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| Spiral bound Stormbringer... |
In my early days in gaming, my favourite SF roleplaying game was Traveller, and my favourite fantasy roleplaying game was Stormbringer, which rapidly displaced D&D (after some flirtation with Pendragon and to a lesser extent, RuneQuest). My first edition was the 1987 Games Workshop 3rd Edition hardcover which fell apart, but my favourite editions for play was Elric! & Stormbringer 5th Edition (which were functionally pretty much identical). That said, the gonzo power levels and chaotic fun of the first three editions still excite me.
I played it a lot pre-University and once again when I moved to Yorkshire post-2002, when I mixed up the early adventures with the Elric! and Stormbringer rules. It was the game that broke my love of simulationist engines (ie BRP); the final game of our campaign was an epic battle, but it took us nearly six hours of play (attack-parry-riposte-parry-counter riposte etc...) and broke me as a GM. I'd recently been introduced to Hero Wars (aka HeroQuest and now QuestWorlds) and I loved the narrative flow and speed of resolution along with the ability to zoom in or out on detail. I wrote a detailed (20,500 word!) conversion of the Elric! / Stormbringer rules to HQ (titled 'StormQuest') for Continuum 2006 to go in the Con Book which was to be published after the convention, only to see the agreement for the rights move agreed at the con, killing the work dead.
I was gutted and stepped away. But it was like catnip for me and I came back again, converting StormQuest to Wordplay (now Tripod) and running The Song of Loeul (from Adventurer Magazine) at Furnace 2014, followed by the three-part The Madcap Laughs (from White Dwarf) along with Graham the next year. And now I'm doing it again. I'm running the two part The Stealer of Souls and The Black Sword at Longcon at the end of June.
I've run these before at a charity 24h event, but that was many years ago, perhaps at sixth form, and with the original game. The modules are superbly structured to follow straight after the events of the story 'The Stealer of Souls' (originally published in The Bane of the Black Sword). They give the players the chance to interact with Elric, Moonglum and Zarozinia and feel like they matter.
The first step was putting them together in a single spiral bound book for the con. I sold the originals a long time ago (yeah, some regret on that) but I do have the PDFs. I also added material from the Atlas of the Young Kingdoms related to Ilmoria, Org & the Forest of Troos, and Karlaak so all the reference material is together. I ordered the print from DoxDirect.
The next step was to pull together the Wordplay conversion and the more detailed StormQuest conversion to use as reference when converting. Broadly, Tripod and Wordplay are close enough to be the same, so I don't expect too much complication when working through.
This weekend, I've re-read all the material in the spiral bound, so have an outline of the campaign flow in my head; the next thing is to actually sketch that flow out, after which conversion can happen. Broadly, there's a somewhat sandbox-like start of murder & revenge followed by an epic chase and then the denouement when a mortal woman challenges the albino former Emperor with a soul-sucking rune blade to mortal combat.
When I converted The Madcap Laughs back in 2015, I needed to be very structured and wrote a detailed conversion, as I was running with another GM so we needed to be aligned. I can afford to be a bit more loose with this as I'm the only one running, but it still needs a proper dose of looking at. The flow of that was pretty linear, but I found that chunking it out helped in thinking about how it should work.
It looks like the players prefer the idea of pre-generated characters so I will be prepping those up, probably referencing the characters I last used in my campaign. Conversion with the Tripod rules should be pretty quick as they are very flexible.
I'll share more as this develops (although some may be post convention because of the risk of spoilers for the players).
17 June 2024
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