Swords & Chaos is powered by the SIEGE Engine™, which was developed by Troll Lord Games to facilitate quick, easy play and game resolution. S&C lives up to these ideals, featuring the dead-simple mechanics of Troll Lord Games’ Castles & Crusades RPG, though slightly modified from the original design to better emulate the feel of Sword & Sorcery fiction 

Attributes

Swords & Chaos has 7 attributes which run from 3 to 18. These attributes are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, and Luck. When generating attributes, there’s an optional rule where attributes of 8 or less can grant characters something called a Boon. A Boon is a measure of good fortune that comes to them in their time of need. In game terms, it’s an automatic success on any one die roll that they can expend once per game session. A player character can have up to three boons awarded to them from character creation. After that, boons may be awarded over the course of play, but once spent, such boons are gone forever.

From the Book of Swords & Chaos:

Strength: A measure of your physical power. It can be used to determine how much you can lift or carry, how far you can throw, and how hard you hit.

Dexterity: A measure of nimbleness of both body and hands. It can be used to determine how fast your reflexes are, your ability to tumble and roll, and how accurate you are with a bow.

Constitution: A measure of your hardiness, resilience, and health. It can be used to determine how resistant you are to poisons and diseases, how long you can hold your breath, or how far you can push yourself physically.

Intelligence: A measure of your raw intellect, be it obtained academically, or by general wit. It can be used to determine how many languages you can speak, your aptitude for mathematics, and your capacity for sorcery.

Wisdom: A measure of your subtler mental capacity, your life experience, and your connection to the spiritual. It can be used to determine the sharpness of your senses, your ability to seize initiative, and your understanding of the wilds beyond civilization.

Charisma: A measure of your personal magnetism. It can be used to determine a combination of things such as likeability, sense of humor, force of presence, manipulation, and deception.

Luck: A measure of how fortunate you are. Luck is fleeting and admittedly a bit of an abstract concept. Your luck score can be used to determine the outcome of any circumstance that calls for an attribute check that cannot be easily determined by any of the other attribute scores. This is your catch-all for the odd circumstantial needs of a specific character in a specific situation. Locked in prison and need to see if there is a loose iron nail in the bottom of your cot that you could use to pick the lock? Luck check. Want to dive off a cliff into the water below, but want to avoid the shallows? Luck check. Want to find a horse for sale in a town of people who exclusively walk everywhere? Luck check.

NOTE: There are circumstances wherein your Game Master may permit you to ‘burn’ a point of one of your attribute scores. Doing so will award a cumulative +1 to any roll that would otherwise fail. The more points you burn, the more you add to the roll. The most common attribute score to burn is Luck. 

Combat

In combat, players and monsters roll 20 sided dice to try and overcome one another’s armor class (AC). In this system, higher is better. Player characters add relevant modifiers from their attributes, as well as their Base-to-Hit bonus, which is bound by their class and level. Monsters and NPCs simply add their number of Hit Dice to their d20 roll to determine their bonus to hit. Initiative is rolled each round with the roll of a 10 sided die, and each combatant can perform any two actions on their turn (only one of which can be an attack, unless otherwise permitted by their class).

When monsters and  NPCs are reduced to 0 hit points, they are slain. When player characters are reduced to 0 hit points, they collapse. None at the table, neither players nor GM will know if the downed character is alive or dead until someone goes to inspect the body, and Luck check is made.

Sorcery

Magic in Swords & Chaos is a rare and terrible thing. Player characters can opt to play as sorcerers at their own risk, but doing so is not for the light-hearted. When a spell is cast, there is always at least a 1 in 20 chance that the spell misfires terribly, resulting in Corruption. This a process where the Chaos energy being released from the mind of the caster is so unstable that it warps said caster’s very soul. Their essence becomes tainted, and their mind darkened. As Corruption accumulates, the threat range for accumulating it increases as well. 

From the Book of Swords & Chaos:

Whenever a 1 is rolled on a spell check, that indicates something has gone horribly awry with the casting, and the sorcerer is warped by the monstrous influence of Corruption. Corruption is cumulative and represents the gradual decay and descent into madness on the part of the sorcerer due to the prolonged supernatural exposure they have endured. If a spell is cast that does not require a spell check, a d20 should still be rolled by the Game Master to determine if Corruption occurs.

Corruption has a cumulative threshold for occurring. At the start of one’s adventuring career, only a roll of 1 on the d20 indicates a corrupting influence occurs, however, for every 2 points of Corruption the caster obtains, the ‘threat range’ increases by 1. A caster with 3 points of Corruption would gain another point if they rolled a 1 OR a 2, and a caster with 5 points would gain on a 1, 2, or 3. This goes all the way up to the maximum threat range of 1-5 indicating Corruption.

A character can only endure so much Corruption before they are driven irrevocably insane. At the point when a character gains 10 points of Corruption, they are so consumed by the warping effects of Chaos, they cannot function any longer in an adventuring group. So wracked are they in mind and body by the tendrils of raw Chaos that they either go insane and become an NPC, mad and babbling to themselves about otherworldly horrors, or alternatively, they physically transform into one of the chaos spawn—those hideous, writhing creatures whose inky tendrils give off Corruption in great waves.

Spells are truly Vancian in a way that few other systems are. Sorcerers have total control over what spells they wish to memorize, as there are no level caps on spellcasting. Spells are divided into tiers of complexity (Elementary, Basic, Minor, Major, Advanced, and Master), which correspond to an amount of physical space they take up in the caster’s mind.

A sorcerer could prepare the spell Ears of Ibreukomon the Babbler, and Elementary spell, 25 times, and it would take up the same amount of space in their mind as a master spell like the Indestructible Globe of Protection Against Spells. The only limit to what a sorcerer can prepare is the amount of memory they have in their brain, and what spells they have discovered.