Swords & Sceptres: The Pulp Fantasy

A fork of the SRD 5.2.1. Work in progress.

Overview

S&S rebuilds character advancement around Skill Rank, a per-skill value bought with Skill Points that replaces the Proficiency Bonus for player characters. One number both gates what a character can attempt and scales how well it works.

Monsters keep the Proficiency Bonus, so 5e monster stat blocks work as written. This was a fixed design constraint, and it is what allows the rest of the rebuild.

The system aims for fewer decisions at character creation and more granular control as a character levels. There are no subclasses; identity comes from where Skill Points go and which feats a character takes.

Contents

The core rules are the eight numbered files below. Their numbering is the reading order, and the set is closed: new material goes into a supplement, never into a ninth core file.

File	Covers
01-basic-rules.md	Abilities, Skill Rank, D20 Tests, activities, social interaction, exploration, combat, damage
02-conditions-of-play.md	Damage types, movement, the sixteen character conditions, diseases, mishaps, boons, and areas of effect
03-character-creation.md	The creation sequence, the Party Pool, level advancement, Zodiac signs, the six core races, the classes, upbringing feats, and feats
04-equipment.md	Coins and barter, weapons, bows and arrows, armour and shields, adventuring gear, jewellery, mounts and vehicles, lifestyle expenses
05-spells.md	Schools of magic, Magic Points, casting, Concentration, and every spell by school
06-magic-items.md	Generating enchanted items
07-bestiary.md	Creature stat blocks
08-glossary.md	Every abbreviation the game uses

Supplements

A supplement is optional. It is canonical to Swords & Sceptres, but no campaign is obliged to use it: the setting author or the Game Master decides what a given table adopts, if anything.

File	Covers
supplements/supplement-extended.md	Extended options — character creation, equipment, spells and the rest — written by the S&S author but judged too specific, too marginal, or too redundant for the core, and belonging to no supplement of their own
supplements/supplement-were-who.md	Lycanthropy: rules for werecreature player characters and NPCs, the curse, and its stat blocks
adventures/	Ready-to-run adventures
sheets/	Play aids — the three-page character sheet, in HTML and print-ready PDF

Differences from SRD 5.2.1

Characters

• Seventh ability: Luck, for player characters only. It has no Skill Rank and no save of its own, but its modifier is added to every saving throw a character makes.
• Skill Points are a single currency covering skills, weapon groups, armour types, and magic schools. Per level, a character gains her class value plus her Intelligence modifier.
• Knacks replace binary proficiency. A knacked rank costs 2 Skill Points and caps at character level ÷ 2, rounded up, which puts it at +10 by level 20 and keeps rising if the campaign goes further. An unknacked rank costs 4 and caps at character level ÷ 4, rounded up, to a maximum of +5, so untrained competence arrives late and stops early.
• The Proficiency Bonus is gone from the player’s side of the table entirely; it survives only on monsters, so their stat blocks still work as written. A character’s saves are her ability modifier plus her Luck modifier, plus a Save Bonus of a quarter of her level, rounded up, on the two saves her class grants a Knack in.
• No subclasses and no fixed class traits. A class supplies starting numbers, Knacks, and the schedule on which feats and Ability Score Improvements arrive — nothing else.
• Feats carry what 5e puts in class and subclass features. Everything a character can do is chosen from a list of eligible feats, level by level, in place of a templated progression. Feat slots and Ability Score Improvement slots are separate and never interchangeable.
• Upbringing feats and rolled zodiac signs cover origin.
• Disciplines are trained capacities that are not skills: no ability modifier is ever added to one, none is ever rolled, and none can be knacked. A discipline is opened by a feat and then bought up with Skill Points like anything else, which is how a character specialises after level 6 — the martial classes into the body, the casters into the mind, and the rogue into her own trade.
• Ability scores come from one party pool. 24d6 are rolled once for the whole table, the three lowest are discarded, and each player arranges the twenty-one that remain into seven groups of three. Every character is built from the same dice, including one made later to replace a death. The swing of the dice stays and the unfairness between players goes.
• Experience is a formula rather than a table. The XP needed to reach level L is 1,000 × (L − 1)². Levels 1–3 are proper levels to advance through rather than a formality, and a GM who allows advancement past level 20 has figures for it: the same formula, Hit Points and Magic Points as normal, and an Epic Feat at every even level above 20.

Magic

• Magic Points replace spell slots, at a base cost of 2 MP per spell level. Daily output is comparable to 5e at equivalent levels, but its shape is the caster’s choice.
• Ten schools in four groups: four Elemental (Air, Fire, Water, Earth), three Ego (Body, Mind, Spirit), plus Light, Dark, and Holy. The eight 5e schools are discarded, as is the 5e spell list.
• Spell levels run 1–10; there are no cantrips. A character’s Skill Rank in a school caps the spell level castable from it.
• No prepared-spell gate and no limit on spells known. Learning a spell is the constraint, normally through a purchased consumable or a teacher.
• School access is class-gated: wizards to the Elemental schools, clerics to the Ego schools plus Light or Dark by alignment, paladins to the Ego schools plus Holy. All healing sits in schools wizards cannot reach.
• No spellcasting foci. Material components are unified to one type per school family.
• A Spell Die allows partial Magic Point recovery on a Short Rest, working as Hit Dice do.
• Anyone can cast from a scroll or storing item without having learned the spell, but still pays the Magic Points and components.

