From the introduction:
In a roleplaying game, anything is possible. Your character can explore the world, take part in convoluted intrigues, wage war against rival houses, and do just about anything else you can come up with. But every roleplaying game has particular concerns. Some emphasize action—others, building complex emotional bonds between characters.
Sword Chronicle is a roleplaying game, with an unlimited field for story development. It all comes down to the protagonists: main characters played by you and your friends. But they’re not alone, because Sword Chronicle has a special focus: representing a noble house, and navigating the violent, treacherous politics of a feudal fantasy world.
If you’re new to fantasy roleplaying games, reading further will provide a rough overview, but Wikipedia, videos, and numerous other online sources can give you a complete breakdown of how to play tabletop (as opposed to electronic) fantasy roleplaying games. If you know how to play them already, proceed to the very next section.
Publisher's blurb:
A Game of War and Intrigue
You’re no adventurer. You may have shaken blood off your sword after plunging it into an unholy beast, but the real monsters stalk the world’s thrones. You may have studied the unspeakable secrets of magic, but affairs of state have secrets that are no less horrifying, for they can turn a nation into a million-limbed juggernaut of war.
You belong to a noble house, and its fortunes rise and fall with your actions. You’re a lord, a knight, a servant in the shadows, or perhaps a sorcerer-sage, bound to a dynasty of rulers. A vassal’s honor binds you to obey those above your station, and the responsibilities of privilege make you well aware that your lessers prosper or suffer according to your will—or if you fail, in spite of it. Your people are yours to protect, but the world is yours to conquer. You’ve committed your house to the Sword Chronicle.
Sword Chronicle is fantasy roleplaying in Green Ronin’s Chronicle System, now customized for you to bring in your own worlds of intrigue-laden fantasy. Within this book you’ll find the following:
A classless gritty fantasy roleplaying game, where words can be as powerful as weapons—and weapons enforce your words.
Character creation that gives the heroes specific positions in a noble house of their own design.
Rules for the fantasy ancestries of elves, dwarves, and ogres, and frictionless game systems for playing a character of multiple ancestries.
Grim, dramatic combat where death is a risk, but profit comes from ransoming your noble enemies.
Revised and reorganized intrigue rules for the Chronicle System, to give socially oriented characters real power.
Mass combat rules fit for sieges and conquests.
Subtle, powerful magic for the Chronicle System.
Introducing the Shattered Era setting.