We are living in legendary times, when lightweight and flavourful sword & sorcery rpgs are strewn like a carpet of glittering jewels over lands of high adventure. Clash of Steel from Zozer Games, sits high on the raised dias of play possibilities, delivering a simple to play game infused with genre tropes, rollable tables, mass combat, naval voyages and battles, kingdom building, and solo play.
The core game is a simple 2d6 for a 10+ using a small number of attributes to determine success. Combat is covered with opposed rolls of each Combat Value, made up of your Might attribute added to a weapon bonus. Damage is inflcted by the winner based on the difference between the rolls. An armour value grants a number of d6 to protect, where if a ‘6’ is rolled on any of the dice, the damage is negated completely.
A Skill attribute covers most tasks, with a panolply of Feats gained through profession and social choices, that give you auto successes and some extras on very specific tasks. The combination looks to give fast play with enough specialisation to make your character stand out.
Reputation grows as the hero becomes more experienced, giving social advantages as you stride the world making a name for yourself. Advancement is linked to XP per session and the expenditure of heaps of silver. The silver flows, easy come and easy go.
Sorcery is dangerous and suggested to be for your villains, though player character sorcerers are also catered for. The system is simple, based on domains and freeform effects, with difficulty modified upwards as the magic tries to achieve more impressive outcomes. Make sure you have some bound lesser demons to whisper their duplicitous advice.
Packed into this 200 page book are lots of short sub-systems to manage journeys, create taverns, dungeons, cities, wilderness encounters, and designing kingdoms. A bestiary and section on the impact of the gods all add to the tools you have to create that sword & sorcery oily glisten.
I’d like to try the game as written, but you could also use swathes of the book to inform any sword and sorcery setting you might care to play in. A Role VTT sheet or two is surely to follow.
Although the game is available in A4 print at Lulu.com, the layout is perfectly sized for A5. So, as with Dom’s excellent A5 rendition of Zozer’s Cepheus Universal, I have produced my own A5 version of the book.
Time for a riotous, player led, tub thumper? Perhaps…