Equipment and economy

• Copper is the everyday coin. Electrum and Platinum are dropped, leaving cp, sp, and gp at 1:10:100. Prices are derived from medieval English figures for things that actually existed, which grounds the economy in something real rather than in fantasy inflation. A setting can rename the coins to suit it — penny, shilling, and pound in a medieval English game; as, denarius, and aureus in a Roman one — without touching a single price.
• No firearms and no crossbows.
• Weapons are sorted into eight groups — Axes, Bows, Daggers, Maces, Rigged, Spears, Staffs, Swords — replacing the Simple/Martial and Melee/Ranged split. A ninth group, Unarmed, holds no weapons and carries the punch, the kick, the grapple and the shove. Knacks are granted in whole groups, never in individual weapons.
• Weapon Mastery is a feat, not a freebie, and it triggers only on a 19 or 20 that hits, rather than on every hit. The properties are reworked towards what the weapons historically did: hooks catch, points defeat armour, maces concuss. Bows have no mastery at all and archers can’t take the feat, since a bow is differentiated by its draw force and by the arrow on the string rather than by technique.
• Dual wielding is not free either. A weapon in each hand grants nothing on its own; the second attack comes only from a feat. The Light property marks which weapons qualify for such a feat instead of handing out an extra attack to anyone holding two of them.
• Bows are rebuilt around draw force, measured in lbf. Strength decides which bow a character can draw at all; Dexterity decides whether the shot lands. Longbows also carry a height requirement. The result is that two archers of the same level can play nothing alike — one drawing a 150 lbf warbow that kills what it touches, another loosing light and often.
• Armour is worn by category — Light, Medium, Heavy — and each category is its own skill rather than a class grant. Every armour carries Starting Resistance Points, and Medium and Heavy carry a Strength requirement of weight ÷ 10 + 8; falling short costs Speed, and three points short is unwearable.
• A shield does nothing without a rank in Shields. Above that rank it grants Resistance Points assigned a point at a time across Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing, and armour and shield together cap at 15 points against any one damage type. The eight shields spread across roles rather than along a ladder: a pavise is a wall a bowman plants, a tower shield is worth little alone and a great deal in a line of five.
• Jewellery and barter exist for each other, so a setting that does not use coin still has something a party can carry and trade — and so the ring and amulet enchantments have an object to sit in.
• Mounts and vehicles are rated by what an animal does rather than by its size, and upkeep makes a horse a standing cost rather than a one-off purchase.

Combat and senses

• Resistance Points, a −20 to +20 per-damage-type value rolled against on a d20, replace Resistance, Vulnerability, and damage Immunity.
• Weapon and armour competence is bought as Skill Ranks rather than granted by class, and weapons and armour alike carry Strength requirements.
• Senses are rebuilt for physical plausibility: Scent reports presence and identifies a species only if previously encountered; Hearing pinpoints a noise but conveys no identity; Blindsight is narrowed to creatures that plausibly have it and conveys less than sight.

Table procedure

• Group checks resolve by averaging the party’s rolls. Helping requires Skill Rank, is rolled, and grants half that rank on a 10+.
• Taking 10 and Taking 20 are reinstated, and the DC ladder extends past 30.
• Explicit sections on GM authority and precedent, and on the menu of available actions.

Status

Generally playable until character level 5, though some gaps may occur.

• Core classes — Archer, Cleric, Knight, Paladin, Rogue, and Wizard all written.
• Character creation — the creation sequence and the Party Pool are written. Three further ability-score methods and the full step-by-step description are to follow.
• Level advancement — written, including advancement past level 20.
• Equipment — weapons, bows, armour, shields, adventuring gear, jewellery, mounts and vehicles, wages, and lifestyle expenses all written. Services pending.
• Feats — ten upbringing feats and fifty-three class and general feats, gated at levels 1, 2, and 6.
• Spells — levels 1–2 written; higher levels pending. The Light school is undeveloped.
• Extended options — supplements/supplement-extended.md is open; Black Dwarf and Snailfolk written.

Materials are released on a rolling basis, without numbered editions or errata. Groups who need a stable target should work from a snapshot of the ruleset.

Licence

Rules are licensed CC BY 4.0, which is compatible with SRD 5.2.1 upstream. Attribute as: Swords & Sceptres: The Pulp Fantasy by Konstantinas Flavijus, CC BY 4.0.

Art and miniatures are licensed CC BY-NC 4.0. The intent is to limit bulk commercial reproduction rather than small operators; individual print shops can be granted permission explicitly.

The name Swords & Sceptres, the abbreviation S&S, and the logos in assets/logos/ are reserved and carry neither licence. Personal use is granted, as is verbatim redistribution alongside an unmodified copy of the rules, and unmodified use to identify the game where it is genuinely the subject — a convention banner, a shop sign, a review, an actual-play recording. Modification, standalone redistribution, and merchandise are not granted. A fork of the rules carries its own name and its own mark. The terms are in assets/logos/LICENCE.md.

Third-party material used in this work is listed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.