Dragonlords of Melnibone, How would you do it rignt?

[trancejeremy]

Chaosium will have the rights for it forever, basically. (It's apparently very similar to why Jeff Dee doesn't have the Villains & Vigilantes name.)

The Conan rules would work pretty good, I'd think. The magic system would need a lot of tweaking.

 

[KaosDevice]

The Conan rules would work pretty good, I'd think. The magic system would need a lot of tweaking.

Hmmm...I agree about the Conan rule set, but here's a crazy idea, how about essentially lifting the magic system from Call of Cthulhu, hell even tack on the sanity system, sanity seems to play a pretty big role in Moorcock's multi-verse. I think it would be a good fit.
(Just tweak sanity losses down a bit.)

(Duh, didn't notice using CoC magic had been mentioned up the thread..sorry!)

 

[Gomez]

You could have a rule that you can lessen some of the ability and sanity loss from casting spells by "pledging souls" to your Chaos God of choice.

 

[KaosDevice]

You could have a rule that you can lessen some of the ability and sanity loss from casting spells by "pledging souls" to your Chaos God of choice.

Dig it, Chaos allegiance should defintely help vs sanity loss. Perhaps there could even be some sort of correlation between the number of allegance points to Chaos vs. amount of sanity lost from using magic. Obviously though, the more magic you use the more tweaked you get. (Look at the Theocrat of Pan Tang for example)

 

[Red Spire Press]

As a huge fan of Michael Moorcock, I don't feel too bad about a little thread hijack. Dark Legacies' magic system may do the trick with a few tweaks. Spells are difficult to cast, potentially mind-destroying, and very demon focused. Additionally, the Campaign Guide contains complete rules for binding demons.

 

[Odhanan]

Chaosium will have the rights for it forever, basically.

Nothing lasts forever.

Using Iron Heroes to play in the Young Kingdoms could be great too.

 

[Ron]

A simpler system would help, True 20 appears to be a good choice. Magic should be redone, I heard that the initial editions of Chaosium's Stormbringer were pretty good in that regard, perhaps worth of a check. However, I would kept the current edition aliance system, as I think it is pretty well done and very cool!

 

[Voadam]

Do full d20 conversions for the monsters and everything.

Redo the demon summoning.

Stick to D&D/d20.

 

[radferth]

It seems to me there would be two ways to do Elric right:

1) Young Kingdoms D&D: Use the core rules as a base, do D&D conversions of everything you needed. Moorcock was one of the inspirations for D&D in the first place, so this is not as big a stretch as it sounds. It would be hard to simulate many specific things in the books with this method, but it would work well enough, and be compatible with other D&D stuff. (Although this sounds like what Chaosium tried, what they did was an ill-advised port of Stormbringer/d100 into D&D, and a lot was lost in translation).

2) Young Kingdoms D20: Make up your own version of the d20 system (like Conan or Black Company). This would be a much closer simulation, but much more work. It seems like much of the discussion here is trying to find the right combination of current systems (e.g. Conan with CoC magic tacked on) to do this.

I prefer #1, but I have always liked the young kingdoms setting while disliking most of the actual Moorcock stories set there. (Did the guy who played Elric have like the worst railroading DM ever, or what?)

 

[Psion]

I think you would have to ditch all magic using classes (and strip magic out of the ranger), and create a new magic using class; YK does not have the same sort of arcane/divine distinction that core d20 does. You might even make a core eldtritch knight type class; many of the characters in YK are very adroit in combat and summon demons only to aid them in combat.

Reworking the magic and summoning system would be a must.