As we come to the end of the Rules chapter, there's a small section on
character recovery, death, and resurrection. I've covered 0 and negative HP and Life-and-Death checks before, so the new information here is the effects of not getting enough food and sleep, and natural recovery of HP and MP. Not getting enough food or sleep means losing a point off your maximum HP/MP, and inducing a -1 penalty to all checks. These accumulate for each day without food or sleep. Conversely, if a character can get at least a meal and 3 hours of good sleep (on bedding, sheltered from the elements), then they can recover 10% of their maximum HP/MP. They can take two 3 hour sleeps in one day, or one 6 hour sleep for twice the effect. I like this kind of natural recovery. Much better than the old D&D rule of 1 hp per day of rest, and if you like a slightly more grittier campaign, better than the current rules.
Then come the resurrection rules. Here SW 2.5 puts a flavorful twist on the availability of resurrection in D&D. If you are part of an Adventurer's Guild (which the game assumes you are, as we'll see later), you can take your fallen comrade to the guild and have them resurrected for 10,000 G. If you don't have enough, you can take a loan from the Guild. But every time someone is resurrected, their soul takes on Impurity. You roll on a table to see how much Impurity you take on, and if it expresses itself on your body somehow. This impurity may be unnoticeable, or it may express itself in physical deformities such as horns, skinmarks, and so on. The longer an interval between death and resurrection, the more Impurity you're liable to take on. Take on 5 Impurities, and you became a revenant. (None of the above apply to Runefolk, but if they are resurrected, they lose the last year's memories.)
Next is a section on
character growth. I find this very interesting. At the end of a session (=adventure), it recommends the GM give 1,000 XP for attaining the adventure's goals, and 500 XP if unsuccessful, in addition to an "bonus XP" for defeating monsters (10 XP x monster level) and rolling auto-fails (50 XP). What's interesting about that is that this is the Level progression table (numbers in parentheses are cumulative totals):
Level | Table A | Table B |
1 | 1,000 | 500 |
2 | 1,000 (2,000) | 1,000 (1,500) |
3 | 1,500 (3,500) | 1,000 (2,500) |
4 | 1,500 (5,000) | 1,500 (4,000) |
5 | 2,000 (7,000) | 1,500 (5,500) |
6 | 2,500 (9,500) | 2,000 (7,500) |
If you consider that PCs start at roughly Level 2 in their primary Skill Package, it suggests that (assuming a 100% success rate), PCs will get level up roughly every two sessions, up to Level 5, and then it will take about three sessions to get to Level 6. Of course, leveling will likely be slightly slower due to unsuccessful adventures, and to buying levels for one's secondary Skill Packages. IMO, the game is essentially encouraging milestone leveling, while maintaining the tradition of accumulating XP totals.
This is another thing that illuminates, in retrospect, my experience playing D&D 4e with a Japanese group. Rather than a continuing campaign, it was 1 adventure per session, and we'd essentially do two sessions at a certain level and then level up. At the time I thought they were just eager to get through the levels and try different builds, but now I see that this is pretty standard in Japanese TRPG culture, and is in fact encouraged in the domestic games.
In addition to growth by standard leveling-up, at the end of every session, characters improve their ability scores. They roll 2d6, and choose one of the results. 1=Dexterity, 2=Agility, 3=Strength, 4=Constitution, 5=Wisdom, and 6=Spirit. The chosen ability score goes up by 1 point.
Next is a short section on Prestige. Prestige is gained by turning in "sword shards" (found in monsters) to the PC's adventurer's guild. However, the rules of what is done with Prestige are in Rulebook II.
The final section of the Rules covers Fellows. The essential concept of Fellows is basically the same as 5e's Sidekicks: simplified NPCs for the party. In addition to the expected pre-generated characters, each SW 2.5 Starter Set also comes with a selection of pre-generated Fellows that be used to fill out a party or to facilitate one-on-one play. But one might consider that a secondary expedient. Because the point of Fellows, unlike Sidekicks, is that they are created from PCs.
So probably the easiest way of understanding this (and probably the way they are most commonly used) is that you have a group. And sometimes, a player can't make it. Traditionally, this has been handled a number of ways we're probably all familiar with, from cutting the character out altogether, to Schroedinger's PCs (ostensibly "there" with the party, but not doing anything until the player returns), to having another player operate the missing player's character, if the character sheet is available. With the Fellow system, though, the missing player merely supplies the party with their PC in simplified form as a Fellow. The rules govern how the Fellow is handled, in a way that let's them contribute to the party while at the same time not making any other player (or even the GM!) responsible for playing that character. At the end of the session, the Fellow gets the same rewards and XP as the rest of the party.
Okay, again, nothing especially earth-shattering there. But what to me is most interesting about Fellows, and what is foregrounded in their section of the rules, is that Fellows can be publicly shared via websites and social media. In essence, GroupSNE hoped that Fellows would act to stimulate social media engagement in Sword World 2.5. Not only would one's own regular group make use of one's PC as a Fellow, but entirely separate groups, as well. Thus, the first section of the Fellows rules are concerned entirely with how a Fellow is pubicly shared, how they are treated by the receiving group, how the Fellow is rewarded, and how that is all communicated to the sharing player.
As they imagine it, a player has a character. They create a Fellow version of that character and shares it on, say, Twitter. Some other unrelated group says, "We need another PC for this coming session. That looks like an interesting Fellow. Let's put him in a party for the next session." The GM approves the Fellow. They play their session, gaining money, items, and XP. After the session, the group reports back to the Fellow's creator, thanking him, explaining what happened on the adventure, and what the Fellow gained. The creator takes that, and
puts it back into the PC. Ostensibly (with GM approval), they can use the improved PC when playing in the next session. At the same time, they can create a new, improved version of the character as a Fellow, and repeat the process.
Next time, we'll look at this Fellow sharing process in more detail.