A Quick Look at a Big Book: Swyvers

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Once again I have read a book. Swyvers is not the biggest of books, but it's a nice hardback and thus not a zine, and as we all know "Zine" and "Big book" are the only two types of RPG. Swyvers is written by Luke Gearing with art by David Hoskins, published by Melsonian Arts Council. I backed the Kickstarter for the fancy deluxe version, so this is the version I have read. To the best of my knowledge, the only difference between this and the standard hardcover, is that this one has shiny gold foil (making it a more enticing bit of loot for anyone who would burgle me, I guess).

The book has a total of 95 pages of content, written by Luke Gearing at his nastiest, accompanied by David Hoskins' excellent art, bringing Luke's dark fantastic Britain to life. Swyvers is a book full of tables, and this is a good thing, since this is also where the work shines brightest. Gearing's writing is darkly funny, leaving me unable to suppress my chuckles at several points during my read-through: the grim world of The Smoke is built by the implications of the lists of equipment, character traits, encounters, etc. It's Ankh-Morpork if Terry Pratchett gave up all hope of being family friendly, it is a skewering of the wealthy without much valorisation of the downtrodden. If you eat shit, breathe shit, live in shit, you're bound to become a bit of a shit yourself, at least this is the case for the intended player characters, who the game's marketing copy describes as thieves and bastards.

It is chock full of Britishisms (or at least things that seem like Britishisms to a Continental such as I), with the player characters portraying the titular Swyvers, more or less petty criminals trying to survive in the city known only as The Smoke, stealing, bribing, and shanking their way through life, before meeting a dirty end. The rules are deadly, and offer a cornucopia of delightfully grotty ways to go, including diseases both ordinary and venereal. This is the good stuff.

The book is organised into six chapter and an introductory adventure: character creation, general rules, running the game, magic, a bestiary, and a section titled "This ' That", which is essentially a bunch of tables (positive). The rules of the game are honestly the least interesting part here, a fairly basic roll under system, but with a bunch of special cases and exceptions in combat - it feels less like a whole cohesive system than a simple ruleset with a bunch of special case rulings bolted onto it. An attack consists of up to three rolls: a to hit roll, a damage roll if successful, and an armour roll if applicable, which seems like a lot of dice rolling to me. Initiative and defence is based on the weapon, but runs in the opposite direction in the first round of combat. There are also a bunch of other special cases with very granular rules, a couple of examples of this are:

Charging
Combatants who charge reverse the Initiative Order for those involved in combat with them — meaning
longer weapons strike first. The Swyver who charged subtracts 2 from their Defence Value. If they successfully hit, they roll twice the usual number of dice to determine damage.

Set
Weapons which can be Set can receive a Charge, automatically dealing normal damage to an enemy charging someone in such a stance. Setting to receive a Charge occurs during the Shooting phase. 

both of which seem much too specific for a system that purports to be rules light. If I end up running it (and I do want to run it, I just need a group of players who want to get really grotty, as well as the time of course), I might gut the actual system and just keep all the tables and other flavour, which seems pretty simple to adapt to your OSR system of choice.

There is one part of the system which stands out, however, and this happens to be the one that had a whole chapter devoted to it: Magic. Casting is based around playing Blackjack, which returning readers will know that I enjoy immensely, but augmented by attaching additional meaning to every specific card on top of its pure value. The spells themselves are also fantastically flavourful, and often incredibly gross. Will you believe that this is the second game I have read that has an effect to vomit up a clone of yourself? The magic is lore-wise well-integrated into the world, but seems otherwise detached from the rest of the game, relying on its own blackjack instead of the roll under used everywhere else. It would be very easy to tag it onto any other OSR game in need of a magic system. It's the most interesting magic I have seen since The Book of Gaub.

If I had to give a total verdict, Swyvers is a thematically cohesive book, dripping with delicious rot, but the actual game system seems mechanically disjointed, and I wonder if the game would have been better off as a setting conversion book for a game like Cairn, Into the Odd or Mörk Borg. However, this should not be a problem to anyone who wants to play it, as the bones of the system are light enough that it could easily be replaced. The purposefully basic layout also at times make it difficult to find the specific special case rules that are so common, as many are just denoted by smallcaps line in otherwise ragged right paragraphs. However, none of this really takes away from the impeccable content written by Gearing, which absolutely makes me want to run some really gross bastards through The Smoke and it's soggy underbelly, The Midden.

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