Remarks: Sword Noir

This game is full of things that I love. I love genre mashups, and Sword Noir combines two of my favorites: sword & sorcery, and film noir. Specifically citing Fritz Leiber alone would have won me over, but he also credits inspiration to Robert E. Howard, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett.  It’s also a system mashup. To create it, author Fraser Ronald (of the Accidental Survivors podcast, among other things) cites the influence of Chad Underkoffler’s Prose Descriptive Qualities (PDQ), Jaws of the Six Serpents (itself a PDQ variant), Clinton R. Nixon’s The Shadow of Yesterday, Fate 3.0 (as seen in Spirit of the Century and the Dresden Files RPG), Savage Worlds and indie darling Lady Blackbird. Hey, if you’re going to mine ideas, mine from richest veins. It’s primarily PDQ with Fate aspects hung on it, and smaller bits and concepts from the other games.

You create a character by assigning him (or her) Qualities, which are Fate Aspects. These tell things about the character, and can provide modifiers to die rolls. you have a concept (what’s the character about), a background (where he comes from, who is is, why that matters), a Faculty (kind of like a special talent) and a Flaw. These are ranked with descritions, from Weak up to Legendary, each having a modifier (Average is no modifer, for example; Poor is -4, Good is +2).The example given is Tara, a mercenary (Concept) who formerly belonged to a monastic order (Background), a scrounge (Faculty, tied to the Charisma Trait), and Greedy (Flaw — actually written a “mama needs a brand new bag”).

All characters have the same Traits, which are attributes: Physique, Agility, Wit, Charisma, and Will. There get ranked the same, with descriptives, and more Qualities can be linked to them. Unlike Fate-based systems, I like having some baseline boilerplate stats to do apples-to-apples comparisons between characters.

Ranks also have Target Numbers. If something requires a Weak effort, for example, the Target Number is 3. A Legendary effort means hitting Target Number 21. You roll 2d10 and add your modifiers, and hope to beat the Target. Pretty basic.

Each character also has up to three Pivots. These are goals within the story, things the character wants or needs to accomplish. Characters advance not by accruing experience or other kinds of points, but by completing goals. I like that idea a lot, because it keeps the players focused on the plot objectives. This is a key strength of the system for me.

Magic is generally not allowed to player characters. If it is allowed, it’s expensive and has consequences. Characters with a little familiarity, like the Gray Mouser, are Dabblers. You build sorcerous power through descriptive, so you could manipulate the element of earth, or fire, and so on. Spells are freeform, but you can also write your own stock spells. You figure casting turns required (longer is cheaper), range, duration, area of effect, and energy used. All of those help establish the target number to cast. With that formula, you can easily convert your favorite spell from a certain other 800 pound gorilla fantasy game.  I really, really like this method of magic, because it allows you to exercise their own creativity. The toll of magic is twofold: if you fail your Test to cast magic, you take physical damage. If you succeed, you make a Will save and if you fail, you gain the Aspect “Susceptible to Madness” at Average Rank. The more times you successfully cast a spell, the more likely you are to go mad. That is pure awesome in a can and completely appropriate for the genre.

There’s a whole section on creating s Sword Noir setting, which is all philosophy and no crunch. I’m guessing most people buying a game called “Sword Noir” already kind of have a good idea of what the setting should be like. It’s a short section. There’s a section on creating adventures and preparing to run the game. Pretty boilerplate stuff. There’s a sample Sword noir city, Everthorne, to give you an example of creating your own city, and a sample adventure set in Everthorne. The great part (in my opinion) about the adventure is that it’s mostly text, with not a lot of crunch. There’s information about key encounters, but a lot of it is investigation and skill checks, not a ton of combat. As something called “sword noir” should be.

There are no animals or creatures lists. Fraser state on the Sword’s Edge web page that this was by design, because most encounters are going to be with people. That’s how it happens in film noir, that’s how it happens in most of the best Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, that’s how it is here. For those who want monster stats, they’re included in the free, basic, stripped-down Sword’s Edge system PDF (link below).

I only have one grouse: it took me a while to write this because I hate reading long PDFs on-screen. At 74 pages, I would have just printed it out, but the greyscale background and illustrations with heavy blacks would have taken forever and killed an ink cartridge. The layout of the book is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but there’s no print-friendly option. If I get the opportunity to run it, I’ll spring for the $11 or so to have the print-on-demand version sent to me.

Overall, yes, I would run this with the right group, yes, I would play this in a heartbeat and with great enthusiasm. It’s a lovely combination of things, and is an absolute keeper in my collection.

Buy Sword Noir at RPGNow

Check out the Sword’s Edge System for FREE

Get Prose Descriptive Qualities (PDQ) for FREE