Song of Swords

Song of Swords
RPG published by Opaque Industries
Rule System	TROS-inspired d10 pool
Authors	James Lacombe AKA Jimmy Rome
First Publication	2012

Long ago, in the ancient primordial mists of 2011, some guy created a thread on /tg/ asking about Riddle of Steel, an out of print game by Jake Norwood known for having a fucking great combat system grounded in actual medieval martial arts and an early attempt at narrative character progression and not much else. A helpful namefag named John Galt offered to run a fight in the system for the thread, and an institution was born. The fecht thread, named after "fecht", the medieval German word for fencing, in which characters are thrown up against one another for the entertainment of the crowd. These threads ran for a good long time, until John Galt fucked off to space with the promise that he'd fix the game's many problems and come back with something new and better.

Months later, he returned, and be brought with him Sword of Heaven Esoterica Song of Swords. The company making it was Opaque Industries, a bunch of weirdo fa/tg/uys Galt found on the street. Their voice on /tg/ was Jimmy Rome, the weirdest of them all. He promised that the company had incorporated and that a Kickstarter and beta release was on the way within a week. But as everyone would soon learn, Jimmy Lied and People Died. Unforseen setbacks pushed back the beta release, and thus the Kickstarter. When the game was actually shown to the public, it was rough. Really rough. And so as the Kickstarter kept getting pushed back, /tg/ flamed the fuck out of the game with every ounce of autism that it could muster. With update after update, the game was honed into a razor sharp edge while the near-constant threads about it hosted arguments about pointless historical minutia and Jimmy Rome occasionally returning to chum the waters with lore tidbits about the upcoming game. Combat was refined. Skills were refined. Initiative was reworked twice, and a whole side game called Ballad of the Laser Whales was made as a joke that became deadly serious.

Finally, in February 2017, having gone through a number of major overhauls and emerging as a major improvement on Riddle of Steel in every way and the premier autistic medieval combat simulator, Song of Swords launched a Kickstarter. It went on to surprise everyone and succeed (in 25 hours and by 300%) becoming one of the few times in which /tg/ actually got shit done enough to become a commercial product, along with Engine Heart.

As of January 2019, the game is officially released, but everyone who's playing the game is not using the officially published core rulebook but a "revised" edition in a google doc that gets tossed around Discord servers, found here.

As of 2022 the game is still not considered "complete", everyone is waiting for yet more updates, including a magic system and a bunch of other stuff to turn it into a fully fledged game.

The System

Much like The Riddle of Steel, SoS is a dice pool based system. A character's combat pool is divided between actions, both in offense and defense. This means that combat works like a kind of gambling game where players wage dice on maneuvers to bash each other's heads in or avoid having their own heads bashed in.

Each combat round between is divided into two parts. In part 1, player A attacks while player B defends. Then in part 2, player A defends, while player B attacks. Both combatants split their dice pool between the two parts, so melee combat plays as a kind of gambit. If you spend too many dice to attack in the first roll, you won't have enough to defend in the second.

The Setting

Despite being setting agnostic, usable for whatever historical or fantasy game you want to stab one another in, the game also has an interesting fantasy setting of its own. To sum it up, it's like if 16th century Europe was a setting written by a mad monk living in the 1600's. Pretty recognizable on the surface, but underneath everything is strange and horrifying. A wiki for the setting is maintained here

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