Swords of the Serpentine (Part 2)

Solving the Riddle of Steel

This is the conclusion of the critical analysis of Swords of the Serpentine. You can find the first part here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Ludo

Swords of the Serpentine may have some interesting innovations, but it does not mess with the solid engine of GUMSHOE. It works just like any of those games; it is also a testament to how, until Lovecraftesque and Brindlewood Bay, remained the benchmark of investigative cooperative collaborative storytelling¹ for a decade. And, due to the different approach of such mystery-telling, there is much that GUMSHOE is still the best at. And it shines through Swords of the Serpentine how aware they are of that.

GUMSHOE is all about investigation and the mystery, assessed as clues. You always get “essential clues” — no need for randomness, or character abilities or what not. You will always get Core clues, aka, “information that you need to have a story”.

What about all these Investigative abilities, what do they do? Well, they let you find additional information, seize on opportunities, set up future events, and so on. And this is the engine of the game; whenever you get a core clue, you also get to spend Investigative abilities to receive a boon: this flow of resource-expense into concrete-benefits paces and powers an investigation through.

Brad

GUMSHOE knows what it is about, it is about solving mysteries and preventing the classic “The GM just decided who did it based on our evidence.” or “We missed this small clue, so the case is unsolvable”. GUMSHOE does and has done this incredibly well, you will always get core clues required for the case, and then you have Investigative abilities that let you get bonus, it works beautifully and leads to the exact sort of stories you want from the description.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game, you going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, your have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to try to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the felling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lucrécia 

If you played GUMSHOE before, you can jump in a case and refer to the book whenever something seems to work slightly different. Even if you make a mistake, it will still give you a general idea of Swords of the Serpentine. Even if you have not, one hour of reading the rules chapter and picking a mystery scenario will get you up to task. The example case in the core book — Corpse Astray — is a decent start, however, if you are able to get your hands on Losing Face, it and the Quickstart rules are the perfect bite-sized entry point to see if Swords of the Serpentine is up to your taste. The game deserves a more in-depth read and custom cases based on the many hooks laid across Eversink; so a short read and short play is ideal before getting invested.

The actual mechanics of how you do things are easy to track, with a convenient checklist of how to handle things (pg. 50). To make a cast of characters:

• Investigative abilities per character depend on the number of characters (pg. 19).

• Every character has 3 Allegiance points (pg. 33), which set their position in the city.

• Spend 30 points in General abilities (pg. 35).

• Assign 18 points between Health and Morale (pg. 35).

• Get five or more minor, unique, character-defining items and +1 Grit (pg. 42).

Brad

Lu has just saved you all so much time by printing that character creation summary, I think you need to be familiar with that, and like always have an extensive talk on what tone you are expecting, because fantasy city mysteries don’t really define anything.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your time, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (our have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line in page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Ludo

The divide between Investigative and General abilities always been one of the most inelegant and awkward aspect of the GUMSHOE engine, and Swords of the Serpentine inherits this duality. The distinctions between them is that General abilities should be things that failure, success or boon can be left to randomness, and no matter the outcome, it does not prevent the resolution of a mystery².

This makes it necessary to avoid relying on General abilities, which in turn feedbacks in General abilities outcomes not flowing back into the main Investigative abilities; all too often, whatever is handled by General abilities just pools to the side. It is a common trap to make scenes related to General abilities to feel irrelevant or arbitrary; and when General and Investigative abilities are used in the same scene, one becomes clearly secondary to the other when you grab the dice and someone uses a resource. The interplay between making General abilities hook neatly into narrative and engine is one of the most challenging but rewarding aspects of Swords of the Serpentine.

The way Swords of the Serpentine handles disability and cover relationship with Sway attacks is a baffling, ridiculous fumble. It suggests that those or that you can get cover by covering your ears as the guards try to arrest you, or that you can avoid being demoralized by diving into a fountain — not to say how this paints those with audiovisual and vocally disabled. Such a catastrophic ableism and tone-destroying ruleset should be ignored by anyone willing to engage with Swords of the Serpentine as it otherwise demands. Cover for Sway attacks should be, well, being under the scrutiny of your divine patron, right in the middle of succeeding at your plot, surrounded by your fellow cultists, etc.

You could not have pulled this shit on the Ankh

While the amount of Investigative abilities is dependent on number of characters, to incentivize class-like “archetypes”, Swords of the Serpentine awards an extra point if all your investigative abilities are either from the same Profession or all-Social. This can be easy to forget and hard to parse.

The initial Grit you get at character creation is tied to having at least five minor character-defining items on you.

Piggybacking and Cooperation (pg. 58) are essential to face higher difficulties in General abilities.

Brad

Understanding that investigative abilities is determined by the number of PC’s is a mistake I still make, so do better. If you are totally new to the system, don’t be afraid to run the adventures until you get comfortable deciding what is and isn’t a Core Clue, and be merciful to each other because you will inevitably make a mistake on those.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lucrécia

The poor showing of heavily materially supported games like Blade Runner RPG in trying to make mystery-focused cooperative collaborative storytelling a thing, and the different direction taken by successful examples, make Swords of the Serpentine and its innovations are good study material for anyone working of mystery-based play.

Swords of the Serpentine is also a must read for GUMSHOE fans, as it is the best at bridging the dissociation between Investigative and General abilities.

Sorcery and traps are done amazingly in Swords of Serpentine, and definitely worth looking into for anyone working on the fantasy genre.

Orpheus Protocol, which we covered last year, also learned a lot about GUMSHOE. It was overlooked at our critic at the time — as we never talked about GUMSHOE before, — but if you want to see how a game can learn a lot from this system engine without replicating it and integrating such lessons in a big complex machine, it may be work to see how that game does mysteries side by side with Swords of the Serpentine.

The setting of Eversink is fantastic, lively and blooming with personality. Even if you don’t play it, it is a great example of a living real city in TTRPGs.

Brad

You know what you should steal? You should steal building what people want. If you have been online in ttrpg’s for any length of time you should be able to recall literally hundreds of asks for a “good sword and sorcery ttrpg.” and a “cool investigative fantasy game” or the ten thousand and one ways people have asked for those things. Swords of The Serpentine is both, and it didn’t have to contort itself into some hideous barely playable thing to do so, it realized that it was good at a thing and so it did it. If you are great at designing meaty, combat heavy games don’t be afraid to do that!

1. Hegemonic mystery TTRPG designer “do not tie yourself at birth to Lovecraft” challenge. Difficulty: Impossible.

2. Why the real distinction (general abilities can fail and produce the desired gamestate, while investigative abilities must always succeed in different degrees) can only be coded through randomness, breaking symmetry how everything else is done in the game? More than 10 years later, maybe it is time to make General abilities also work as a pool: you spend it to succeed, and what this means is, well, you cannot succeed all the time, can you? Swords of Serpentine dances around this idea, in abilities such as Bind Wounds or allowing Investigation to boost General abilities/using General abilities as Investigative, but fails to challenge the core GUMSHOE engine assumption on this divide.