Jump to content

Sword and sorcery

steph

By steph
in Fantasy Hero

 Share

Recommended Posts

Alcamtar Proficient

Alcamtar

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

Agreed on the Conan. Every story has it's own plot hook and its own villain.

 

Also track down the "Brak the Barbarian" novels by John Jakes. Brak is a blatant Conan clone, but less well-known and probably unfamiliar to your players.

 

Many Conan stories start in medias res... he's on a ship when it gets attacked, or leading a band of men when he gets attacked, or scaling a cliff in search of a legend, fleeing from wolves or lions, dying of thirst in the middle of a desert. Conan survives by improvisation and boldness in the face of the unknown, not so much by careful planning and deliberate motivation.

 

Start with an action scene that draws the characters in and points them toward the adventure, while simultaneously appealing to their motivations and leaning on their disadvantages. [Maybe precede with a very short narrative explaining how they got there.] Then keep the action moving, one scene leading to the next at a breakneck pace with little time to think or plan. Just when they get a breather... wham! A new twist or crisis demands quick thinking and action.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest Admiral C

Guest Admiral C

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

I want to start a campain in the valdorian age but where to start and how keep the attention of the players without a arch villain and all the epic fantasy patterns and concept

 

What kind of PC types do you have? I've noticed that unless you have a sorcerer in the group most Valdorian PCs embrace "baser" desires and the noble PC stands out even more for his virtue. Assuming that the PCs are of the stock that produces gloryhounds and the greedy you can always run a treasure hunt style game until you get a handle on what really drives the PCs.

 

If you need something faster than that I've noticed that the Valdorian Age setting has plenty of opportunity for high seas adventures. Having all the PCs on the same ship and having the ship wreck by storm or by pirates on an uncharted isle could get them together as a group pretty quickly.

 

An idea....

 

Maybe the island they land on was once underwater and volcanic activity has caused it to rise for about thirty years, enough to get dry and some wind borne seeds and maybe a little vegetation. But not long enough to be discovered by every pirate around. They can even fight giant crabs or something.

 

Let's say this island was once an outpost for one of the older civilizations, not a really long lost one but old. There is a little gold here and there but the big thing is an old sealed log book. The log book was stored in a place in the castle/outpost that became an air pocket when the island first sunk. This log book details a the last path of a treasure ship to the mainland. It was believed lost in an area that is not dry and barren. If the players take the hint (perhaps to a volcano exploding in the background) they find that the remains of the treasure ship are sunk beneath a small oasis guarded by fierce nomads. For an additional lark if they are being chased by another group they mistake the ruins on the island for the lost temple of BLANK and thing that the PCs know where the lost treasure of BLANK is and follow them to have a three way battle between the PCs, themselves, and angry desert nomads.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Shadowsoul Mentor

Shadowsoul

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

It's always good to mix it up a little, throwing everything from backstreet brawls to huge military conflicts at the players. For a bit more variety you could try adding a few sports in, chariot racing, gladiator matches, beast hunts, archery contests and so on.

 

One way to get all of that in would be to have the PCs hired to kill a certain ruler, (or develop a grudge against him due to various clashes they have had with his forces in the past). Then it's the standard idea that the ruler is reclusive but has decided to throw a big contest to see who are the strongest, fastest etc people in his kingdom. The more contests the PCs can win the more of them can meet the ruler for the awards ceremony; then they can assassinate him and escape in suitably swashbuckling style.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
keldrak Rookie

keldrak

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

I'm not familiar with the Valdorian source material; however this should work just about any where:

 

Just arrived in the city. Two very long months escorting the caravan up from (somewhere two months away by ox drawn wagon or whatever). Found a good, clean bed-n-breakfast to stay at until you decide what to do next and decided to reward yourself with a night on the town. After a long night of drunken revelry, you awaken in the local drunk tank. The last thing you remember is getting cold-cocked from behind just as you won the arm wrestling contest with that dwarf. (The mage’s last memory is of the dwarf beside him sucker punching him just after he snapped his fingers for the barmaid’s attention. Watching an arm wrestling contest is thirsty work.)

 

Tossed together by chance, penny-less, concussed, cut, stinking of day old ale and covered with someone’s dried blood, each PC awakens with a similar story. They may commiserate until called to court. A group of clean, well dressed, upstanding dwarves accuse the mage, fighter and other PCs of "fixing" the match. Not guilty but still found guilty of various petty crimes, public drunkenness, resisting arrest, various and sundry property damages; they are unable to pay the court costs (purses gone), much less the fines, resulting in additional charges of vagrancy, etc. Given the choice of accepting service with a dapper looking gentleman, acting on behalf of unidentified person(s), or serving off the charges on the harbor defense galley, as a rower…..

 

Which leads to gladiator matches, beast hunts, treasure hunts, grudge/revenge actions or the ever popular sport of yachting.

 

Just a quick thought.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Captain Obvious Grand Master

Captain Obvious

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

There are plenty of big-time villains, but among the biggest tropes of S&S, IMO, are short, high-action adventures, generally with the villain dead at the end. There are a few exceptions here and there, where a villain will come back a time or two to antagonize the hero, but generally they end up with their head lopped off, or prey to their own machinations, or torn asunder by a howling mob.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
ghost-angel Grand Master

ghost-angel

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

Not on as big a scale, no. They definitely aren't.

 

Usually they're the focus of a limited quest:

-The evil sorcerer has kidnapped a girl, go kill him and save her

-The evil cultist has kidnapped a girl, go kill him and save her

-The evil king has kidnapped a girl, go kill him and save her

 

That's about the extent of S&S "arch nemesis" that I'm really aware of. They make good Movie Villains, but a lot of the stories focused on smaller goals . . .

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Captain Obvious Grand Master

Captain Obvious

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

I was thinking of Yyrkoon from Elric and Thoth-Amon from Conan. Thulsa Doom could be a contender, but he seems to have mostly recurred in the comic books. There were a few minor recurrences in the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, too, IIRC.

 

But yeah, there's no Sauron, no Undying King, nothing like that, generally speaking, where the one villain is the focus of everything the main character does over a series of stories.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Captain Obvious Grand Master

Captain Obvious

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

I'm a little surprised Captain Obvious didn't provide a link to his fine thread of other games' adventures converted for Valdorian Age play: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=68185

 

Hmm...that reminds me...I never finished that Dungeon adventure path I was working on, and a new Mongoose magazine should be out by now with something for Conan too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Lucius Grand Master

Lucius

Posted
Posted

Re: Sword and sorcery

 

Death does come to mind.

He kept trying to use the duo to fill his "Heroes" quota, and they kept overcoming his agents.

 

That's what I was thinking - the ultimate hero's archvillain I suppose, since you can't even think of taking Him on directly and destroying Him (well, you can think of it if you're Teatime, but Teatime was batshit crazy - not to mention being in a completely different world facing a different Death.)

 

So there were quite a few adventures in which a personified Death was actively trying to kill Fafhrd and Mouser, but even those are stand-alone stories.

 

I'd say that the presence of a recurring antagonist does not make something NOT Sword and Sorcery, but it's a feature of Sword and Sorcery that it doesn't NEED a recurring villain. The emphasis is on short, self-contained stories.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary points out that just because Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never see Sheelba and Ningauble as recurring villains, doesn't mean the reader can't.....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Unfortunately, your content contains terms that we do not allow. Please edit your content to remove the highlighted words below.
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...