More cock with Moorcock

2023 promises to be a year of Moorcockian gaming, but what does that mean? Where is the essence of Moorcock and how do we activate it in RPGs?

“A fatality is any wound which deals more hits than the character has Hit Points. This is instant death. File the character sheet,” Ken St Andre declares in the rules of Stormbringer, channeling his inner librarian.

As a rule-set derived from Chaosium’s basic role-playing (BRP), Stormbringer can be brutal. When we began the epic Rogue Mistress campaign last week, the mayhem was unleashed within the first twenty minutes. Two characters were badly injured by demons, while another had an eye-ball sucked out of its socket.

“I didn’t expect to be reaching for the filing cabinet so quickly,” one of the hapless players said.

This year promises to be a year of Moorcockian gaming. Rogue Mistress is a long-running epic for our Sunday group of players, (well, I say long-running, at least as long as the characters can survive.) A recent twitter poll overwhelmingly supported Stormbringer as the game to run at UK Games Expo in June. Next month, a group of us are gate-crashing the One Ring Road Trip (the Tolkien games weekender) to play a selection of Moorcock games. A whole weekend of Moorcockian games, but what is a Moorcockian game exactly?

“A LEPER FIGHTING WITH A RUSTY BLADE”

Breakfast in Ruins podcast takes exception to how mundane BRP Stormbringer is to play. For them, it’s more concerned with a shopping list of pots and pans, than emulating the experience of being a hero in the multiverse.

In the game, the characters are generated randomly, so it can famously have a party of adventurers featuring a Melnibonian sorcerer alongside a blind, leper beggar from Nadsokor. As my players are discovering, it can create gritty, brutal encounters that are gruesome fun, but the books are different. Apart from Corum being tortured by the mabden, Moorcock stories usually involve legions of armies, exotic demon entities and moral dilemmas against a psychedelic background, far removed from the minutia of the simulations of BRP.

In their most recent podcast about Moorcock and role-playing, the Breakfast in Ruins panel suggested that it wasn’t enough to invoke Moorcock with set-dressing. There was some other ingredients required to create a more satisfying experience. They landed on the idea of doomed characters working through a sandbox world where it was possible to link across into different games operated with different players, like the labyrinthine Tenerife project masterminded by Andrew ‘Clarkey-the-Cruel’ Clark

The Lester Dent Method

Perhaps one way of cracking the Moorcockian RPG code is in the composition of adventures. Back in 2020 I created a Hawkmoon scenario that was developed using Moorcock’s writing techniques described to Colin Greenland in Death is no Obstacle, among other places. The structural techniques that he adopts could easily become a template approach to scenario design in the spirit of The Five Room Dungeon.

This is the method adopted by Moorcock at his prolific height, during the sixties when his industrious, Johnny Walker fuelled output was funding the experimental New Worlds magazine. The pulp author Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, suggested a ‘Master Fiction Plot’ formula with an emphasis on the drivers of action. Moorcock adopted these methods, such as the goal of the villain threatening the protagonists in a manner that they have something to move away from as well as their personal quest. He also says that doom should be a menace hanging over them “like a black cloud”.

By filling in the blanks, it is possible to compose a credible scenario, but there are limitations. This is a plot driven method rather than a ‘situation’ generator. RPGs need situations to engage with rather than plots to move through. Perhaps the most useful advice is to have a list of fantastic images to hand and an emphasis on motivations that both push and pull.

The Hawkmoon scenario was based on the Netflix series Money Heist. The protagonists needed to take over a Granbretan oil-well and extract the fuel from the site before the Dark Empire forces arrived in Ornithopters. The idea was developed using the Moorcock writing techniques. Tremendous fun, according to Breakfast in the Ruins podcast, but it could have taken place in any setting, it wasn’t distinctively Morrocockian enough.

Pang TangAGON

The Lost Province Issue 2 (from December 1992) includes an article from Pete Strover who suggests that the true key to playing in the Moorcock universe is playing the Eternal Champion. He asks, “What happens when different aspects of the champion meet? How would players react if they were told that they were all aspects of the same person? It’s a great tool for encouraging player interaction.”

Maybe this is the key to the Moorcockian role-playing experience. Playing champions. The BRP mechanics don’t have the ability to accommodate The multiple scales of encounters experienced in Moorcock’s books ranges from the mundane to the cosmic. To be effective, the mechanics need to be able to tolerate this range in interesting ways.

John Harper and Sean Nittner’s Agon is the game of ancient greek heroes and is a perfect match for the Eternal Champions. I’m not usually a hacker, but I can feel a Moorcockian version of the Paragon rules, but it will be able to accommodate Eternal Champion level of play. The rules allow for a cycle of play where they forge heroes on an odyssey, facing contests and battles, challenges and strife. There’s even a doom tracker to emulate ‘the black cloud’ of menace.

At the Moorcock weekender, I’m going to take players on a tour of the multiverse as Eternal Champions to face the paragon of challenges. Maybe Elric will be heading to a prosaic doom rather than the filing cabinet.

Dirk the Dice