Sword Opera on Kickstarter

A few years before the pandemic, two people who were part of an online community I participated in, the Misdirected Mark Podcast Network community, started a podcast to talk about what they loved about Jianghu stories. They talked about the liminal space in which the stories take place, the language of combat scenes, and the idea of holding systems of power to account.

That was when Eli Kurtz and Eric Farmer started the Jianghu Hustle podcast. In addition to inspiring me to watch the movies they talked about when I hadn’t yet seen them, Eric and Eli had Fonda Lee on as a guest, which introduced me to one of my favorite book series, the Green Bone Saga (Jade City, Jade War, Jade Legacy). The show was great, but introducing me to Fonda Lee’s writing was a massive gift.

Go to Kickstarter, Quick!

I’ve met Eli and Eric at Gamehole Con, interacted with them online, and patronized their show on Patreon. Does that make me biased? Probably, but I still think they know what they are doing and how to provoke a thoughtful conversation, and they bring a lot of knowledge and insight to the topics they cover. Disclaimer: they sent me a review copy of the Ashcan Edition, but it’s not like I wouldn’t have looked at it on my own.

Eli and Eric have a Kickstarter running for Sword Opera: An RPG of Melodrama and Violence, which I should have covered sooner because you’ve only got about a day to back it when I post this. Hey, 2025 has been a rough decade. But you should go there and check it out. But if you want, I’ll discuss it more before you go.

What is This Thing?

Sword Opera, as a game, is meant to present a world with factions and supernatural powers, which are heavily flavored toward feats of prowess and impossible speed and athleticism. It’s a Forged in the Dark game that tracks the goals of the factions and the players as big dramatic things happen. While a specific setting is detailed in the Ashcan, the game is designed to address the broad conventions outlined above and isn’t just tailored to present the Ashcan’s setting.

The broad structure has your players defining their goals and principles and detailing their relationship toward the faction’s leadership, consisting of the Boss, the General, and the Executive. Based on how events unfold, characters can have relationship ratings of Failing, Tense, Typical, Proven, or Privileged from these officials. This plays into the “melodrama” side of the game because even if you’re working with a faction whose goals you feel are good and pure, how do you do your job when the faction leader has a vendetta against you? What happens when one character is Privileged by the General when another has a Tense relationship with them? 

The Cycle of Play includes a Paragon Phase (when you attempt to advance your goals and take care of tasks you have been assigned) and the Circle Phase, where you deal with your entitlements and come together to check in with the rest of the faction. The leaders of the faction discuss where the faction should go next. Entanglements can help drive that melodrama, as the dice may have ideas about how well the personal goals of the PCs align with the faction or with the allies they have cultivated on the outside.

Power and the Arts

If you’re familiar with Forged in the Dark games, you probably already understand Actions and how they inform your ability to accomplish your goals. Actions in the game are split between Ambition and Loyalty, which means that your ability to resist consequences will be couched in how your avoidance plays into either of those concepts.

What’s different is that you have a pool of dice that you can add to rolls that represent the supernatural ability that your Paragon has. You can spend these to boost your ability to accomplish your actions. Several Arts describe what your supernatural ability helps you with, and you determine which ones you are trained in and which you can’t quite tap into. The number of dice in your dice pool is based on your training level and the size of your faction. 

If you’ve never heard a discussion of scale in Jianghu stories, you should find some old episodes of Jiahghu Hustle where Eric and Eli talk about it, but having more dice based on the size and importance of your faction plays into this idea. Sometimes, people operate on a completely different level than those around them. 

Supernatural powers have a source that can inform how the Paragon draws energy to perform their amazing feats. The sources are Faith, Grit, Luck, Magic, Passion, and Training. This can inform whether your paragon does what they do because it’s the will of the gods, if they are too stubborn to fail, or if they want to display their prowess in precise, complex techniques.

