Some companies just shouldn't get some licenses. Elfquest is a good example of giving a good license to a good company that simply isn't right for the job.
Elfquest was a huge hit during the 1980's; one of the first independent comics to take off, along with Cerebus, it had a huge audience, and is still going strong. Basically, it's about a small tribe of feral, half-wolven elves driven from their home by a forest fire and fanatical humans; the tribe, called the Wolfriders, retreat through the caverns of the nearby trolls, but are doublecrossed by the troll king and dumped into the desert to die. After crossing the desert and settling with a newly-discovered desert tribe, the chieftain of the Wolfriders - Cutter, along with his sidekick, Skywise - crosses back to try and discover the origin of the elves.
That, in turn, leads into the actual quest of the story, where the Wolfriders eventually discover that they're the distant descendents of "pure" elves, who crash-landed on their world and were barely able to survive. The Wolfriders themselves descended from a pure elf who shapeshifted into a wolf, stayed that way, and bore a half-elf/half-wolf cub who became the progenitor of the Wolfriders.
That's a pretty dry and uninformative sketch of what's basically an eight-hundred page comic story, and it doesn't touch on any of Elfquest's strengths. The authors manage to give every single Wolfrider a distinguishing personality - that's for eighteen or so different characters - as well as a subplot of their own, which is skillfully interwoven into the body of the plot. There's fighting, romance, sex, friendship, jealousy, greed, scheming and plotting, betrayals, massacres and tragedies throughout, which is more than most people expected from a comic book at the time.
When I read them - around fourteen - I thought that they were fantastic, and they are. There's holes in them looking back from the doughty age that I'm at now, but they're still excellent fantasy. They're still making Elfquest comics now, as a matter of fact, some of them still covering the Wolfriders and their children, others covering the World of Two Moons a few thousand years into the future. (Elves in space, basically.)
The problem is that Chaosium picked up the license about a quarter of the way through the series, at issue 18 - before the series was even over. Most of the early books were the creators slowly learning how to tell stories, establishing the world, moving from a relatively close focus on the elves to the world-defining events of the later books. (Well, actually, the focus is always on the elves, but the scenery in which they interact gets bigger.) Elfquest the books were about characters who went from being feral near-savages to creating a elven nation of sorts; Elfquest strips you of all of the progress that the Wolfriders made and throws you back to where they were before their home burned. You can play the Wolfriders and retell their stories - which is, to be sure, a possibility - or make your own characters and have them wander around the periphery of the central story.
And that's a problem. In Star Wars, there's an entire universe that took place around the Rebellion. In Lord of the Rings, there's endless amounts of free space to scrawl stuff into. In Elfquest, it's the very beginning of elven history, the steps from a tribe to a nation. It feels like there's no extra space to stick your characters without adjusting events so dramatically that it stops being Elfquest's story. Nothing that you can do can really affect the story; the Wolfriders will still find the Palace and the mother of their tribe, and the rest of the story gets along perfectly without them. It's like playing Hamlet: The RPG. It doesn't matter if there's another castle full of Danish nobles down the road that you can play, Hamlet's death is the point. The book does give a little advice, suggesting the characters meeting other elf tribes - or playing the Wolfrider tribe in the past, which seems like the best option - but there's not much more advice given than that.
The RPG just seems to fail to capture any of Elfquest's spirit. For example, the combat system is hugely detailed - it's the Basic Role-Playing System gussied up for combat, complete with hit locations, parries, dodges, special weapons, missile weapons, fighting in darkness, mounted characters, and various other combat widgets. But combat was never a huge part of Elfquest. To be sure, there was fighting, especially towards the end - but there's no need for a combat system this complex to emulate a comic like this. (They do offer options to strip down combat in the latter half of the section, though.)
Elfquest has more in common with Vampire: The Masquerade, with its focus on clashing personalities and various intrigues, than with, say, GURPS. It's a pity that the system doesn't even begin to reflect that. Chaosium didn't really have a choice when it wrote the system; while the book has a publication date of 1989, I think that it was published earlier, probably about 1984. Since then, there's been a lot of development in the field, pretty much across the board. Elfquest is old, and it shows it; and there's nothing wrong with that, but using this game to simulate Elfquest is like using a Sherman tank to clean a cupboard. It'll get the job done, but it's not the right tool for the job.
Again, not for lack of trying. There's a lot of information here. There's character sheets, filled out for each member of the Wolfrider tribe, and for a few non-Wolfriders too. There's a summary of the first eighteen issues of Elfquest that's pretty decent, a creature catalog, an elf generation guide - including a list of subnames that you can use to create your own elf name - a fairly comprehensive guide to the psychic powers that most elves wield, wolf ecologies and so forth. There's the option given to create your own tribe as part of character creation, although I can't find it within the book at the moment. There's also a lot of gorgeous art from the books themselves, both full pages and comic panels, and a bunch of color plates depicting various characters from the story. (I also like how the character sheets have blank templates of elves of different sizes and genders - you can draw over them to create your own personalized elf or troll.)
The scenarios unfortunately show off the real problem with the Elfquest RPG. Two of them are direct translations of scenes that happened in the comics; the rescue of Redlance from humans and the battle between the Wolfriders and Madcoil. Another deals with natural threats, such as a plains fire that drives elves into a magical trap accidentally created by true elf magic. The better ones have some interesting thoughts, but don't capture the atmosphere and tone of Elfquest. "Lord of the Spiders" deals with a true elf who's gone mad and created a parody of the environment in which the true elves live; and if you had good players, it could be a lot of fun. The same goes for "The Dying River" - but the assumption is that the elves will make outright war on the trolls polluting the river, possibly with the aid of nearby humans. There's no option for negotiation that I saw within the scenario - and while a lot of trolls do get killed towards the end of Elfquest's first story, it seems unusual that the scenario assumes that it'll end in war.
I can't recommend buying this game - which is okay, since it's largely out of print. Chaosium did a good job with what they had, but they were outstripped both by the difficulty of writing around a setting that's highly focused and the lack of the proper tools to do the job. If you do want to play in the Elfquest setting, you'd be best served by kludging it into another system - I'd be inclined to transfer it to the White Wolf system myself, but that's just me. (Actually, I can already see how it'd work quite well, but I'm sure that devotees of other systems will be able to suggest alternatives in the sassback forums.)
And just a quick hint: If you happen to loan a game book to the local oaf, don't expect to get it back in one piece. I made that mistake with my copy of Elfquest, which is now missing its back cover and looks like a dog's been chewing it.
-Darren MacLennan
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