Clash of Steel Playtest

On March 8, 2025 I ran a playtest of Clash of Steel from Zozer Games. Here are my (much delayed) playtest notes.

The Adventure

Taking a cue from one of the adventure seeds in the back, the adventurers start by witnessing five boys being flogged by the royal guards. A distraught old man reveals they are his sons, who approached the king to tell him their taxes would be delayed because some thing was killing their flocks of sheep. The king accused them of lying, hence the flogging.

The adventurers would then accompany the old man to Shepherd’s Hill, a tiny village from which they could mount an expedition. The thing turns out to be a Cyclops, whose lair is actually the entrance to an ancient crypt. I used the dungeon generation tools to create the crypt and populate it with mummies, skeletons, zombies, shadows, a wraith, and a vampire, not to mention treasure and traps.

On their journey back I planned an encounter with a bandit gang, most of whom were easily dispatched mooks.

The Playtest

The three players from my regular group chose from the pre-generated characters in the back of the book. Creating a character in Clash of Steel is not that hard but, not being familiar with the system, they went for the easier option.

The adventure went off more or less as planned … until the Cyclops. Its combat strength seemed balanced against three adventurers, but its natural armor made what I anticipated as a tough but short fight into a grueling slog. (Armor is rated in a number of six-sided dice, two in the case of the Cyclops; if either rolled a six, all damage is negated.) After barely defeating the Cyclops, the adventurers retired to the village (with its head) to regain their lost HITS.

On the second day, they tackled the creature’s lair and found the fissure that revealed stairs to the crypt. The crypt itself proved fairly easy, compared to the Cyclops. They dispatched some of the monsters with ease, eluded the traps, and found most of the treasure.

Since we were coming up on the three hour mark, the time we normally break, I decided to forego the bandit encounter. The players opted to hit the road immediately after conquering the crypt, bypassing the village and a second hero’s welcome so they wouldn’t have to share the loot. Thus ended the adventure.

Player Critiques

The players had the following criticisms:

• Despite the simultaneous die rolls with the highest being the victor, combat can still become a slog, with far fewer tactical elements. Our group plays nearly all of our games theater-of-the-mind, but others like Shadow of the Weird Wizard provide more options and opportunities than “I hit the enemy”.

• As a corollary to the previous point, Armo(u)r can completely negate a hit. This drags out combats when both sides have significant amounts of armor, and proves a serious advantage if one side has more armor.

• MIGHT is an “everything stat” in combat, even more so than DEX in other games:

  • MIGHT adds to the COMBAT bonus, along with a weapon and shield.
  • MIGHT determines the maximum size of weapon one can carry.
  • MIGHT determines the maximum amount of Armour one can wear.

  Thus maximizing this one stat could easily turn a character into a combat monster.

  The only other stats that matter in combat are HITS, which determine how much damage one can take before keeling over, and possibly FATE to resist enemy spells and magical effects. The only limits on a player character’s MIGHT is the maximum of 4 during character creation, and the cost of raising it with experience.

• Monsters don’t have “levels” but probably should have some sort of indicator of what monsters are appropriate for each experience level.

• The rules around the Two Swords Feat were a little nebulous. It reads:

  The character has been trained to fight with two hand weapons (such as sword and dagger, or two hand-axes). Make a single Combat Attack Roll with a +1 bonus.

  However, the player with the Feat objected that, as written, this was no better than fighting with a single weapon (presumably the better one) and a shield, which also grants a +1 bonus to combat. I therefore house-ruled that the total COMBAT bonus includes both weapons and the +1 bonus. I do not know if that was the authors’ intent.

• Using experience requires an outlay of 500 sp per XP per person, so adventurers must earn at least 500 sp and adventure in order to use their XP. (This didn’t come up in a one-shot, but one player noticed it.)

GM Critiques

I also have a few critiques;

• I’ve commented at length about how the use of temples as banks ruined my immersion. (And even provide an alternative.)

  The author, I suspect, wanted to simplify managing money in the game, particularly since silver pieces are more historical but less valuable than the “gold pieces” of other RPGs. Having, essentially, an ATM at every temple means player characters don’t have to lug around sacks of silver. However, my alternatives linked above add only a little more complexity – and potential plot points – for a lost more naturalistic verisimilitude.

• The Sorcery system is intriguing … yet so potentially lethal to the user and to everyone around them that players who value their characters would be loath to use it. The rules explicitly discourage sorcerers as player characters. Magic items are similarly cursed; they turn on their users at about the same rate as sorcery spells.

  The author wanted to create the atmosphere of classic swords-and-sorcery, where magic is toxic and used only by antagonists blinded by power. Also, there’s the simple fact that too many bonuses will blow up the bell curve of 2d6. (This is probably the reason why MIGHT limits maximum damage and maximum armor.) So in that respect Clash of Steel succeeds. Still, one longs for a way to improve player characters' arms and armor without their risking life and limb to do so.

• Priests in Clash of Steel seem under-powered. Each priest knows only a few rituals and often have to expend more than one HIT to use them. Like sorcerers, the rules explicitly discourage priests as player characters or even NPC traveling companions. One can almost drop them from the game, except that players regaining their Divine Aid points depends on making sacrifices at temples … plus their role in keeping player characters’ loot, mentioned above.

  Granted, in low magic fantasy one doesn’t want a D&D-style paladin or cleric wandering around. Still, one can limit their power in other ways. In Advanced Fighting Fantasy priests get one casting of each of their powers per day; a successful LUCK check can grant a second casting. In Barbarians of Lemuria priests get a number of “Fate Points” in return for their devotion, which only allow them to impose boons or flaws on themselves and other characters.

Conclusions

Despite the criticisms above I really like Clash of Steel; it’s a lightweight system for classic sword-and-sorcery adventure. Nevertheless its lightweight nature leaves many points where a GM or solo player has to house-rule for the sake of consistency, verisimilitude, or replayability.

Since I get the feeling the entire combat system has been balanced so as not to make 2d6 rolls irrelevant, I am loath to change the combat system as written. Instead I may work on giving players more combat options than “I attack the monster”, ranking monsters according to relative threat (taking Armor into account), and perhaps adding weapon buffs like “masterwork weapons” that maintain the mystique and danger of magic.

More than that would require greater experience with the system. I would like to understand why all combat rests on MIGHT (and HITS), whether the existing limits keep 2d6 rolls relevant, and how my house rules for banking and other things work in practice. A mini-campaign using Clash of Steel isn’t out of the question … if I can find willing players.