Heroes and Anti-Heroes - Or Lovecraft and Tolkien in RPGs

For a long time, I've been thinking about characters in Dungeons and Dragons/Pathfinder and their derivatives and Call of Cthulhu and its epigons. My main interest is the role of the "character" in these games and their relationship to the worlds of the games as well as our world and the world of their authors (D&D/Pathfinder being set in a High-Fantasy world inspired greatly by the works of Tolkien and colleagues). As part of this thought process, I have also pondered the question of heroism, fear and what is the underlying premise of these games and their backdrop worlds.

Call of Cthulhu

CoC is set in our world, the classic time being the 1920s, when HP Lovecraft created the bulk of his work. Protagonists of his stories are everyday people, scientists, farmers, archaeologists - mainly men who encounter something truly out of this world. The game is based on the Mythos cycle developed by HPL and his followers and collaborators. The game is usually categorized as "Horror", and his work quite referred to as Horror Fiction these days, although in his time, it was, more aptly, called "weird fiction."

Dungeons and Dragons

D and D and its epigons and clones are loosely based on fantasy fiction, suhc as The Lord of the Rings, which, in turn, is based on Western/Northwestern Europea mythology, such as the Edda, Beowulf, the German hero sagas as well as the later, more romantic, works like the Nibelungenlied, Parzival, Le Morte D'Arthur. This type of RPGs are usually called "Fantasy" RPGs and a distinction can be made between High Fantasy and Low Fantasy. 

I have read the works of HPL, some of his followers, Tolkien, as well as most of the epics, sagas and fairy tales mentioned above. In addition, I am very familiar with the Greek and Roman mythologies and epics: The Iliad, Odyssey and Aenid. With regard to my role-playing credentials: I have been playing D&D since the late 80ies, have been playing and DMing CoC since the nineties and have also played Pathfinder and other types of RPG (NWoD). 

Based on this, I want to enter into a longer meditation on these, as I have been thinking more andmore about such questions as:

1. What is horrific about CoC?
2. Is CoC really a Horror RPG?
3. Why do I personally find it easier to immerse myself into a completely fantastical world (e.g. in Pathfinder), which, undoubtedly, requires a higher effort in suspension of disbelief?
4. What is a hero?

The role of "Horror" in HP Lovecraft

The works of HPL contain very many different types of stories from the slightly supernatural splatter-based horror akin to Nightmare on Elm Street (Herbert West - Reanimator), which mainly feals with the scientific exploration of prolonging life by reanimating the dead, to stories centred around the "Mythos" as known from Nyarlathoptep, Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, and the Dunwich Horror. HPL also wrote very poetic stories about searching for the meaning of life, coping with being a "displaced person", namely a person who does not belong (The Dreamlands Cycle, but also Polaris). HPL himslef had always felt that he had been borne too late, that he should really have been an esquire living in New England during the time before the war of independence. 

The stories of overt horror, with a massive and bloody death toll, or horrific experiments are probably the ones that modern readers of the genre would find easiest to get into and would possibly get the most out of as they represent a visceral form of horror. 

His stories about the mythos are, however, quite often deemed boring and quite a lot of affacinados of the horror genre find them plain disappointing. The reason for this could be that quite of the horror scenes in those stories are grotesque rather than terror-inspiring. While the great Cthulhu certainly instills awe with his tentacled face, towering stature, green skinned body and huge claws, he is these days competing with such creations as the Alien by HR Gieger in the Western horror fans'  minds, and Godzilla in the East, and must come out the loser in the contest. The same goes for the Dunwich Horror or Wilbur Wately. In trying to describe the otherworldliness, their difference, Lovecraft goes so much overboard in his descriptions of writhing tentacles, ichor and red sucking mouths: "The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. " (The Dunwich Horror) and the reactions these cause in the people who behold them (nervous breakdowns, temporary madness) that they become almost laughable to an audience familiar with such paragons of heroism as Ellen Ripley in the face of the Alien(s), or Riddick in Pitch Black and countless unnamed people at the sight of Godzilla in one of her (!) many incarnations on film. I would go pn to argue that, today, "vreature horror" is much less powerful than it may have been in the past. Possibly due to the fact, at least since WW II, we have reason to believe that nothing is more horrible and can cause more malicious damage to humans than other humans themselves. The time of non-human monsters (and we've had them through the ages from the python slain by Apollo to the dragons in Beowulf and the Siegfried saga) has ended. The new horror wears the face of Hannibal Lecter, Ted Bundy or Josef Mengele. Everyday faces, the faces of the good neighbour, the face of the parish priest or soccer coach. 

