Taking a break from RPG books this week to talk about some old paperback series.
First up: the Elric books, by Michael Moorcock, one of the most prolific and influential of the British New Wave science fiction writers in the 60s. Many of the concepts Moorcock mainstreamed – an infinite multiverse, a never-ending conflict between the forces of Law and Chaos, a champion whose different facets exists in all possible worlds, all tied up in a psychedelic package – have become standard fantasy fare now, but at the time it is hard to understate just how revolutionary and groundbreaking his writing was.
Elric is his most famous creation, the albino emperor who dooms everyone he comes in contact with, who wields the soul-drinking runeblade Stormbringer, who is bedeviled by his conscience, turns against his people and damns the entire world. The Elric stories are heavy and dark and, in many ways, unmatched in their themes and execution. The climax of the core stories (collected here in six volumes by Ace in 1987) remains for me one of the most shocking and effective endings I have ever read in any genre. Take that, Shakespeare.
Elric’s impact on RPGs is easy to trace. There’s the Stormbringer RPG from Chaosium, which I covered a few weeks ago, as well as another Elric based system from Mongoose in the aughts. White Wolf, the makers of Vampire: The Masquerade, took their name from Elric’s nickname and, I think, many thematic elements of their games from the stories. Elric also appeared in the first couple of editions of Deities & Demigods and the stories were listed in Gygax’s famed Appendix N of the Dungeon Masters Guide as foundational reading for D&D. And of course, the Stormbringer knock-off, Blackrazor, was one of the three iconic treasures in White Plume Mountain.
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