Gamified: Black Sword Hack

Or, How I Drafted Something from Nothing, Part 2.

hey everyone! It’s been a busy week.

I have been beset with the finer details of “A story that would work for a second book in sequence with Bringer” and this, in turn, has captured my full attention for the better part of said week. I had always set out with the intent that Bringer would function as a standalone work, and I think that is still true: the book resolves in a place where, I feel, readers can easily imagine for themselves the greater picture outside of the events of the book.

But.

The world of this book and these characters laces through other stories I want to tell, and for me, knowing what happens to these characters is going to be critical to shaping the later stories in this place… and for at least one of those stories, it means I’ve got to write it.

I am still working forward on Amaranthine—Amaranth and her story need to be told!—but my heart, and my Post-it Notes, have been captivated with a followup book to Bringer of the Scourge, a book I am pretty confident is entitled The Shepherd in Shadow.

---

While I am thinking about that project, in terms of process and story shape, I am retreating back into one of the resources that really helped me get my feet under me the first time around… Black Sword Hack.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the whole history of Old School Revival, nor do I really want to get into the particulars; I am not an RPG expert by any definition of the term.

For my purposes, it’s more or less literally irrelevant. Being frank, I struggle a lot with roleplaying games because I have a specific type of sensitivity to the sensation that the kids call “cringe” these days. I’m cringe-sensitive and I have a lot of difficulty roleplaying because of it. When I was in high school, though, I played a shit ton of Magic: the Gathering, and because of this, I had a lot of adjacency to RPG materials, especially 2nd Edition (AD&D) and 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons. This era—for me, between roughly 1996 and 2004—I spent poring over fanzines and how-to guides and so a lot of the roleplaying culture and content still got to me via osmosis.

Last year, I picked up the RPG manual for Black Sword Hack solely on the strengths of the primary illustrator on the project, Goran Gligović, who is one of my all-time favorite sword & sorcery illustrators in the industry today. I bought the game on Kickstarter primarily as objet d’art and discovered that the entire contents were more or less a wonderful, dark and glittery stew of sword & sorcery concepts, especially the beautiful-doom ambience of Michael Moorcock and the everything-ends retro-grimdark circa Glen Cook detailing. It’s gorgeous and dense with shiny things to magpie from its depths. It’s refreshingly simple, in my opinion, a very lean system designed for the player’s creativity.

And it has a single-player mode.

This was the bit that helped me to realign the whole muddle of early character work I had done in service of crafting this book. I knew I had an angry princess who needed some sort of broad, abstract vengeance—it’s right there in her face, Vi is a creature of quiet fury—but I didn’t have the whole of her broad tapestry. I rolled up three characters; I knew I needed three people to carry this story, and I had the lightly-sketched outlines of those three people but they weren’t taking shape because they had little in the way of… well, quirks. They were just an abstract adventuring party stuck in a dreadful castle anticipating some future events that weren’t gelling.

Black Sword Hack to the rescue.

There are three broad categories of character origin that the game uses, so I rolled one of each of these: Barbarian, Civilized, and Decadent; Kharise, Mehren, and Vierrelyne, respectively. I pivoted away from these definitions pretty swiftly in the actual shaping of my characters, but having little suggestions of who they were and where they had come from very quickly gave me a richness to each of them that I think carried through into the book itself.

After origins in character design for Black Sword Hack, the next step is backgrounds—essentially, sets of skills that complement the origin point and expand your character out into a person of varied abilities. This is where each of my main characters got some of their defining quirks. (Among her other abilities, I gave Kharise the ability to take a long rest wherever she is—a detail that actually did make it into the book.)

I also fiddled a bit with things like starting items—though most of these things did not last, especially things like weapons specified themselves as the story went on. (Mehren’s character sheet, rather hilariously, specified the pilgrim’s staff and the cestus—that might have been interesting, but it didn’t really fit his reclusive “the best defense is a good… hiding place” stratagem… for the first book, anyway. We’ll see what changes with Mehren in Shepherd, I suppose!)

In the solo play section of the game’s rulebook, there is a table for plausible starting points, and one of them is in fact the starting point that ended up being the first chapter of Bringer. I hadn’t set out for that to be the actual beginning of the story, but at the time I was doing this exercise, I certainly needed something to start things off. In my developmental drafting, I had spent a lot more time with Vi and Kharise in Talorr, but it lacked any excitement and trying to induce an inciting incident into that blasé fantasy idyll had been like pulling teeth.

I realized, writing from the prompt “you just got out of the cell in your father’s castle…” that the story had plenty of forward momentum from that point and that anything we really needed to know about Talorr could be managed in retrospection; that the shadows crafted around Talorr by its absence left much more space for the reader to feel its absence where needed.

I feel like I am already going overlong with this, so I will keep it short, but it was super helpful to have all three characters and the premise in hand. I also used the map-making resources for help in designing a few of the disparate and distant lands in the book—all of my names and traits have been altered, but I left an homage: the Unconquered Plains, riffed from one of the notes in the sample materials. I loved it and it spoke to what sort of person I needed Kharise to become.

---

I am thinking a lot about all of this, as I mentioned, because I am… horror of horrors, finding myself in need of a sequel (technically, probably, two).

I really love the idea of Bringer as a standalone, and I was really, really determined to make it a book that doesn’t NEED a series for its gravitas, and I think, in that regard, I succeeded.

In a nutshell, I need to know more about what happens next for my leads, after the events at the end of the first book, and the only way I can really accomplish that is to write it. I am very determined to get it done as quickly as I reasonably can—sometime this year! Preferably by spring!—and I am determined to keep it a similar form-factor and with the same fairly tight view on my characters.

---

In other news, I received multiple nominations in the Indie Ink Awards for this year! I am so pleased and looking forward to looking at the broad swath of fellow nominees. More information on that tk—I have to read up on what’s next!

Of the categories—Best book cover and cover artist; Best friendship; Best mentor character; Best setting; Side Character MVP—gosh, best friendship, best mentor and side character MVP genuinely melt my heart, because I worked real hard in that regard. Kharise and Mehren are both super special to me, as special as Vi, and I am glad that really came through for someone!

Paperback plans were temporarily scuttled by some print proof dilemmas; I have remedied the issues I was having and I should have new, improved books in hand by Tuesday. Watch this space!

Until next time!
Drafting our way out of this wild goose chase, til Hell won’t have it,

—M.

BRINGER OF THE SCOURGE is out on most ebook platforms: snag it here!

I’m also listed on GoodReads and the StoryGraph—add me there and check out the reviews I have done so far for this year’s Derby books—or maybe leave a kind word for my little tome if you have taken the time to read it already; reviews are a form of love.