True Sword and Sorcery games have always sat a little uncomfortably in the hobby. While the influence of the genre on RPGs is undeniable (as a cursory read through Appendix N reveals), many of the conventions of the genre — low magic rather than everyday wizardry, personal stories rather than good-vs-evil epics, and only one or two protagonists — are at odds with not only mainstream gamer tastes, but also the more mundane needs of how to entertain six people with varying tastes once a week for a couple of years.

(The definition of S&S is outside the scope of this review, but for starters there’s the Wikipedia article, but better is probably this analysis by Howard Andrew Jones.)

I doubt that this is likely to change. At your typical RPG table, you’re likely to have at least one person who likes epic magic; and it’s kind of hard to focus on internal drama when your PC is jostling for spotlight time with five others. Plus, the tendency of S&S heroes to end up right back where they started (usually broke and running for their lives) makes it hard to get that sense of “zero to hero” development that many enjoy. So S&S gaming will probably always play second fiddle to high fantasy.

But if you’re like me, and prefer Conan to Caramon, Imaro to Isildur, and Red Sonja to Rand Al-Thor, then there’s a wealth of great games out there: Crypts & Things, Conan, and many more.

However, they’ve all now been fired by my favorite S&S game, Blade of the Iron Throne.

The first thing to know about Blade is that it's not an easy game to learn. Many of the ways it does things are different than most RPGs, and this can lead to a lot of rules errors and time spent looking things up. This isn’t going to be a great one-shot RPG as a result, unless GMed by someone very familiar with the system.

(While a lot of the online discussion around Blade has focused on its development history [in short, it started as fan-made update of the old The Riddle of Steel RPG, and gradually took on a life of its own], I want to treat Blade as a thing in and of itself. Thus, this review will not assume any familiarity with TROS.)

From a broad overview, the game has two major pillars. The first is a very detailed melee combat system, probably the most detailed I have ever seen in an RPG. The second is a reward cycle that makes the game extremely player-driven. These two features are unusual to see in the same game. Typically, detailed rules are in the simulation camp of design, where your PC is not a special snowflake, but merely one inhabitant of the rules-neutral setting among many. Conversely, player-driven rules usually fall more in the lightweight, storygames approach, where your PC is the star of the show and has varying degrees of protection against deprotagonization. Regardless, I think there’s a pretty good reason for combining these in the same game, which I’ll address later on in the review.

THE BASICS

The core of the game is pretty standard stuff. At its heart, the system uses dice pools, although d12s instead of the more typical d6s or d10s. Your target number for a success is usually 7. Normally you only need one success, but harder tasks might require more. The more successes you get over the minimum requirement, the better. Circumstances add or subtract dice from your pool as appropriate.

Attributes are on the scale of 1-9, making it a pretty compressed system. Skills are around the same range. Attributes are not added to skills like in many dice pool games; rather the attribute serves as a cap on the maximum dice you can roll against a skill.

The skill list is medium-small: thirty-seven skills of fairly narrow scope. Anything outside the skills, even if it’s normally what you’d think of as a skill, you do as an attribute check or under the auspices of another skill.

There are Assets, which are either advantages or disadvantages depending on your character. If you have “Abrasive” as an advantage, then you get a bonus to intimidation. If it’s a disadvantage, then you get a penalty to negotiation and other finesse-based social interactions. Not all assets have this yin/yang split; there are no benefits to having an Addiction, for example.

And finally you have Proficiencies, which are either combat styles or sorcery. There’s quite a few, but they all default to each other with varying penalties depending on how far removed they are.

Aside from the Proficiencies, all this is a pretty normal dice pool system. Let’s look at the more complicated bits:

COMBAT

The basic structure of combat is:

1. Combat consists of a series of “Limelights.”
2. A Limelight is an indefinite series of Combat Rounds.
3. A Combat Round is two Exchanges.
4. An Exchange is where the Attacker and Defender each choose a Maneuver, and resolve them.
5. A Maneuver is something like (for the Attacker) Cut, Thrust, Beat, or Feint; or (for the Defender) Parry, Evade, or Block.

