Tell me your experiences with Elric!/Stormbringer...

[NoOneofConsequence]

Can anyone tell me a little about the novels? I understood that it took place in different time periods? ...

Elric is the fulcrum of his universe, a being called the Eternal Champion. An incarnation of the Eternal Champion exists in every universe and he/she fights continually in the war between the forces of Law and Chaos.

Moorcock has written stories about several Eternal Champions:

Elric - in the Young Kingdoms (Earth before the beginning of time)
Corum - a prince in an alternative universe
Dorian Hawkmoon - a knight in far future earth where Europe is being conquered by the Gran Bretanians (Great Britain) who are using techno-magic. (This is my favourite of all)
Erekose - an Eternal Champion who actually travels between universes and is aware of who and what he is. (Most Eternal Champions do not know)
Jerry Cornelius - a modern Earth figure (and my personal vote as the primary inspiration for Lestat)

As his body of work expanded, Moorcock frequently had his eternal champions meet one another to solve multi-verse threatening problems. Time travel, multiple universes, divine and demonic gods etc.

If you ever wanted to play a Manual of the Planes based campaign then your best inspiration is Moorcock's work. His conception of the multiverse is almost awe-inspiring in its scope.

I was a big fan of Moorcock in my teens but haven't read any of his works for years now. They're well written, but the characters all tend to talk like university graduates though.

 

[Neowolf]

I haven't looked at any of the various Elric RPGs myself, but I can tell you quite a bit about the novels. I've read all of them except for 2 (Revenge of the Rose and another where Elric somehow ends up fighting in WWII (???)).

The character Elric is an anemic sorcerer/swordsman/noble from Melnibone (pronounced Mel-NI-bone-ay, there's an accent mark I couldn't type over the second E). Melniboneans are cruel, beautiful pseudohumans with powerful ties to the multiverse's magical forces. They serve the powers of Chaos (more or less the evil gods), and at the time of the Elric novels are in a sharp decline as their power in the world wanes in the face of the upstart Young Kingdoms (inhabited by humans).

The setting is truly awe-inspiring, and I'm very tempted to run a D20 homebrew game there myself. The biggest roadblock to doing that, however, is that you'd have to almost totally scrap D&D's magic system and rebuild it from the ground up in order to have it fit the setting. From what I remember of the books, Moorcock's magic didn't often immediately and painlessly produce impressive results. Elric might be able to summon a wind elemental to push the sails of a ship along, but it usually took him several minutes of pleading with it in the elemental's own language (which to the untrained observer would probably sound like an ear-splitting wail). Magic also almost always left the caster drained and exhausted afterwards, I doubt even a very high level mage would be able to perform more than one or maybe two summonings per day.

Once again, I can't comment on how the existing RPGs handle this, but it seems like it would be pretty difficult to quantify.

 

[NoOneofConsequence]

I haven't looked at any of the various Elric RPGs myself, but I can tell you quite a bit about the novels. I've read all of them except for 2 (Revenge of the Rose and another where Elric somehow ends up fighting in WWII (???)).

The character Elric is an anemic sorcerer/swordsman/noble from Melnibone (pronounced Mel-NI-bone-ay, there's an accent mark I couldn't type over the second E). Melniboneans are cruel, beautiful pseudohumans with powerful ties to the multiverse's magical forces. They serve the powers of Chaos (more or less the evil gods), and at the time of the Elric novels are in a sharp decline as their power in the world wanes in the face of the upstart Young Kingdoms (inhabited by humans).

The setting is truly awe-inspiring, and I'm very tempted to run a D20 homebrew game there myself. The biggest roadblock to doing that, however, is that you'd have to almost totally scrap D&D's magic system and rebuild it from the ground up in order to have it fit the setting. From what I remember of the books, Moorcock's magic didn't often immediately and painlessly produce impressive results. Elric might be able to summon a wind elemental to push the sails of a ship along, but it usually took him several minutes of pleading with it in the elemental's own language (which to the untrained observer would probably sound like an ear-splitting wail). Magic also almost always left the caster drained and exhausted afterwards, I doubt even a very high level mage would be able to perform more than one or maybe two summonings per day.

Once again, I can't comment on how the existing RPGs handle this, but it seems like it would be pretty difficult to quantify.

Chaosium still hold the rights to produce rpgs based on Moorcock's work and have already put out a d20 Young Kingdoms campaign setting.

