A game of wits and wiles

Since Blood Sword was first released almost four decades ago, I wouldn't mind betting that plenty of GMs have used elements of the books in their roleplaying games -- the meteor stalker from book 2, to take just one example. Even so, it wasn't until Tambù's Blood Sword 5e and Prime Games' CRPG adaptation that the whole saga got converted into a detailed campaign.

Dungeons & Dragons is pretty much as good a choice of system as Dragon Warriors, given the relatively high-fantasy variant of Legend on display in Blood Sword. I recently heard from someone who is running a Blood Sword campaign and had to prepare the encounter with the elves from The Kingdom of Wyrd. (You can play through that sequence from the gamebook here and read an excerpt from the novelization here.)

In Blood Sword 5e the checkers game is handled by a series of Intelligence checks if the PCs play fair, and Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) or Charisma (Deception) checks against the elves' Wisdom (Perception) if the PCs try to cheat. The GM wanted to make it less abstract and thought that it might be worth playing it out at the table using chess, not draughts. But, he added: "One of the players is very good at chess and would have no difficulty beating me. So how do I set up a chess game that might reflect the in-game challenge of beating the elf lord? One possibility is that I nakedly cheat, moving pieces illegally until they figure out a workaround. But perhaps there's a better way."

Naturally I began by asking Claude:

The GM could et up an actual chess position, but every few moves, have the elf-king invoke 'ancient rules' that change the game:

• "Ah, but in the unseelie variant, bishops may leap once per game."
• "Did I not mention? When the moon is full, as it is tonight, pawns may move backwards."
• "Of course, in the endgame, my king gains the knight's move."

The players must figure out they need to either bind him to standard rules through a magical contract or else distract him from invoking new rules.

I liked that because it is potentially both funny and hair-pullingly frustrating for the players. It's also quite Vancean, as Claude seems to have realized from the dialogue samples it provided.

As an alternative human-created solution, and inspired by Amarillo Slim's trick for beating a tennis champ, I suggested ways to throw the chess whizz off his/her game. It made sense that the elf lord would propose a game using medieval chess rules, for example. More simply, given that the GM perhaps didn't have time to familiarize himself with a completely different set of rules, he could make it a game of cylindrical chess -- that is, any piece that moves off the left side of the board appears on the corresponding square on the right side, and vice versa. To make it more of a surprise, the elf lord wouldn't tell the player-characters that was the variant they were playing until the first time he needed to move a piece in that way.

Another option is to reflect the elf lord's illusions by having the PC play blind chess while the GM gets to see the whole board.

What did my correspondent do? After the game he reported back: "In the end I decided that the elf lord's cheating would be represented by brazenly illegal moves. The PCs confronted him when one of these moves placed two bishops on the white squares, a situation that obviously could never arise in normal play, and he conceded his queen in penance. As the game built to a climax, the character playing the chess game, who was a sorcerer, simply made his own shamelessly illegal move to deliver checkmate, and that felt dramatically right (the mortal sorcerer has his own tricks, after all) even if a bit more D&D than Legend."

I do like how the player picked up the improvisational aspect and ran with it, but if I were running the game myself I'd be dubious about interrupting the session with a full chess game, so it might be better to fast-forward to a classic endgame and play on from there. Or maybe you have a better idea -- in which case, let's hear it!