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Dragon Lords of Melnibone

This review might be considered flogging a dead horse (or dragon), as it's a fairly old product in a dead line, but comes up from time to time in message boards in various places, from the ones here at RPG Net, EN World, to usenet.

Dragon Lords of Melnibone is a d20 sourcebook for Michael Moorcock's character Elric. While he's not a household name, Michael Moorcock is a somewhat popular science fiction and fantasy writer. He's a bit of a commie (though ironically he apparently lives in Texas for tax purposes...) but is a fairly nice guy (he has a website where fans can ask him questions about anything and he's very good about answering) and I've read most of his novels. He started off as something of a hack writing pastiches of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the like when he was really young (16 or so), but he developed into an excellent writer and one of the more experimental writers around. Along the way, he had one hit series, that of Elric! He tried to kill him off in the 60s(and did, actually), but presumably for money purposes, he kept writing them over the years, to this day (the last Elric novel being released last year, The Dream Thief's Daughter).

His novels were a big influence on Dungeons and Dragons, most notably the concept of Alignment. Pretty much every novel of his involves the struggle between the forces of Chaos and the forces of Law. So, it would be something of a circle becoming complete, having a sourcebook for D&D/d20.

Chaosium has had the license for Michael Moorcock's novels for 20 years or so, and has put out several RPGs based on it, all (until now) using their Basic Role-Playing System.

The first was Stormbringer. This had 4 editions over the years, though they were generally an evolution, like what they did with Call of Cthluhu. Then came Elric!, which was a dramatic new version, with little in common with the original Stormbringer. (There was also a Hawkmoon RPG, based on another of Moorcock's characters, and fairly recently Chaosium sub-licensed the Moorcock license out to another company to produce a Corum supplement, yet another one of Moorcock's characters.)

Dragon Lords of Melnibone is essentially Elric! converted to the d20 system. Because the two systems are quite similar, much of the text could be repeated (and was). (Another version of Elric, originally going to be Elric! 2.0, was released and retitled as Stormbringer 5th Edition a few months after DLOM was released. I used to own it, and near as I can tell, it was identical to Elric!, only with the layout and art from DLOM)

This book basically has 2 ratings.

If you're not aware of the Elric! RPG, or own the Elric! rulebook, Dragon Lords of Melnibone appears to be a very good book.

OTOH, if you're like me, and own the Elric! RPG rulebook, you'll see that Chaosium literally just did a quick cut and paste job on it, replacing BRP (Basic Roleplaying, or d100) stats with d20 stats (this being possible as BRP was originally very very close to D&D, basically taking all the stats and adding a d100 skill system). This has resulted in a lot of problems and weirdness in DLOM. The most notable example is the entire Demon Summoning/Binding system and the magic system.

This review is mostly going to focus on how it was translated to d20, and the problems with how they did it. (Elric is a character in a series of novels by Michael Moorcock, Elric! is a game about him which Dragon Lords of Melnibone is based on).

Elric! uses a fairly simple basic system that uses spell points or as they call them, magic points. Each character gets a number of magic points per day based on another stat called Power or 'Pow' for short.

This isn't actually a great fit for the Elric books, but isn't nearly as ill-fitting as the default d20 fire & forget system, which DLOM uses. In any event, it would have been fairly easy to port over the spell point system from Elric! to DLOM, but Chaosium doesn't even bother.

Similarly, the demon system also is flawed by the conversion. In the original Elric!, the Power stat is sacrificed to bind a demon, and also determines how many 'magic points' a character has, which are temporarily spent to determine the summoned demons characteristics and abilities and such. Besides the fact that the magic points regenerate rapidly, the Pow stat can be increased fairly easily. So it's not that big a deal to summon a demon.

But in DLOM, instead of magic points being spent temporarily to determine a summoned demon's stats and abilities, experience points are permanently spent. And instead of sacrificing a point of Pow to bind a demon (which was easily replaced in Elric), any ability point is sacrificed in DLOM. While it's not as hard to increase ability scores in d20 as it was in other versions of D&D, it's not nearly as easy to do as it is to increase Pow is in Elric. So, demon summoning (and binding, especially binding) is much more costly for the summoner than it should be. Far more, in some cases (like the 'Passing Demon', which eats 1 point of the caster's ability scores per day).

This actually solves one of the problems of Elric! - demons being incredibly common in the game products, but not nearly as much as in the fiction. But it goes too far, making demons almost unusable.

A closer conversion would have substituted Experience Points (XP) for Power points, as both can be readily regained. However, as they use a different scale, this would have required some extra work on Chaosium's part.

The Demon section in DLOM also repeatedly calls for opposed "Will:Will" rolls, which is just a seach and replace of the "Pow:Pow" roll from the Elric! rulebook. A opposed "Will:Will" roll is not explained anywhere in DLOM, but is a common Elric! (or BRP) mechanic requiring use of a chart where you compare two character's stats and make a d100 roll., In d20 terms, I would guess just roll a d20 for each character, and add the characters Will Save - whoever gets the higher score, wins.