Breaking that down a little:

1. There’s no traditional initiative order like in more traditional RPGs. Instead it is designed to feel like a series of camera shots: you stay with one protagonist, then cut to another. NPCs do not have a place in the order of Limelights; rather they act on a PC’s Limelight. This is easy enough when the PC and NPC(s) are in combat with each other, but still applies even if they aren’t.
2. When it’s your Limelight, you engage in a series of repeated Combat Rounds with your foe until there is a break in the action (like someone disengaging by leaping back) or other dramatic moment (someone is wounded, someone is disarmed). Then the camera snaps to the next PC’s limelight.
3. Each Combat Round you have a Melee Pool of d12s. The size of the pool is dependent on your Proficiency in that particular weapon style, and your stats. You allocate these dice to perform attacks and defenses in a series of Exchanges with your foe. A Combat Round has two Exchanges; at the end of the second Exchange, your pool refreshes and you get all your dice back. If there’s a break or a dramatic moment, then you pause and go to the next PC’s Limelight. Otherwise you do another Combat Round.
4. In each Exchange you and your opponent choose a Maneuver. The attacker declares his Maneuver first and states how many dice he is committing from his pool — more dice means a more committed attack, which has a greater likelihood of succeeding but also leaves fewer dice in your pool to do anything with on the next exchange. Then the defender declares his Maneuver and dice. They both roll their allotted dice vs. their target number and compare successes. If the defender wins, then he has successfully dissolved the attack and will gain the initiative on the next Exchange. On a tie, the defender is unharmed but is so hard-pressed that he stays on the defense. If the attacker wins, you check for damage.
5. Damage is a function of the margin of successes you got over the defender, plus the weapon’s damage rating, plus your strength. It is reduced by the target’s toughness and armor, but is usually catastrophic. You temporarily lose dice from your Melee Pool from shock. You might take an ongoing penalty to your Melee Pool due to pain (until the wound is healed). And you might start bleeding and eventually pass out due to blood loss. Of course, all that assumes your wound is not immediately fatal.

Putting that all together: You clash with a foe, exchanging attacks and defenses. At a dramatic moment, the camera cuts to your companion and we find out what he was doing in the meantime.

I’ve left out a lot. Compared to a longsword, a rapier has a lower target number when making thrusting attacks, but a higher target number when parrying anything heavier than itself. You can spend dice from your Melee Pool to outmaneuver your foe, gaining superior ground or keeping yourself from being surrounded. The exact location struck in combat is determined via 1d6 (swinging at the lower leg, you might hit either the knee, the shin, or the foot), and you can allocate dice from your Melee Pool to influence the d6 roll. And so on — essentially, if you can do it in a sword fight, you can do it in Blade.

To sum up, Blade combat is:

• Deadly. This is not a game where you can turn into a pincushion of arrows and keep fighting. Even one hit can end the fight, either immediately, or when you start bleeding and your opponent just fights defensively until you pass out. You have to fight carefully, or even better, make sure that any fight you start is as unfair as possible — in your favor, of course.
• Detailed. This is a blow-by-blow system: every thrust, dodge, parry, etc. is resolved. There is no “I attack him.” Every attack is described and targeted: “I cut at his arm,” “I swing downward at his head,” “I thrust my sword at his belly,” etc. If you find combat inherently boring, then this will be excruciating. However, as a result of the deadliness, combat is short. If you like the martial arts and especially the historical western ones, this will be thrilling.
• Difficult. The combat system requires an enormous amount of player skill. A player with more experience in the combat system can often overcome a significantly large disadvantage in terms of pure numbers. This means that there is a skill to the game, and it’s not the pre-game skill of efficiently building characters that you find in 3e or Pathfinder. Some people hate this and think that they should be able to make a character who is a good fighter, regardless of their personal abilities. That is understandable, although personally I like this type of skill vastly more than learning how to manipulate a character creation system. Or maybe you hate both these types of skills, and just want to get to the story, in which case something like Fate is probably more your speed. But after getting over the initial learning curve, I found that this increased my sense of immersion — I can’t just check out in combat and let the numbers on my sheet do the work for me. I have to be involved, and make the right decisions.
• Dynamic. The combat in Blade feels more alive than any other game I’ve played. There’s a fluid and visceral back-and-forth. One unique aspect is the fine-grained decision of commitment (both over- and under-). Deciding the number of dice to allocate to each attack or defense is non-trivial. So you go by feel and guts. Experience helps. Making a weak attack might get your strike violently knocked aside, leaving your sword out of line and opening a straight shot to your center. Making an attack that’s overly strong might result in your opponent seeing you wind up, and leaping forward to beat you with a stab to your face. Or preparing a counter, winding around your weapon and passing it to pound a pommel in your face, or worse.

