I want to first apologize to everyone who is reading this that I have gone nearly two weeks without updating it.  I fear that my work load has become increasingly difficult as we prepare to return to the states, and while getting home is a great thing, that means little time to work on this project at the moment.

One thing I did notice though is when talking to my old D+D group is that the excitement for D+D simply isn’t there anymore.  I remember in college where we would drop anything, including classes, to play a few hours (or all night and day) as we were pretty much addicted to it as others are to WoW or Everquest.  The difference?  We played 2nd and now we play 4th, and it seems to me 4th is simply a very watered down version of the game where as 2ndallowed such great flexibility if you knew what you were doing that you could be pretty much what you wanted, if you were willing to spend hours creating your character.

Anyways, that was my thought for the day.  Have fun, and be back soon I promise .

After a long time, well three weeks,of being on R+R I am finally not only back in the office but finally settled down as well.  Unfortunately as my unit begins to ready itself to return to home, my job as the UMO will pick up, and has picked up, quite a bit, making for far longer work days and far less time to devote to this site.  I am sorry to say that, but I hope to still update the blog at least once a week, as well as continue to churn out more and more of the handbook as the ever nearing finish approaches.  Anyways, just wanted to let people know that after a long battle with our filtering site, I have finally gotten the category of Swords8Sorcery changed to something that the Army does not block, meaning when I get a bit of downtime at work I can jump here and update you on what is going on.  A little extra access, always good .

So, as I sit here in the USO at the Atlanta airport, waiting 8 hours till my flight with my computer power supply in my pocket because otherwise I would have to check it in my main bag, I realize that I have nothing better to do than go into some in depth discussion about the three major parts of Swords and Sorcery character creation.  Sure, I have talked about it briefly before, but now that I have plenty of time to kill I figure it might not be bad to get down into the nitty gritty of each the Abilities, Talents and Skills so with luck there will be no questions about them and perhaps even some good ideas that can come up to help them along.

Talents:  These are the core of a character’s being as they are simply what the character is born able to do and cannot be later picked up without some serious magic or DM intervention, besides pact magic that is.  Talents include such things as dark vision which allows your character to see in a green spectrum thus even when it is very dark out, they can still see with some degree of success, though colors are lost on them; and the great Body of Steel which increases your hit points and resistances as well as other little nifty things.  All around, talents are designed to help give your character that little edge over normal people, things they are born with that might not be too common otherwise, such as a human with night vision or an elf with body of bronze.  Magic, like all other Talents, can only be taken at the beginning of the game if Intuitive, and unless given special permission by the DM even if it is Divine as the length of time needed to attain the church rank will be outside the scope of most game lengths.  Pact magic, which may be taken at the beginning of the game, may also be taken later in the game if the situation arises, a dark pact with a  creature of evil being the most common, though a few creatures of ‘good’ or ‘nuetral’ may also make the deals.

Skills:  Skills are things a character knows that assists them outside of combat for the most part.  These can be jobs they have previously had such as blacksmith or cooking, or can simply be knowledge picked up such as heraldry, acting and bargaining.  Skills, unlike talents, come as Basic and Advanced, as well as four levels of training.  Basic skills can be used by anyone, regardless of their training, while Advanced skills require a character to at least have apprentice training in to use.  Training is broken into four levels, Apprentice, Skilled, Master and Grand Master, and each level increases a characters proficiency in the skill, where otherwise they suffer a -20 to their chance of success if using a Basic skill untrained.  A character may only be a Grand Master in 3 separate skills , two more than an NPC would be allowed, and a Master in 5 skills, 3 more than a normal NPC would be allowed.  With skills, a character is well defined and fleshed out, but they are not the final part of a character.

