For Coin & Blood

For Coin & Blood is Alan Bahr's brilliant grimdark take on Swords & Wizardry White Box. Your party isn't Frodo and the Fellowship taking the ring to Mordor. You're Jamie Lannister, killing those that threaten your families hold over the kingdom. You will plot, poison, and murder to make sure your taken care of.

The book is divided into eight chapters. Not counting the OGL it clocks in at 120 pages. Every interior piece of artwork is a gorgeous black and white illustration done by Ger Curti. I have the soft cover version, though hardcover is available too.

The book begins with a short story written by Steve Diamond. "The Profession of Violence" is short, but evocative and really drives home the feel of the game. Life is short, bloody, and people will do anything for money.

Chapter One is very short, but necessary. It gives the brief this is an rpg section and discusses dice, experience, and attributes. For Blood & Coin adds a new a character trait. Infamy represents a character's notoriety and having a high Infamy score is beneficial. It lets the characters charge more for their work and gives them an XP bonus.

Chapter Two presents the system's classes. These are probably familiar to gamers, but have a nice, dark slant. The classes are:

• Assassin - contract killers and blades for hire
• Blackguard - warrior priests serving dark gods
• Cutpurse - classic rogues and scoundrels
• The Knight - fallen warrior nobles
• The Magus - mysterious students of the arcane
• Necromancer - these arcane casters trade high level spells for the ability to control undead
• The Priest - armored servants of the gods, they can be healers or war-priests
• Sellsword - warriors trained to fight and kill 

These classes fill roles similar to those in classic games. They work a bit different though. Instead of having traditional hit die, a character's hit points are their Constitution score plus their level. This means at first level their HP is going to be higher than a classic White Box character, but this total is really going to change much as the ascend to level 10.

Chapter Three is all about weapons, armor, items, and other equipment. This is short and pretty standard. There is a chart that gives hireling information, which is quite handy.

Chapter Four is the standard White Box "Playing the Game" chapter. It gives all of those rules that you need to know and if you're familiar with other games there's not much new here. I do appreciate the last chapter and its discussion of the rules light nature of the game and the roles of GM's and players. 

Chapter Five is about spells and magic. It gives a brief description of the three phases of a spell: memorized, prepared, and cast. The chapter then gives the blackguard/priest and magus/necromancer spell list. This is pretty standard stuff.

Chapter Six is a short chapter discussing running the game. It's a few pages devoted to adventure design, creating campaigns, scaling things, and xp. The discussions are brief but useful. In particular I'm a fan of the XP discussion which says if something leads to players making really bad decisions for XP, maybe reconsider it. 

Chapter Seven includes magic items. This is a pretty standard White Box game listen. I might have renamed a few things. For example, the book makes no mention of elves, so Boots of Elvenkind could have had some other name.

Chapter Eight gives rules for organizations and gangs. There are some really cool rules here about gaining reputation, joining groups, and the benefits of doing so.

The rest of the book isn't technically a part of any chapter. First we're presented with a critical hit charts. These replace the normal "maxed out and double damage" crit rules. They can kill you and even if they don't life isn't going to be easy for your character. This is followed by 20 unique magic items. These are really cool. I kind of wish the game did away with standard magic items and made everything unique like this. Next we have a few pages of enemy descriptions. This is a game that's light on monsters and such so most of the foes are things like bandits, cult members, and such. There are a few summoned creatures stats. Finally there book includes a character sheet.

While I typically love my games heroic, this game has me under it's grimdark spell. Alan has done an amazing job taking an OSR game we know and love and making it feel different enough that it warrants it's own stand alone game. I definitely am looking forward to running this sometime in the future and already have some fun campaign ideas in mind. Of course, you'll probably be seeing them in posts on here soon.