Q: What do you think about prepping and running Swords & Sorcery adventures?

Unlike “science fiction” or “fantasy” or “alternate history,” for which you can make pretty solid definitions, “sword & sorcery” is kind of an ill-defined term. If we go with the original definition  (“fantasy fiction that feels like the stuff Robert E. Howard wrote” — no, seriously, that’s literally how Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber coined it), the first thing on my list would be:

Don’t use Dungeons & Dragons.

Or, if you do, ban all the spellcasting classes. Or maybe only allow PCs to have two or three levels in a spellcasting class.

Because if you look at Howardian fantasy — Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, and so forth — the sword is the good guy and the sorcery is almost invariably the bad guy: It’s the strange unknown lurking just beyond the eye line of civilization. (Or, alternatively, crushing civilization under a sanity-rending tyranny.)

(Moorcock’s Elric and Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane are both sorcerers, but they’re also deconstructing the genre by making the bad guy the protagonist.)

THE WORLD OF SWORD & SORCERY

But how do you make a story or adventure feel like sword & sorcery, as opposed to epic fantasy or paranormal romance or whatever genre you want to assign a typical D&D campaign to?

Ultimately, my advice — and I think all advice when it comes to sword & sorcery — will be tempered by my own idiosyncratic and imprecise “feel” for what “sword & sorcery” means. But here’s a few thoughts:

• The “civilized” portion of the world is, on some fundamental level, barbaric. There is no glittering, chivalric ideal; no ethics-enforcing Empire (except possibly far, far, away). If city-life seems sophisticated, it’s merely a veil behind which the “sophisticates” indulge heinous pleasures.
• “Civilization” is pressed right up against uncivilized enigmas, which are heightened through the fantastical and the magical. This happens as soon as you walk out of the city gates. It also happens when you journey into the black abyss of the wilderness beyond civilization’s borders. But it can even happen inside the city: “Tower of the Elephant” and “Rogues in the House,” for example, are both Conan stories in which a single building within “civilization” is revealed to contain barbaric horrors.

Civilization is, thus, the dark mirror of barbarity. It attempts to seal that darkness outside its cities, but its cities nonetheless give birth to it.

To perhaps get a clearer sense of this, consider Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Obviously neither of these are sword & sorcery fiction, but they view civilization and high society through a similar lens: As a veneer covering a festering boil of sublime cruelty and murderous amorality.

On the flipside, the things that civilization describes as “barbarian” — Conan’s Cimmerians, Fafhrd’s Snow Clans, Belit’s pirates, Tarzan — are where nobility and chivalry are actually found. The mythic root of these stories is Robin Hood, whose idyllic society of Merry Men living in the barbarism of Sherwood Forest achieves the ideals of chivalry and nobility which are falsely claimed by the corrupt powers of “civilization.”

ADVENTURE & CHARACTER

We now know both the heroes of swords & sorcery and the source of conflict for our stories and adventures, but I think there’s a final component missing that truly gives a good swords & sorcery tale its unique “feel.”

This is sometimes described as sword & sorcery stories having “low stakes,” but I don’t think that’s quite right. A lot of the archetypal S&S heroes — Conan, Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, etc. — all end up in reality-defining conflicts. So it’s not as simple as “Frodo saves the world and Conan doesn’t.”

I think what it boils down to is the primary motivation for a swords & sorcery hero: Survival.

This may be very literal (any number of S&S stories begin with the main character marooned or abandoned or left for dead), but often also manifests at one step removed: The desire for treasure and coin.

(And this, of course, ties into the broader themes of the world: The corruption of civilization strips the common people of wealth and power, creating a permanent lower class desperate just to survive. And the dark enigmas of the world are a constant source of deadly danger.)

Importantly, however, this base need for survival is always displaced by a selfless heroism: When given the choice between securing his treasure and rescuing the maiden, Conan will always rescue the maiden. Robin Hood doesn’t simply steal from the rich, he gives to the poor. (Which is, of course, why both we and Maid Marian love him.)

Where civilization fails to protect the innocent (and is, in fact, often the ones victimizing them), it is the “outsider” that civilization teaches you to fear that will ultimately sacrifice to help those in need.

