Sword & Sorcery Heroic Roleplaying – Adventures: “Rogues in the House”

After hacking character creation, tone, and offering some classic heroes and threats, it’s finally time to put all the pieces together a complete adventure  for Sword and Sorcery Heroic Roleplaying. (Rogues in the House)

Following the Event format of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, this and an upcoming adventure draw inspiration from two of Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales; Rogues in the House and The Tower of the Elephant.

If your players have read these stories, it is simple enough to change a few details and descriptions to disguise the source of your scenarios. At the end of each adventure, you’ll find some notes on making such changes.

  • Rogues in the House is an adventure suitable for a single hero. He or she starts the adventure in an unfortunate position, chained to a wall in a dungeon cell, convicted of a capital crime…
  • Tower of the Elephant is an adventure suitable for a pair of heroescharacters suited, either by skill or by inclination, to commit a robbery. In what may in fact be the origin of a time-honored fantasy tradition, our pair of erstwhile criminals meet in a tavern…

A Note on Party Size in Sword & Sorcery Adventures

The current ‘party of adventurers’ style of play in fantasy RPGs derives from Tolkien. Before The Lord of the Rings, fantasy stories—like most fiction—tended to have a single primary protagonist. In the Sword & Sorcery genre of pulp fantasy, as with the pulp Westerns, this dovetailed neatly with the notion of the ‘rugged individualist’; a perpetual outsider making his or her own way in the world.

Sword & Sorcery gaming thus models it’s inspirations best when the protagonists are few in number, and not necessarily united by an ‘all for one, and one for all’ ethic.

Now, without further delay, here is Rogues in the House, a Sword & Sorcery Heroic Roleplaying adventure.

Rogues in the House originally appeared in Weird Tales, January 1934, vol. 23, no. 1

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