Characters
todd - zombie pygmy (halfling) Tribal Outcast rogue
nate - Atlantean Bearer of the Black Book sword mage
jereme - human star-lore adept occultist
bryce - high elf ethereal occult scientist chaos mage
joe - half beastman (half orc) pajama man fighter
kyle - human barbarian
Clerics of Thule gods only
talk with me about paladins (they don't really fit, but maybe we can make it go)
totally are chaos mages
taken from The Design Mechanism's Monster Island
Living for the Day
Sword & Sorcery adventures are scaled at the personal level. Protagonists are not great heroes and their deeds rarely save the world. Instead they are generally in it for the loot, romance or vengeance. If this seems base or egocentric, then you’ve hit the nail on the head. Whatever they do hardly ever affects anything beyond their immediate locale; a town or battle at most. Their quests are pragmatic rather than epic.
No Black and White Morality
Characters in Sword & Sorcery are generally the antithesis of selfless heroic types. They are usually flawed in some way, whether cowards, sadists, avaricious, misogynistic, misandrous, vengeful, treacherous, lustful, selfish, intolerant and so on. They are not necessarily bad or evil, but definitely have their own codes of honour which might not reflect modern sensibilities.
Healing is Hard
Magical healing is a rarity in Sword & Sorcery, making incessant combat extremely dangerous. Most protagonists heal naturally either during the long travel between hazardous locales, or by resting up in a safe, comfortable place like a tavern. - for the purposes of this game, I probably will not alter healing much
Corrupting power of magic
Magic in Sword & Sorcery tends to be a dark, perverted art limited to a few specialist sorcerers, priests, and shamans. Only those willing to make great sacrifices in time and perhaps personal morality have any chance to master it. Whilst not all magic is evil per se, the majority of practitioners tend to become corrupted by its use – psychologically more than physically – whether in the manner of the deals required to learn it, the methods used to cast it, or the power it provides the practitioner over others.
Whilst many claim the genre lacks ‘flashy’ magic, nothing could be further from the truth. There are examples of flaming spheres of death, induced earthquakes, monstrous transformations and even the summoning of demons so huge their galloping hooves crush an entire nation underfoot. But whatever its source and however it manifests, magic is always time consuming, terrifying and deadly; the latter being why its secrets are long searched for and jealously guarded.
Horror of the unknown
Many of the places encountered in Sword & Sorcery are, by their very nature, mysterious and disconcerting. This can be due to a variety of reasons, for example the alien architecture of buildings, copious blood stains across altars, or ruins empty of any form of animal life. Those creatures that end up attacking protagonists are similarly ghastly; being giant, savage forms of common animals or weird conjoined chimeras of wildly different species. Even entire tribes or cultures can be horrific because of the inhumane traditions they practice to survive or to placate the gods they worship.
Anthropocentric and xenophobic
Not only are the protagonists of the Sword & Sorcery genre almost universally human, but the majority of their foes are too. Even if occasional monsters are met, it is often humans who are their underlings or control them.