This game of Stormbringer (1981) writte by Ken St Andre and Steve Perrin. That game was played the 8 September 2025v at the Adept Play Happening in Norrköping. I made 9 pregen characters that the character could pick from.

The book suggest to play with “3 to 6 players, probably with two or three characters by player”. I suggested 2 characters by player.

Christoffer picked a Sorcerer Warrior-Priest of Arioch from … and a leper beggar from Nadsokor. Ross picked a Sorceress Noble-Warrior-Priestess of Lassah (the Elemental Lord of Air) from Myrrhin and a thief from Shazaar. Ron picked a sailor (captain) from Dharijor and sailor (mate) from Pikarayd. I had one page of description of the regions of those pregens in only one paragraph by region. All those pregens were created randomly using exactly the book’s rules, then I raised some of those skills to get them slightly better than at creation.

The arbitratry premisse was that the Priestess of Lassah, a member of the winged people,  was looking for some knowledge able to help her dying race to survive. This happened after the Sack of Imrryr and the fall of the Melnibonnean empire. All the characters are on a ship aiming to explore the ancient ruins of the tower of a Melnibonean Sorcerer.

The combat

Stormbringer’s combat is brutal. Order of action is done by descending DEX. Every loss of 4 HP, a character lose 1 DEX point. If the amount of damage is equal to the character’s maximum Hit Point divided by 2, the character takes a majour wound. In this case, in addition to the damages, they suffer a major wound effect rolled a table. In our game, the Priestess of Lassah lost 2 points of Charisma and gained a scar in her face.

At first reading, the combat rules seemed to be a bit of a frozen frame, going character by character in order. The alteration of DEX due to the wounds mitigates that. But more importantly, spatial positionning is also a great deal. In this game, the two sailors characters waited outside the tower, in the entrance, expecting for a clackar to get out. The Priest of Arioch baited him to get out. Due to the entrance, only one clackar could get out. To resolve that, we used the Ambush rules.

An ambush is a big deal in combat. Every characters involved roll their Ambush skill.  If they all succeeds, a roll of 1D4-1 is made to see how many round the target is surprised. In our case, I rolled a 3, so 2 rounds. During this turn, the target cannot parry or dodge or do anything that could help. At their DEX round, Ron’s sailors succeeded at hitting the Clackar, inflicting a crushing serious wound first (with a head concussion), killing him.

Failing an ambush roll doesn’t mean there is no surprise. In a previous combat, an orchid-snake tried to ambush the Priest of Arioch, failing its roll. In this case, the target rolls his See skill. If they succeed, they can draw their weapon in hand – but they can only parry during the first round.

Spatial positioning seemed to be the most important factor in this combat. The one death of a character was clearly caused by her bad positionning : inside the corridor, facing the doorway where the clackars were coming from.

The Sorcery

The Sorcery felt really like “game-breaking” in this world to me or, more accurately, “physics-breaking”. First, Christoffer’s decision to sacrifice one of his character was obviously impactful for the situation, and our perception of his character.

Ross summoned an air elemental with his Priestess of Lassah, on the ship. Summoning an elemental is automatic but binding it is a roll (and may give POW to the Summoner). Christopher’s priest of Arioch summoned a Knowledge demon on the small island. The rules have literal description of how the ritual has to be done, fictionally speaking, and it includes a sacrifice. Christoffer sacrificed his second character, the beggar, and sucessfully bound the summoned knowledge demon to the leper’s bell.

Rules-wise, the Demon of Knowledge had the ability of knowing a lot of things. A Knowledge demon has 3 attributes: INT, CON and POW. POW is determinated by rolling 3D8. Then, the Sorcerer sums all of his attributes, and distributes the total (minus the demon’s POW) between the demon’s attributes, so here, it was INT and CON. The demon had something like 67 in INT and 12 in POW, and the rest in CON. The CON represents the resistance/fragility of the object in which the Demon is bound (here, it was the bell).

