https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_%26_Sorcery_(SPI)
Growing up I had the luxury of enough disposable income to afford to purchase entertainment items. Books, in addition to entertainment, had been a surprising source of education even without the marketing as educational material. Eventually, movies would do the same thing for me. I’m convinced two of the reasons ultra conservative extremists don’t like Hollywood are that it takes some smarts to get a decent movie made and the forbidden ideas inside. Don’t let the smart people sneak in anything woke, long before woke was a thing.
I hardly ever got to play the games with friends. I enjoyed the complexity and recreation of enormous historical battles and you simply didn’t have enough time to plod through a full game in one afternoon. So I would often play solo, rolling the dice for both sides. And doing stupid things like cheating for who I wanted to win.
The gaming industry was dominated by two companies at this time. Avalon Hill and SPI were the recipients of the bulk of my disposable income. And SPI put out one of my favorite games to play solo, Swords & Sorcery. A fairly obvious rip off of some Dungeons & Dragons lingo combined with a bizarre sense of humor. Like a character named Tim the Enchanter ripped off in part from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I learned a fair amount of warfare strategy at this time of my life. Instead of relying on luck some key concepts sunk in as broad “applies to most every game” concepts. Like waiting for your one force to cut off the enemies retreat before attacking. This, if the dice roll indicated a forced retreat it was as good as a killing dice roll. Nowhere to run to - get slaughtered in the chaos. And Swords taught me a surprising lesson - one of those things that wasn’t really talked about in school. Slavery, and warfare to keep the losers enslaved is not at all fun for the losing side. And the side that wants to enslave will expend lots of resources to keep in power.
Within the pages of the rule book is a quote I’ve looked for. And that brings us to another point of the times we live in now. I found the entire rule book on the internet on a site called Scribd. And it’s almost completely unusable. It insists on loading one page at a time while trying to put ads in the way. So I gave up on rule book screenshots to avoid unwanted crap on my phone. So you’re gonna have to take my word for some of this.
And since I’ve already interrupted the flow let’s put more context out there now. A game like Avalon Hill’s Victory in the Pacific recognizes that Imperial Japan had zero chance of winning the war in the Pacific. So doing better than historically can win the game, but never actually play out to invading the U.S. and taking it over.
That sense of inevitability plays out in Swords and Sorcery. There’s no doubt that the humans in the game, The Empire, are a fascist evil empire. Their military is more numerous and powerful. Offsetting that are scenarios where the other races, who don’t want to be enslaved by the Empire (duh) would team up at least temporarily to avoid destruction.
Within the rule book is a lengthy Tolkien like introduction to the racial origins and characteristics and one bit stuck with me, paraphrasing from memory about humans in the Empire.
Just give them sex, money and fame and they’ll work until they drop. Throw a little more money at the troops and they won’t mind going out and enslaving entire other races. Don’t worry that there’s a king back at the castle who has zero chance of being unalived in the conflict. You might get laid.
Buried within the jokey atmosphere are other tidbits of forbidden knowledge. There’s an SS Wiking Division that is absolutely a nod to Nazi SS units. There’s an entire group of Cultists, the Corflu Cult. I did find this clear, as free and usable info:
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1450205/father-and-son-review-of-swords-and-sorcery
Again, I’m reminding you that buried within entertainment is a lot of weird and useful knowledge if you have been lucky enough to be able to think critically and process it. For now, it still seems like stories of good triumphing over evil are fun that we haven’t given up on the hope that maybe we can get through a face of doing counterproductive things like voting in a dictator. The other races will not take it well and fight back.
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