After 2.5 years of development, Im Reich der Nibelungen is finished & available at DriveThruRPG in German — and French (core book only), courtesy of Greg! Ron’s greenlit a link, so here it is:

Im Reich der Nibelungen | DriveThruRPG

No promotion (e.g. no pitch or blurb), as befits this place, but some information and related observations:

The game is a booklet of 36 pages and sold in one big package including Rheingold (44 pages of optional rules, monsters and more), a GM screen, a starter adventure, pre-gens, the aforementioned French translation and more.

It’s been an incredible journey: tons of research and insights, new skills, about 50 sessions of play with five different groups, attending my first convention (FeenCon24) to run it for strangers (who loved it!), many discussions and some wonderful new acquaintances. Special thanks must go to our Greg for translating the game – a huge motivational boost! – and for Thorsten Göbel for geeking out on Nibelungs lore for the past twelve months with me!

Consulting Ron also paid off as our discussions here kindled my desire to not just publish the rules, but to teach them. To that end, the last stretch of development was focused on the starter adventure Gunther Must Die — the rules have been stable for about a year at this point.

I’ve run Gunther Must Die four times so far and recently created a scoreboard to compare groups, which the players at FeenCon24 were very eager to do (no surprise as they scored big time and now hold the top spot) and which I’ll use next weekend at KrähenFee Con as well.

And that’s actually one of its pedagogical elements. Here are the others:

1. At the beginning of the adventure, the giantess Lodinga kidnaps King Gunther and vows to devour his manhood within seven days. Contrary to a lot of traditional adventures, the PCs are NOT present during the kidnapping as this would just require the GM to keep them from preventing it so the scenario proper can begin.
2. The GM is tasked with explicitly explaining the scoring in advance (10,000 XP for saving Gunther, 2,500 XP to retrieve his corpse etc.) which should get people oriented towards the challenge and the possibility of failure.
3. The GM is also instructed to explain the mechanism for Gunther’s possible death: He is castrated and killed after 1d6+1 days and this should be rolled openly (or verifiably with a dice cup) the moment we need to know. Because the PCs need at least two days to get to Lodinga’s grotto, the minimum chance of Gunther dying is 1/6 — so the PCs might fail even if they get everything right. I hope to drive home the point that the characters and developments in the original *Song of the Nibelungs* should not be preserved but are fodder for YOUR game.
4. For my first fantasy convention, I provided pre-generated starting characters (level 2, the standard for my game). I also waved around pre-generated replacement characters (level 1) to emphasize that death is a very real possibilty, but won’t keep anyone from playing. (We had one death late in the game.)
5. Classic procedures (e.g. random encounters, reaction rolls etc.) are referenced by the adventure and explained by me at the table prior to rolling (openly, of course).
6. The adventure is clearly a scenario, i.e. a problem to be solved (under time pressure in this case), and not a string of pre-determined scenes or guided outcomes intended to create a satsifying story. (There have been two near-TPKs, so it’s just a matter of time until an entire adventuring party bites the dust.)

In Rheingold, I also talk about how to prepare adventures suitable for the game, provide monsters from Germanic myth (which can hopefully inspire or carry entire scenarios), and explain old practices like ‘simultaneous initiatve’ and using a caller (which I both discovered for myself during development).

Adept Play has been an excellent place to discuss my game-in-development, so thanks everyone for your insights and encouragement!

Best,

Martin (aka Johann)