Horvath’s Hoard

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes In the Ground was penned by enthusiastic RPG collector Stu Horvath as an outgrowth of his other work documenting vintage RPGs, which began with a humble Instagram account and now takes in a weekly podcast. It’s a handsomely-presented coffee table book, offering a sort of tabletop RPG equivalent of A History of the World In 100 Objects in which Horvath goes over his extensive personal collection and picks out RPG books to discuss – core rules primarily, but supplements, adventures, campaign settings, and less easily categorised items also feature.

Rather than simply offering a run-down of Horvath’s favourites, Horvath attempts to select items which help illustrate something about the tabletop gaming zeitgeist. If a game is historically significant or extremely influential, that counts for a lot, but Horvath also allows himself to include a few items which represent noteworthy oddities, intriguing creative dead ends, or outright screwups, because as in other creative fields infamous failures can be just as illustrative as celebrated successes. In addition, Horvath sticks to items from his own collection – he won’t include something he hasn’t heard of, or has not at least at some point owned and been able to make his own assessment of.

In this respect the biggest gap, as he acknowledges in the introduction, are RPGs in languages other than English; I don’t know whether or not Stu is multilingual, but presumably if he was multilingual enough to read and appreciate RPGs written in other languages, he’d have included some here, so this is really a tour through the Anglophone segment of the hobby; we get only second-hand glimpses, via translations, into areas like the Swedish scene, and nothing on Germany or Japan, all territories where games other than D&D rule the roost.

Mini-Review: Advanced Sorcery for Magic World

Chaosium’s 2012 Magic World RPG was, at its heart, a version of the 5th Edition Stormbringer system with the Michael Moorcock-specific aspects polished away so that the game could act as a generic Basic Roleplaying-powered fantasy RPG, much as the 3rd Edition of RuneQuest had in the past and games like RuneQuest 6th Edition, Legend, and OpenQuest would be doing at around the same time as Magic World made it to publication.

What’s quite interesting about Magic World is that, by being primarily based on a setting-neutral version of Stormbringer instead of a setting-neutral version of RuneQuest, it’s starting from a somewhat simpler baseline, which allows it to stand out somewhat in what was a crowded field. Ben Monroe’s Southern Reaches, the sample setting in the core book, was also interesting to some, though I found there was an unfortunate lack of detail on how system concepts like Light and Shadow played out there.

In the comments on my Magic World review, Ben was nice enough to swing by and talk about the plans he’d had for the line, which would have included a supplement line in which each supplement would either be mostly generic content with a significant pinch of Southern Reaches stuff, or mostly Southern Reaches stuff with a bit of stuff for more generic use. I imagine as the line went on, this might have led to a closer integration of the rules into the Southern Reaches setting.

In the end, Monroe was only able to bring out Advanced Sorcery before the old regime at Chaosium collapsed and a new crew came on, who made the decision to stop putting out new Magic World for the foreseeable future as part of a bid to refocus on key lines and generally reconfigure the company into a more sustainable shape. The book is a collection of alternate magic systems and expansions to the existing magic systems in Magic World.

In some respects it offers an interesting glimpse of what Magic World could have evolved into, with Monroe’s rules for fae magic in the Southern Reaches giving some crucial rules underpinning to Reaches-specific concepts whilst other ideas suggest interesting directions for other settings. There’s a Deep Magic system which offers a sort of keyword-based freeform casting system, for instance, and “Arete” – a system in which characters whose skills end up exceeding 100% can end up attaining quasi-supernatural or genuinely supernatural effects from their superhuman competence.

At the same time, however, Advanced Sorcery is still very much a product under the shadow of previous products, since a good chunk of the material in it originally hailed from sources Chaosium can no longer republish like RuneQuest Vikings and The Bronze Grimoire. Thus, it’s still part of Operation Repurpose Old Material, as Magic World was, rather than consisting of wholly-original work.

The Arcane Top 50 – Where Are They Now?

Arcane, a short-lived British tabletop gaming magazine from Future Publishing which ran from December 1995 to June 1997, is a name to conjure by for many gamers of around my age. I came to the hobby after White Dwarf had become a Games Workshop in-house advertising platform, and just as Dragon was on the verge of dropping its coverage of non-TSR RPGs altogether; that meant I got a brief taster of TSR having a broader scope of coverage, and missed out on the golden age of White Dwarf altogether.

With other RPG-focused gaming magazines available in the UK either consisting of patchy US imports or a few local magazines published on a decidedly variable basis (whatever did happen to ol’ Valkyrie?), the arrival of Arcane was immensely welcome. Sure, even by this early stage the Internet was already becoming an incomparable source of both homebrewed material and cutting-edge RPG news, but much of that was in the form of Usenet and forum discussions of variable quality or ASCII text files. To get something which was informative, read well, and looked nice, print media was still just about where it was at.

Truth be told, taking a look back at Arcane in more recent years I’m less impressed than I was at the time. It took largely the same approach to its own subject matter (primarily RPGs, with some secondary consideration to CCGs – because they were so hot at the time they really couldn’t be ignored – and perhaps a light sniff of board game content) that Future’s videogame magazines took to theirs, particularly the lighter-hearted PC Gamer/Amiga Power side of things rather than the likes of, say, Edge. That meant it focused more on brief news snippets, reviews, and fairly entry-level articles on subjects than it did on offering much in the way of in-depth treatment of matters.

