Melsonian Arts Council
Swyvers
Swyvers
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What is Swyvers?
Swyvers is a tabletop role-playing game about bastards. You and your gang of criminals scarper through heists and sewers, stalk through the filth of The Smoke and, if you’re lucky, you’ll make it out with a few extra shillings. The whole of this city is your filthy, sickly oyster.
Swyvers is a light-weight set of rules married to a full set of tools and tables for running a game in the chaotic sprawl of The Smoke, its many districts and The Midden. What a city it is — corrupt officials, looming war, rogue sorcerors, monsters below and nobs above. Violence rests as thick as the smog, nothing is sacred and it’s always bloody raining.
The Smoke
The Smoke is the greatest city in the world, the beating heart of an empire. It is filthy and sprawling like a burst pustule left open to weep besides the iron-grey sea. It does have a name, but only the nobs and learned-readers know it.
Beneath slumbers The Midden – the interconnected passages of built-over streets, basements, tombs and hidden lairs where criminals lurk, beasts squat and lost wealth resides. An enterprising fellow with a sledgehammer can traverse in any direction they please – not that they’ll like what they find. It is rife with corpse-thieves, cellar-breakers and enterprising businessmen shunned in sunlit places.
The rich of The Smoke honour their dead with elaborate crypts, whose morose edifices encroach ever further into the slums – the trap-smiths of The Smoke do fine business from their craft, and the fences keep the money flowing thanks to enterprising tomb robbers.
Building The Smoke
Every group of swyvers will have their very own Smoke. The GM starts a campaign by generating the city, starting from a core of districts: the Royal Gaol, the Palace, the Mayoral District and the Docks. From there they follow along swyvers' generation tables to flesh out and, potentially, endlessly expand their rotten city.
You will have a unique engine for running your own Swyvers games. In the book you will find procedures for building hideouts, generating heists, investing in properties (both legitimate and illicit), installing bizarre prosthetic tools, engaging fences, picking up odd jobs just to pay the bills, bribing officials, and dealing with demonic forces for personal gain.
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The setting is great, specially if, like me, you like to play stories about thieves and people living on the edge. But the best part of this book is not only the setting, but that that setting can extrapolate to other games, making playing a thief, in any other system, feel complete and solid
It is entertaining to read, and inmidiatly makes my imagination goe into overdrive with sotuations I can put my players through.
The diseases table is great, an they mechanic is very fun to play. Recommended.
A little disappointed with the paper quality of the pages though, I was expecting something better for this price tag, as with the other (perfect quality) Melsonia books.
I haven't yet run the game, because of the classic inability to find people that want to play games that aren't D&D - but I digress.
Having read the rulebook cover-to-cover, all I can say is that the premise is sublime. There are games for people who want to be heroes (D&D, Pathfinder), games for people who want to be weird heroes (Troika!), and games for people who want to be weak pathetic humans (Mothership)... there are games for people who want to cooperate (ARC, UVG), and games for people who want to anti-cooperate (Paranoia).
But Swyvers? This game, in contrast to almost any other TTRPG I've seen, actively *wants* your players to be kleptomanic murderhobos, and provides an excellent (if concise) toolset to help the GM keep things cohesive in spite of that fact. The reality that a book this thin can include comprehensive rules and tables *alongside an example adventure* astounds me, and, of course, the cherry on top is that it also wants you and your table to pretend you're living in 20th century London - sorry, The Smoke - with accents to match.
Five stars. Interesting concept, concise rules - not too heavy, not too light - and flawless execution. Very excited to see how this plays! I have a few people in mind that might enjoy this already...
Sleeping on the streets has never been so much fun.