Depending on your ability level, you can retain your dice after you spend them. This happens in a 6 for practitioners, up to 4-6 for a Master of their Art. That also means you need to keep track of the die that you use from your pool separate from the rest of your roll.

Similar and Different

As it currently appears, Sword Opera doesn’t use clocks explicitly to track progress, but certain incremental elements have different stages before they are fully realized. 

The resolution levels in the game are described like this:

• 6s on more than one die–critical success
• 6 on at least one die–full success
• 4-5 is a partial success
• 1-3 is a bad outcome, which is a failure, or the character can accomplish their goal with a severe consequence

The results of the actions have a similar framing to other Forged in the Dark games, where the player declares what they want to do and what action they want to use, and the GM describes the Threat (the degree of consequence) and Effect (the scope of what you can accomplish).

Characters can Tempt Fate for an extra die by introducing an additional complication to the resolution of the roll, much like a Devil’s Bargain in other FITD games. Consequences are defined as Sword consequences and Opera consequences. Sword consequences involve damage to people or things’ physical structure or abilities. Opera consequences involve uncomfortable coincidences, revelations that could cause trouble or a crisis that must be eventually dealt with.

The paragon types included in the Ashcan edition include:

• The Analyst–the planner
• The Captain–the leader
• The Disaster–the one with the terrible luck
• The Guide–the helper and advisor
• The Ruthless–the relentless fighter
• The Savant–the person that’s all about mastering the Power

The Setting

Reading about the leadership roles in the faction and how factions operate and track their territory and resources, I couldn’t help but think of how closely this hews to the setting of the Green Bones Saga and the families in those stories. That’s not a negative from my point of view. That said, stories are built from tropes, and there are different trappings you can hang on the framework of the rules.

Eli and Eric know what they are talking about. They’re insightful and enthusiastic. I’m also happy that the setting isn’t a more traditional Jianghu setting; instead, it presents San Mercurio, an island that blends the supernatural elements of Jianghu stories with Shakespeare and Dumas. It’s an island set apart from the Europe we know from this period, where the supernatural is present, and that sometimes interacts with the mainland but plays with its own rules and remains independent and outside of time in some ways.

Don’t get me wrong, Eli and Eric know the Jianghu storytelling conventions, and they’re well versed in the classics, but I’d also love to see people connected to the cultures that spawned those storytelling conventions to tell stories in settings they create. Have I mentioned you should go read the Green Bones Saga?

San Mercurio has noble factions, spies, and a corrupt Bishop grasping for power. Pirates use the island as a port, the Phantom Market appears and disappears, and the island is home to rumors of fey courts, ghosts, and spellcasting witches and magicians. The example factions include two feuding noble families, a fleet of privateers who always find their way back to the island, and a fighting school hiring themselves out to the highest bidders. There is a list of contacts, landmarks, and starting situations for the first play sessions.

What Comes Next?

Some of the stretch goals include a setting with trappings of Dune and the Locked Tomb, a modern urban fantasy expansion, a setting of fey families in conflict, an expansion to add merfolk to the San Mercurio setting, and a Jianhu professional wrestling setting. 

In addition to San Mercurio, the settings already slated to appear in the book include Hot City, an alternate 1970s New Orleans that draws inspiration from John Wick, and a more traditional Jiahnghu setting, which also draws on The Wire for inspiration. 

The project is funded and has hit its first stretch goal as of this writing. If it gets enough support, maybe we’ll even be able to see some of those stretch goals over time as people continue to pick up new copies of the book. But if you really want to, you can rally around and push them to the next stretch goal before this is all over.

Call to Action

If this sounds like your kind of thing, head to Kickstarter, and if you have the spare resources, consider backing this. Eli and Eric know what they’re talking about, so I’m excited to see the final version of this, and hopefully, they’ll forgive me for taking so long to write this.

Now go, quick; I’m too long-winded to do a sales pitch this late in the game.

#Dumas #JianghuHustle #Shakespeare #SwordOpera #ThreeMusketeers #Wuxia