Swords & Sorceries: Origins, Inspirations, Destiny (Patreon)

This year, Arc Dream Publishing launched the Swords & Sorceries line of fantasy adventures for Fifth Edition. Swords & Sorceries began as a fun side project. I was reading a lot of ancient history and mythology, and having my imagination sparked by the evolution of the West’s most enduring myths and beliefs from theorized prehistoric origins. And after playing every version of D&D for 40 years now, I was having fun digging around in the origins of popular RPG monsters and tropes in myth and folklore. 

At the same time, I had been playing Fifth Edition for a few years and found a number of its design elements interesting and challenging. And I became interested in Fifth Edition's capacity for gaming not as an endless, level-grinding quest of heroic fantasy, but as disparate swords & sorcery adventures that build up to an epic changing of the world. Less Lord of the Rings and more Elric, or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Conan. 

All those interests started coming together instinctively. 

Swords & Sorceries has been one of the most exciting and rewarding projects that I have worked on. Here’s one part of how that happened.

THE FIRST TIER

Fifth Edition suggests linking character level advancement to the impact of the characters on the world around them and their place in society. 

• Levels 1–4: wandering heroes. 
• Levels 5–10: defenders against threats to an entire city or kingdom. 
• Levels 11–16: defenders against threats to a whole region or continent. 
• Levels 17–20: defenders against threats to the whole world or to the whole multiverse.

That is a spectacular vision of the evolution of characters in a game world. Too often, though, that sense of growth and impact is diluted by the way the game is played. Instead, adventurers go through a single long quest that brings them from “local heroes” to “heroes of the multiverse” with barely a break. You can go from 1st level to 20th, from apprentice to demigod, in a few months of a character’s life. 

Moving that quickly, without providing the context of a character’s gradual, years-long effects on the setting, you don’t feel like the character or the world are changing. You just pile on new powers and fight bigger monsters. Which is fun! But there’s so much more potency in changing not just a character’s capabilities, but the character’s personality and impact on the world. I wanted to build a series of adventures around that opportunity. 

The challenge of establishing adventurers’ impact over time, and playing in the “short story” mode of swords and sorcery, already began to shape things:

• Each adventure should be discrete and self-contained.
• Each adventure should take place in a distinct, new locale, so it clearly is not an immediate sequel in time or place.
• Each adventure should be playable in any setting and with any characters, but be informed enough with an assumed setting to make that setting valuable and intriguing.
• Each adventure should suggest that a substantial amount of time has passed since the last one, and a substantial amount of time is likely to pass afterward. These episodes are highlights picked out from the adventurers’ lives.
• Each adventure should be built for characters of a particular level and include enough sources of XP to bring them to the next level.
• Each adventure’s background and storyline should be based on the overall tier of play, so the characters' impact on the world grows with their levels.

With all that in mind, developing the individual adventures became easy. I watched for items from ancient history and myth that caught my fancy and could easily be spun into adventures for a picaresque band of heroes—or, more likely with most players, rogues or straight-up antiheroes. The adventures, as the saying goes, pretty much wrote themselves. Or at least, six of them have so far.

1st level: The Sea Demon’s Gold. A very short adventure, since advancing from 1st to 2nd level is quick in 5E. Inspired by the Sea Peoples, by ancient Tiamat myths, and by a Monsters & Other Childish Things idea that Benjamin Baugh had of kids dungeon-crawling through the corpse of a gigantic dead kaiju monster.

2nd level: The Song of the Sun Queens. A longer adventure with more pronounced diplomacy, outdoor travel, and dangers from the elements. Inspired by east African myths and stories of shapechangers, by the oldest representations of gnolls and blink dogs, and by a notion I had of putting spell scrolls in new forms.

3rd level: The Tomb of Fire. A long adventure that begins with an overland journey across a deadly desert, and requires diplomacy or intrigue to gain the secrets of a tomb full of treasure. In the tomb itself, many dangers face the unfaithful. Inspired by pre-Islamic Arabic folklore, mythology, monsters, and religion, and by theories as to the prehistoric trans-Jordanian origins of worship of Jahweh.

