A Swords of the Serpentine rules playtest for strongholds and hideouts

By Kevin Kulp.

High Concept

You invest your base of operations with General and Investigative abilities that anyone in your group can share as long as they’re in that location. This location is called a sanctum.

What is a Sanctum?

A sanctum is a place of safety and power that your group invests with resources. That gives you an advantage when using it as a base, a fortress, a hideout, or a place of business. To establish a sanctum:

• you must control the building or location (i.e. there isn’t a Supporting Character clashing with you for control of the space)

• you must have the authority to make changes in the building or location

• you must have a reasonable presumption of safety (so no worry of constant attacks)

• you must invest at least one sanctum point (see below) in the location

Using these guidelines, a canvas tent on the edge of a battlefield can’t be a sanctum but a makeshift fort surrounded by walls might be. Other common examples include:

• your favorite neighborhood bar or tea shop

• a fortified stronghold or an abandoned, crumbling fort

• a ship large enough to live on

• a series of underground tunnels and basements

• a ramshackle, sinking house in the Tangle

• an abandoned sorcerer’s tower rising from the waves

• your local church and sanctuary, run by a sympathetic marketpriest

• your Mercanti friend’s guildhouse

• The local city watchhouse, where you and your fellow guards are stationed

• An ancient noble’s tower in Alderhall

What Does a Sanctum Cost?

Your new base may cost Wealth to establish. There’s three common ways to handle initial sanctum acquisition:

• During the course of an adventure a perfect place for a Sanctum falls into your lap. You don’t need to spend any Wealth to acquire it, either because you’re invited in or no one else currently claims the location.

• The GM will charge you a one-time or ongoing fixed amount (usually 1 to 5 Wealth per Hero) based on who you need to bribe or buy off to acquire the location.

• Your GM shows you a perfect location, but to claim it you must first complete an adventure.

Designer Notes: When should you establish a sanctum?

The design intent is to make it fun and easy for even new Heroes to establish a sanctum, although no one will be surprised if your first sanctum is in a half-sunken house instead of a prestigious fortified tower. These rules encourage you to spend more Wealth when choosing your Lifestyle for an adventure. This in turn gives your GM an excuse for handing out more treasure.

It’s recommended that any initial acquisition cost be reduced or eliminated if the GM thinks that a sanctum will make the game more fun, and increased if the GM wants to encourage you to spend money more quickly. Under the theory that you value most that which you earn, we like adventuring for a sanctum location best.

The Floorplan

Take a sheet of paper and sketch out the rough floorplan of your sanctum. As you make improvements to your sanctum over time, note down how many General and Investigative abilities you have invested in the site and which rooms have been improved. Track unspent sanctum points on this sheet.

A simple example might be as follows.

How Do You Improve Your Sanctum?

You improve your sanctum by spending sanctum points to invest it with sanctum abilities, General and Investigative abilities that anyone can share and use while inside the sanctum. Your group gains a total of one sanctum point at the end of any adventure where Advancement Points are rewarded, assuming you have established a sanctum. An additional Sanctum point is handed out to any Hero with an Opulent Lifestyle (spending 5 Wealth or more for your Lifestyle). Once the sanctum is first established, these points are saved until used; establish one player to record the group’s sanctum points on the Floorplan.

You may turn unspent sanctum points into sanctum abilities at any time.

• Spend sanctum points to add shared ranks of any General ability to the whole sanctum; each 1 sanctum point adds 1 rank of any General ability.

  • These pool points are shared by members of your group and may be spent by any of you while in the sanctum.

  • They can only be spent by an Allied Supporting character if the players (as opposed to their Heroes) give permission.

  • Once used, Sanctum General abilities don’t refresh until next adventure.

  • No General ability in your sanctum can be greater than rank 10.

Example: Your group has spent 5 sanctum points to invest your sanctum with Preparedness rank 5. Using these points, any member of your group can draw on this Preparedness pool while they’re in the sanctum to have just the object they need. These points Refresh next adventure.

• Spend 3 sanctum points to add 1 rank of any Investigative ability to a room or area (such as “the ramparts” or “the library”) in the sanctum.

  • For every rank of the ability, pick one room or area in which it may be accessed. For example, five ranks in an ability means it can be accessed in five different locations.

  • When in these rooms or areas, any member of your group can use the Investigative ability’s rank to decipher clues or leads.

  • When in these rooms or areas, any member of your group can spend the Investigative ability’s pool points to gain a benefit, as per SotS p. 51.

  • Spent Investigative pool points fully refresh next adventure.

  • You may invest in as many Investigative abilities as you want (on a 3 sanctum points = 1 Investigative rank basis), but in any given adventure you can’t increase any single Investigative ability by more than 1 rank.

