No BS

As sure as men walked on the Moon, we now have incontrovertible evidence that the English edition of Blood Sword 5e exists. One of my gaming pals sent me this photo of the pack he just received. Others in our roleplaying group confirmed they also got their copies, and I'm hoping at least one of them will try running the campaign for their kids.

As to whether the book will be available to non-Kickstarter backers -- well, yes, that would make sense, 5e reputedly being a popular choice of rules, and it's a beautiful volume with detailed spells like Fairy Stride, Pillar of Salt, and (of course) Summon Faltyn, along with monastic orders, character backstories and birthmarks, guilds, blood feats, monsters, rules for magic items, colour maps of places like Crescentium, Sheol and Spyte -- along with lots of Russ Nicholson's best work, all on glossy high-quality art paper, and of course the whole Blood Sword saga converted to a 5e campaign.

It really is a labour of love by the creative team involved, and what I find most interesting is seeing a version of the lands of Legend that draws solely on the Blood Sword books and not on Dragon Warriors. This high-fantasy Legend is a very different place from the world of DW and Jewelspider, but no less brilliantly conceived and inspiring for that. I'm awed, flattered and humbled by the care Valentino Sergi and his team have put into every aspect of the design. In the ongoing absence of new official DW material, Legend players could do worse than embark on a Blood Sword 5e campaign.

How to buy a copy? You could try contacting the publishers, Tambù, but I suspect after two and a half years they've got other priorities. Maybe they'll license a paperback edition if enough people ask. For those who want to roleplay in the Blood Sword universe but simply can't get the 5e book, Oliver Whawell has converted the encounters to Dragon Warriors rules. Download those here:

The Battlepits of Krarth

The Kingdom of Wyrd

The Demon's Claw

Doomwalk

The Walls of Spyte

My backers on Patreon got to see how I'd have written that final book, a more flashback-heavy, character-focused version that would probably be a better fit for a roleplaying campaign than the dungeon crawl that actually got published. And talking of book 5, Edizioni Librarsi have just published an all-new edition (based on my revised text of 2019) with a gorgeous Mattia Simone cover showing the Ghosts of the Magi in ominous conjunction on the last night of the world. (The hopes and fears of all the years...)

If you need maps of Legend, there's a wealth of cartographic treasures freely available on Lee Barklam's site The Cobwebbed Forest. And there will be some truly scrumptious maps in the forthcoming Blood Sword CRPG -- but now I'm getting ahead of myself. More news on that to come. Oh, and if all the above is like a coded message in Cabbandari and you're asking what Blood Sword even is, here's a podcast review by Mr H J Doom to get started.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 5

The Walls of Spyte is the last installment in Oliver Whawell's series of rules conversions from Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors rules. The stat blocks are available in PDF form here.

I had a lot less to do with the writing of the fifth book than the rest of the series. Oliver Johnson was supposed to write it, but ran out of time. Luckily Jamie Thomson was on hand to step in, but necessarily it was a rush job so he didn't have time to read the earlier Blood Sword books. I came in right at the end to tie up the last 40 sections or so.

Patreon backers can see how I'd have liked the series finale to pan out. Tambù's Blood Sword 5e campaign and rulebook drew on those notes, and I have a feeling so will Prime Games' forthcoming CRPG.

Various player-characters guest starred in the Blood Sword books, in a manner of speaking. This time it was the turn of Zaraqeb (Zara in the book) and Karunaz, who were played in my and Steve Foster's Empire of the Petal Throne campaign by Gail Baker and Paul Mason. The original PCs weren't a lot like their gamebook incarnations, incidentally. The real Zaraqeb wasn't a sorceress and wasn't that nasty; the real Karunaz was neither posh nor noble, though he was a much more interesting kind of hero because of that.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 4

We've got another set of stat blocks from the Blood Sword gamebooks, as converted to Dragon Warriors rules by Oliver Whawell. This time it's the turn of Doomwalk (the one where they go to the land of the dead) and you can get the PDF here.

The original 1980s covers were always an oddity, as they were completely different in tone from the books themselves. Blood Sword was verging on grimdark (well, the nearest you could get in a book sold to 10-12 year-olds) before the term was even invented. The covers on the other hand were cute and funny. I'm not sure what the art director at a publishing house actually did in those days. Took long lunches, I suppose.

Thanks to Wombo I've been having a ball rejigging the cover art to suit the interiors. Use of AI art infuriates some people to the point of hysteria, but you can see that (a) it's not going to replace human artists just yet and (b) these aren't for commercial use, so it's not taking away a job that I'd have otherwise hired anyone to do. However, let me just assure General Ludd's followers that I'm doing my bit as the forlorn hope against the forces of AI art by engaging real-life illustrator Inigo Hartas for the Jewelspider project.

In the video below, Grim expresses pretty much how I feel regarding the use of AI art. But I'm open to debate on this, so let me know what you think.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 3

The third of Oliver Whawell's meticulous conversions of stats from the Blood Sword gamebooks to the Dragon Warriors RPG covers The Demon's Claw. You can get a PDF of the stat blocks here.

