A few years ago I backed Big Sword: Graves & Groves. It’s a really lengthy zine full of vampires, vampire hunters, and a lot of supporting material that helps make that kind of game come alive. I recently saw that Big Sword is returning with Steel & Stone! When I spotted the author posting about the project, I reached out for an interview because I wanted to know more! So keep on reading about this dwarven focused, 70~ page zine!

Tell us about Big Sword: Steel & Sword! You did Graves & Groves a few years ago and put out a fantastic zine that had a lot of focus on vampires and surviving in the creepy wilderness. This one seems to have a big focus on dwarves!

Steel & Stone is absolutely about Dwarves, but I’d say it focuses on a lot of things: joining a martial clan, smithing or discovering weapons forged from exotic materials, firearms, and explosives. It’s definitely themed in a different way than Graves & Groves, though quite similarly.

In the last two years I’ve thought a lot about how much I enjoy cohesive settings and world building and I think that absolutely affected how I think about writing BIG SWORD. There’s a lot more narrative cohesion between elements; even if the thematic cohesion to Steel & Stone gets thinner than the last zine. Well, that and the size certainly exacerbates it. I say it’s 70+ pages because I’m not sure where we’ll sit after layout, editing, and art placement, but the Google docs draft I have is currently sitting at 81 pages and roughly finished.

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What’s the main feature of the new classes? You’ve got the Dwarves of the Exiled Clans and the Scholar.

As far as the classes are concerned. The Dwarves of the Exiled Clans are interesting for a couple reasons but I’m not sure which I’d call their core feature. I wrote them because I wanted to experiment with a couple concepts and the overall design of a class that has direct narrative threads tying them to the world. First and foremost, they get a clan, which is my attempt at thinking about what a subclass feature might look like in DCC. This grants them a minor ability, a list of possible grudges, possible heirlooms, and a skill-like feature, and with certain clans you can look very similar to the classical DCC Dwarf. I’m hoping to see other people write their own clans at the table to make the class truly their own. You may noticed I mentioned grudges and heirlooms, those are the other two narrative threads I wanted them to focus on; Exiled Clans Dwarves have a much lower than normal Mighty Deed die, but when facing an enemy that they have a grudge against, they fly into a frenzy and have a higher than average deed die. For the sake of brevity, I’ll leave heirlooms to the imagination, as well as what horrible things these dwarves may have grudges against.

The Scholar is a much simpler class; it follows the hybrid class design of Graves & Groves to make characters that can function as wizard or thief, though obviously not as well as their respective full classes. They primarily cast through scrolls and can produce them much easier and cheaper than a regular wizard, though at the cost of flexibility; only they can cast these cheap scrolls. I wanted to play with alignment based design, like the core Thief, but I still appreciate characters having a choice of their skill preferences, so you can expect fundamental differences to their casting based on alignment. It was fun to write and it makes characters feel very different. Chaotic Scholars are very reminiscent of magical tricksters who focus on thievery and theft of magic, while neutral and lawful Scholars can often feel like adventuring librarians or learned jacks of all trades, though they are far from being a master of any.

You’ve got a lot of new options, like new mighty deeds, equipment rebalancing, and special materials. What’s the one that you are most proud of?

It’s hard to list any one feature that I am most proud of, but if I was forced to pick... it would probably be either the new Mighty Deeds or the new Materials section, mostly because of how well I’ve made them interwoven with other features, themselves, and the world at large. It’s incredibly easy to think “Hey! I want that! And Hey! I think this is an obvious path to Questing For It!” With the DM having plenty and plenty of threads to work with on both fronts; getting it, and making it interesting and fun at the table.

I’ve really curious about the included adventure: Citadel of the Last Tammuzar. Is it a funnel or a leveled adventure? What’s the premise?

The adventure, The Citadel of The Last Tammuzar, is intended to be a level one adventure. The hook is that, due to a number of possible reasons (I wrote many possibilities), the party has found one of the last standing strongholds of the ancient Dwarven kingdom. It was sunk deep into the sand dunes when the land itself was first cursed, and lies abandoned and untouched. The first part of the adventure has the party looting the upper castle (as the entrance is the tallest window on the tallest tower, barely peeking through the sand) though they need to be wary of dark magic and foul curses, as the very curses that struck the land, also afflict their ancient artifacts.

The second half of the adventure is a madcap dash point crawl through a collapsing castle as the stones themselves give way and the party is forced to choose between searching for ancient heirlooms and leaving before they, too, are crushed beneath the weight of a thousand tons of black sand.

Thanks for sharing with us! Is there anything else that you’d like to share?

Overall I’m very happy with the way the zine turned out, and I sincerely hope I finish the next one sooner than two years out from now!

Here’s to hoping the wait is more than worth it for 70-80 pages of BIG SWORD!

Thanks for reading, folks! Tell me in the comments how you make dwarves special in your game and why they are better than elves!

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