Naming The Faceless: Swyvers

Getting grimy in the Smoke

Ages ago I started a short-lived series of blog posts where I grabbed a system and rolled up a character in it. I can’t remember exactly why I stopped doing them - I tend to flippantly blame Burning Wheel for killing my love of RPGs for a few weeks, but in reality the answer is more than likely just “I have ADHD and I forgot once”. This also started as an excuse to read more RPG books and engage with them critically, and it sort of morphed into my Long Read posts.

Anyway, I’m bringing it back at least once, because Swyvers is on Kickstarter and I’ve been hearing a lot about how good the tables for generating its setting are. I want to play with them a little bit, and this feels like a good excuse to do that.

Full disclosure here, Luke Gearing is a friend and I’ve seen bits of Swyvers over the past couple of years. (Most notably I’ve been using the carousing table in my games for ages). Nobody has asked me to write this post, though, and I’m using the publicly-available quickstart to generate everything you see here.

Here’s the pitch for Swyvers:

SWYVERS is a Dickensian tabletop RPG of heists and scoundrels in the big city. Swyvers is a light-weight set of rules married to a full set of tools and tables for running a game in the chaotic sprawl of The Smoke, its many districts and The Midden. What a city it is — corrupt officials, looming war, rogue sorcerors, monsters below and nobs above. Violence rests as thick as the smog, nothing is sacred and it’s always bloody raining. 
Swyvers is a game about bastards. You and your gang of criminals scarper through heists and sewers, stalk through the filth of The Smoke and, if you’re lucky, you’ll make it out with a few extra shillings. The whole of this city is your filthy, sickly oyster.

While this blog series has traditionally been about character creation specifically, today I’m mainly looking at generating The Smoke. This feels like the kind of game where the setting is as important a character as anyone else, and I really want to see what comes out of these tables. Plus it just sounds fun. I may also roll up a PC, but we’ll see. Swyvers is described as “a grotty system for running a grotty game”, and I’m expecting the city I roll here to be suitably horrible.

The very first page of the quickstart (after the same introductory/marketing copy we see on the product page and a piece of really stunning, evocative black and white art by David Hoskins) is character generation, so I guess I’ll do that before I jump ahead to creating The Smoke even though the city is really what I’m here for.

Character creation looks to be incredibly fast. You’ve got three attributes (Constitution, Dexterity, and Strength, which all do exactly what you’d expect them to do), each generated using 3d6. Hit Points are equal to constitution, and you have a 25% chance of being literate. The text tells us that “a reason for literacy must be determined in under 5 seconds, or else literacy is lost. (e.g. “A mouse taught me.”)”. I love this, frankly. This really stripped-down, simple approach to characters reminds me a lot of Luke’s other game Wolves Upon The Coast.

My character has 12 Con, 11 Dex, and 8 Str, and is illiterate. We start with 1d10+10 shillings (I get 13), a Ropey Shank, and some ‘Orrid Rags. We also get to roll one item from a 1d100 table of trinkets, and I come up with a diary and writing material. What is my illiterate Swyver going to do with them? I have no idea. These seem like pretty decent starting stats, since most of the time we’re going to be trying to Roll Under them.

The final step - which I missed initially - is to roll a Trait. I think this (optional) step could probably be mentioned up top before the long trinket tables, because the way it’s laid out means that the trait table looks like an extension of the trinket table and can be easily missed, but it’s not exactly a big problem. My trait is “Always fumin’” - presumably because I’ve got this notebook and pen but no idea what to do with them.

And that’s it. That’s the whole character. All the other details - who am I? What do I want? Why do I have this notebook and pen? - will emerge during play.

The next section gives us some “alternate starts” - effectively classes, which we can use instead of rolling a character in the way we just did. “Some players might not want to be bog-standard scum,” the book tells us. “These [alternate starts] all change the game significantly, so use with caution”. We’ve got a Ruined Nob (“Your house has fallen, and now you must mingle with the muck.”), a Ratman Exile (“A ratman ejected from their clan. The bounty on your tail is still very appealing.”), and a Hedge-Swyver (“Any old twat from out of town.”). I’m not going to make a second character here, but these do look really fun. I will note that two of them say “Does not roll on the normal Contact table” and I don’t yet know what that means (though I can guess, of course), but I’m assuming that we’ll roll Contacts when we generate The Smoke. This is possibly another case where some guidance up top might have been useful, but it’s also the case that reading the book generally (hopefully) answers most of the questions raised by reading the book.

After the alternate starts we’ve got some Starter Kits of equipment to aid fast play, and I’m just going to grab one of them. Using 10 of my 13 shillings I grab the Pick-pocket’s pack, giving me a Decent Shank, Clobber, a Sack, and a Ratty Leather Coat. What is Clobber? It’s just my clobber, innit. Does it do anything? No idea mate. (A few pages later we find out that Clobber is “Shoes and a shirt without ‘oles. Nice.”) 

