A Bit on Sword & Sorcery

Taking a break from thinking about supers to talk about another genre that is near and dear to my heart: Sword & Sorcery.

I probably don't need to go into detail about what that is. If you don't know, why are you here? That being said, I came into the genre via the same door that most fans do. Conan the Barbarian. I started with the 1982 film (which remains one of my all-time favorite movies, and I have watched it at least 100 times, including once just last week). I then moved to Marvel's Savage Sword of Conan, and then to the Lancer/Ace editions. I currently own almost all of the Del Rey editions of Howard's works, and the Conans are my favorite. I've also read a lot of others in the genre, including Lin Carter, Gardner Fox, and Fritz Leiber. And finally, I have even written some in the genre myself.

In fact, about the only thing I haven't done with the genre is played an RPG. Well, aside from a session of Mongoose's now-defunct d20 Conan RPG (which was really well-done, btw). Which brings me to my point.

I was looking through my backlog of blogs I follow, and noticed that Chuck over at They Might Be Gazebos! has put up his homebrew OSR S&S game, YARC. I downloaded it, and perused it. Looks pretty good! It borrows from other OSR retro-clones, so there are some things that are a bit foreign to me, yet it all makes sense. But what struck me was that I had completely forgotten something I had done a long time ago.

Many, many years back (about 14 or so), I sat down and wrote a completely original RPG from scratch. It was a universal system I called EGO: Endless Gaming Options. I never played it, or playtested it, though I did have one guy download it so he could use it for a homebrew Zelda game.

Anyways, about five or six years ago, I dusted EGO off, cut out all of the parts that didn't pertain to a Sword & Sorcery game, and proceeded to create a complete S&S RPG, which I called Age of the Sword. I littered it with a lot of pilfered art, mostly from Frank Frazetta, and created a bare-bones setting highly influenced by the world in the film Fire & Ice. And then I sent it out to anyone who showed any interest. To date, no one has gotten back to me. And so, AotS has languished on my flash drive ever since.

Well, today I am saying screw it! I'm going to put it up for download on my My Products page above. If you like S&S, and all that goes with it, have a peak, and let me know what you think!