to be something the PCs can search for to get a reward that matters to the player. (XP matter to players, cash that can't be spend on anything practical does not.) And there needs to be something that makes idling around indecisively not an option.

In Sword & Sorcery fiction, we don't usually get any mentions of characters getting food. But very often we see stories starting with the protagonists realizing that they are dead broke and they have to get up their asses and do something to rectify the situation. Because otherwise they will starve.
The earliest incarnations of D&D are regularly being described as being heavily inspired by Sword & Sorcery, and occasionally even as being straight up Sword & Sorcery. (Though that's of course always controversial, as it is with calling anything Sword & Sorcery.) And I've come to think that it might possibly even be one of the best system for such campaigns, at least if you open yourself up to getting a bit more creative. "I give you XP for all the treasure you collect, I don't care where you get it." seems perfect to get players into a mindset that reflects Sword & Sorcery protagonists without directing them along any specific course of action. The task for the GM would be primarily to dress the world around the PCs up with sorcerers, demons, skulls, and volcanos, and your preferred quantities of evil princesses and wenches.