Sword & Sorcery Settings

After taking a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_mythology I can safely say you'll have more than enough deities and cults to work into an interesting tapestry of setting material.

Everyone in these threads always seems to focus on the sword but never the sorcery
It's always Conan and barbarians and shit and the only time sorcery is brought up it's when people are talking about villains
No one ever talks about the heroic or at least as heroic as a S&S protagonist can be sorcerer

Elric is the exception not the rule and Moorcock deliberately designed him as the anti-Conan. If anything, in many ways, he'd be a villain in every other case.

The better question is, "Why have you still not thought of Wilderlands of High Fantasy?"

>Everyone in these threads always seems to focus on the sword but never the sorcery
Then how do you think the Sorcery aspect should be integrated to a S&S game and setting beyond a nebulous, corrupting force and source of dark spells for villains?

Do understand sword and sorcery genre is specifically created for Conan and its copycats.
If you want to create a story or campaign based on magical heroism with barbarian society, you can simply used common fantasy tropes with a few spin on it of your own.

Nobody give a damn what fantasy genre you are doing except autist since it's all just fiction anyway at the end of the day.

But Elric is, nonetheless, the other side of the Sword & Sorcery coin you drooling imbecile.

>cucks actually like this edgelord

lmao

worse than 40k

But he's the ORIGINAL edgelord anime powered prince with a dark and tragic backstory, dyde.

This is a great list. I would suggest picking one or more genres to bleed ideas into.

The most obvious is Lovecraft (for very self-evident reasons). Just crank the eldritch horror elements to 11.

I'm running one right now, that's pretty S&S pulp-ey. The players liked the setting enough that they asked me to run another campaign in the same setting. I didn't plan it out from the beginning, though, I let the setting develop organically as the players explored it.

So, a willingness to improvise, and put rule of cool before everything making 100% sense seems to be a key whenever I do it at-least.

Another thing I try to do with my players is: there are never any totally good choices presented to the players whenever there's a dichotomy of choices, though I'm open to the players "Going Stone Cold" and rejecting all the choices for their own.

I try to remember that, while the setting itself is grim and brutal, the PC's themselves are the protagonists of their stories, and collectively are this world's "Conan." This doesn't mean they won't suffer consequences, often brutal ones, but literal death is counterproductive (oh right, that reminds me, ressurection is rare, resource intensive, dangerous, unreliable, and NEVER brings the intended target back quite right.)

That's all I can think of right now.

Is there a good system to play this sort of setting in? I really like riddle of steel, but I'd be happy to play something that flowed better.

That depends. What kind of S&S do you want to play.

>I want them to play regular people in a S&S world, desperately trying to survive
Song of Swords
>I want them to play the rare Conan-Esque heroes of this world, who rise up and push back the darkness and brutality with their own brutality, even if only for a moment
4e Dark Sun

I suppose somewhere in between. In our group we rotate as GMs, and I'm usually playing high lethality games like CoC or low level Dark Heresy. I'm trying to expand my horizons a bit and I'd like to actually allow my players to engage in escapism, to a point. I liked the episodic nature of Conan (which fits well with how our group is structured) and I'm really not a huge fan of D&D at all. Song of Swords looks good though, and I might consider giving them boosted stats to start.

Well Elric is from a Melniboné a super ancient kingdom surrounded by "The Young Kingdoms" that represent human civilization so I would say that a more sorcery focused game probably shouldn't be set in the same lands as a more sword focused game

Most of Elrics spells come from pacts he has with various spirits,gods,demons and eldritch beings with only a few coming from just plain old magic so a magic system for a sword and sorcery game should probably be similar to something like Changeling the Lost and Mage the Awakening where you have sort of a vague level of things you can do within a certain purview

Savage Worlds is a good balance between hyper-lethality, and pillow-fist-gloves, and it's kind-of designed for pulpy-action.

The phrase actually comes from Fritz Leiber.
It's a play on a quote from one of his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.
And the phrase 'Conan the barbarian' isn't really how Howard himself referred to the character; 'barbarism' is not a necessary ingredient of sword and sorcery.
If you're going to try and pretend that your 'genres mean nothing' argument has any informed weight behind it, you might try learning something about genres.
But keep plebing, it's amusing.