For similar heroes in other genres, consider Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark or the vampire hunters in John Steakley’s Vampire$.

There are plenty of RPG tips that look great on paper, but not at all when you bring them to the table. The really tricky ones, though, will work just fine… and then suddenly explode in a fiery ball of chaos and destruction.

The problem, of course, is that players, groups, and games are all unique. Something that works for one group may not work for another. It may not even work with the same group when they’re playing a different game. Or it may work for some players in the group, but not others.

For example, back around 2000 there was a brief fad for character flags: The clever insight was that if players put something on their character sheet or in their background, that was a signal — or “flag” — that it was something they wanted to be featured in the game!

In practice, unfortunately, this didn’t hold up. Turns out that just because you included “escaped from an abusive father” in your character’s back story, it didn’t necessarily mean you wanted the abusive father to show up in the game. Often quite the opposite.

Similarly, it turns out that many players will buy up a skill in character creation because they DON’T want that skill to be a significant part of the game: They invested a bunch of character creation resources to specifically NOT be challenged by it, wanting to quickly and trivially dispose of any such content if it does happen to show up.

Conversely, someone creating a character with a high Lockpicking skill might absolutely want lots and lots of locked doors to show up in the campaign… but only so that they can show off how awesome their character is by getting their LockpickingLawyer on and casually gaining access to every egress, treasure chest, and safe. If you were to instead respond to their lockpicking flag by creating lots of ultra-difficult locks that will challenge their high level of prowess, you’ll still end up with a frustrated player.

(And the point, of course, is that other players who have created a character with a high Lockpicking skill will want to be challenged by lots of very difficult locks.)

Recently I’ve seen a similar “GM trick” doing the rounds that I’m going to call Schrodinger’s secret door. The basic idea is that if the PCs are in a dungeon (or a gothic manor or whatever) and they look for a secret door, the GM should respond by adding a secret door to the room and letting them find it!

The idea, of course, is that when the players say, “Let’s see if there’s a secret door!” what they’re really saying is, “It would be cool if there was a secret door here!”

Which might be true.

But it can just as easily be, “I hope there isn’t, but let’s make sure before we use this room to take a rest.” Or simply, “Let’s test this hypothesis and see if it’s true.” (See The Null Result for more on that.)

It doesn’t have to be a secret door, of course. Maybe the players decide to run surveillance on their new patron to make sure they don’t have any secret agendas. Or they check their room for bugs. Or they post a watch at night to make sure they aren’t ambushed while they’re asleep. None of that necessarily means that they — as either players or characters — want to betrayed, bugged, or battled.

EXPLICIT FLAGS

None of which is to say, of course, that it wouldn’t be useful to know if the players want a confrontation with their abusive father or more challenges of a specific type.

But if you want to empower the players to signal that they want something included,  it’s usually better to include specific mechanism for them to directly signal that, rather than trying to intuit signal from proximate cause.

In character creation, for example, you can have players make a specific wants list for the campaign.

The stars and wishes technique (created by The Gauntlet) can provide a simple structure for feedback at the end of sessions: Each player awards a star (indicating something they really liked about the session) and makes a wish (for something they’d like to see happen in a future session).

Along similar lines, I’ve used a technique I call gold starring, in which each player gets a “gold star” that they can at any time “stick” to an element of the campaign (even an element that hasn’t been established yet) to signal its importance to them. (They can also move their gold stars at any time.)

For stuff like, “I think it would be cool if there was a secret door here!”, storytelling games are designed entirely around narrative control mechanics and it’s not unusual to see similar narrative control mechanics lightly spicing roleplaying games, too.

The common denominator in all of these techniques, of course, is that you’re explicitly asking the players for specific information and, in response, the players are clearly signaling what they want. The resulting clarity means you can have confidence and focus in how you respond to your players’ semaphoring.

A patron asked me to explain what I mean when I say “nonsense railroad.” (Which is something I occasionally do in reviews and online discussions.)

Let’s start by laying some groundwork.

First, in The Railroading Manifesto I defined “railroading” in an RPG as:

Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

Technically, therefore, railroading can only happen at the actual game table. In practice, though, we’ll talk about “prepping a railroad” or “railroaded adventures,” by which we mean scenarios which require the PCs to make very specific choices, therefore forcing the GM to railroad the players into those choices to avoid having the scenario fall apart.

