Last week I tackled a 5$ ‘pocket’ Sword & Sorcery RPG called Broadsword co-written by my good friend (that I have yet to met IRL) Jeff Meija, AKA The Evil DM. The game is part of the 1PG product line that offers low cost, pick up RPGs whose rules fit on just one page.
This week I’m tackling an expansion to the game written by Jeff called World of Broadsword . Support material for small press games are not that common and this one is actually so good it more than makes up for the shortcomings of the original game.
Nutritional Crunch
The 31 page PDF gets into the meat of the matter really fast. After a short 1 page homage to actress Lana Clarkson, we get 6 new advantages for characters. I personally like ‘alcohol immunity’ as I could totally see a few scenes where my character would drink a whole mob of NPCs under the table.
Then you get more that 5 pages of full game statistics for animals and monsters (including special powers when appropriate). Given that each entry takes about 4 to 8 lines of text, you get quite a few. This alone makes the book worth it because it offers a GM all the needed stats for non-human adversaries, making adventure creating a real snap. It features, among other creatures, Alligators, Bears, Sharks as well as Basilisk, Dragons and Vampires, you don’t need much more than that.
Tasty Fluff!
However, the true added value of the book (and testament to Jeff’s skills) comes from the Gazeteer section of the book. There, following an old school, color hex map of the proposed game world, Jeff created a series of 15 one page entries for its major regions.
What makes it so interesting is that Jeff used an actual corporate planning tool called SWOT analysis (Short for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) to flesh out key regions of the world.
Thus after a short description paragraph, each given regions gets fleshed out in terms of where it shines (Strength), how it can be exploited (Weaknesses), Adventure Hooks (Opportunities) and things that can befall it (Threats) catching PCs in the middle of it. I’ve rarely seen a settings write-up provide so many plot ideas and adventure hooks in so little space.
Mike Mearls would be proud.
I must say, this is so freaking brilliant that I’m going to steal that and incorporate it in my World building toolkit from now on.
About the world itself, it’s a pretty straightforward low-magic fantasy world. I’ll even jab Jeff (who never touched the recent editions of D&D) a bit and say that it’s a perfect ‘Points of Light’ setting where small City-States and kingdom co-exist in an otherwise savage wilderness.
The ‘chapter’ concludes with a one page description of various other location where a Broadsword GM could set his adventure (The Corsair Coast, the Deathlands Swamps and other imaginative locales).
After that, there’s a short, partial page on the world’s gods, featuring names and portfolios.
The last section of the product features an adventure centered around the infiltration of a band of river pirates. It’s got a lot of the trappings of the classic pulpy Sword and sorcery Feel, including fighting in an alligator pit and squaring off against a black magic witch woman and her pet leopard.
Actually my only non-positive critic about the product is that the adventure at the end of the book contains absolutely no game statistics for human NPCs. As such, in order to play it, a GM would need to generate each and everyone of them, including a Witch, without much guidance in terms of average mook stats or using the games somewhat convoluted and incomplete Magic rules.
Having spoken with Jeff about it, I know that he wanted to make the adventure as system neutral as possible to allow it to be adaptable for other system. While the concept is noble, chances are prospective clients would not usually buy it unless they were hoping to use it with Broadsword.
If a revision of the PDF was to be done, I’d suggest addressing that issue as the main priority.
Final Verdict
While I wasn’t all that sold on Broadsword, the World of Broadsword sourcebook actually multiplies the worth of the whole game and makes up for most it’s original weaknesses. The sourcebook itself can actually be useful for GMs, especially for someone looking for a simple, Conan-like setting for any fantasy RPG.
Finally, if you want to see an example of SWOT analysis applied to world building, this book is well worth the 5$.
In fact, I’m going to ask Jeff if I could make a Blog post about the technique (or maybe ask him to post one over here…)
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