This is the book where the series starts to kick up into really epic gear, seeing you face off against one of the series' best guest villains, have a return match with your arch-foe Icon (that is, Aiken, Lord of the Mountain of Songs), experience a close shave with Psyche (Saiki, his sister), and get a close encounter with the gods (allegedly) themselves.

If none of that makes any sense, and if you're interested in turning the Blood Sword gamebook saga into a roleplaying campaign - now's your chance. I'll just caution that the Legend of the gamebooks is considerably higher fantasy than the Legend of Dragon Warriors, never mind the "real" Legend of Jewelspider. But that's just my view anyway. All versions are equally valid.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 2

We're on to the second installment of Oliver's Whawell's conversion of Blood Sword encounters to Dragon Warriors rules. You can download the stat blocks for The Kingdom of Wyrd here.

This one is interesting because I already had a crack at converting the Meteor Stalker, a weird creature brilliantly visualized by Russ Nicholson. Patreon backers can read all about that, but in a nutshell (or a meteoritic geode) it's as follows. The characters see a piece break off Blue Moon, one of five celestial bodies in the night sky over Krarth. The object plummets to earth:

"Concealed in the undergrowth around the clearing, you watch the blue flare crash through the trees at the edge of the clearing and explode in a shower of blue sparks at its centre. The high-pitched whistling noise has stopped, but now you hear a hissing sound from where steam rises from the place where it struck. In the centre of the steam you can see a black stone which even as you watch cracks apart like an egg. An area of darkness spreads like a pool of shadow. Then a hunched shape rises up from the shadow as though taking shape out of the very ground. It is a skeleton dressed in black tattered robes. Its eyes are glowing blue crystals. It seems to sniff the air as it looks around."

And the stats I gave for it are:

Oliver's calculations give a very similar result, possibly proving that great minds think alike? Obviously I couldn't possibly comment.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 1

Last time I mentioned Oliver Whawell's conversion of Blood Sword stat blocks to Dragon Warriors rules, which Oliver has kindly agreed to share with readers of this blog. There's a lot of great work there, so I'll be running it in installments. To get the ball rolling, here's The Battlepits of Krarth.

The original books might be useful if you're thinking of running Blood Sword as a DW roleplaying campaign. You can get those here:

In the US

DRAGON WARRIORS

Core Rulebook

Bestiary

Players Guide

Cold Fury

Friends or Foes

Sleeping Gods

The Elven Crystals

Prince of Darkness

BLOOD SWORD

The Battlepits of Krarth on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

The Kingdom of Wyrd on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

The Demon's Claw on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

Doomwalk on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

The Walls of Spyte on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

Blood Sword Battle Boards on Amazon

In the UK

DRAGON WARRIORS

Core Rulebook

Bestiary

Players Guide

Cold Fury

Friends or Foes

Sleeping Gods

The Elven Crystals

Prince of Darkness

BLOOD SWORD

The Battlepits of Krarth on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

The Kingdom of Wyrd on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

The Demon's Claw on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

Doomwalk on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

The Walls of Spyte on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

Blood Sword Battle Boards on Amazon

Italian gamers won't need to use Dragon Warriors as all the work has been done for you by Valentino Sergi and Daniele Fusetto in their magnificent Blood Sword 5e book, published by Tambù. It turns the whole gamebook saga into a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and it truly is a thing of beauty.

And if you aren't familiar with the Blood Sword series and you're looking for a taster, Raphael Perry did a playthrough of book 1 on YouTube along with this very interesting strategy analysis:

Lich Lord, Legend-style

Gamebook critic and writer Oliver Whawell writes to say, "I was the perfect age for Warlock of Firetop Mountain when it was released, and quickly became a fan of gamebooks. The Fighting Fantasy books developed alongside my reading age, but then they started to feel a bit immature - and along came Blood Sword: great writing and a challenging game, especially if you adhered to the rules.

"Inspired by the excellent work of Red Ruin Publishing (and a throwaway comment from Wayne Imlach) I wanted to see if Blood Sword and Dragon Warriors were compatible. It took a little while but I created a formula that would turn a warrior’s stats into a knight's, and an enchanter’s stats into a sorcerer's, and then applied this throughout. It worked for humanoid opponents remarkably well, so I just had to find modifications for animals, demons, and giants/dragons. I did cheat with a couple of extreme encounters in book 5; other than that the numbers don’t lie.”

The complete set of stat blocks that Oliver kindly provided for all five Blood Sword books is a bit much to reproduce in just one blog post here, so I'll release them in installments. To get started, though, Oliver also calculated the DW stats for The Keep of the Lich Lord, and you can download those here.

If you're a Fighting Fantasy fan, don't miss the latest issue of Casket of Fays, which is free on DriveThruRPG and has stats conversion from AFF, rules for Rhino-Folk (a critter from Out of the Pit, apparently), and the Volucreth as a Fighting Fantasy species, as well as Mercanian runesmiths and a complete town (I do love maps) in Outremer.