Just started listening to the Breakfast in the Ruins podcast about Moorcock. Good stuff, sounds like me and my mates riffing back in the day.
They have a nice pisstake on the Stormbringer RPG HERE.
I agree that the D&Dification of Moorcock's world was a misstep. It focuses on emulating sword & sorcery, not the epic fantasy of the Elric books, which include the fantasy trope of rags to riches to rags again as a pulp background to the epic saga foreground. Ditto the halfhearted reshaping of Chaosium's house system into a Stormbringer emulator, with D&D bean counting thrown in for good measure.
That said, their assertion that they wouldn't want to play a beggar points to one of the conundrums in roleplaying in a Moorcockean sandbox. You can't have a party of all Elrics. It just doesn't work as a fun game, and didn't really exist in the source fiction aside from the Four-who-are-one crossovers (which are a kind of literary Power Rangers transformation in themselves).
(What's the difference between THIS...)
(... and THIS?)
In the novels, the Eternal Champion is both powerful yet lacks free will. The next tier is Companions to Champions, who have more freedom of action, but consequently less power and a higher chance of being sacrificed for the greater good. Finally, Elric and other avatars pal around with local lords and their nameless servants, a third yet expendable tier of players (or pawns) in the great game.
This is all great grist for the mill, and my eventual homebrew Moorcock RPG.
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