Abilities:  These are the abilities of a character, mostly designed for combat though sometimes they have effects that might apply outside of combat as well, such as Detect Noise and Vanishing.  Though there are no classes and thus no restrictions on Abilities allowed to be taken, for ease of referencing and linking, all Abilities are separated as Fighter Type, which is direct damage and defense, Stealth Type, which includes moving silently and sneak attacks, Mage Type, which enhances spells and decrease spell cast time, and Other, all other Abilities though this category might soon be removed from the game.  In addition to their type, all Abilities also have what is known as a Link, which groups it along with other Abilities that are considered to be similar.  Such links include Mastery and Focused Strikes.  These Links are what allows a character to learn a new Ability when they level without the need of someone to teach them.  When leveling, if a character chooses to take Ability points, they may learn any Ability they want which is in a Link with another Ability they already know for an additional point than normal.  If they have a trainer, they may learn any Ability the trainer knows as well at the cost of taking the ability.  A teacher may not train a character in an Ability they do not have, even if they have a Linked ability.  This allows a character to advance in a few links on their own without the high need for a trainer to be present, or to wait until they can find someone to train them before advancing in a new link.

I hope this has been helpful, and that people might now see the major differences between Skills, Talents and Abilities, and understand why I feel that Swords and Sorcery is such a unique system in part because of them.  Until next time, Peace Favor.

Having played hundreds of games, I have found that one of the things that is most important to me in an RPG is the ability to have a character that is exactly like I want them to be, from not only the abilities and traits they have but their looks as well.  I am not sure why this is, but I guess it simply stems from the fact that I have in mind someone I want to be for the game and I want my character as close to that as I can possibly get.  I remember many a game of AD+D 2e where I had to sit down with about a dozen different books, searching them for obscure rules and abilities that would allow me to make the character I wanted.  Now granted I was often playing a mage or a priest, making me need more books thanks to all the magic I needed to have at my fingertips.  But even than I was unable to get exactly the character I wanted, for though I was able to make him pretty much the mage I was after, unless the DM gave me permission to change racial features, no race ever really fit the look I was after.  So with this in mind, and with some help of a fellow designer, the Fixed Phased Changeling was born.  Below is the Races page which describes the Fixed Phased Changeling, so read on and let me know what you think about it.

• Fixed Phased Changeling:
• Frequency: Rare
• Attributes: Special
• Common Talents:
• Rare Talents: Special
• Height:

M: 4’ 0” – 6’ 9”
F: 4’ 0” – 6’ 5”
• Weight:

M: Any
F: Any
• Age: 30/90/180
• Society: Due to the nature of a Fixed Phased Changeling, there are no natural societies of the creatures, rather they live in the society of whatever raised them or they first found.
• Extra: Fixed Phased Changelings are a very unique race as they are born as an amorphous blob that takes on the characteristics of the first things they see.  Thus a Fixed Phased Changeling can look like any living creature in the world, or some strange combination of them, all depending on what it first sees.  The size of the creature though is limited to its maximum mass, which can be anywhere from the size of a gnome to that of an Ulgar.  Thus even if the first thing that the Fixed Phased Changeling sees is a Frost Titan, it will never grow to that size but look like a miniature Titan.  Regardless of what they look like, they age at a common rate, and right after transformation they start to grow up, going from an infant like creature to full grown in about twenty five years.  Around the age of twenty five, they will look exactly like the first things seen by the creature.  Also, regardless of looks, a Fixed Phased Changeling is not a genetic copy of anything, and thus cannot reproduce the same way the creatures it took a liking to can, nor does it even have the same hormones or desires such creatures have.  How they reproduce or how new ones are formed is unknown, but they are an asexual creature most of the time and never can reproduce.  At age 90 their genetic makeup slowly starts to break down, allowing them to start to look older as other races do, and by the age of 180 they look ancient due to such a break down.  As a Fixed Phased Changeling, you may take any combination of Attributes you want, though each Attribute can only be taken once.  Thus if you take Strength/Fortitude, you cannot take Strength or Fortitude in any other combination again.  As well, all talents are considered rare, but instead of costing double they simply cost an additional point.  If you take both Fixed Phased Body and Fixed Phased Mind than all other talents will cost 3 points.  Their speed matches that of the creature they look most like, and they can use any special appendixes at the GM’s approval.

