Sword and Sorcery

The cruel Sorcerer lashes the heroic warrior with terrible corruscating black and green lightning. The Berserker leaps into the fray against a dozen guards bellowing a war cry to strike terror into their hearts. The decadent Rogue finds himself trapped in a den of iniquity where a drug addled haze makes it easier for the cultists to do as they will.

All of these moments, and so many more, fit into the visual and emotional tropes of Sword and Sorcery films, books, and videogames. And without these moments your players may feel like they're going through the motions rather than getting the full experience. But there's more to Sword and Sorcery storytelling than set piece scenes which fulfill the oaths and goals of your characters. And we'll be going over some of them, here, to offer a fuller experience in Project Chronicle.

Aesthetics

Unarmored warriors with a hefty sword descending a staircase stealthily. Hazy drug dens with heady smoke curling away from every movement. The wicked king fat upon his throne as his people starve under his heavy taxes. Fistfuls of gems heaped upon a scale, some tumbling over the side, as the cruel bargain for their life while the just's dagger rests on the other side of the scale.

These things are always going to be important to the image of sword and sorcery. But some of them, particularly the Half Nude Warriors and Drug Dens, are likely to cause problems at your table. Whether you're making half your players feel uncomfortable by going into too much detail on the curves of some character's form, or touching on the topic of slavery as it's used in settings like this one.

So how do you make sure everyone is comfortable? Simple enough: Make it evil. More than that, make it an evil that can be -faced- and -defeated-.

If you know slavery is going to be a touchy subject at your table due to the preferences and interests of your players you can largely avoid it by replacing "Slave" with "Servant" in your vocabulary. But a common theme in sword and sorcery works is the ending of slavery. The breaking of chains to free the caged, giving those slaves weapons and turning them on their taskmasters and slavers in a show of clear vindication.

Similarly, if scantily clad characters presented for sex appeal upsets your table, you can discard it whole cloth or you can make it into an act of subjugation and cruelty to create a stronger, more visceral, villain. Someone who forces all of his servant boys to wear little more than a thong and a smile is going to be someone the party enjoys beheading when the time comes if they don't like that sort of treatment of characters. Particularly if they happen to know one of the servant boys.

This is going to be table-dependent, though. A strong session 0 with anonymous consent sheets can let you know whether such a topic is a Red Line that should not be included at all to avoid discomfort, or something that you can use for evil characters to add a layer of more visceral disgust and hatred.

But never cross a Red Line. No matter how tempting.

Dark and Gritty

Swords and Sorcery worlds tend to be treated as darker and more gritty, with characters having muddled motivations and environments being harsh. It may be tempting to tip over the edge into Grimdark, where nothing makes a difference and all characters trudge inevitably toward their defeat and demise.

Resist that urge. Swords and Sorcery are, and have always been, heroic fantasy. Where against all odds and dangers the hero saves the day. Often for their own reasons and motivations rather than altruistic ideals or a devotion to Justice and Goodness... but you have to walk that line to keep the Swords and Sorcery vibe.

Horror

Horror and Swords and Sorcery go hand in hand. Terrible powers beyond mortal comprehension are a foe that fits the style well, but so is the horror that man inflicts upon man. Don't hesitate to jump scare or terrify. Just try to avoid Gothic Horror. This isn't Ravenloft, after all.

Low Magic

A fairly simple concept, in theory. Worlds of Swords and Sorcery have very little magic in them, in a day to day sort of way. There are still sorcerers and the like, or bards with alluring magical music. But these characters are rare, often practically unique, to a given story. Most Priests can't cast Cure Wounds or Healing Word, but instead offer prayers on one's behalf while taking tithes and offerings.

Player Character Bards, Clerics, and Wizards are exceptions to this, to some measure. But consider playing with expectations in describing spells. Instead of a Fireball's Golden Bead streaking across the battlefield, perhaps the torches or lanterns of your targets explode with flame, burning everyone in the area, relying on what exists rather than creating flame whole cloth, then it makes sense to do so.

Similarly, try to make Healing Magic less overt. Things like special herbs or drinks which numb pain or promote healing rather than overt healing potions.

Minimal Armor

Warriors in loincloths to show off their mighty thews, seductive beauties wearing minimal silks, and characters caught off guard while bathing forced to do battle in the nude are all fairly common tropes. LevelUp/A5e models some of this in the Adept's and the Berserker's unarmored defense values. But if you intend to have moments like these in your campaign and don't want your players to feel "Punished" for letting their guard down or choosing to make their character fit in a Boris Vallejo painting, consider allowing them to still be "Armored while Unarmored".

Essentially, give them on the fly defensive bonuses, or allowing characters to use armor bonuses while narratively and visually being unarmored. It's a game, after all, which works best when ACs and Attack Bonuses are more balanced. If you do wish them to feel punished in a specific situation, ignore this advice.