Another example of the search and replace style, is in the skills of the sample characters and NPCs in the book. D20 is fairly skill-lite, in that skills are fairly broadcategories and characters don't get a lot of skill points. BRP takes the opposite tack, at least in later incarnations - there are a lot of skills (and some very narrow and just plain silly, for the comedy factor) and many are add arbitrarily when creating characters. For instance, City Guards in BRP get things like "Ask Embarassing Questions 50%" and Barmaids get "Be Seduced 40%" (though in my experience, they really have "Spray Mace 60%").

The fumble/major wounds tables were also similarly lifted straight from Elric!, as is the Allegiance system. Those work well enough with d20, but could have been tailored better to it, rather than just lifted almost verbatim.

They also fail to adhere to d20 conventions in a couple of places. Most notably, some races get -1 and +1 to their ability scores. Sorcery and Sorcerer is often used not in it's d20 sense (that of a character will innate spell casting ability), which can be confusing. Rather than using the Profession (Sailor) skill already in the d20 rules, they create their skill for sailing ability - Sailing. But, for their included new class, the'Sailor', they use the default - Profession (Sailor). The Sailor is also pretty much a joke - it's just the Expert class with 10 skills picked. (The Sovereign Stone Campaign Setting book took this idea, and fleshed it out fully).

They also removed the sample adventures from previous BRP editions. This is really quite silly. Presumably they were hoping to follow this up with a separate adventure book, but they didn't put out a followup until a year later. What's especially sad, is the Games Workship edition of Stormbringer had about half a dozen D&D style adventures - adventures that basically involved the exploration of strange ruins or structures or mysterious places. But Chaosium seems to now look down on those sort of things with disdain, being stuck up and focusing supposedly on more role-playing orientated adventures (despite the fact that that goes against the Elric novels. Elric is basically a D&D character - he does D&D style stuff. Explore ruins, goes on quests, rescues people (sometimes - he usually ends up accidently killing them), travels to mysterious places, and gets in a lot and lot of fights. While there is some stuff that would be 'role-playing' if it were a game, there's not all that much, Elric doesn't even talk much in the novels.)

The art is also pretty bad. The Games Workshop Edition of the original Stormbringer (which I own) is an absolutely wonderful looking book. Unfortunately, this doesn't use any art from that except for on interior piece from that is used as the cover for DLOM. While supposedly DLOM features the best art from all the international editions of Stormbringer, it looks like they got the worst. The layout is okay, but the size of the text is very large, almost the size of the font in books for the sight impaired and features huge amount of white space.

The end result isn't a very good book. Not completely bad, since the Elric! RPG rulebook was pretty good (although notably lacking in some areas, like planar travel, which Elric does quite often). But the whole thing is very disappointing, because Chaosium apparently sees DLOM or d20 not as a viable game system of it's own, but simply a way of selling Elric 2.0/Stormbringer 5th edition. The head of Chaosium admited as much on their website. And Chaosium employees have publically said they hate the d20 system, and are basically made d20 fans to feel unwelcome on the mailing list for their Moorcock based games. Which is their right, but they shouldn't go around making d20 products, then, should they?

A book based around Elric really written for the d20 system could have been really great. While the Elric!/Stormbringer games weren't bad, some (or at least me) feel that BRP is best suited for realistic games, or semi-realistic fantasy, not the epic, high fantasy of Elric.

I've run several Elric! games that resulted in dead characters in the first combat. Realistic, yes? Fun? Maybe, depending on your taste. True to the novels? No. While it's true Elric had his magic sword Stormbringer which made him almost invincible, he also had a companion named Moonglum who didn't have a magic sword and was also very capable in combat.

But instead, Chaosium did a quick hack job (strong words, but really no other way to describe it) to sell their other game line...(which didn't seem to work, either). Many people diss the conversion that Pinnacle did with Deadlands d20, but they came up with 10 real new core classes, a new spell point system, new rules for combat (some of which have been used in d20 games from other companies), and actually correctly re-statted all the NPCs, monsters and weapons, and showed a very clever knowledge of the d20 system. Chaosium didn't do any of those things. As someone who has probably bought 25+ books from Chaosium in my lifetime (not a complete fanboy, but someone who likes their stuff), I lost a lot of respect for them. However, they seem to have learned their lesson, and are now supporting the d20 version of Cthulhu somewhat.

If you want to do a decent Elric/Moorcock game with the d20 system, then perhaps the best starting block is the Slaine RPG from Mongoose. It's a bit more primitive in feel, but the magic system is a closer fit. Then get the original Stormbringer, and try to convert the classes over (yes, the original BRP game used classes)

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