Swords Without Master (Digital)

Swords Without Master is a game of making amazing and wondrous sword and sorcery tales. You play adventuresome rogues living by your wits and prowess, plunging into the unknown, and seizing from it untold treasures!

Swords Without Master is by Epidiah Ravachol, with art direction by Shel Kahn. 

About The Game

To play Swords Without Master, an Overplayer joins a group of 2-4 rogue players to spin a satisfying sword and sorcery tale from the fabric of your shared imaginations in but a few hours. Using 2 Tone Dice, one Jovial and one Glum, you pass through the phases of your story - Perilous, Discovery, and Rogues' - generating threads of moral, mystery and motif as your adventure unfolds. Your tale concludes by weaving these threads back together, reincorporating that which came before.

Swords Without Master cares about the “gigantic melancholies" and "gigantic mirth" found in classic sword and sorcery fiction. You have two tone dice, one Glum and one Jovial. Each roll determines which tone inflects your current situation, and then you decide how to fit your rogue's actions to that tone. Sometimes your tone will match the Overtone of the phase, and sometimes it will contrast, guiding your rogue into actions that you, perhaps, never would have considered. 

In addition to deciding fictional tone, physically picking up, passing and rolling the tone dice is how you begin and end each phase of play, creating small rituals that quickly become second nature as your tale unfolds. 

Adventures go through phases, each containing specific sets of rules for when and why to roll the tone dice.

• In the Perilous Phase, the rogues’ lives are on the line. You roll the dice once the danger escalates to be worthy of your rogue's attention, or when you can suffer the peril no longer!
• In the Discovery Phase, you learn about the wonders of the world. You roll the dice to guide your revelations of mysteries and introduce what you want to see in your unfolding story.
• In the Rogues' Phase, the Rogue Players hand the dice back and forth, making demands of each other and answering them in order to test their mettle, see them in action or give them a problem to solve.

As you play, you generate the threads of your story, sometimes based on the dice, and sometimes by highlighting the most resonant, impressive and entertaining things your companions narrate into the game. When you have enough, you enter the endgame, wherein you pull together the threads to come to a satisfying conclusion to your tale.

But within each adventure is the seed of another! You can play Swords Without Master as isolated adventures, linked series with the same Rogues over time, or an anthology of tales in a shared wondrous world.

The Treasures Within

Swords Without Master includes:

• The full rules for Swords Without Master, ready for players of any experience level.
• The extended game, a myriad of additional Rituals, Phases, Threads, and optional frameworks for playing out everything from extended campaigns to journeys back from the dead.
• The play-as-you-read starter scenario The City of Fire & Coin.
• A full example of play that shows how an entire adventure unfolds.
• 16 Scrolls, alternate settings and custom sets of rules to support adventures through space, time and genre.
• 11 Miscellanies, each a list of 36 things to add surprise and delight to your adventures.
• The Eidolon Folios, 64 full-color sword and sorcery art cards to inspire your Rogues and guide your adventures. 

The Swords Without Master digital edition includes the game PDF and the print-and-play Eidolon Folios, 64 full-color fantasy art cards with optional play-supporting material on the back.