Hawkmoon Redux # 2 - How Not To Recreate Hawkmoon

So, in my last Hawkmoon musing, I basically boiled Hawkmoon’s story and attendant Science mechanics down to a narrative of capitalist cult exploitation of natural resources, vs the religious fanaticism of Stormbringer’s demon magic system. Moorcock’s fiction is expansive enough to contain these ideas without him necessarily having consciously written with them in mind.

However, before I dive into the nitty gritty, I want to set out a no-go zone, a dead end that I do not wish to explore. Let’s start by reviewing what I did wrong with Stormbringer.

My Stormbringer Mistake

In my Stormbringer redux project, I often lost sight of how the original game blended mechanics with narrative devices in evocative ways. For instance, the rule that Beggars have 10% in dagger PLUS 1% per extra beggar in the group makes total sense in light of the Nadosokar segment of the Elric saga. I emulated this with my special weapon attacks and troop rules in a good way, I think.

However, I got bogged down in simulationist crunch, such as my encumbrance rules. To be fair, the designers of 4E fell into the same trap when they added extensive powers and calculations for the demon section, and a laundry list of item prices, including canoes. To me, the brevity of the elemental rules worked so much better than the bloated 4E point buy demons, or even the limited random roll of 1E demons. In the same way, my detailed encumbrance rules take away from the mood of the game, but the lack of encumbrance in the original rules also was not a perfect solution.

The Hawkmoon Problem

Hawkmoon has a similar danger - that of filling out Science too much. Just as Stormbringer 4E took too much influence from GURPs and tried to make a point buy demon system that is arguably less compelling than 1Es unfinished rules, Hawkmoon’s Science rules could tempt one to flesh them out with lots of steampunk tech from other games. Imagine Baron Meladius and Hawkmoon dueling with lightsabers, or D’Arvec flying his own starfighter?

Ugh, I think I just threw up in my mouth.

This is not the way I wish to take.

The Way of Hawkmoon

If anything, the Hawkmoon books were closer to Dune than to Star Wars. Just as in Dune the Fremen still use wormtooth daggers because personal shields can’t stop slow weapons, the juxtaposition of Hawkmoon’s high tech (ornithropters, flame lances, and weird cannons to name a few) with the primitive swords and horses used by many combatants gives the series and its setting a unique charm.

I am overdue for a reread of both the Hawkmoon RPG and the novels that inspired it. When (or if, as RL seems trying to stymy me at the moment) I can sit down and do this, I think I’ll be able to tread a fruitful path through Hawkmoon with far fewer missteps than I did with Stormbringer.