I’d like to draw your atten­tion to recent movie that is not only enter­tain­ing to watch, but that can also serve as good atmos­pheric inspi­ra­tion for Blade of the Iron Throne: British-​made Cen­tu­rion.

It’s a his­tor­i­cal action movie set in early 2^nd cen­tury Scot­land, telling the tale of a hand­ful sur­vivors of an oblit­er­ated Roman army try­ing to make their way back into Roman Britain, all the while being hunted by Picts led by an emi­nently blood­thirsty female war­rior who makes killing Romans a per­sonal mat­ter. The film plays very straight­for­ward, but is a rous­ing action adven­ture with quite a bit of blood­shed (rated R) that moves at a relent­less pace. While it does lack any sor­cery, I would still regard it as a Sword & Sor­cery movie, and one of the most enter­tain­ing I know at that.

Has any of you seen this movie? And if so, how did you like it?

I did see this movie on a whim late one night. I must say I was pleas­antly sur­prised and I enjoyed it.
True there was a lack of sor­cery, but there was def­i­nitely a sense of mys­tery and unknown por­trayed by the Celts. Often times in games and movies it is the unknown that really dri­ves a sense of sor­cery than the sor­cery itself.

I can think of a game sce­nario in par­tic­u­lar that the play­ers were so intim­i­dated by the expec­ta­tion of magic that they fed them­selves sus­pense. It was months later in real time that they found out there was noth­ing in that scene, just sounds and setting.

If you enjoyed this movie, you might want to take a look at the Robert E. Howard short story Worms of the Earth, which has a sim­lar set­ting: Cale­do­nia around 200 AD, Picts vs. Romans, only this time told from the Pic­tish side of things and with def­i­nite super­nat­ural, Cthulhu-​esque ele­ments. Many peo­ple, I among them, con­sider it one of the very best of Robert E. Howard’s yarns.

The story is avail­able for free on the net on Project Guten­berg Aus­tralia. And for those of you who won’t take my word for the story’s qual­ity there is even a graphic novel of the story avail­able for free on the net, divided into part one and part two. It is a scan of the orig­i­nal appear­ance in Marvel’s Sav­age Sword of Conan the Bar­bar­ian mag­a­zine and is not only a faith­ful adap­tion of the story scripted by Roy Thomas, but also visu­ally stun­ning, with art by Tim Con­rad.

And should y’all hap­pen to be made of stone and still not curi­ous, take a look at these two down­sized pages from the links above:

That story tick­les the back of my mind. I can almost remem­ber read­ing it before.
It is a damned good one and the graphic is well illus­trated. Thank you for bring­ing that up for reading.

Great movie.Good action sequences, one or two really nice (i.e. nasty) betrayal moments — some minor blur­ring of ‘them/​us’ bound­aries etc , so all in all ‚from a start­ing point of not expect­ing much from it, it turned out to be a cracker. I’m not sure I’d have pre­vi­ously thought of it as S&S, but I can see how it has some of the attributes.