Swag and Sorcery is a new “streamlined RPG” from the creators of Graveyard Keeper. It involves hiring heroes and sending them out to different areas to kill monsters and come back with ingredients, from which you can craft (pretty easily) various armours and weapons. And there are loads and loads of weird items to create, or occasionally find.
There’s no exp in this game. You instead sell stuff – and it’s easy to make tonnes of money – and then you buy level-ups. This is kind of weird, because it means when you recruit a new Level 1 character, there’s no point doing anything with them until you’ve bought them a few levels. Also weird is that much of the “higher level” gear didn’t seem to be that much more powerful than lower level stuff, though it sells for a tonne of money (6,000+).
It’s not a very difficult game once you get going, because money generation is so easy, thus you can level up loads. It is grindy, but your players do their own fighting, you have minimal interaction while they do (there are some spells but the spell points never seem to regenerate once you’ve used them up). There are also some very light town-building and shop-upgrading elements, but not enough to make this in any way a sim-hybrid.
There are also various “quests” – some of the later ones are a little more cryptic in that they don’t tell you directly what you need to find/create. There’s also an odd “fashion show” feature where you compete and if you win, you get a bit of cash and earn village points. I never had any need to match the colour theme – I just bribed the judges a few times (pretty cheap) and won every time.
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