 

[Maldur]

I have played stormbringer, Elric!, Hawkmoon, and Corum.

They were all CON games, but I have been playing in a ones a year, convention campaign (hawkmoon) for about 7 years now, and it has been great.

The GM (Lawrence Whitaker) is a writer for Stormbringer and the other eternal champion RPGs, so Im a bit spoiled.

His website holds some nice info, primairily for Hawkmoon.
www.brilliantthings.org.uk

 

[Kamard]

While I have never played any of the Elric RPG's, I must say that I absolutely love Michael Moorcock's work. I think the best part of them is Jerry Cornelius, or one of the many respellings of that name. He's a sidekick with a winged cat. Somehow, whenever one of the Eternal Champions needs a sidekick or some information or some advice, he shows up with exactly what they need. Hes the plot device of the gods...heheh.

In any case, my favorite of the serieses is Hawkmoon.

 

[trancejeremy]

I like the original Stormbringer a lot better than Elric/Stormbringer 5th edition.

The original one is actually not unlike d20 in a lot of ways, only with d100. Probably the best implementation of BRP I've seen. Not very balanced though - as others have mentioned, some people could end up with Melniboneans (who tend to kick ass) and another person could end up playing an ex-farmer. Elric/Stormbringer 5th edition fixes the balance problems, but also does a lot of things I don't like, like removing abilities bonuses for skills.

The trouble is, I don't think either version does a great job of capturing the feel of the Elric (or any other Moorcock) novels. They tend to be epic fantasy. Elric and company hack down dozens of lesser opponents, travel planes, confront gods, etc.

BRP, OTOH, is relatively realistic and gritty. Characters die quite easily, even tough characters. This is okay for Call of Cthulhu, but not good for epic fantasy. Or campaigns in general, where you have characters live from one session to the next.

This resulted in size inflation in NPCs in Chaosium products. Just about every NPCs has a size of 15 or greater to improve their survival chances. (Size is averaged with Constitution to get hit points).

Also, there's demon inflation in NPCs. For some reason, just about everyone has demon possessed equipment. Demon swords, axes, etc. But because this is even more deadly, just about everyone also has demon armor. This is worse in the Elric/Stormbringer 5th edition stuff

 

[trancejeremy]

I haven't looked at any of the various Elric RPGs myself, but I can tell you quite a bit about the novels. I've read all of them except for 2 (Revenge of the Rose and another where Elric somehow ends up fighting in WWII (???)).

The Dreamthief's Daughter, the latest one.

Elric does quite a bit of planar travelling, that's how he gets to WW2, along with another incarnation of the Eternal Champion.

 

[Desdichado]

I must be the only one around here who thinks so, but I found that the Elric books sucked hard, and Moorcock was an over-writing hack. Perhaps the difference is that I didn't read the books in junior high school, like nearly everyone else I know. When I went back and read a few of them a couple of years or so ago, they seemed like the kind of thing that would appeal to junior high kids. Maybe I'm just missing the nostalgia that everyone else attaches to them?

 

[King_Stannis]

I must be the only one around here who thinks so, but I found that the Elric books sucked hard, and Moorcock was an over-writing hack. Perhaps the difference is that I didn't read the books in junior high school, like nearly everyone else I know. When I went back and read a few of them a couple of years or so ago, they seemed like the kind of thing that would appeal to junior high kids. Maybe I'm just missing the nostalgia that everyone else attaches to them?

Diffr'nt strokes, I guess. I just read the series for the first time (I'm 32), Joshua, and I found the writing quite good. I thought the stories were very imaginitive. The "Fortress of the Pearl" dragged a bit, but other than that I thought the series was great.

 

[arwink]

I must be the only one around here who thinks so, but I found that the Elric books sucked hard, and Moorcock was an over-writing hack. Perhaps the difference is that I didn't read the books in junior high school, like nearly everyone else I know. When I went back and read a few of them a couple of years or so ago, they seemed like the kind of thing that would appeal to junior high kids. Maybe I'm just missing the nostalgia that everyone else attaches to them?

Maybe not. I'm reading them for the first time now (at 25) and I don't mind them. The writing style is pulpy, but that's what was expected at the time. Fantasy hadn't really been around long enough to have the standards we have today

No worse than the original conan books or their ilk.