Swords of the Serpentine (Part 1)

Solving the Riddle of Steel

Swords of the Serpentine is a game by Kevin Kulp and Emily Dresner. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Pelgrane Press.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we do not find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgement that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement. )

Ludo

Swords of the Serpentine is a fantastic book, with neat organization and a cohesive art direction. There are constants notes and asides explaining why things were designed this way, reminding certain interactions, or going deeper into a topic; they somehow do not get in the way.

This, alongside the Night Black Agents line, may be the best GUMSHOE has looked in terms of approachability, accessibility and consultation. Made for the table, without sacrificing usability in name of aesthetics, like Yellow King RPG.

Brad

I love a good sidebar that actually enlightens instead of simply serving as an altar of tangents. Swords of The Serpentine has beautiful sidebars and a wonderful and enlightening art direction, it feels perfectly legible while also having an identity beyond another GUMSHOE game

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lucrécia

Swords of the Serpentine is an investigative game built on the GUMSHOE system. It is made for mystery stories, involving hidden information, investigations and clue tracking and management. You will not be able to play the game and avoid these.

In its interpretation of sword and sorcery mysteries, Swords of the Serpentine is arranged so that successful investigations leads to climatic confrontations. Violence, physical or otherwise, awaits at the end of every trail.

Sorcery is based on Corruption, and can get quite intense in what it can do and how it is regarded by the city’s authority figures and institutions. One would do well looking into how Swords of the Serpentine sees and portrays magic before making a sorcerer.

Swords of the Serpentine’s relationship with disability is on the questionable side, and the concern with safety and comfort barely counts as “tokenistic”.

As it known, nobody has ever been able to communicate and be persuaded when deaf.

Brad

Swords of The Serpentine is a game about investigations and noir stories in a fantasy setting instead of the traditional roaring twenties or neon-soaked streets. It uses Gumshoe well to facilitate the mysteries Gumshoe is about.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and creates a common space for creation.

Ludo

While Swords of the Serpentine lands squarely in the genre of sword & sorcery fantasy of intrigue, action and mystery, it is not “GUMSHOE D&D”. It avoids the genre conventions of the adventurer-conquistador entirely, being about urbane, institutional or communal adventurers.

You can be all sorts of people or actors in these stories of conspiracies, secrets and rising climaxes — as long it is some kind of sword & sorcery character. Inquisitors or city guard, a family holding together, a sorcerous cabal, champions of a neighborhood or a company of mercenaries. Swords of the Serpentine has a place for you as long as you are turning stones and do not shy away from confrontation.

Brad

The pitfalls of the Dragon Game often become apparent the first time the game master tries to run a mystery plot, or a political plot. These stories don’t do well in the bloody dungeons, and the game has few enough mechanics to support its anti-social tendencies as it is, let alone interesting ones.

Swords Of The Serpentine really does do those well, you can be feuding mercenaries working for an evil empire, low level street vigilantes with some magical training, brutal torturers in political intrigue, or simple city guards, trying to improve some lives.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists on a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lucrécia 

The city warps fantasy, everything is handled through its lens. You don’t need Eversink — the out-of-the-box setting, — but you will not get what makes Swords of the Serpentine unique without the soul of a polis. This game is about cities in a way few are, and fully meeting the expectations I have tackled before.

Swords of the Serpentine understands that a urbe and a polis are different things, that a city, proper, is a political body and the citizen a part of the political agency of it. This is how Eversink — or any place where you play the game — is presented: a political organism, rather than a series of blocks and institutions. This connection is centered by the importance of Allegiances as defining your character and where they sit in their city: how they relate to the traditions and ideologies of the city, who they align with and who they disagree with.

These interactions make Eversink a place of countless leads and clues, filled with things a few would like to remain forgotten and many more would give anything to remember. A city, in Swords of the Serpentine, is secrets as geography.

Brad

Swords of The Serpentine is about Gritty Fantasy. I don’t mean the truly brilliant examples of this genre, but of what has become an ugly counterpart to Young Adult Fantasy, the brutal and realistic ADULT FANTASY that really doesn’t have anything to say or even contribute meaningfully to itself. The kind of book you see everywhere on the shelves now, and that every fantasy ttrpg has to be now, where your protagonists are always brutal, never merciful, always seduced, and there is guaranteed to be enough pointless deaths to fill a landfill

Swords of The Serpentine is set in a setting that could look at home in any of those books, but instead it makes a solid point to involve the player characters in the wonder of the setting, to get them caught up in the tangle of the lives of their fellow urban denizens. You could never have your ‘ruthless butcher’ without them expressly being in the company of other ‘ruthless butcher’s, maybe they have a knitting club. They effect the city and the city effects them, and so they become infinitely more interesting.