Spending the last week on R+R has given me a bit of time to really think about the project I am building as well as trying to explain it to my family and friends who ask about it.  I find that it is rather difficult to actually write out an explanation about what it is that makes Swords and Sorcery such a great system for players of all kinds because of how excited I get just thinking about it.  I will not lie, I have looked through many different systems, those I have played and even those I simply read over, and have taken them apart, looked at what it was I liked and what it was that I did not and really started to hash out the system.  Even as I write the manual now, having gone through so much of the system on paper and in tests, I find myself tweaking it each and every way just to make it a bit better, to get a slightly more comfortable feel to it, and thanks to the help of some of my play testers, I really think the system is going great.

Granted, that is until I try to sit down and actually write, remembering why it is that I am a computer scientist and not an author, but I think it is coming together rather well and over the course of the next few weeks I will be posting parts of the book to give you, my readers, a chance to see just how the book is written in this pre-edited version.  What I am hoping for though is that even as I write out this book that I can get some feedback from those who are watching the development and more importantly some ideas on what it is that you really look for in a system.  So far the questionnaire has been a great help in advancing the game in ways I know players like, but the more I get filled out, the better this system will be.

Anyways, back to a bit of R+R before I sit down some more with this book, hope all is well out there and come back for more in a few days.

Well, I wanted to apologize to everyone for the delay in my posts.  It has been a hectic last few weeks, and what is worse as of last Thursday the filter decided to start blocking my site.  Well, that means no more working on it at work, and since my net in my room is, well, less than desirable, I fear this might be a problem for the next little bit, but I promise to try to update it twice a week still.  This weekend I get to start my R+R, meaning back to the states after nine months, so that is going to be GREAT, but also means time to work on this project without interuptions, so that is good news for all of you out there.

Also, as some of you may have noticed, I now have a mailer set up, well mostly.  Please understand that I still have it coded where I send the email myself, not getting any of those big fancy auto mailers for Swords8Sorcery just yet.  But please, sign up and as soon as the ability charts are done be ready for those as a little thank you for signing up.  Giving all of you out there who do a little sneak peek into the Swords and Sorcery game, while also giving a great tool for you to use once you get it.

I have been playing for years and years on a number of different RPG systems, from both the electronic kinds to the Pen and Paper and the ones that I have found to be of the greatest interest to me have been those that do not limit the creation of a character.  In truth, I took great inspiration from Bethesda Softworks in how they make character creation possible. 

Where many of the popular systems out right now require a player to choose a class for their character and choose from abilities in that class to use, I adopted the idea that Bethesda and a few other gaming systems use where you simply choose what abilities you want without limitations based on an arbitrary class chosen.  Although advanced and skilled players can make a character nearly just how they want if they have enough time and all the different books out there, Swords and Sorcery instead make it far easier to make a character you want without needing to reference fifteen different books with vague rules and unseen tricks needed to give your character that ability you so badly want that is reserved only for certain classes.

The next step in character creation is the way I have split up the different skills and abilities a character has.  In Swords and Sorcery, there are 3 different categories for players to choose from.  Talents which are the innate abilities of a character can only be taken at their creation and are things such as keen eyesight, touch the flow (to use magic), body of iron and such.  Skills represent the parts of a character that are learned over time but normally have little relevance to battle and require no Essence to use, such as cooking, blacksmithing, sailing and others.  Abilities are parts of the character that are most often used in battle or during certain circumstances and require Essence in order to be used and thus can only be used a limited number of times before rest is needed.

