# On Mighty Thews tags: #game/rpg/on-mighty-thews ![[On Mighty Thews 2.0.7 (cover).jpg|600]] **On Mighty Thews** is Simon Carryer's pulp sword-and-sorcery short-story machine — the game you reach for when you want the Howard and Moorcock energy without the setting bible or the five-hour battle. It debuted as a free 13-page PDF in 2011, a frankly-borrowed mashup of **[[Donjon]]** (the player-empowered bones), Jason Morningstar's **Dungeon Squad** (the engine), and **Savage Worlds** (the attitude), and it does something that still isn't common: it hands the setting to the players and trusts them to make it worth caring about. A revised, expanded, and paid **second edition** (v2.0.7) followed in 2016, and it's that edition that carries the name today. ## Setting On Mighty Thews ships no fixed world. What it ships is a *method* for conjuring one on the spot, in the spirit of the pulp magazines where every story needed a fresh corner of a dying civilization to burn. The game practically begins with a blank sheet of paper: everyone at the table — GM included — draws a few exciting things onto a map and names them, seeding cities, mountain ranges, swamps, monster dens, and grudges before the first scene. Two rival cities? They may as well be at war. A cave mouth? Something lives in it. The world then gets its poles from the characters themselves, each player marking their character's d20 **trait** onto the map as a compass point of the kind of people who live here. The flavor is unapologetically pulp rather than high fantasy, and the book spells out the difference with a wink. Its "Extra Material" runs a translation table from mainstream-fantasy tropes to their sword-and-sorcery equivalents: **tavern** becomes **opium den**, **knight** becomes **deathseeker** or **eagle-rider**, **king** becomes **potentate** or **god-king**, **wizard** becomes **godling** or **immortal alien being**, standard orcs become **mania-brained moon-folk**, **lizard kings**, **leech-women**, and **maggot-men**. Heroes are sell-swords, thieves, and adventurers; the world runs on **demon princes**, **giggling specters**, and **fist-sized jewels**, and a hero's mount is as likely a **riding-beetle** as a horse. It's a genre that lives on big passions, cruel ironies, and people who would rather leap off a cliff than negotiate. ## Core Mechanics The system is deliberately slight, built on a small hand of polyhedral dice and the understanding that players will share the narrator's chair. A character is three **attributes** — *Warrior*, *Sorcerer*, and *Explorer*, each given the d4, d8, and d12 — plus two self-described **abilities** (rated d6 and d10) and a single-word **d20 trait** that defines how the character most often behaves. "Making jewelry" is too narrow an ability; "Good with my hands" is right. And the trait — *Coward*, *Hero*, *Obedient*, *Mercenary* — isn't a cage so much as a hook the fiction keeps tugging on. ### Conflicts Play runs in **scenes**, and you only roll dice when something is **dangerous**, two characters are **competing**, or they're **fighting**. For a dangerous conflict you pick the relevant attribute plus any fitting ability (up to three dice, usually fewer), roll them, and keep the highest result against a target of **4**. Beat it and you win; the margin above 4 divided by two gives your **degree of success**, which buys facts or +1 bonuses you can stack and spend on future conflicts — a running catalogue of what you'd like to see happen next. Lose, and the GM narrates the price of failure, which the player agreed to in framing the stakes. Competing and fighting conflicts swap the fixed target for an opposed roll against a GM character. Mooks have a single die in a gloriously named ability — guards are good at "Guarding," fang monsters at "Fang Monstering" — while major villains and end-bosses get abilities like a player's, rated d10 and d6. The player wins ties against GM characters. In fights, if you beat the GM but by only one point, you still get your intent while the opponent also gets theirs — both sides can land their licks — and you can spend a fact's worth of success to block an opponent's intent outright. Injuries are written on the sheet as a -2 penalty the player may invoke (and erase) by describing how the wound hampers them; three injuries take a character out of the scene, and death is a group decision. ### Traits, Lore & Magic Two quirks give the game its teeth. First, the **d20 trait**: at the end of each scene a character who acted true to it banks a **re-roll token**, and once per scene a character acting *against* their trait rolls a bonus d20 — which also gives them the option to change the trait, the fiction quietly reshaping the soul. Second, the **lore roll**: whenever something new appears, a player can roll their Sorcerer to declare what their character knows about it — creating pieces of **lore** about the world's history, weaknesses, and secrets, each of which must come with an explanation of *how* the character learned it. This is also how magic enters the game: you introduce a magical effect as a piece of lore, and then you still have to win a conflict to make it happen. ## Editions - **First edition** (2011) — the free 13-page original. Bare-bones layout, the same dice-assignment core now without the polish, released into the world with an author's note that he was "absurdly proud of it." *In the library.* - **Second edition** (2016, v2.0.7) — the revised and much-expanded release under **Simon Carryer Games** on DriveThruRPG, 51 pages with proper layout, pulp-trope tables, sample maps, and a character sheet. This is the version the game is known by today. *In the library.* Both are in the library as a version-family, with the first edition tagged as the free original and v2.0.7 as the current edition. ## References - [On Mighty Thews - Simon Carryer Games (DriveThruRPG)](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/171413/on-mighty-thews) - [On Mighty Thews - author's site](https://www.simoncarryer.com/rpgs) - [Review - rpg.net](https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15788.phtml) - [Review - Gaming Brouhaha](https://gamingbrouhaha.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/review-on-mighty-thews/) - [About On Mighty Thews - Axian Spice](https://axianspice.blogspot.com/2020/09/about-on-mighty-thews.html)