This, I'm partial to having my settings in the early dark ages technologically, set a few centuries after the collapse of a brutal but efficient continent-wide empire.

There's some sort of cthulu in like basically every Conan short story. This isn't a change.

>What makes a good S&S
Primarily two things. The hero/heroes need to be common folk, not born to great destiny or helped along by great powers, who struggle and suffer, and achieve more moderate and earthly goals for their own purposes (revenge, loyalty, honor, wealth, etc.) rather than slaying ultimate evils because they are destined to same the world.

Second, the world should be mysterious, bleak, and largely savage, with less magic and civilization than you tend to see in high fantasy.

>how does one make one without just flat out ripping out Conan?
You can't, really, since the genre is almost entirely derived from Conan. It's sort of like making a traditional fantasy setting that isn't similar in some ways to Tolkien, it's just not that easy to do. But I wouldn't worry about that. It isn't important that your ideas be original, just that they be interesting. You can do almost anything if you have ideas and passion. You shouldn't be ashamed to be inspired. Everyone imitates the things that inspire them, including Tolkien and Howard.

Conan literally takes place in the lovecraft universe

Jim Jarmusch was a weak faggot

This, the Hyborian Age is 'adjacent' to the Cthulhu Mythos, connected via references mostly. Keep in mind that HPL himself never intended to make a coherent, connected setting, but was merely self and cross-referencing, much like what Stephen King himself did to his own work and the Cthulhu mythos. However it is not implausible to consider the Hyborian Age a part of a 'unified timeline' for the mythos if one choose to. Its not a 100% accurate matter but it does not need to be because, again, the idea of a unified mythos is something purely the creation of fans.

Eldritch sorcery and squamous, ageless tentacled horrors are just as home in a Conan story as a a degenerate beast or some 'swarthy thief from faraway lands'. The difference being that the former is even more alien to the characters. The eldritch forces are a major step up in 'otherness' than foreigners.

So beside Conan, Elric, Dark Sun and to a certain extent Berserk what else count as S&S material?

Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

To look more at the sorcery part there's Jack Vance's Dying Earth stuff.

I'd argue some of China Mieville's fantasy is a pretty close modern day successor
>talented but basically relatable protagonists
>Weird, sometimes violent adventures
>Authorities tend to be corrupt and/or incompetent
There's certainly influence there.

I really want to believe somebody could write amazing swords and sorcery in the classic vein today, but I'm not sure it's possible/likely.

I suppose the best authors are focusing their talents elsewhere, and our culture has changed enough that a lot of the tropes now seem hokey or outdated. Urban fantasy is in.

I dunno, Moorcock did pretty well.

Absolutely any lack of competent female combatants.

The more emphasis on the inherent weakness of females and the superiority of Men, the better.

But Elric fights against the gods of chaos directly, and interacts with the gods of order.

Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series.

Will you go away if I give you a (You)?

Here's how to make it fresh: combine Howard (Conan) and Lovecraft (Cthulhu)

Lovecraft and Howard, surprisingly enough, were fucking bros to the end. Both settings lend themselves to each other well. Howard even has some streaks of cosmic horror in at least one of his stories (the one about the chained up elephant alien in the wizards dungeon)

There exist such fags who DON'T like Elric?

Yeah, buttblasted Howard and Tolkien fags.

Action, characters with personal motivations (rather than external moralistic ones), weirdness. That last part I think is the one people miss most, Burroughs, Howard, Lieber, and Moorcock all had the same thing in common: their stories stressed a sense of the exotic and strange.

why does this keep getting recommended? bleh.

Song of Swords is a bloated mess of a system. Nice try.

It's an autism simulator.

The funny thing, as others have said, is they are literally the same setting (as much as either one is cohesive). The serpent people Kull fights are tied to Lovecraft's Yig. Some of Lovecraft's ancient danger/wisdom comes from Howard's lost continents and civilizations. They even collaborated at least once (though it was on something of a storytelling round).

There is literally no reason Conan couldn't be saving his damsel of the week from being ravished by the Deep One followers of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. It's almost more surprising that he didn't.

I have no idea who this is, but he looks like a huge wiener.

Because they knew better than to fuck with Conan

Have a look at Crypts & Things remastered and Totems of the Dead for Savage worlds. Always thought it could be a good mash up.