Tangentially, this is a pretty basic tip: Don’t prep what the PCs will do, because (a) that requires precognition and (b) deciding what the PCs are going to do is the players’ responsibility. Instead, prep interesting and provocative situations that create rich opportunities for the PCs to make decisions and give you, as the GM, the toys you need to actively play the world in response to those decisions.

But I digress.

Second, if you do want to design and run a railroad — (please don’t!) — then the secret to making it work even some of the time, as I describe in How a Railroad Works, is to make sure that every choice is obvious and appealing: You need the players to know what they need to do and you need them to want to do it.

A nonsense railroad is basically what you get when a railroaded adventure doesn’t do that. Instead, the actions mandated by the nonsense railroad are hidden, capricious, unlikely, and/or idiotic.

For example, imagine that the PCs are playing Triads locked in a gang war with another organized crime outfit. Then imagine an adventure in which, unprompted:

• The players have to decide that they should make peace with the rival gang at an arbitrary point in the gang war.
• The players have to propose that peace talks take place at the rival gang lord’s mansion.
• During dinner at their rivals’ mansion, one of the PCs needs to sneak away and break into the rival gang lord’s office.
• Once in the office, they need to take the time to search through all the file cabinets.
• This will not give them any information about the gang lord’s business affairs, but they will find one scrap of paper that says “something weird is happening at one of our warehouses at the docks.”
• They need to immediately leave the dinner and go down to the warehouse in order to interrupt the voodoo ritual being performed there.

And, again: All of this needs to happen unprompted. None of them are given a reason to be done, many of them are completely illogical, and quite a few are actually the opposite of motivated — they’re actively inimical to the PCs’ agenda.

This is not, bizarrely, an exaggerated example. I’ve seen much worse than this on countless occasions, including professionally published adventures. Strangely common varieties include:

• “I’ve mentioned some random object, why aren’t you stealing it?”
• “You’ve got rock solid evidence that So-and-So is guilty of the crime you’re investigating, but please don’t do anything with that evidence because the adventure will immediately break.”
• “I think we can all safely assume that the PCs will leave the pocket-sized object they’ve been sworn to protect unguarded in their hotel room while they go shopping. There’s absolutely no chance that they’ll take it with them or leave one of the PCs behind to keep an eye on it.”

And so forth.

If you’re familiar with the old computer adventure games, then you’ve likely encountered this same type of tortured logic in a different guise.

In short, a nonsense railroad is an adventure where the PCs are required to perform a predetermined sequence of specific actions, which they will certainly NOT take of their own volition because the actions make no sense, and — when they’re clumsily and overtly forced to take those actions — they will feel stupid doing so.

(Because, again, they make no sense.)

Railroads are bad and nonsense railroads are their nadir. They are overtly hostile to the players and, when published, an act of sabotage aimed at the unwitting GM.

One of the more fundamental divides in tabletop roleplaying is between those who have a gaming group and those who are going to play a game.

It seems subtle, but it’s actually huge.

If I have a group, we all need to find something we can enjoy together. That’s true whether it’s an RPG or a book club.

But if I say, “I’m running a game about dragonslayers, who’s interested?” that’s different.

“I have dracophobia! I don’t want to play a game with dragons!”

Great! Maybe the next game will work for you!

This isn’t some radical notion.

If I say, “Hey, let’s all go see a movie next week,” we need to agree on a film we all enjoy.

If I say, “I’m going to see Encanto, anybody want to come?” then you just don’t come if that’s not a movie you’re interested in.

Each event has a different premise. And when it comes to books, for example, people have no difficulty understanding the difference between book club selections and personal selections.

In tabletop roleplaying games, on the other hand, there’s a good portion of the fanbase who only reads books in book club and many of them simply assume that it’s the only way to read books. So they interpret a statement of “this is the book I’m reading” to mean “I’m going to kick you out of the book club if you don’t read it with me.”

You’ll frequently see people online, for example, replying to statements like “this is the game I’m running” as a “red flag” revealing that the GM is some sort of tin-pot dictator forcing their players into misery.

