Castle Falkenstein: A Stirring Journey To a Europe That Never Was

I realised a while ago that the body of work of R. Talsorian Games – which pretty much equates the body of work of Mike Pondsmith, since he was the core designer of all of their key RPG lines – makes a ton of sense if you think of them in terms of anime. For Mekton, the connection is obvious – the mecha genre originates in anime, after all – and for Cyberpunk, though the company would turn to the literary genre for inspiration I still think the game “clicks” best once you view it in terms of slick, violent cyberpunk anime of the era.

Carry this through, and even though Castle Falkenstein is perhaps the most literary of Pondsmith’s designs, you can still defnitely see it as being set in a very particular type of fantastic Europe – the sort of mingling of steampunk and romance you might get if you blended elements of Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle In the Sky, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Castle of Cagliostro. (Damn, Miyazaki really loves castles, doesn’t he?) Sure, on the face of it Cagliostro is set outside the time period, but it riffs enough on The Prisoner of Zenda that you can imagine it as an adventure of Lupin I instead of Lupin III. It’s a Europe of mystery, steampunk invention, and magic, seen through a lens distant enough to make the old continent feel unfamiliar and romantic to those of us that live there, which I rather appreciate.

I mentioned that Falkenstein was rather literary in its conception, and I meant it: Pondsmith goes highbrow with the presentation on this one, based around a premise which I was worried would make the rulebook burdensome to navigate but is actually rather neat – specifically he gives the game an honest to goodness framing device. This is based around the fictional conceit that the Castle Falkenstein core rulebook wasn’t written by Pondsmith, he only edited it – like how William Goldman poses as only being the editor of The Princess Bride. The “real” author is Tom Olam – a videogame artist and old friend of Pondsmith’s who disappeared on a holiday in Europe some years ago. One day, a package showed up at Pondsmith’s house, containing a bundle of documents and illustrations – and a covering letter from Olam, explaining that he was safe and well; he’d just been isekai’d into a parallel world whilst visiting Castle Neuschwanstein, one of Crown Prince Ludwig’s castles in Bavaria.

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Specifically, he had been summoned to what he dubs New Europa – a parallel Europe in a parallel world, where magic is real, creatures of faerie legend share the Earth with humans, astonishing steampunk invention are crafted by ingenious inventors and cunningly villainous masterminds, and characters of Victorian melodrama from Sherlock Holmes to Count Dracula are all real. Olam was summoned by two of the most powerful mages of this world to play a crucial role in restoring Ludwig to the throne of Bavaria and resist the machinations of Otto von Bismarck, preventing the absorption of Bavaria into to the growing Prussian-led empire. Having played his role in this grand adventure, Olam is now a guest in Castle Falkenstein, the greatest of Ludwig’s castles; in our world, Falkenstein was never built, but the world of New Europa is in many respects kinder to its romantics and idealists than ours – here, the powers of faerie granted Ludwig’s wish, and built Castle Falkenstein in a single night to be a symbol of the friendship between his realm and theirs.

Olam thus has come to know this world from an outsider’s perspective – and one day at a high society function he ends up telling the gathered functionaries something of his own world, and ends up explaining tabletop RPGs to them, They decide that these sound like a capital entertainment, but are quite scandalised at the idea that dice might be used – they’re rather tawdry and common things, after all! So Olam devises a system based on playing cards, which becomes popular in its own fashion. Eventually, he’s given a chance to send a missive back to his own world, so he assembles a package containing notes he made on this new world he’s found himself in, his artwork of the fabulous people and places he’s encountered, and – because he knew it’d give Mike a kick – his RPG rules.

This means that the setting material in here consists of Olam’s narrative of his isekai adventure, interspersed with more focused notes he offers on particular topics, whilst the RPG rules are those he cooled up in the other world. This all ends working better than expected. There’s a nice, clear distinction between the gorgeous (and predominantly full-colour) setting section and the rules, so you can flip to the rules quickly if you don’t need setting detail or want to get cracking with a game straight away, In addition, the balance in the setting section is very much towards clear breakdowns of interesting setting details, with most of the ongoing story stuff concentrated at the start and end and not taking up an obnoxious amount of space. My main concern with the presentation, ever since I learned about the “Tom Olam” framing device, was that it might obscure the useful information in a mass of narration, but Pondsmith does a bang-up job of making sure that doesn’t happen.

As far as the system goes, it’s quite elegant – influenced somewhat by the Interlock system that powered Mekton and Cyberpunk, sure, but a fine job is done of keeping it nice and simple, and the use of cards is adds a distinct new dimension. All the players plus the referee have a hand of four cards drawn from a standard deck, and every time a player takes an action they play a card, add its value to the appropriate stat, and try to beat a target number based on a difficulty level and a card played by the referee.. (Endearingly, the game’s term for referee is “Host”, getting across the idea that this is a refined entertainment for classy Victorian dinner parties.) You then draw to replace the card you played, and play goes on like this.