  • No Investigative ability in your sanctum can be greater than rank 5.

  • You may invest these points in a Supporting Character (such as a butler or spymaster) instead of a room if you wish; doing so allows you to access those points whenever you are with them inside of your sanctum, but you lose those invested points if they are slain.

Example: Over multiple adventures your group has spent 12 sanctum points to invest your tower of wizardry with Corruption 4 (along with four associated spheres). Any member of your group can stand in the tower room, the summoning chamber, the library, or the hall of prophecy and use those Corruption ranks to learn more about clues or leads; any member of your group can also stand in those areas and spend points from the Corruption pool for an advantage, internalizing or externalizing the corrupting effect when they do. If you have a Hero with 3 ranks of Corruption, they could make a 7-point Corruption spend while standing in one of those four rooms. That’s why sorcerers have towers!

Ongoing Upkeep

A sanctum’s upkeep is included in your Lifestyle expenditure (SotS p. 127). Expect to get disapproving glances from your neighbors and to get mocked by your rivals if your Lifestyle expenditures aren’t up to the neighborhood’s standards, but this won’t stop you from getting a Sanctum point as detailed above.

GM Advice: “I’m a hero, not a shopkeeper!”

Some sanctums are locations like a bar or a guild house that bring in an income on their own. Swords of the Serpentine isn’t a game about running a business, so it’s easiest to handwave the site’s expenses and profits and declare that they cancel each other out. If you find the business aspect fun, consider Guaranteeing a Minimum Lifestyle (SotS p. 130) instead of directly giving the Heroes extra Wealth.

How Many Sanctums Can You Have?

Your group is limited to one sanctum at a time unless the GM decides otherwise. This is a flavor and tonal choice; there’s no mechanical reason why Heroes can’t have multiple sanctums, splitting Sanctum points up between them.

Changing Sanctums

Your group can leave your old sanctum and move to a brand new sanctum in any adventure where at least one Hero has an Opulent or better lifestyle (spending 5 Wealth points for your Lifestyle). You may do this to get a better location, a better building, or just to move into your dead enemy’s mansion so you can rub it in the face of their detested heirs.

Draw up a new floorplan of the new location. The old sanctum’s abilities are dismantled; you regain all sanctum points invested in the old location and may reinvest them however you choose in the new sanctum. If you want to maintain two sanctums and the GM agrees, you can divide the old sanctum points between the locations however you wish.

Installing Investigative ranks

Investigative ability ranks in a sanctum are connected to specific areas, one area per rank. A given area may have multiple Investigative abilities connected to it. That means that you may have to head to your sanctum’s library to use its Forgotten Lore, and the City Secrets-linked escape tunnels might be accessible only through the basement.

You decide and explain how the physical spaces in your sanctum reflect the abilities you have connected to it. Sanctum ranks of Warfare might mean you have convenient weapons mounted on the walls; ranks of Scurrilous Rumors might mean that a network of beggars and spies use your sanctum as a place to drop off rumors that they’ve heard.

Playtester Instruction and Notes

We’re pretty sure this system works well – effectively it’s gradually adding the abilities of an extra Hero to your group, but only accessible when you’re in your headquarters – but we have questions about power acquisition and complexity.

• Is the sanctum’s advancement too fast or too slow?

• Are the costs associated with sanctums too high or too low?

• Does the power and flexibility gained feel balanced?

• Are there ways to “game the system” and get very powerful sanctums very quickly?

• Is it fun, or superfluous? Is it too complicated or too simple? Are players excited by it?

• How does the assignment of Investigative abilities to specific parts of the sanctum feel?

Please give feedback in the Swords of the Serpentine channel of Pelgrane’s Discord, which can be found at https://discord.gg/5CQMmkcE38.

A sanctum should be a great adventure background and source of plot hooks but it shouldn’t always be the star of an adventure. Our biggest concern is that a motivated and wealthy group of Heroes can save up their sanctum points and build a sanctum invested with something powerful like Allegiance rank 5 or Corruption rank 5 in as few as five adventures (although they’d spend at least 50 Wealth to do so). Is this overpowered? We don’t think so, because we think that establishing this sort of powerful sanctum attracts the attention of powerful rivals in the game world and that just makes for interesting adventures, but we need to find out – and that’s why we’re playtesting.

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Kevin Kulp (@kevinkulp) and Emily Dresner (@multiplexer) are the co-authors of Swords of the Serpentine, out now in hardback and PDF. Kevin previously helped create TimeWatch and Owl Hoot Trail for Pelgrane Press. When he’s not writing games he’s either smoking BBQ, watching dubious shark movies, or helping 24-hour companies with shiftwork, sleep, and alertness.