Those who aren’t in a movie club, on the other hand, are baffled by a claim that it’s some sort of ethical failing to arrange a group outing to see a specific film.

(The Geek Social Fallacies may also play a role here.)

THE LOCAL POOL

For context, rather than having a gaming group, what I have is a local pool of a few dozen people that I will pitch specific games to: These might be roleplaying and storytelling games (like Blades in the Dark, Ars Magica, or Brindlewood Bay). They might also be board games (like Captain Sonor or Gloomhaven).

Those interested in that game join. Those who aren’t, don’t.

I’ve built this pool primarily through my open tables, which make it a lot easier not only to introduce new players to RPGs for the first time, but also to invite existing players into my circle. (One of the many reasons I suggest that, if you want to increase the amount of gaming you do, having an open table in your pocket is an essential tool.)

I also have a couple of specific social groups active at the moment that stick together between campaigns or who got together as a group first and then figured out what game to play next. For those groups, of course, we find the game that everyone wants to play.

Returning to board games for a moment:

Sometimes we’re getting together to play Captain Sonor.

Sometimes we’re getting together to play with Peter and Hannah.

These are different premises.

They’re both okay.

In “My First Book,” Robert Louis Stevenson tells the origin story of Treasure Island, a book which I’ve just had the pleasure of reading this afternoon. It begins when Stevenson was a lodger at the Late Miss McGregor’s Cottage. One of his roommates was an artist who would spend afternoons at the easel, and Stevenson would periodically join him. On one such occasion, Stevenson:

…made a map of an island. It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance ‘Treasure Island.’

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence worth of imagination to understand with!

No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of ‘Treasure Island,’ the future characters of the book began to appear visibly there among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection.

The map that appears above is, sadly, not the map that Stevenson drew that day. Much later, when he had completed his first novel, he submitted the map along with the manuscript to the publisher. Unfortunately, the map became lost in the post (or, perhaps, the publisher misplaced it). In either case, the horrified Stevenson had to recreate the map from memory, with great difficulty because he also had to comb through his own text to make sure all of the continuity was correct with the new version of the map.

In this, Stevenson was in some way reversing the process by which the novel had actually been written.

I had written it up to the map. The map was the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an islet ‘Skeleton Island,’ not knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe and stole Flint’s pointer. And in the same way, it was because I made two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her wanderings with Israel Hands.

I suspect that many a game master will recognize themself in Stevenson’s tale — whether it was the dim recesses of a dungeon, the vasty wilds of a hexmap, or the starlit expanse of a Traveller sector map.

Oft have I found myself peering at a published map and found my eyes drawn down into its enigma: If I stepped onto that street, what would I see? What strange mysteries lie beneath those mounds?

But even more often have I walked in Stevenson’s footsteps, beginning an adventure not with an outline or a scene list, but by seizing graph paper and letting my creativity flow through the geography.

This is not, of course, the only way to begin an adventure. (I am equally likely to start with, say, a revelation list.) But take a dungeon, for example. An interesting arrangement of chambers invites the imagination to fill them, and I find the encounters “peeping out,” as Stevenson suggests, from between the gridlines. The same is true of a wilderness map: My hand will chart the Silverwood before I ever learn what might lie beneath its boughs.

“The map is not the territory.” When dealing with the representation of reality, Alfred Korzybski’s saying means that we cannot capture all the complexities of reality in our representation of it; there is a vast wealth of detail that cannot be captured. But when it comes to imaginary creation, the meaning is almost inverted: the representation of the map is all that exists because the details have not yet been created; but that howling void will, like any vacuum, suck you down into it, providing a lattice on which all the detail of a world can spill out.

I’ll let Mr. Stevenson have the final word here:

I have said the map was most of the plot. I might almost say it was the whole… It is, perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is always important… It is my contention — my superstition, if you like — that who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative immunity from accident. The tale has a root there; it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better if the country by real, and he has walked every foot of it and knows every milestone. But even with imaginary places, he will do well in the beginning to provide a map; as he studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon; he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and footprints for his messengers; and even when the map is not all the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be a mine of suggestion.