Reviewed by Tom Zunder

 by Ken St. Andre (and others)

 published by Chaosium Inc.

 GW edition reviewed, published in UK by Games Workshop 1987

 no longer available new

 Score:  ****

Stormbringer was the first licensed roleplaying game to be published set in the worlds of Michael Moorcock. Before then a copy of Deities and Demigods for AD&D had listed gods from Moorcock novels, but this was unauthorised. TSR chose to remove these gods from future editions, although I have heard from both Chaosium and from interviews with Moorcock that neither party actually raised an issue with TSR about this.

Stormbringer was written by Ken St. Andre, a figure famous in role playing as the author of Tunnels and Trolls. T&T was the second fantasy rpg in the field, both humurous and lighthearted and also a breath of frsh air in comparison to the development of D&D and AD&D at the time. T&T is a freewheeliing game in which many of the concepts fundamental to modern rpgs were first tried, and RuneQuest, Chaosium's first rpg, owed a lot to the concepts in T&T. (Attributes modified by species, playing non humans, no separation between monsters and players, attributes modifying skills.)

Stormbringer was a development of the simple Basic Role Playing concepts that lay behind RQ, CoC and many other 1980's Chaosium rpgs. It was, in keeping with the setting, a wilder version. Armour hit points were expressed in dice and rolled at every blow, character generation was quite random, leading to wildly imbalanced characters. Dread the day you randomly created a beggar from Nadsokor, you had to role play hard to cope with that… Combat was wild, violent and deadly, and I have to say that it all captured the feel of the Elric books of the eighties very well. This was the Stormbringer of the short stories, of the slash and kill approach to storytelling which Moorcock did in the seventies.

In Stormbringer a critical happened on a roll less than 10% of your skill, so double damage death blows were common. The hit points locations of RQ weren't used. If you took half or more of your total hit points in one blow you suffered a Major Wound, and the effects of those were long term and vicious. After playing RQ and Stormbringer for years I think this is a simpler mechanic.

Stormbringer went thru' 5 editions, and progressively refined demons and magic, trying to balance the sheer power of sorcerers with everyone else. At the same time Moorcock started to write new, considered and balanced Elric stories. Just as the game and novels had always been wild, the novels were now calming down. Chaosium stepped in and decided to start from scratch with a more balanced and stale game platform.

Don't get me wrong. I both think Chaosium were right, and I also think Stormbringer is still one of the most vibrant and raw power games ever. It's very well for the authors of Elric! rpg to state that their new game is closer to the saga but that is after MM has retro-written substantial chuns of literature into what was originally a dark, evil and chaotic set of tales. At the time Ken St Andre wrote Stormbringer he was creating the sort of freewheeling game that felt like the books. The game was one of the incredibly powerful and evil sorcerers and the poor dregs they killed. It made for a wild and sometimes deeply dark game, especially when your friends just decided to take you out because they could, but it was also cool.

Nice touches in this game, all chaotic creatures used d8 for characteristic creation, some of the demons are just aswesome, the sheer knife edge thrill of rolling rando armour, will it hold won't it? Some of the scenarios published for Stormbringer were the best ever published bu Chaosium. Look for the Velvet Circle by Larry di Tillio.

Worth buying? Yes, get this game if you see it second hand, still get it if you have Elric! Since there is still a lot you might use and you might retrofit it into your Elric! game.