Essence is the very spirit of a character, their energy level and how often they can use their abilities.  As a unique portion of a character, character leveling is done in two ways in Swords and Sorcery.  Experience levels are gained in fighting of creatures, completing quests and other commonly understood parts of RPs, while Essence levels are only gained by fighting certain creatures, using all your essence up, and completion of major quests and overcoming of impossible challenges.

Finally another part that makes character creation unique is the idea of alignment.  Like many systems and ideologies, there are 8 alignments in Swords and Sorcery, Lawful Good, Neutral Evil, Neutral Good and Evil, and Chaotic Good, Neutral and Evil.  Where some might have True Neutral, instead Swords and Sorcery removes that and leaves it only to NPCs and instead makes a Non Aligned category to choose.  When a player sticks to their alignment for a while and makes some tough choices because of it, they will gain Essence Points to help gain Essence Levels, and if they go against their alignment in major situations they will lose Essence Points and possibly entire Essence Levels.  To make it so players need not worry, if you choose to be Non Aligned, you neither worry about gaining Essence Points nor fear losing them based on your actions and how they relate to your ideological views.

So, as of today I have transfered to my new site, Swords8Sorcery.com.  Welcome everyone and I hope that you are as excited about this as I am.  Soon I will continue my posts concerning Swords and Sorcery, but for the moment I shall be focused on getting this site just right.

I know that like many of you, I have come to realize that combat is an intergral part of any  RP system and it will continue to be one for ages to come.  After all, half the fun of the game is to beat something else up with your incredible powers and feats of strengths, so of course combat will be an important part.  How many times though have you gathered your group together for a night of role-playing and quickly come up to a battle that takes three or four hours to accomplish?

It’s not that the battles are entire armies fighting, but rather that each side has so much damage they can take verses what they deal that it takes hours to widdle down an opponent before it, or the party, is finally killed off.  With this in mind, Swords and Sorcery has reworked the most common combat systems out there so that not only do players and opponents only have a handful of life, but now damage done is equally balanced.  Having played AD+D 2e as a rouge, one issue I noticed is that even at a higher level, my back stab damage was simply not enough to save my hide once I got close enough to an opponent to use it, and 4e has the same problem as well.  And D+D is not the only system out there that has these problems, a rouge based character sneaks in, strikes an opponent and then is leveled because his damage isn’t enough to subdue or kill his opponent.  That changes now, and a character that specializes in sneak attacks will do quite a bit of damage and as they grow more powerful they can even kill an opponent in one strike with a little luck.

Besides just damage done, what about damage received?  The idea that many games hold a single defense score just seems a bit silly to me.  After all, why is it that a touch based attack such as Heat Metal, Surge or a number of touch poisons have the same chance of damaging a nimble acrobat as they do a heavily armored knight?  Well, Swords and Sorcery takes that one score and splits it into two, giving characters a base Dodge and base Armor scores that take into account the different way attacks work.  Now a very nimble acrobat has the same chance of avoiding damage as a heavily armored knight does, but instead of it showing the same way the acrobat would dodge the attack while the knight would simply not be damaged by it.  You might be asking how is this any different than the single defense system, and the answer is simple, touch based attacks now have meaning.  If you are a deadly sword singer and have your sword glowing with ethereal power that can cut through armor like butter, it does not help at all against the acrobat who simply dodges the attack, though the poor knight is in trouble since his dodge is so low and his armor cannot protect him.

This overhaul on combat is not the only amount done, but I do not want to get into the rest of the changes quite yet as they relate far more to other aspects of the game I hope to describe better in future posts.  For now, the biggest thing I hope you see is that combat has quite a bit of focus in the Swords and Sorcery world in order to make it a bit more fair and far more realistic than in other systems.  Just be warned, watch out for that Kobold, for even a powerful adventurer can be taken down if it gets a little lucky and pulls of a few good tricks.

Until next time, peace favor.

I have just created a small questionnaire I would really appreciate people taking a moment to fill out.  It’s located on the sidebar, so please take a few moments and let me know a little more about your role playing preferences.