In August 2024 we presented the Serpentine Quick Deal. As a tie-in to the free online Pelicon gaming convention, Pelgrane Press offered the Swords of the Serpentine FRPG rulebook for a special promotional price.
Swords of the Serpentine is the GUMSHOE-powered sword-and-sorcery RPG set in Eversink, a fantasy city modeled on Renaissance Venice. You may dive deep into flooded ruins in search of lost treasure, play politics against sly nobles to discredit a powerful enemy, track down murderers with the City Watch, or plan breathtakingly ambitious thefts that take place in broad daylight. Your actions change the city, the politics, and the state of the world. Using the famous GUMSHOE rules for investigation and detection (seen in Trail of Cthulhu, Night’s Black Agents, and TimeWatch), you’ll learn secrets that can bring down the mighty or raise the humble, and you’ll uncover whispers of the past – even, yes, the corrupting sorceries of the long-dead Serpentine Empire.
Swords makes a great introduction to the GUMSHOE system. Jared Rascher, in his detailed 2022 Swords of the Serpentine review on Gnome Stew, wrote, “I would feel more comfortable introducing someone to GUMSHOE with this game than many other iterations. […] I’m also extremely pleased that this isn’t just a good genre application of an existing ruleset, but also an engaging setting in its own right.
“If you have been curious about GUMSHOE, but never fully engaged, this is a good introduction. If you like grittier swords-and-sorcery stories with some weird humor and social commentary thrown in, you’ll find a lot of what you like here. If you want to use it for another fantasy city, it’s got great tools for that, but if you really want a new and fresh city that still maintains a lot of the tropes, it’s still got you covered.”
(Note: Someday, if Pelgrane Press permits, we hope to present a larger Swords of the Serpentine Bundle with many supplements. That bundle, if it happens, will be a new, different offer, and purchase of the Swords of the Serpentine core rulebook in this Quick Deal won’t automatically entitle you to anything in that lineup.)