A Knowledge Demon is not a magic trick: it basically forced the GM to read his prep here.  Christoffer asked his demon what was in the tower. He rolled under the Demon’s INT and succeeds, which means, accordint ot the rules, that the demons knows everything about what is inside the tower. The question being straightforward, I described what was in the towers (the type of creatures, their numbers, where they are, the type of treasures, where they are, etc.). I understand now why the insistance of GM advices instructing the GM to interpret very litteraly any questions of the Sorcerer, and trying to manipulate any possible interpretation in the worst way. Their power is incredibly strong: but any little mistake in phrasing and it would work against you.

I would have loved to see more demons and demonic interactions.

Playing two or three characters

The instructions are the same than in Tunnels & Trolls. It makes a lot of sense to have a “stable of characters”, with 2 or 3 characters that you play at the same time, and the player’s stable being refreshed between “adventures”/session if one or more of their character die. Learning sorcery also takes times, months, with a mentor, and if you have 2 or 3 character, it makes sense that you would decide than one of them is not “here in the session” but doing other stuffs.

Ron used his two characters to prepare an ambush outside the tower, but inside a combat turn. Christoffer used his second character for sacrifice in benefit of his other characters. Ron’s characterization was quite interesting. One of his sailor came from Pikarayd, an evil chaotic region. He played it as someone a bit too interested by Christoffer’s priest of Arioch sorcery – cheering him, questionning him. The rules are explicit in saying that a character can be trained to do sorcerer by another player character or non player character. I could totally see this relationship developped session after session with Christoffer’s Priest of Arioch training Ron’s mate, or maybe try to sacrifice him, or Ron’s Mate joining the Church of Arioch. There are rules about that, inspired by Runequest’s cult rules.

Ron’s second character was a Dharijor captain. He seemed wiser, giving cautious instructions to his mate, with a clear goal of securing the ship and its team. It’s obvious that should if any other player got the mate, the interactions would have been really different.

I’ve heard people being cautious about “roleplaying with themselves”, but I think it’s not a big issue. The GM could easily get the personnality and roleplay intepersonnal interactions, with the player instructing the GM on what his character is doing.

Elan and potential development

Priests and agents of law, chaos and elemental lords have a specific skill: Elan. Elan is a currency that can be traded for POW. Christoffer’s priest of Arioch started with 7 Elan (rolled during character creation), and won 1D4 Elan for having one character slain.

Depending on which god a character is worshiping, Elan is not gained in the same way. We forgot to do it at the end of our session, but because a second character had been killed, Christoffer’s sorcerer would have gained a second 1D4 Elan and could have won 1 POW by trading 10 Elan.

Priests and agents can also call their god for a divine intervention, rolling 1D100 under their Elan. At some point, every character can gain POW and INT by training by Sorcerers, acquiring Forbidden knowledge during play, or other magical means.  Once they are priests, or Agents, they surely are attracted in the grabby schemes of the God’s wars.

I’ve read Elric stories before playing this game, in that order: The Dreaming City, While the gods laugh, The Stealers of Souls, Kings in Darkness, Dead God’s Homecoming.

I got a sense of how I would play this in longer term. First, I’ve set up that game just after the Sack of Imrryr, when Pan Tang allies with Dharijor to expand its empire, against a weaker confederation between Jarkhor, Myrrhin, Tarkesh and Shazaar. This is the backstory of the “Dead God’s Homecoming” and the state of the regions as described in the rulebook.

I think it would be easy to take the events from the Elric stories and treat them as fixed backstory. It is an apocalyptic world: there is cosmic/metaphysical threat that is going to happen, and the world is going to be destroyed. There is nothing that can be done about this. The campaign should not focus on what Moorcock’s characters are doing in the stories with the player character as sidekick, but on the player characters and what they are doing in those fixed events.

I could definitely see them on Pan Tang pirates ships raiding Tarkesh, or as mercenaries defending a city (or attacking one) against Dharijor. The game assumes a dungeon crawl (it’s definitely a dungeon crawling game), but it’s really to see how this could develop in something different than “exploring ruins”: infiltration inside palaces to assassinate a king, assaulting a Pan Tang pirate ship, etc, with the players setting their own goals.

This, added to the various way of gaining Elan, seem to be a potential driving force for a campaign. Also, I would like to see characters becoming agents. This means that the character is chosen by a god to fulfill his own agenda. Which basically means using it as a tool – surely for the worst. I can see some brutal fun to this.

I hope I get to play more of this kind of campaign soon.