Gear: worn chain armor, great sword, smoldering blue gaze, panther-like demeanor, full skin of wine, urge for adventure, and still a full and endless supply of disdain for the soft and the civilized. In most GUMSHOE games, you have one defense pool (usually Stability) which measures how well you can keep it together when everything around you is going to Hell. Swords of the Serpentine has Morale; a high Morale usually means you’re stubborn, confident, and relatively self-assured. Overcoming someone’s Morale is handy because it defeats them without leaving a corpse, and you’re not going to get tried for murder if you just clashed with someone socially important. Sorcery gets it own section, but I mostly just reiterate: it’s flavorful and awesome, but also dark and costly. That foundation of commerce folds into the expectation of law. Certainly, law’s job is to provide an environment where commerce can safely be plied, but its priorities are also shaped by that emphasis. The very worse crimes in the city are things like counterfeiting and fraud, with things like murder, or even theft, coming as sloppy seconds. The idea is that these things (and the corruption of sorcery, which is also super illegal) are existential threats to the city, and everything else is mere inconvenience. Special: You may not possess any ranks of the Investigative ability Liar’s Tell. If you have ranks of Liar’s Tell when you become Drowned, reassign these ranks to other Investigative abilities.

Characters can have five or more pieces of minor, iconic gear that define your character. While these might be temporarily lost, you always end up with these items (or ones just like it) in your possession without needing to spend wealth or favors to get more. It conveys the presence of the goddess in a non-blatant way. Because this is a thing which is done, it conveys its taken seriously, which in turn suggests that the goddess’s opinion/dictates carry real weight even when there’s not necessarily an enforcement mechanism. It is rare to see religion conveyed as important in a setting with anything approaching a light touch.Another one of the fun setting details is the Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers. In a city that is constantly sinking and constantly being rebuilt, it would take almost miraculous effort to keep that city functional. The Guild of Architects and Canal-Watchers are all sorcerers granted special permission to practice if they internalize all corruption, to keep the city functional. This is a huge secret, and there is a special retirement home in the lower levels of the city for the most obviously corrupted and mutated members of the guild. Corpse Astray The way that the city's structure and story is woven into the setting and gameplay is illustrated by the Adversaries section. Each major faction in the city is detailed with an army list of commanders and minions, fully statted, so that any run-in with the City Watch or the Church of Denari can be immediately fleshed out with a complete cast of opponents. The corollary is that this is not a wilderness setting: the whole world where Eversink resides is detailed, with plenty of hints as to where you can take your characters for wilderness hex-crawling, but the action is clearly geared to Eversink itself. The spirit of the setting is closer to Early Renaissance with fireballs replacing firearms than medieval knights and castles, although there is some guidance for recreating Eversink as a steampunk setting if you want to shift the technological development needle. Out-of-the-box Eversink is such a rich and stimulating setting, though, that I doubt too many people will bother. In fact, I expect that, as with many Pelgrane products, gamers who aren't enamoured of Gumshoe will buy the book anyway for the superlative setting detail.

Appendices and Index: Don’t forget they’re here; we grabbed the most important tables and charts for your use. If you have an investigative ability with any ranks, you gain a clue whenever you are in the right place at the right time, without rolling or spending anything Wealth is handled interestingly. To reflect the idea that character fortunes will go up and down, it’s a value that’s set at the start of a game. Technically, it’s a 1-5 rating, but practically it’s a -2 to +2 rating, with -2 being “super broke” and +2 being “rolling in it”. In addition to giving some fictional framing, any rating other than zero turn into an investigative ability that works like an allegiance with wealth or poverty.

Sample Adversary – The Drowned

Sorcery is rare and dangerous, and seldom can be trusted. Sorcery corrupts and has a cost. Its rules and origins are little-known. For comparison, a sovereign Hero has about 16 adventures worth of experience over a standard Hero, and a standard Hero has about 17 adventures more experience than a fledgling Hero. That’s enough of a power and capability difference to feel like you’re at very different stages of the Hero’s career. A fun scenario might be to run three adventures: one at standard level to showcase a threat or problem, then one at fledgling level to show how the threat or problem originated, and finally one at sovereign level to let your Heroes crush the threat once and for all. Outside of co-creating Dungeons & Dragons, the next biggest contribution Gygax may have made to fantasy gaming is Appendix N. I’m not going to defend Gygax’s taste in fantasy as being definitive by any means, but Appendix N introduced the concept of mapping your inspirational media. In my case, Appendix N introduced me to Fritz Leiber and the city of Lankhmar. More than about anything on the list, the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories fired my imagination. You know what you don’t see too often? Robust and fun social combat systems that lets you defeat a foe without laying a finger on them. You know what we really wanted for this game?

Quests tend to be small, personal, and centered around self-interest and small groups instead of saving a nation or the world. As always in Swords of the Serpentine, you should be able to know a character just by reading their Adjectives, Drives (or “what three things are best in life?”), and Gear. Fledgling

A GUMSHOE roleplaying game of swords & sorcery!

Instead of rolling for different abilities, sometimes a character can propose that they spend X amount of one of their pools to declare that something happens. This must make sense for the pool being spent. For example, someone with Servility might say that they blend into a crowd and are unnoticed, instead of making a Stealth test. Someone with City’s Secrets might propose they spend X amount of their pool to find a shortcut to a location to arrive there before a rival band, instead of rolling the dice to race them.