Not Much Underneath the Animal Masks…

The Hawkmoon self-contained RPG was a boxed set put out by Chaosium as a sort of cautious attempt at expanding Stormbringer into other fictional settings from Michael Moorcock’s stories. On the face of it, this wasn’t a bad idea – after all, the whole Eternal Champion premise that underpins so much of Moorcock’s fiction hinges on the idea of a multiverse of alternate worlds. Moreover, the Hawkmoon series would seem on the face of it to be a good one to pick for a first salvo into the wider multiverse, because it’s another sword and sorcery sequence and so extensive reworking of the Stormbringer system isn’t particularly necessary.

The series in question concerns Duke Dorian Hawkmoon, who resides in a future Europe that is stumbling out of a new Dark Age brought about by the devastating wars and catastrophes of the Tragic Millennium. Hawkmoon spends a lot of time fighting the sinister forces of Granbretan, a twisted future Britain that has become an evil empire, its repressive culture represented in part by the way its citizens go about in animal masks denoting their station in life and in part by the menacing figure of King Huon, its centuries-old king who rules over the Empire and preserves his existence thanks to the fabulous technology of his sorcerer-scientists.

So far, so science fantasy. The Hawkmoon boxed set attempts to convey this setting by providing character generation rules for player characters hailing from a great swathe of Europe and North America, details on fabulous sorcery-science artifacts and terrible mutations, summaries of the Hawkmoon saga and a general overview of the setting, complete with NPC stats. Fine. Yet despite providing most of these features it still feels hollow and flavourless somehow next to Stormbringer.

Admittedly, part of what leaves me cold here might come down to the fact that I don’t really like the source material. Moorcock has gone on the record as saying that he cranked out the Hawkmoon novels in the space of mere days for the sake of earning some quicky and easy money so he could concentrate on weightier work, and is kind of surprised by their continued warm reception by fantasy fans. Frankly, as far as I am concerned the novels betray their origins as rush-written disposable trash very easily, and the high regard they are held in by some readers is evidence of generally poor taste and low levels of discernment in the fantasy fanbase. The series is blighted by flat characterisation that gets contradicted from book to book, a similarly contradictory and hopelessly muddled plot, and degenerates in the final three books (and final novel The Quest For Tanelorn in particular) into a mass of self-indulgent multiversal crossover waffle and heavy-handed allegory that never misses an opportunity to insult the reader’s intelligence.

Still, there’s stuff to enjoy there – the descriptions of Granbretan, in particular, were places where the novels really came alive (not least because it was Moorcock’s vicious autopsy of British culture’s worst tendencies), and made me feel like conceivably this could be an interesting setting to game in. Whilst it might be possible to whip what you get in the books into an interesting, gameable setting, the Hawkmoon set doesn’t quite get there.

For one thing, it gives lots of attention to the various little nations of 6th Millennium Europe and America, all of which are a bit flavourless at best and tastelessly based on national stereotypes at worst, and whilst it does give a certain amount of detail to Granbretan, it could have afforded to concentrate on it a bit more in order to invest things with the flavour the broader setting is sadly lacking. For another, designer Kerie Campbell-Robson puts in sops towards having a scientific invention system, whilst at the same time not really offering much of a robust invention creation system – a particular problem since most of the items described in the set are items from the books which play a very specific role in those very specific plots and aren’t of enormous utility outside that context.

It feels like the weird science of the Hawkmoon series and its occasional forays into interdimensional wackiness are regarded by Campbell-Robson as being the meat of the setting, given the energy put into describing them, but after this description is offered it remains unclear what you’re really meant to do with them. The interdimensional travel rules exist mostly to allow characters from Stormbringer to visit the Hawkmoon setting and vice versa, which is nice in principle but in practice if I were going to spend a significant proportion of a campaign in the Young Kingdoms I’d just bite the bullet and play Stormbringer rather than bringing in this watered-down stuff. The mutation stuff we’ve seen before in Gamma World, and like I said most of the super-science items are very tied into particular plots from the novels.

Campbell-Robson does not successfully identify a niche for players to get involved in this stuff independently of the action of the novels, which speaks to a wider failure to offer a distinctive time period for adventure. Stormbringer assumes that campaigns kick off before Elric’s saga passes the point of no return and thus takes place in an identifiable point in time in the setting; in Hawkmoon it’s not clear whether we’re assumed to be playing before, during, or after Hawkmoon’s own adventures. It doesn’t help that the sample adventures, though imaginative, end up sliding well outside the scope of the novels – having the player characters uncover long-frozen folk from the 21st Century feels like the sort of thing which instantly tonally shifts the campaign to something well outside of the world presented in the books.

Apparently Hawkmoon underwent significant further development in its French translation, but in terms of the English-language product it remains a bit of an also-ran compared to the wild, flavourful Stormbringer.

Chaosium’s Worlds In the Balance

Lemmy died recently. Before he made Motörhead happen, he was in Hawkwind, who also collaborated regularly with Michael Moorcock. Michael Moorcock has written an awful lot of stuff, but perhaps his most famous work is the story of Elric. Therefore, this is a good time to talk about Chaosium’s Stormbringer RPG and its successor game, Magic World.

Are you buying this? Never mind, I’m going to review them anyway.