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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2008134" data-attributes="member: 924">This book basically has 2 ratings. One for those that aren't familiar with Chaosium's Elric! and Stormbringer RPGs, and those who are...If you're not aware of the Elric! RPG, or own the Elric! rulebook, Dragon Lords of Melnibone (DLOM) appears to be a very good book.OTOH, if you're like me, and own the Elric! RPG rulebook, you'll see that Chaosium basically just did a quick cut and paste job on it, replacing BRP (Basic Roleplaying, or d100) stats with d20 stats. Oh, they did a little more than that, like including some NPCs from the Stormbringer Companion. But not much more.This has resulted in a lot of problems and weirdness in DLOM.  The most notable example is the entire Demon Summoning/Binding system.In the Elric! game, there is a stat called Power or 'Pow' for short. It is sacrificed to bind a demon, and also determines how many 'magic points' a character has, which are temporarily spent to determine the summoned demons characteristics and abilities and such.  Besides the fact that the magic points regenerate rapidly, the Pow stat can be increaed fairly easily. So it's not that big a deal to summon a demon.But in DLOM, instead of magic points being spent temporarily to determine a summoned demon's stats and abilities, experience points are permanently spent. And isntead of sacrificing a point of Pow to bind a demon (which was easily replaced in Elric), any ability point is sacrificed in DLOM. While it's not as hard to increase ability scores in d20 as it was in other versions of D&D, it's not nearly as easy to do as it is to increase Pow is in Elric.  So, demon summoning (and binding, especially binding) is much more costly for the summoner than it should be. Far more, in some cases (like the 'Passing Demon', which eats 1 point of the caster's ability scores per day)The Demon section in DLOM also repeatedly calls for  opposed "Will:Will" rolls, which is just a seach and replace of the "Pow<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />ow" roll from the Elric! rulebook. A opposed "Will:Will" roll is not explained anywhere in DLOM, but is a common Elric! (or BRP) mechanic requiring use of a chart where you compare two character's stats and make a d100 roll., In d20 terms, just roll a d20 for each character, and add the characters Will Save - whoever gets the higher score, winsAnother example of this, is the City Guard's skill at asking Embarassing Questions mentioned in the other reviews. This was lifted directly from Elric! as well...The fumble/major wounds tables were also similarly lifted straight from Elric!, as is the Allegiance system. Those work well enough with d20, but culd have been tailored better to it, rather than just lifted almost verbatim.They also fail to adhere to d20 conventions in a couple of places. Most notably, some races get -1 and +1 to their ability scores. Sorcery and Sorcerer is often used not in it's d20 sense (that of a character will innate spell casting ability), which can be confusing.  Rather than using the Profession (Sailor) skill already in the d20 rules, they create their skill for sailing ability - Sailing.  Their included new class, that of 'Sailor', is also pretty much a joke - it's just the Expert class with 10 skills picked.The end result isn't a very good book. Not bad, since the Elric! RPG rulebook was pretty good (although notably lacking in some areas, like planar travel, which Elric does quite often). But the whole thing is very disappointing, because Chaosium apparently sees DLOM or d20 not as a viable game system of it's own, but simply a way of selling it's upcoming Elric 2.0 (or Stormbringer 5th edition, as it was recently renamed). The head of Chaosium admits as much on their website.  And Chaosium employees have publically said they hate the d20 system. Which is their right, but they shouldn't go around making d20 products, then, should they?A book based around Elric really written for the d20 system could have been really great. But instead, Chaosium did something reprehensible...just a quick hack job to sell their other game line...Still, even so, the price is pretty good. Even though the type is pretty large, it's a thick book. $23 for 204 pages isn't bad at all. A similar book from WOTC would probably cost almost double that (they price the non-core books really high).  And the artwork isn't bad, but isn't great. It recycles a lot of art from the Elric! book, but not much from the gorgeous GW edition of the Stormbringer game (other than using an interior plate from that as the cover art)</blockquote>

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