3rd level: The God-King’s Curse. An easy job watching for ghosts in a crowded neighborhood in an ancient, crumbling island city turns up an all-too-deadly haunting. That reveals the opening of a monster-guarded maze and an ancient, cursed tomb, by zealots wanting to awaken the horrors inside. Inspired by the mythological Labyrinth of Knossos, Roman curse tablets, and the idea of reclaiming the “erinyes” devils of D&D as the far more interesting Furies of Greek myth. (A second 3rd-level adventure because it takes a lot of adventuring to go from level 3 to level 4.)

4th level: The Temple of Lost Prayers. In a far land, the adventures find their reputation has followed them on the ships or caravan they accompanied for months of travel. A prince has vanished, abducted by an evil witch that he thought a friend and send to work evil in a temple said to imprison a forgotten, cruel goddess. The prince’s sister asks the adventurers to find the temple and save him. Inspired by the Rig Veda, Vedic Iron Age culture, and the theorized links between major Hindu gods and the ancient Greek, Celtic, and Slavic gods that all might have evolved from the same Proto-Indo-European cultures. 

5th level: The Fane of the Frost Giant. In a farther land still, the adventurers wait out the long months of a frozen winter in a king’s hall, where intrigues among warlike tribes threaten to break the kingdom apart. Meanwhile, a far more dangerous, supernatural threat looms. Inspired by the Iron Age origins of what became famous as the Germanic and Norse gods, the shifting and ambiguous nature of monsters that translation upon translation eventually reduced to “giants,” the bloody nature of faith in cultures where survival itself is fraught, and the complexity of politics in every human society of history, even those that seem small and simple to outsiders. 

VOLUME 1: THE BROKEN EMPIRE

My partner Dennis Detwiller and I have planned out this series in detail and depth, in case it takes off. We envision those first six adventures becoming the first volume of a trilogy—Swords & Sorceries: The Broken Empire. 

Those adventures start with adventurers at 1st level and end with them attaining 6th level. The begin as “local heroes” with minor impact on the world and become “heroes of the realm,” changing the course of a kingdom’s history and perhaps its culture.

Over the course of six years or so in the fiction, the adventurers wander across the lands and develop reputations for good or for ill as heroes—either heroes in the modern sense of powerful people doing good things…or at least as heroes in the ancient sense of powerful people coming to recognize their own true natures and claiming rewards and honors for their strength. 

If those first adventures become a full book, it would be rounded out with further details about the world of the Broken Empire, character and magic options to help bring that world to life, and recommended “house rules” to maintain the swords and sorcery tone.

AND BEYOND

Further adventures and volumes in the series, then, would see the adventures growing from “heroes of the realm” to “masters (or defenders) of the realm” (Swords & Sorceries: The Usurpers, from 6th level to 12th level) and then from “masters of the realm” to “masters (or defenders) of the world” (Swords & Sorceries: The Conquerors, 13th level to 20th level). 

Later adventure series may cohere more and more, as shared experiences, threats, and recurring enemies come together and the sense of epic stakes feels fully earned. We may see in those adventures whether the adventures turn their growing power to the good of society, or—as was the case with so many figures of mythic tragedy—only to the good of themselves.

I hope to write more later about the nature of the Broken Empire as a setting, the role of magic and nonhumans in it, the challenges of adapting historical elements into a fantasy world, the importance of downtime activities in establishing character growth in this mode of play, my approach to the pacing of scenarios and encounters to challenge veteran players, and more. 

For now, check out The Sea Demon’s Gold and The Song of the Sun Queens. The third scenario, The Tomb of Fire, is coming soon. Buy them, play them, and rate them. How well they do will determine how far this adventure can go. I hope you enjoy this adventure in Swords & Sorceries as much as I have.