I'm also trying to put together a campaign in a S&S setting by pooling together tropes and leitmotifs from heavy metal/power metal concept albums. That is, I'm taking the Conan imaginary, sifting it through the lyrics and characters, and names, and trying to make a fucking potent mix to be down with blood and glory.

I think you misspelled *master of contemporary cinema* there you dirty fucking philistine

>What makes a good S&S setting and how does one make one without just flat out ripping out Conan?

Lankmar is not S&S.

It is though

No, it's medieval fantasy.

>how does one make one without just flat out ripping out Conan?
By ripping off Fafhrd & The Grey Mouser.

The very genre of “sword & sorcery” owes its name to Leiber. He coined the term to describe the types of stories that featured “Middle Earths and lands and worlds based on this planet, worlds which exist only in some author’s vivid imagination,” as Michael Moorcock described the genre. At the time of the term’s coinage in 1961, Leiber had already been weaving stories set in fantastical Lankhmar and its environs for more than two decades. His first Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, “Two Sought Adventure” (later retitled “The Jewels in the Forest”) was published in 1939. Leiber would continue to explore Nehwon and the sword & sorcery genre for almost fifty years in more than forty stories and poems, publishing his final Fafhrd and Mouser story in 1988, four years before his death

Really, no one mentioned Greyhawk yet?

sauce is Goodman Games folks who are doing the Lankmar DCC conversion.

Check out their full Lankmar description here:

kickstarter.com/projects/1409961192/dcc-lankhmar

Blade of the Iron Throne was explicitly made for sword & sorcery using Riddle of Steel. Literally in some cases, as many parts of Blade were copied and pasted from Riddle of Steel, with exactly one sentence moved.

magic users exist but aren't OP.

He's right though. If you want to be normal people struggling to survive in a sword & sorcery world, Song of Swords works well. I think GURPS would be better at it though.

>what would happen if I mixed and matched Sword & Sorcery...with anachronistic meso-america
Tekumel.
Or well if you add another hundred or so dashes of India and ancient Egypt.

Have a look here for OldSkool and OSR stuff.

D4rk Sun, Gr4yh4wk, T3kum3l, Crypts&Th1ngs etc. Should all help you get inspired.

snip < DOT > li/I8fF

Nah fuck all that. It's not about being gritty, or low magic, or whatever. Wikipedia actually managed to get it right:

Unlike works of high fantasy, the tales, though dramatic, focus mainly on personal battles rather than world-endangering matters.

Despite all the cool shit with the characters of Lord of the Rings, the focus was the threat of the ring. Conan was about fucking Conan and the badass shit he and his friends did. I've kept that focus in every game I have ever run and the players always leave satisfied.

He definitely fought a few beasts that were pretty much lovecraftian. The monster in the very first Conan story ever written, the Phoenix on the Sword, drives a dude insane just by him looking at it, and Conan almost goes the same way before he manages to kill it.
The Devil in Iron has a cool villain with the same schtick, an eldritch abomination who comes to earth and assumes human form, but because human flesh is too weak to hold him, he has a body made of iron. When Conan finally kills him with a knife specially crafted to do so, the villain returns to its true form quickly before dissolving and Conan is forced to look away because it's so disturbing.

>Low tech,
Check.
>Rare magic (with a few comparatively ridiculously powerful rituals and items),
Arguable.
>Uncaring society,
Checkerooni.
>Evil or corrupt kings (or an occasional good king beset by corrupt nobles/councillors),
Check.
>Very varied and mixed amount of cultures spread through the world from skilled mailed cavalry to naked tribal warriors with spears,
Check.
>Lack of karma (goodness is not rewarded for the sake of being good),
Check.
>Human sacrifice,
Check.
>Dark gods / cults / demons,
Check.
>Lusty men and scantily clad women
Hoo boy, check.

That sounds metal as fuck.

>Jim Jarmusch was a weak faggot
Well, actually, he's still alive. But thanks for your input, I guess?

Damnit Carlos!

If you're American look at the history of your local region. Colonial and western history mixes well with S&S ideas. Don't try and tell the story of some huge historical event find the small, interesting backwaters and convert them into fantasy stories.

That's Sword and Planet or Planetary Romance, but close enough, I guess.