What does it take to go against the gods? That’s the prospect that faces a group of unconventional queer heroes in Hectic Electron’s new Kickstarter book Defy the Gods, a unique take on the “sword and sorcery” setting of old.
Defy the Gods is written by Chrys Sellers, a game designer whose past work included the GM-less Raccoon Sky Pirates, a book about raccoons raiding a house with a trash ship in a silly yet delightful romp of an adventure. Now Sellers is taking on a Sumer/Mesopotamia-based fantasy world with Defy the Gods.
The game is built on Powered by the Apocalypse, which relies on a 2d6 dice system and has players operate with “playbooks” rather than classes. This approach is more narrative-focused, where the player’s dice determine all the events, in contrast with D&D or Modiphius’ 2D20 system.
Players adopt one of six archetypes: the Sword, the Sailor, the Revenant, the Wolfling, or the Sorcerer. Each one present power and magic in different ways, but are also presenting different queer tropes, acording to Sellers. For example, the Sword is the “sword lesbian” or the “himbo”, while the Vessel might reflect a more dominant/submissive relationship. These dynamics inform their mechanics as much as they inform their identities.
Players have Epithets, which are phrases describing who they are. Each are worth certain points, and those points modify your dice rolls. Epithets are gained and grown through offering your heart to others in romantic or platonic manners. That power is restricted by a player’s Dooms, which can offer dramatic moves that may seriously impact the story. A player will have to balance all of these, else they risk turning Epithets into Dooms and losing control of their character to the World Forces.
Players roll 2d6s plus appropriate modifiers connected to their Epithets to see if they fail or get a mixed/complete success. If you’ve played Monster of the Week, Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows or Avatar Legends, this will feel exceptionally similar.
The World Forces are the antagonists of the game. Players will have to face off with the Gods, the city and its corrupt leaders, the Wilds and its wide breadth of monsters, the legacy of Atlantis and its corruptive ruins, and Death and the Underworld. These forces are the tools that a storyteller will attempt to turn upon you.
The game is heavily inspired by other PBTA games, Sellers affirmed, and even takes several of the more innovative gameplay mechanics into account. For example, Apocalypse Keys introduced the idea within PBTA of rolling too high, and how that can have detrimental effects on the character. Sellers decided to incorporate the same mechanic, where having too much success can lead to one becoming less and less human over time. There’s also the Doom Spiral, a tracker that will show when a player might face their end.
There are also mechanics governing emotional and relational moments between players and NPCs and when and where a character can flirt with NPCs and either win them over or turn them away. This is all done in a very queer setting, Sellers emphasized, where everyone and anyone is fair game for such relationships.
They also noted that there are relationship mechanics for each playbook that offer them relief through relationship moments that are special to them. For example, as the Sword, “you give your heart away easily and you can heal anybody that you give a heart to who also lets you break something of theirs in the process,” Sellers said. It’s not a required mechanic in the game, but it helps to incentivize personal moments with other players at the table, Sellers notes.
The game draws heavily from Sword and Sorcery roots, which is a subfaction of fantasy where the average man wielding a blade (such as Conan) is often the hero in comparison to the evil magic-wielding sorcerer. It’s a setting that stands in stark contrast to the magically saturated worlds that games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder seek to provide, where spells are at a player’s fingertips with ease. It’s a world touched by Sumerian mythology, although the lore is still generic and mystical enough that players can take the book and make their own world rather than be stuck in its own.
The game provides several tools for building a world filled with tyrants and gods, but it also allows players to act as their own enemies through the “World Scene,” a set of rules and abilities that they can use during downtime between adventures to inform how the varying forces they oppose act. It’s a unique concept that allows players to harass themselves as much as a storyteller might.
Defy the Gods presents a unique set of storytelling opportunities that imagines a very queer and very different take on ancient Sumer that presents players with an alternative setting to adventure in.
Defy the Gods is available on Kickstarter for backing.
Images Courtesy of Hectic Electron
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