Before we get to The Smoke we’re treated to lots of equipment lists, including prosthetics and pets, and I think my partner will be very happy to learn that you can save up to buy a trained bear. I really like the way pets are made useful here, and the way they learn new tricks as they survive more heists (meaning you can teach them to keep watch, follow people, etc). I’ve got 3s left over so screw it, I’m buying a pig (“Less big, less tasty. Smarter than you think.”)

Now let’s turn to the generators for The Smoke and see what sort of place my weird little pig-bothered is going to occupy. Here’s what we know about The Smoke before we start, the things that are always true:

The Smoke is the greatest city in the world, the beating heart of an empire. It is filthy and sprawling like a burst pustule left open to weep besides the iron-grey sea. It does have a name, but only the nobs and learned-readers know it.
Beneath slumps The Midden - the interconnected passages of built-over streets, basements, tombs and hidden lairs where criminals lurk, beasts squat and lost wealth resides. An enterprising fellow with a sledgehammer can traverse in any direction they please - not that they’ll like what they find. It is rife with corpse-thieves, cellar-breakers and enterprising businessmen shunned in sunlit places.
The rich of The Smoke honour their dead with elaborate crypts, whose morose edifices encroach ever further into the slums - the trap-smiths of The Smoke do fine business from their craft, and the fences keep the money flowing thanks to enterprising tomb robbers.

The writing in this section is exactly what you’d expect from Luke - punchy, evocative, and visceral. I get a really good sense of how grimy and horrible this city is, and I’m excited to see what my specific iteration of it is going to look like. The “Building The Smoke” section tells us that The Smoke has 1d4 rivers (I get 3) which merge into one and flow into the sea, and that all versions of The Smoke have Palace, Royal Gaol, Mayoral, and Docks districts. We’re encouraged to physically map the place and given a “simple, abstracted method” to use, and so I’m going to do that and show you my progress as we go. I’m going to split this into steps just to make it easier for you to follow what’s happening.

Step 1

Draw coastline, connecting the rivers of your Smoke. Then place each of the districts above on this map, drawing ovals and labelling them appropriately.

Nice and easy, this. The idea is that you draw the bare bones of the city and then, as and when you need to add districts, you simply add them to the map. Here’s my initial map.

Step 2: Expanding The Smoke

The Smoke is sort of quantum and potentially infinite, at least at the start of play. There aren’t a fixed number of districts. Instead we generate them as needed, though we’re advised to generate about 5 before play in order to “give players options without over-burdening them”. We also need to decide some key facts about our Smoke, including its True Name, who the Monarch is, how they rule, and how strong the Church is. There are tables for all of this, so we’ll do that now.

True Name: Kaergate

A melancholic, war-hungry teenager wears the crown. The Smoke itself is oppressively powerful, while the Country and Continent themselves are only of middling power.

The Church of Our Vengeful Lord of Salt and Wrecks is pitiful, but violent and driven. I assume there has been some sort of reformation in the not-too-distant past, and that the Church is now attempting to recover from this.

As far as the man on the street is concerned, the War is being waged against “another sodding Continental monarch”, and we’ve got the advantage now.

District Generation

I’ll talk through the steps used to generate a district, and then I’ll roll up my starting 5 and place them on the map.

First we roll a name from a d66 table. Then we generate its size, density, wealth, “Royal Visits”, crime levels, and watch presence. From here we can generate the “average house and carried wealth” according to the overall district wealth. Then we roll for the dominant function of the district, plus some opportunities and rumours alongside notable denizens and secrets.

After this we’ve got tons of tables that we can use during play - things like “why is this district deserted”, some very granular random encounter tables (arranged by wealth level of the district plus the time of day), street names, jobs, and detectives, plus extensive tables for generating the Midden - the undercity that I expect a lot of our adventures will descend into quite quickly.

All of this is very cool, but right now we don’t need it. We just need the bare bones of some districts. So let’s do that, and add them to our map.

District 1: Wrought Moors

Huge (60 minutes to cross), deserted, destitute, vanishing royal visits, pervasive crime, average watch presence.

These rolls honestly fell perfectly. A huge, deserted area that’s effectively a no-go zone filled with crime and nothing else, right in the middle of the city, is very compelling. A quick roll on the “why is the district deserted?” table gives me the result, “A bumbling necromancer was crushed by a wagon, and his uncontrolled creations stalk the area still”, and I basically have enough to run a full campaign in this area alone.

I think that the reason the watch presence here is “average” isn’t that they actively patrol the area. I think they’ve hastily walled it off, and the watch presence is in the form of guards walking the walls to keep people out - and to make sure that whatever monstrosities are inside stay inside. Looking at my map I also have a pretty perfect place to put this.

