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Stormbringer Redux #29 - Anonymous Stormbringer Q&A and Moorcock Psychedelia

I can honestly say that I write this blog mostly for myself and do not expect many replies. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that some anonymous reader lurking out there had left some very deep and delectable questions on my blog in May, which I totally missed due to work, life, and Nuna.

Whoever you are, I really appreciate you taking the time to pose such weighty questions. Here are my responses to your excellent questions and comments.

Behold the psychedelic glory of an old Moorcock cover. Care to guess what book this is?

Q1:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:14 PM

Hello. This seems to be your last post on pushing Stormbringer into balance and stronger narrative.

I’d like to share a few considerations and a silly request.

Silly first. How many fantastic stories have you read that involves a storm at sea and perhaps a ship wreck? How many myths have storms and ships at sea? I can think of a few.

I want rules for sinking ships in storm and rules for being thrown ashore in the middle of the night and waking at dawn.

A1: Waking up on a strange shore is such a common trope in fiction. The whole TV show LOST was built around it, I remember reading it in Umberto Eco's Island of The Day Before, as well as the Bard's The Tempest and Twelfth Night.

There is a supplement about ships for Stormbringer, but I don't recall storm or avoiding drowning rules. Since you end with the narrative trope of being washed ashore, I would say it is GM fiat in a good sense and might not benefit from being codified into rules that could kill PCs due to a shoddy Navigation roll. That said, way back in 2017 before I dove into Stormbringer, I wrote a post about turning death in D&D / LotR into a story hook HERE. I think this would fit the bill nicely, but would require limitations on use (number of times per session, place in the story arc, etc).


Q2
AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:33 PM

Moorcock(as Elric) vs. Stormbringer the rpg.

Moorcock is the story teller that we seek to experience in a story,

I want to stick to the first six books.

1) Moorcock began his mythology with the death of Elric. That blows me away. And his death might have been in vain. All the cosmic actors tricked by a devil in a sword, only to be tricked?

Moorcock the pulp writer had a three stage formula: the hero runs into problems, the problems get a whole lot worse and the hero defeats doom. No major player is to be introduced beyond mid point.

Moorcock is a moralist. He wrote moral stories. This is a hard concept.

A2: Aye there's the rub, we all want Moorcock at our table, but our stories are D&D derived hack & slash fests and none of us have the wits and erudition to draw from literary tropes on the fly.

Sticking to the 6 books makes perfect sense. As I noted in my research on Japanese media (available HERE), a work sets the conceptual basis in the first few foundational stories, then mutates into something unrecognizable as the entropy of success takes over.

Yes, moral stories are difficult when the game reduces moral complexity to black versus white. As I noted in my interview with Andy at BotR, Stormbringer the rpg replaces Moorcock's cosmology with theology, a huge step down in framework.

The way plans go awry in Moorcock's older books reminds me of Matt and Trey of South Park's story advice:

"Each beat of your story needs to cause or be disrupted by the next one."

Note that I did the same in my novel of the supernatural in Japan, Heisei Ghosts.

Q3

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:34 PM

Moorcock is not a world builder. Like any good writer he pulled from his own psyche ideas unique to him or reexamined. Moorcock’s scenes are a random generator of the psyche. “Need a giant. Giant will have ten arrows. Each arrow will be named after a form of suffering.
That sounds cool. That is good…”

https://lucasrolim.itch.io/salamandur-household


A3: I wouldn't say he is not a world builder, but just that he does it in a resonant, lyrical, stream of consciousness way, and not in a literal or cohesive way. If you read my Moorcock Bestiary post HERE (one of my best IMHO), you'll see that I was testing out this idea of creating monsters based on the human psyche.


Q4:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:39 PM

The above link is to a little rpg in the Moorcockian tradition that has random tables.
I’d like Stormbringer to have a chapter of Moorcockian tables in his voice, using some of his favorite words: saturnine, sardonic, chitinous, irony, melancholy…. Use spontaneity. Use speed.

A4: Ooh I am a sucker for a good collection of tables! I will pick it up! (NB If I can get Musk's bank to work and get over my revulsion of giving him money)

Q5:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 1:53 PM

I must have read this at some time, but I consider Elric (Eternal Champion in general)
to be psychedelic sword and sorcery. Moorcock has spoken of how he has hallucinate since a child. His mother might see a green velvet hat in a shop window and he would see a samurai helmet. Quite serious. Later as he used hallucinogenic drugs he experienced what could be considered chaos or awakened dreams.

His youthful writings have a raw creative that is unique to him. Moorcock drew a great deal from the Broken Sword, Ship of Isthar, Jirel of Jorel BUT Moircock was using drugs.

A5: It certainly is psychedelic, as I noted in my Bestiary posts. Considering he was writing in the 70's, Moorcock's use of drugs and the psychedelic nature of his writings are only natural. But there are writers who come from the same era who didn't stand the test of time, so I think MM had something special, a fusion of the psychedelic and mythic a la Campbell or Celtic mythology. Elric is almost a doomed elf from the Norse sagas, as is Corum.


Q6

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 3:36 PM

So his drug use contributed to his aesthetic.
Now here is an odd framework for Stormbringer, four types of drugs. This how Moorcock used drugs:

LSD - The grand concepts.
Cannabis - Relationships
Cocaine - Drive to complete.
Amphetamine - Speed

I don’t expect anyone is going to drop acid for a good Stormbringer session, but if look at the drugs as archetypes, then an early Moorcock story involves big ideas, human struggles, and a confidence the story will work, so don’t labor over it.