Existentialism

Kull the Conqueror sits upon the Jeweled Throne of Valusia remembering the innocent boy playing upon the shores of Atlantis. Remembering the thief and pirate sailing wine dark seas. Remembering the mercenary who fought in Valusian wars. And remembering the man who slew the king before a crown was placed on his head. And he wonders "Which is the True Kull? Have I any right to the name, the identity, or was that boy, innocent and free, the true Kull?"

Robert E. Howard and his contemporaries practically invented the concept of Existentialism in the 1920s and 30s with their Sword and Sorcery adventures. They touched on the innate smallness of man against cosmic forces, how the march of time would render even the greatest victory forgotten, and how one's life was really a collection of different lives, different selves, that exist only in memory. How one can be a King or a Pirate or an Innocent Child without being all of those things at once.

This, too, and perhaps more truly than Aesthetics, is a part of Swords and Sorcery. And it can largely be broken down into four parts

1) Cosmic Forces are Beyond Us

Whether it's C'thulhu stirring in the city of Ry'leh or Thoth Amon calling down the Sorceries of Set there are things and powers beyond mortals. Ancient entities that cannot die, gods manifested as monstrosities, and magics darker and more foul than one can ever hope to truly understand. And if one -were- to truly understand these forces, they would be driven mad by that knowledge, by the inability to express it to anyone else, to encapsulate it in words or even thought.

Project Chronicle touches on this by making Outsiders, even Angels and Demons, into Unaligned creatures. This doesn't mean that Angels are "Evil" or "Neutral". It doesn't mean that they're uncaring about the suffering of mortals. What it means is that they are not, inherently, moral creatures akin to human beings with the capacity to make such judgements.

Instead, they act in accordance with ineffable designs laid out to create a specific, good, outcome. No matter how many mortals must die to see that outcome happen. Their morality is on a scale far above the petty desires and ideals of mortals.

2) Magic is Strange

In most D&D Settings magic is tamed, essentially a science. You twiddle your fingers and the Firebolt launches from them to strike your target, it's the tool of heroes, some of the greatest once spells like Wish and Clone become available.

But "tamed" or "dramatic" magic in a Sword and Sorcery story is often the tool of the villain, rather than the hero. And when it is the tool of a hero it's often fickle, or ill-learned, like a wolf kept on a chain that might turn on the one who chained it rather than launching at his foes.

In a tabletop RPG this is hard to mimic without making certain classes or character concepts largely unplayable. Far better to take a narrative approach to the matter, like the aesthetic advice of making the magic of villainy large, overt, and dramatic while the magic of the players are more reliant on their environment.

3) Corruption is a Palpable Effect

Whether it's the decadence of the city-states which makes you soft and weak within it's walls, or a more metaphysical corruption of your spirit and mind by magical corruptive forces, Corruption is a real and tangible thing within such a setting.

In Project Chronicle, corruption is such a force. One which is applied to characters who perform dark acts, or utilize magic to solve their problems. The corruption comes from the Gods, or so the Priesthood claims, with each god offering their own specific curse on mortals.

But some forms of corruption are less visual, less overt. The corruption of a character's desires or intentions and be a powerful tool to advance the narrative of a campaign while granting that character more power for the cost.

Such as a Sorcerer gaining access to additional spell slots at the cost of their Hit Dice, and eventually learning that they can steal hit dice from other creatures in order to fuel their spells, which is obviously a horrific act when you consider it in narrative, rather than purely mechanical, terms.

Even the nicest player who would never consider such a thing might be tempted, even feel forced into doing so, when pressed to the edge of their mystical limit and unable to stop their foes without taking that terrible step.

4) People Change, Sometimes Dramatically

In most tabletop campaigns which focus in on narrative and character identity, which Sword and Sorcery campaigns should do, characters grow and change. They become more than they were when they began. Not just in power, but often in closure from their backstory, or the culmination of their hopes and dreams.

Whether it's a character confronting their childhood mentor turned Big Bad Evil Guy or the Orphaned Street Rat who has a Found Family in the form of the party, the heart of these stories play into something primal within us. But there are other goals, like the reformation of a government, which are not so swift. So hopeful.

Consider a warrior who rises up from nothing by her own hand, she gains fame and wealth and is renowned across the land for her skills and magical blade. And returning home at long last she overthrows the wicked Sorcerer-King of the city-state and the people cheer. Soon the crown is upon her head.

But can she lead? Can she run the city-state without succumbing to the same shortcuts and problems which plagued the last King of the region? If there were very good reasons he leveled such terrible taxes that the Swordswoman's mother had to sell off her wedding band to avoid being killed for tax evasion, will the new King uphold the same terrible policies because there is no choice?