So combat is hard and dangerous, as befits a gritty game. The other interesting part of the game:

THE REWARD CYCLE

Players will do the things for which you give them XP, which is hopefully not a surprise to anyone. In B/X D&D, you get a lot of XP for finding treasure and a little XP for killing monsters. As a result, players learn to look for treasure and avoid fights. In 3e, you get XP for encounters, so players seek out encounters. Some storygames use this to drive the narrative: In Lady Blackbird you get XP for acting according to your character’s “Keys,” for example. Blade falls into this latter school of thought, through a mechanic called “Passions.”

Each character has a total of five Passions. Four of them are drives or goals like “Avenge my brother’s death” or “Get the loot!”. They are entirely player-created, and it is recommended that the group write up their characters’ Passions at the table together, so that there is at least some overlap. During character creation, a player gets seven points to divide between the Passions. They have a minimum of zero and a maximum of five.

The fifth Passion, Drama, is a Hero Point style metagame mechanic. It works differently than the main four Passions. You can spend a point to call for a scene, catch a lucky break in a scene (“Oh, of course that guard’s a drunk”), act out of Limelight order, or automatically succeed at an easy task.

During the game, whenever a character puts himself at risk to pursue a Passion, or has a chance to make significant progress towards resolving the Passion, he gets that Passion’s rating added to his dice pool. So your pool of six dice might now be a pool of ten dice! That is a pretty big jump and thus a strong incentive to bring them into play.

The reward for using a Passion is that the GM lets you increase it by a point (up to the maximum of five). This happens immediately, not at the end of the night, and you can start using the extra die right away.

Other than making your character much more competent, Passions are used to improve your attributes and skills. You voluntarily lower them, and get that many points to improve your stats; e.g. lowering a Passion from five to zero gets you five points. Raising a skill costs its current rating in points, raising an attribute costs its current rating x 3. Once a Passion is at zero, you can change it to anything that the group considers reasonable and consonant with your character’s story arc.

And just like Passions are increased in the middle of a session, so too may they be spent in the middle of a session. Need to boost your strength? Here’s your chance.

So let’s review. A character’s reward cycle looks like this:

1. Pursue a Passion’s object in a significant and/or risky way.
2. Passion rating increases.
3. Continue pursuing the object of Passion, with increased likelihood of success.
4. Resolve the Passion.
5. Drop the Passion to zero and change it.
6. Decide on another Passion that interests you; go to #1.

Thus, the Passions on a character sheet are a signal to the GM: “This is what I want the game to be about.” As a GM, this makes your job easy. No more hackneyed character hooks! Dangle that thing in front of your players’ faces and watch them go after it. Conversely, if you try to force an irrelevant story on your players, they will ignore it once they internalize how the reward cycle works.

The really interesting part comes from the group dynamic this creates. When you have one or more Passions at 5, you’re all about going after them, and at your best when you do. As that story element gets resolved and you spend down your Passions, someone else in the group will now be the guy with the highest Passions, and so the focus of the story naturally shifts to him. It’s a neat mechanic that creates ensemble stories in a way that feels organic.

