Elric!
tabletop role-playing game
Elric!, subtitled "Dark Fantasy Roleplaying", is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game published under license by Chaosium in 1993. Based on the Elric of Melniboné books by Michael Moorcock, this is the fifth edition of the game originally titled Stormbringer.
Description
The campaign starts when the world is only ten years from utter and inescapable destruction. Like Elric in the original Moorcock novels, the player characters will, during the course of play, be offered weapons, powers, spells, and quests that offer great power, but always at a cost. By engaging with these pacts, a high-level character might reach the stage where they can no longer miss a sword swing, no longer take damage from weapons or poisons, nor be outwitted.
As RPG historian Stu Horvath noted in his 2023 book Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, the world's oncoming doom and the ability to create pacts with dark forces to become unstoppable and invulnerable "seduces players by offering a way around the randomness that so often frustrates their ambitions and, in giving them that power, sets their fate and damns them. It is a rare thing for a character not to be utterly consumed by their choices, just like Elric." Richard Watts concurred, saying, "In Elric!, everyone is self-serving. What matter such details as honour or nationalism, when in less than ten years the entire world will be one seething, shapeless seas? Law and Chaos be damned; greed and self-aggrandisement are the true gods of Elric!."
Publication history
Chaosium published the first edition of Stormbringer, a role-playing game based on Michael Moorcock's Elric novels, in 1981, followed by a second edition in 1985, and a third edition in 1987. All of these used a variant of Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying, with revised rules for magic and other setting-specific elements.
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