Even though it’s deserted I’m also going to roll up a notable denizen and a secret, just to have something currently going on in the place. The dice give me a Disgraced River-man, and tells me that “the accidental sprawl of the district functions as a magic circle”. That works perfectly with our bumbling necromancer, who presumably was trying to make use of the magic circle for… something.

District 2: 66 Keystone March

Large (45 minutes to cross), normal density, rich, rare royal visits, common crime levels, average watch presence.

This one is less immediately evocative than the Wrought Moorts, but I think a deserted district is always going to be more interesting on its face. Given that this is a rich area there must be a reason why royal visits are rare. Let’s roll up the dominant function and some rumours and see what we get.

Dominant Function: Barber-surgeons

Opportunities & Rumours: A traveling carnival has set up in the area.

So we’ve got a nicer part of town with surprising crime levels but no increased watch presence to account for it, and it’s largely left to its own devices by the nobility. I think this might be a place for the nouveau-rich, barber-surgeons who’ve made themselves wealthy off the back of the ongoing War. It used to be a less affluent area on the outskirts of the city, which is why the royals and the watch don’t pay it much mind. The traveling carnival is just the latest in a long line of attractions, as the residents throw increasingly rowdy parties and splash their cash around. 

Rolling on the Secrets table also tells me that “someone is conducting experiments on corpses in The Midden”, which immediately gives us some ideas for heists/adventures as these experiments spill over into the surface world and wreak havoc during one of the ongoing parties.

District 3: Grim Downs

Tiny (10 minutes to cross), quiet density, affluent, occasional royal visits, pervasive crime, high watch presence.

I immediately really like the juxtaposition of a ton of wealth concentrated in a tiny area with a name like “Grim Downs”. Given the pervasive crime and the high watch presence I think this is mob central. This is where the heads of the crime families of the Smoke live, in what is essentially a gated community. We’re talking mansions behind high walls, and guards walking the streets who are all on the payroll of various mob bosses. This is where our Swyvers aspire to live.

The “Dominant Functions” table also gives me tailoring as the main trade in this area, as well as a rumour that animals have been vanishing in the area - even the rats.

I used to work for someone whose husband was one of the richest men in England (or at least claimed to be). I visited his house once and was amazed to find that he had a large aviary in his back garden. He kept peacocks (among other birds), and he had an ongoing problem with someone stealing a specific peacock from his grounds. Peacocks are, in my experience, horrible animals, and I desperately want to put them into this rich gated community full of horrible bastards, so that’s what we’re doing. One of the mob bosses keeps peacocks, and nobody really cared about the animals in this district going missing until one of his prize birds vanished. That’s our hook. 

District 4: Chunt Towers

Large, normal density, affluent, rare royal visits, fleeting crime, high watch presence.

Based entirely on the name I wanted to make this either a university district or a place where wizards hang out, but I’m going to roll on the Dominant Functions table rather than going with my initial (obvious) idea to see if we can make something interesting out of the results.

The result I get is that this is the legal district, and that unexplained lights have been appearing in empty buildings. I’m picturing court houses, lawyers in offices high up in their towers (and cheaper lawyers in relative shitholes on street level), and all the known entrances to the Midden being secured under lock and key. This area is probably close to the Gaol and the mayoral district.

I also rolled up a mute scholar, and a cell of anti-monarchists embedded in the area. I wonder if they’re what’s behind the weird lights in empty buildings?

District 5: Thatcher’s Hole

Tiny, quiet, rich, royal visits sometimes, common crime, small watch presence.

Another interesting one here. What’s going on in this district that the royals occasionally show up despite the relatively unchecked crime? Maybe this is a residential area where the teenage monarch’s mistress lives with the royal bastard? Maybe it’s a district of brothels and prostitution, and the monarch occasionally visits in disguise? 

I was going to roll on the Functions table for this, but given that “‘Gentleman’s Clubs’” is one of the possible entries I’m just going to go with that, since it fits what I’ve already come up with. The rumour table tells me that “a noble scion, missing for a week, was last seen here”, and that immediately gives us our hook. I don’t think I really need to roll anything else for this district, but I’m going to grab a secret anyway.

A result of 9 gives me “a foreign nation has installed a spy in the area”, and that’s basically all we need. One of the monarch’s new favourites happens to be a spy from the nation we’re at War with, and nobody has figured it out yet.

And that’s it. Here’s my final map:

This whole process took about an hour, inclusive of writing it up for this blog, and I feel like I could run a game in this city immediately without needing to do any more prep. The city feels alive in my head, and I can picture how to spin a lot of play out of this without ever needing to generate more districts.

Swyvers is on Kickstarter at the moment. Whether you back it or not I’d definitely recommend picking up the quickstart, which is currently free. Maybe next week I’ll do one of these posts for Wolves Upon The Coast, too, since rolling horrible viking bastards is always a laugh.

Thanks for reading.