MISCELLANEA

So that’s the two main parts of the game. Here’s what else you’re paying for:

• Character creation: This is done with a ranking system, kind of like old Shadowrun. You rank Culture, Attributes, etc. from “A” to “F.” Whatever you choose gets you a particular result, or a number of points to spend on that thing. There’s rules for creating your own ranking system, although I think this would be best shoved into the appendices. As written, the rules imply ancient and decadent civilizations, sorcery, etc., which is fine by me.
• Magic: It’s evil and entirely detrimental to human health, both mental and physical. The effects you can achieve with it are limited to what is common in S&S fiction: mind control, cursing, demon summoning/binding, necromancy, and so on. There are no Leomund’s Tiny Huts or anything else that would be absurd for Thulsa Doom to cast. Most of the greater effects are not available to PCs or even NPCs; learning how to raise the dead, for example, would be the object of a long and harrowing quest, if indeed anyone in the world even knew how to do it. Mechanically, you have a Sorcery pool, and you have to allocate dice to producing the effect and then containing the backlash. Failing to contain the backlash is bad. There are rules for magical duels that use a simplified set of maneuvers similar to the melee rules.
• Sword & Sorcery gaming: A chapter-length analysis of S&S tropes and how they relate to RPGing, and specifically Blade. In a nutshell, S&S games should be dark, gritty, religiously ambiguous (i.e., lots of cults and temples, but no obvious divine intervention), humans only, rare magic, and above all fast-paced.
• The setting: It has a short chapter on Xoth, which is also used in The Spider-God’s Bride and a few other products. My take on Xoth is that it’s a pretty good setting for S&S, more near-Middle-Eastern than European. It has lists of various (human) races, prominent cities, gods worshipped, and commonly available drugs. No metaplot or godlike NPCs, thankfully.
• Appendices: Thirty pages of damage tables, which seems ridiculous except that you will refer to them about once per fight per opponent. Twenty pages of weapon stats, covering not only the standard weapons of medieval Europe, but the various weapons of India and the near Near/Far East. Fifteen pages of stats for NPCs, monsters, and demons. A five page “Appendix N”-style analysis of S&S fiction that I generally agree with, and you could easily get a lot of great entertainment from working your way through their overview of the genre.
• The product: I have the black-and-white PDF, and the deluxe color hardcover. The PDF is okay; readable enough, but not a lot in the way of links and bookmarks. The index is fine but seems to have been mostly constructed via text search. The physical product is good; with high quality paper and solid binding. For both of them, the organization and writing leave a lot to be desired. Not only is the tone didactic, but much is not clear about the game and its procedures on the first pass. Persevere!
• Art: I am not really a big art guy (I tend to ignore or not even notice it), so grain of salt here, but most of the art struck me as serviceable but pedestrian. Also there is some cheesecake: the page borders have a naked succubus on every even-numbered page, for example. Of course you don’t have to put that in your game, but regardless of your feelings about the appropriateness of traditional S&S nudity, you might not want to read a book in public that has boobs on every page. Or play it with younger gamers (but this is a game where people get violently disemboweled on a regular basis, so hopefully you’re keeping it away from the kids already).

CONCLUSION

The Two Pillars: I mentioned earlier that the it’s a little odd to see hyper-detailed, simulationist combat along with mechanics for narrativist, player-driven stories. The connection between these two, and the reason why the game works as well as it does, is that both of these design decisions highlight the elements of choice and will. These are two prominent themes in S&S fiction, and so in Blade.

Choice: S&S protagonists make decisions that matter. By making combat deadly and difficult to master — for you as a player — the game makes the decision to put a character’s life on the line something more than “well, my guy has the best stats.” Having your Passions in play can push the odds in your favor, but that will not guarantee a win. Even so, the choice to pursue what is important to a character puts the focus immediately back on exactly what is important to the character. And then back on your decisions as a player. What do you want to bring to the table? What story do you want to tell?

Will: S&S heroes regularly get beat to hell and back. They persevere through sheer grit and determination. They win because they want it bad enough. So do you, as a player, want it bad enough? The combat system is hard to be good at. If you win fights, it’s because you toughed it out and mastered it.