The interesting dimension to this is that it means that there’s a mixture of randomness and choice – you don’t get to pick what cards are in your hand, but you get to pick what you play. As a player, you can opt to go all-out on an action and play your highest-value card, or you can play a low-value card and either deliberately take a loss or gamble that your stat plus card score will be sufficient to accomplish your goal anyway. You also have a certain level of choice as the Host – you can opt to soft-pedal an action or thwart the players as you wish. At the same time, neither the players nor the Host has a full range of choice – drawing four cards each is a limited enough set to allow for intriguing reversals of fate. One can see how sometimes in a Falkenstein game you might end up in a run of bad luck or a spate of good fortune – either as the Host or a player – and that’s going to have dramatic effects on play.

In some respects Castle Falkenstein reminds me a lot of Deadlands, which came out a couple of years after it, in that both games present a setting stuffed with weird little elements, but because each of those weird additions is its own distinct subsystem (though here they’re fairly elegantly developed from the core mechanic) you can adjust to taste. If you want to explore Pondsmith’s alternate universe, you absolutely can do that, but if you want to remove the steampunk stuff, or the magic, or the faerie elements in order to get a more specific genre of counterfactual Victorian adventure – or if you want to pull all that stuff out and have a game based around adventurous melodrama without supernatural or science fictional elements present – the game can handle that just fine. Pondsmith shows a fine sense of what’s needed for the style he’s going for – there’s even two combat systems, a general combat system and one calibrated for duels (and which can be reskinned in order to cover other types of one-to-one challenge, from wizardly duels to chess matches to riddle contests).

That said, I think Pondsmith’s fantastical setting has a lot to recommend it. If I had one criticism, it’s that it seems fairly comfortable with the society of the Victorian era, and one might want to include a thicker seam of anti-colonialism. (Karl Marx as the mastermind behind an international anarchist conspiracy may raise eyebrows in this respect, though mention of British atrocities against workers do help to make sure the depiction of the age isn’t entirely sanitised.) At the same time, it’s made very clear that this is a better, finer, and crucially more equal world than the one we live in; in the pages of the game women are depicted as being substantially more equal to men, the main gender bars here actually being to playing certain types of faerie creature (because they’re mythic archetypes constructed along gender lines), and one can read in more progressive interpretations of this parallel world if you had a mind to.

For instance, the Native American peoples have not been genocided here to nearly the extent they were in our history (though there’s a perhaps misjudged line about the Templars destroying the Aztecs due to the whole human sacrifice dealio) – as in Shadowrun, a group of tribes collaborated to fight back against the self-proclaimed Manifest Destiny of white settlement and the result is that the United States only holds sway east of the Mississippi; for much of the rest of north America, a Twenty Nations Confederation holds sway. (Delightfully, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington are in their own country – the Bear Flag Empire – as a result of the westernmost states declaring allegiance to Emperor Norton.)

A swathe of fictional figures and incidents from an impressively deep bench of Victorian literature are namedropped here, as well as individuals from beyond that scope; references to “the Master” using armies of automata and the threat of annihilation by an “Inferno Bomb” to extort the British Empire sounds just close enough to Terror of the Autons and The Mind of Evil to make me think that a certain Doctor Who villain paid a visit to his timeline at some point.

By and large, Castle Falkenstein is an utter delight. I remember being charmed by the adverts for it when it first came out – though it never graced the shelves of my local game shop so I didn’t get a chance to see it at the time – and in retrospect it must have presented a striking contrast against the prevailing trends of the time. After all,. it came out in 1994, when the World of Darkness games were the new hotness and Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, and a swathe of others were competing with them in the edginess stakes – the sort of era when SLA Industries fit right in, and where HoL‘s dark sense of humour provided a timely satire of the scene’s obsession with grimdark edgelordery.

Standing in contrast to these, Castle Falkenstein is unabashedly romantic and idealistic, whilst at the same time embracing some of the best ideas of the era, like the impulse towards system-light games and the encouragement towards experimenting with LARP elements during play. (In keeping with the literary elements, it even encourages players to frame their character notes as a diary, and the Host to frame theirs as a Victorian potboiler novel.) In many respects, it feels like the bright, colourful, hopeful, and optimistic counterpart to Vampire and the like which Changeling: the Dreaming tried to pitch itself as being but didn’t quite stick the landing on. Whilst Cyberpunk might be the game which ended up paying the bills for Mike Pondsmith, I think Castle Falkenstein is clearly his most innovative, forward-thinking, and impressive game design.