swordscomic

Let's Do Some Homebrewing!

Added 2025-10-25 00:35:04 +0000 UTC

Recently I asked What Does A Swords TTRPG Need To Be, To You? and a lot of the ideas that got thrown around were already what I was thinking about for Swords: Pens & Papercuts, so I did what anyone would do and made the tiniest version of the game I could think of.

The rules PDF is 3 pages long and I've included blank templates for Heroes and Swords. There isn't too much to unpack about how it all works - you'll need an 8x8 grid, a dice and something to represent your Heroes and Terrain; then everything else is played with printable cards.

I highly recommend that you craft your own party of Heroes and invent some of your own swords too. Be dumb! Be creative! Make a sword that damages everything in a 5 square radius, but only on a Tuesday! Heroes are pretty uniformly basic by design, but the Swords should be nuts.

I'd love for the community to pitch in and make some pages of extra swords. If you share the file with me on the Swords Discord I'll be happy to bundle them up and share them here. Please don't use any copyrighted material or AI - if you need help with the art, someone in the community will almost definitely help.

I'd like to keep the core game pretty light and fluffy, but some things I will be adding to the Optional Appendixes later:
- Collectable Runes to upgrade swords over time
- Swords having a Soul that can infer some kind of bonus
- A Mystery Sword with corresponding D100 chart
- A bigger, more dramatic Injury Table
- Hardcore Heroes having a more dramatic looking character sheet

I have not playtested this, it's fresh, so if you think a party needs to be 4 Heroes instead of 3, please experiment and let me know what you think.

Have fun! Thank you!