And thus, player-driven. S&S heroes in the fiction take on tasks because of greed, hate, vengeance, or any other powerful internal motivation. Having fights come down to randomness is less powerful than the motivations of the characters and the decisions they make. Having a reward system that is based around something the characters don’t care about (e.g., killing monsters for the sake of killing monsters, or just “leveling up” based on GM or group fiat) lacks connection to the motivations of S&S characters.

This game is absolutely not for everyone, and I hope I’ve made that clear. If “roleplaying” for you means that your character can be good at things without you, the player, being good at the subsystems, then you will hate the combat system. If you like exploring an environment without your character being special in the narrative, you’ll hate the reward cycle. If you like high magic, playable nonhuman races, or wondrous magic that doesn’t damn your soul for studying it, you’ll hate the various assumptions that are baked into the mechanics.

But, if you’re like me, and you’re a combination of martial arts nerd, hippie storygames nerd, and dark fantasy nerd, then it just might be the best possible game, and you owe it to yourself to check it out.

DENOUEMENT

There’s a lot more I could mention about the game, but honestly, it’s just details. So I will relegate myself to a few cursory notes.

Where to Get It: DriveThruRPG. Available in black & white PDF, color PDF, black and white softcover, or color hardcover. The hard- and softcovers currently include the PDF for free.

Compared to other games with which I’m familiar:

• Stormbringer. Go with this if you don’t like the player-driven mechanics or difficult combat systems, but want a great S&S setting. Based on BRP, so percentile-based and fairly deadly. Can be kind of crunchy if you play RAW, since all actions increase your allegiance rating with Law, Chaos, or Balance. Earlier editions have a more thematic magic system — based more on binding demons to your will than casting little cantrips. Moorcock’s setting, with the eternal struggle between Law & Chaos, was formative to OD&D, and is used to great effect here. Lots of room to adventure without messing with canon, if you care about that kind of thing. A great game.
• Conan. Go with this if you like 3e-style d20, or love REH’s setting enough to put up with it. One of the classes has an ability called “To Sail A Road of Blood and Slaughter,” which is an amazing name for an ability; sadly the actual ability in play is not that impressive. I love REH’s Hyperboria, but really dislike 3e, so this is probably my least favorite. The books make for good reading though.
• Barbarians of Lemuria. Go with this if you like a rules-light S&S game that has a super slick system. Easily the lightest published S&S system outside of hacking Fiasco or Risus or something. Great lifepath character generation/skill system and solid writing. If someone backported the more tactical combat from its swashbuckling descendent, Honor + Intrigue, then it would be a strong contender. The system as written is a little lightweight for my tastes personally.
• Crypts & Things. Go with this if you want a rules-light S&S game with a simple system that is more old D&D than the d20 Conan. It’s based on Swords & Wizardry, with a ton of easy and clever hacks to reinforce a S&S feel — the magic system and the damage system would be amazing on their own; together in the same ruleset is fantastic! The structure of the rules, and the adventures available for it, put most of the focus on exploring weird environments. Which is cool, and still S&S, but S&S is a lot more than this. C&T is probably my second favorite S&S system, despite the fact that the name reminds me of a defunct housewares store.
• Burning Wheel. While not explicitly a S&S game, BW and Blade are very similar in concept, although not in the details. Both of them are very player-driven. Both of them have crunchy rules systems that take time to master. BW is more Tolkienesque fantasy. Hacking it to do S&S ranges from easy (disallow nonhumans and Faith) to difficult (rewrite the magic system). BW also has the “Duel of Wits,” a complicated subsystem to win arguments, and a few others. Blade resolves social interaction more traditionally, through roleplaying and maybe a roll on an appropriate skill. Comparing the combat systems, BW’s combat is fun and tense as a game, but feels artificial to me in a way that Blade’s does not.

TL;DR

Get it if you like:

• Rules that let the PCs direct the story.
• Complicated, tense, realistic combat.
• Sword & Sorcery fantasy.

Avoid if:

• You don’t like any of the above things.
• You don’t want have, or want to buy, several dozen d12s.
• You have no patience for odd terminology or opaque writing.

AND FINALLY...

Any questions?

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