Let us tell a tale as written by...
Tales are the adventure modules of Swords. They can be as simple as a single style or as elaborate as an actual module. For me, I rather like a Tale that is a title, one or two styles, and an overtrick. Such as:
"The Legion of the Damned"
A Tale of Horror and Dark Magicks
Overtrick: Inevitable Foe—A phalanx of skeletons dripping with their own fresh gore.
In #SundayAMSwords this past weekend we played a tale comprised simply of a single style: ...of Beauty. It was astounding. We had the torches in an inn extinguished so one rogue could blow the embers from the hearth across the ceiling in the pattern of constellations. Dawn herself appeared in all her rosy, scintillating glory. And captivating patterns of light and dark moving about in the silent depths of the ocean.
The purpose of a style is to plant a flag in your game that says, "We will tell this sort of story," and then to give you a single rule that may aid you in that endeavor. The rule tantalizes you. We all love rules, that's why we're here. We want to toy with them, see how they tick, and see what they can show us about the game.* But it's the flag that is the most important element of the style. The rule exists to remind you of your flag.
Thus far, all the styles in Swords are about themes or things that can appear in your tale. One of my intents with styles, however, is to eventually let groups base them on authors they'd like to emulate. A tale as written by... rather than a tale of....
What makes an author's work definitively of that author is in some ways deeply personal. What I see and love in Fritz Leiber's work may not be what you see and love in his work. It gets cloudier the more people you get involved and the more media that is focused on the work. 1982's Conan the Barbarian is not Howard's Conan and the 2011 film is neither. Simply planting a flag will not do. Not everyone will see the flag on the same hill. Any added rules would only be ignored by folks running for their own hill the same way folks ignore their GPS when driving around their hometown.
It is more effective to use a constellation of non-author styles followed by an "as written by" flag. The beauty in this Sunday's game coupled with the sad news of Tanith Lee's recent passing put me in mood to create just such a style for just a sliver of what I find so captivating about her work: A Tale of Beauty, Seduction and Sorcery as Written by Tanith Lee. You could have a wildly different cluster of styles in mind for Lee's work, but if we sat down to play this tale together, we'd all be on the same page. In fact, even if you had never read a word written by Tanith Lee, I suspect you'd have no trouble keeping up.
Show us what constellations of styles would you use to play a tale as written by one of your favorite authors.
* In fact, one often overlooked definition of the word play means "the extent to which a part of a mechanism can move freely." ( Number 11 in the noun definitions: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/play#Noun) Rules define that extent of that free movement and we love exploring that.