A6: I've gamed with stoned and drunk people, and it sucked. I never touch anything stronger than light alcohol, but if other people want to try whatever that is their lookout. Still, I LOVE the drugs as aesthetic and that would make an epic story or random table in and of itself.

What does MM make of this fentanyl induced age, with people folded on the sidewalk like broken lawn chairs? I surmise he'd agree with Philip K Dick in his preface to A Scanner Darkly - they didn't know what damage they were doing.

If we are linking drugs to Moorcock, what would the Elric characters consume?

Elric - Hash

Yrkoon - Cocaine

Cymoril - Shrooms

Moonglum - Pot & booze

Q7:

AnonymousMay 15, 2025 at 3:51 PM

Lastly, a question on sorcery and how much thought need be given to it. How much sorcery is really present in the Young Kingdoms? Outside of Melniboné and the rare, like in RARE human sorcerer, all most none. Perhaps, an argument can be made for priests, but little is shown in the stories.

A7: Fair point, but a story and a fantasy game with no magic cannot have an equal appeal. In the Elric saga, the Melniboneans have made the pacts to access all kinds of magic (Elemental lords, Chaos lords), but their only rivals, the Pan Tangian sorcerers, pale in comparison.

As I posted earlier, for a game I would open up sorcery to all nations, and to any character willing to transform themselves to get it. This is what makes a game where you can play anyone different from a novel following one doomed protagonist. But the game has got to keep the threat of doom hanging over any magic dabbler's head and not devolve into pew pew fireball fights.

Great conversation, thanks for the thought provoking questions and come again!

Stormbringer Redux # 28 - Was Stormbringer The Wrong Name?

I've been thinking Stormbringer thoughts in my limited spare time.

What if Chaosium got the semiotics of Moorcockean game naming all wrong?

(NOTE - This is just a fun mental exercise about my first gaming love. I have huge respect for Willis, Stafford, Peterson and Campbell-Rogers and would not dare to actually accuse any of them of being 'wrong'. The games they made have stood the test of time, but are also products of their time before the RPG market became the demographic-targeted Kickstarting industry it is now. So in that light, and with tongue firmly in my cheek, I proceed in my analysis.)

Stormbringer is not the name of the protagonist, which is confusing for newbies, but that would emphatically come later with Elric! To be fair, these games came out when Moorcock's popularity was at its peak, so eliciting the albino and his runesword were not bad decisions. Then they made a D20 version during the 3E glut, when arguably younger generations of fantasy enthusiasts had also presumably moved on in their reading, and they chose Dragon Princes of Melnibone. Not the most resonant or representative name or ruleset.

Naming the game after the hero continued with Hawkmoon, and Darcsyide followed this trend years later with Corum (not Corum! I note).

Naming a game after an IP's protagonist is, on the one hand, resonant for hardcore fans. But naming a game after a single hero is limiting - Serenity is not named Mal, the RPG. Conan and James Bond seem to be the exception here.

The original FRPG games were named after their setting, so as to appeal to players as a site where they could be the heroes of new adventures.

Forgotten Realms.

Dark Sun.

Ravenloft.

Planescape.

All very resonant, mysterious names.

So what if instead of Stormbringer (or Elric! or Mournblade), which do not have popular appeal they once might have had, we named the next iteration after the setting instead of the characters?

Stormbringer et al become The Young Kingdoms. Hmmm, sounds like a Percy Janes novel. How about Melnibone?

Hawkmoon becomes The Tragic Millenium. Or maybe Granbretan. Sounds like an AI generated Beatles' album.

Corum becomes Bro-an-Vadhagh. Or maybe The Fifteen Planes. Not very enticing.

These place names were made in a highly literary mode, and thus are not as succinct or enticing as other game-only worlds.

But maybe Chaosium had it right after all. Both Stormbringer and Hawkmoon prudly bore a sticker proclaiming them part of The Eternal Champion series of games.

How about we use this as the game name, and choose a resonant subtitle + blurb for each setting?

The Eternal Champion RPG.

Book One - The Doom of Melnibone. The gods of Law & Chaos have chosen your world as their battleground. Whose side will you fight on?

Book Two - Granbretanne Invasion. Repel the superscience armies of the evil empire that seeks to overrun post apocalyptic Europe.

Book Three - The Sword Gods. Free your world from the Chaos gods who warp its very reality.

Now we're getting somewhere.

I need to get to bed.

The final stretch

 Nuna needs a few more hours of my life then it’s out into the world. Quickstart rules, pay what you want.

Core book coming in 2026. Includes the adventure path Return of the Shamans

NUNA Quickstart is Coming

NUNA Quickstart coming in at about 30 pages.

Barebones rules, sample adventure The Silver Machine.

Combat results table to speed up fights in a fun way and Community rules to give characters someone to fight for. 

Pay What You Want on DriveThru RPG.

Let the games begin.

NUNA Quickstart Update

Nuna quick start 95% done!

Today’ teaser:

“Super Science should never make sense. There should never be a catalogue of buyable abilities or gear. Every item should be weird and unique, and above all, just as dangerous as it is useful.