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Voros

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Ralph Lovegrove of the very good Fictoplasm podcast has an updated beta version of his OSRish D&D/PbtA take on the classic Stormbringer! game and world of Elric up for free on Itch.io here:


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He talks about it more on his podcast (which is usually discussions of sf/fantasy novels as inspiration for rpgs) here:

He discusses the influence of Whitehack, The Black Hack and Beyond the Wall, PbtA and I can see all bits of those games in there. Pretty nifty so far I think.
 
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what are the demon summoning rules like?
 
what are the demon summoning rules like?

Forgot to mention that the Background and freeformish Magic system are quite good!

The magic system is pretty intricate so difficult to summarize here.

Demons and magic are integrated, anything above the first level of magic, runes, requires the summoning of a demon, from common to court demons. The presentation is very minimalist so there isn't a lot of 'flavour' on summoning mostly just mechanics.

It isn't that crunchy, the core mechanic of the game is d20 roll under, but it ties casting spells which requires the expenditure of magic die to demons, allegiance to a Patron (Chaos, Law, Elementals, Beasts) and six planes of magic.

Here I can see the influence of the freeform magic system of Whitehack (which is similar to Maelstrom actually) where what you can and can't do is negotiated with the GM depending on the power level.

Definitely seems like the most effort and thought has gone into magic/demons, which makes sense for an Elric-inspired game.
 
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Yep, looks interesting. I don't know Elric much but I'm all for OSR and PbtA these days and it looks right my alley. Thanks.
 
Yup, I'll be reading this today.
 
I'll check this out later. I'm a big fan of Moorcock and Elric in particular. Might even be something good hiding away in it.
 
Is that stats-lotus flower representative of something in the Elric universe?
 
I thinknits just a cool thing with some numerical riffs going on. I guess a way to give some individuality in the morass of osr product?

It seems to be important for character generation. You wouldn't have to lay it out in circular fashion, of course.

I've not had a chance to read completely through this, but it's interesting for what it is, and isn't. It gives you a set of OSR-ish rules designed for playing in Elric's world, with detailed tables linked to that setting. But there is no setting information--you'll have to get that from reading the novels or from one of the several existing Elric games. There are good copyright reasons for this, I'm sure (no license) but I can see why the author is not selling the rules as opposed to giving them away.

For those more familiar than I am with PbtA games (that is, just about anybody), what are the PbtA influences in this set of rules? Nothing jumped out at me.
 
I realized my previous post came across as unduly negative. I like the idea of a rule-set for a well-established setting that just concentrates on new mechanics, rather than presenting the background material once again. If I want information about Elric's world, I can get that from a bunch of other games I already have.
 
I realized my previous post came across as unduly negative. I like the idea of a rule-set for a well-established setting that just concentrates on new mechanics, rather than presenting the background material once again. If I want information about Elric's world, I can get that from a bunch of other games I already have.
The Black Sword Hack does a very nice of this same task as well. It's a little less fiddly than the one were talking about here, but I'm not judging the fiddly just yet as I haven't really had time to fully absorb this rules set yet.
 
It seems to be important for character generation. You wouldn't have to lay it out in circular fashion, of course.

I've not had a chance to read completely through this, but it's interesting for what it is, and isn't. It gives you a set of OSR-ish rules designed for playing in Elric's world, with detailed tables linked to that setting. But there is no setting information--you'll have to get that from reading the novels or from one of the several existing Elric games. There are good copyright reasons for this, I'm sure (no license) but I can see why the author is not selling the rules as opposed to giving them away.

For those more familiar than I am with PbtA games (that is, just about anybody), what are the PbtA influences in this set of rules? Nothing jumped out at me.

The way Backgrounds work reminds me of the way AW chargen ties the characters to the world and each other, although that is also a Beyond the Wall influence, but then BtW is influenced by PbtA!

 
The way Backgrounds work reminds me of the way AW chargen ties the characters to the world and each other, although that is also a Beyond the Wall influence, but then BtW is influenced by PbtA!


And the makers of Beyond the World have just released Through Sunken Lands which is a Sword and Sorcery adaptation of Beyond the Wall which is apparently highly influenced by Moorcock.
 
And the makers of Beyond the World have just released Through Sunken Lands which is a Sword and Sorcery adaptation of Beyond the Wall which is apparently highly influenced by Moorcock.

Cool, I was wondering what Flatland games was up to!
 
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