And how will she react, months down the road, when you send a young woman to try and assassinate the New King because her mother perished under the same laws the New King sought to right when she took the throne from the Wicked King who came before?

Few moments, in Sword and Sorcery, are more powerful than -showing- a character how far they've come... or how far they've fallen... from who they were when it all began.

Making this world your Own

One of the core principle of the Project Chronicle work is to create a framework of ideas and locations, of characters and organizations, of mysteries and unanswered questions, for a given Narrator to expound upon.

Unlike the Forgotten Realms, where most of the world is a known quantity, the majority of this world is a blank canvas. It often takes weeks of travel to get from one city-state to another in this setting. And while we have some options and suggestions about what to place between them it is ultimately left largely blank for a reason.

It's where you come in. It's where you take hold of the mysteries we've created, and give them answers. Who were, or are, Atorkhan and his Seventy and Seventy? Why is it Seventy and Seventy instead of One Hundred and Forty? Are those who claim his name, or to be a member of his band, truly part of a continuing legacy, or are they only pretenders using his name to seem more important and intimidating than they actually are? It's up to you to solve that mystery.

That said, in time and adventures, we may eventually start solving those mysteries, together. There may, one day, be a module in which someone claiming to be Atorkhan -is- the real bandit of legend. If you've already declared him dead in one of your home adventures, feel free to recontextualize the Atorkhan in that module. Perhaps he's been reincarnated, resurrected, or is simply a madman with some skills and delusions of grandure.

Your world, and your designs, supercede our own. And if your players ever question that at your table, send them to this page so they can read it for themselves. The Canon of this setting is meant to be flexible for the Narrator's purposes. It can, and will, be changed to suit their ends.

That said... The following style guide is meant to help provide Narrators with our design intentions and narrative goals. This may help you, as a storyteller, to keep "On Brand" with the narrative feel of pulp action sword and sorcery stories with weighty morals and a skewed view on civilization, or it may feel like an albatross tied about your neck.

If it is the latter, then discard it immediately. This setting may have been written as Swords and Sorcery, but it has fertile ground to make it into an alternative High Fantasy setting if you prefer, where Elves and Dwarves take a backseat to Naga and Sprites. Again, we cannot stress this more strongly:

THIS IS YOUR WORLD, NOT OURS, FROM THE MOMENT YOU CRACK OPEN THE FIRST PAGES TO THE MOMENT YOU SET IT DOWN.

Evil is Mortal

Otherworldly beings and animals may be antithetical to civilization, or a danger to your party, but they're not evil. They're strange or wild, unusual and difficult to understand. But evil, true evil, lies in the shadowed hearts of mortalkind. In the cruelty that we heap upon each other, in the greed of those with wealth, in the hate of very human beings. A serpent may strike you for stepping on its tail. But a man will spend years ruining your life out of dark malice.

Monologues can be Dull

During a monologue, the players get to learn the intentions and motivations of the villain they've opposed. But they're also an extended spotlight -away- from the player characters more often than not. When possible, limit yourself to 2-3 paragraphs of monologue at most. And try to make sure that at least one of the PCs are referenced in the monologue.

Monologues can be Fun

Make sure to leave room during the villain's monologue for players to prepare themselves. Give them a chance to prepare some harebrained scheme and, perhaps more importantly, give them room to succeed. By breaking the monologue into segments you can add in room for insight checks, deception, and PCs to sneak into position while the villain is focused on monologuing to one PC they think is at their mercy.

Over the Top Villainy

The setting's style is broadly Pulp Action Sword and Sorcery as presented. It's designed for a fairly descriptive and gritty style, with over the top evil cut down by heroic adventurers. Think of characters like Ming the Merciless or Bavmorda. Skeletor and Lo Pan. People whose villainy is clear to everyone, but who still has allies no matter how often they betray them. SOMEHOW. Crack open that Evil Overlord list by Peter Anspach and write baddies right out of it.

Preservation of Weird

Because evil is mortal, most foes that exist in the world are presented as mortals, while truly strange things, like Fallen Gods or Monstrous Animals, are placed outside of civilized areas, largely, unless they're a feature of a specific city-state. This makes them more unique and engaging than wiping out a third goblin camp.

Show -and- Tell

In visual media, showing a character's morality or intentions through action is far more effective than having them monologue about their origins. It provides a dynamic presentation of who they are. In a tabletop medium, however, the Narrator largely has to exposit. Try to do both. Describe an action and its emotional underpinnings together. "He thrusts the curved dagger deep into your belly with all the weight of his sins behind it, and in his eyes you can briefly see the shadow of regret as he betrays his oath, his friends, and you."