Consequently, those stories by Lovecraft, where the horror is inside the normal human being, as I would argue, are still among his most powerful today. An Asenath Wait, the nameless protagonist in the Outsider, but also the almost poetic loneliness of the short piece "Polaris" can and will cause uneasiness and terror in the modern reader, just like the creeping plague in "Colour out of Space". All these stories contain little to no "Otherness" in the form of other life forms, they tell of subtle horrors, more or less fantastical in origin, but they are all "quiet" pieces. Likewise the splatter-oriented "Herbert West", while not one of my favourite pieces by a long shot, I find it quite horrific to imagine a doctor embarking on such horrific experiments, much more so than someone trying to summon Yog Sothoth or his offspring on Sentinel Hill.

In fact, the question remains if any of HPL's otherworldly creature would ever have been able to induce horror in anyone at all. During much of his life, HPL felt a deeply-rooted xenophobia, which becomes evident in many of his stories and letters. In addition, he was always more concerned with things than people. His attitude towards human beings in general, though not to individuals - he had a wide circle of friends and correspondents, was that of a misanthropist. He felt misunderstood, an outsider. Seeing as this feeling of alienation is in itself full of horror for anyone,  HPL would have had to look elsewhere and beyond the normal wordl and normal life to find things that he would consider horrific. He found something  akin to horror in his early ventures into astronomy, which started in his early teens. According to his own words, exploring the universe made it clear to him how small and insignificant mankind really is. So, while he is an outsider in space (it was in the 20s and 30s that it was discovered that there were countless galaxies and our solar system was on the fringe of ours.) In order to hammer home this point, HPL invented a race of gods which reside somewhere in the universe and to whom mankind is of no significance whatsoever. These beings could easily annihilate our world if they really wanted to, but they usually don't even waste any thought on us, so we are, for the moment at least, quite safe. But HPL goes one step further when he creates this race of gods (and whether they are gods is open to debate, and I will give my opinion further down in this essay). In order to make it absolutely clear that these gods are not our gods (i.e. the gods that man has created, first in the form of animals, then in his own image through the ages and has been worshiping for thousands of years), he gives them wholly alien aspects. And I believe this is where the story stumbles into the grotesque. For the human mind, shaped and bound by the physical we and arguably the whole universe exits in, there are certain tropes, forms and shapes which lend themselves naturally to being used when creating something. Tolkien, in his devoutly Catholic approach, calls it subcreation. He believes that god created the world and with it a framework within which mankind can "subcreate". Going beyond this framework is impossible. While I do not agree with Tolkien on the creation part, I believe that mankind created god, not vice versa, I do agree that the physical world we perceive limits our ability to conceive "the Other". Whatever we create always somehow reflects "the Familiar". HPL probably saw this too and attempted to overcome this hurdle, but, in the process, failed. For his gods to reflect his ideas, they needed to be wholly different, he achieved that, but at the price of making them grotesque, I would even venture to say ridiculous. The Elder Things from "At the Mountains of Madness", who, as scientists find out, created mankind on the fly, possibly as a by-product of some experiment, are basically huge walking cucumbers with wings. HPL is always then at his scariest when he does not describe his cosmic horror but simply calls it "unnamable". The infinite possibilities of imagining these things left to the readers' imagination are much more terrifying. We find the same in Greek mythology where the gods usually appear in male or female form. However, when they present themselves "as they are", people who see them are incinerated. Again, we don't get a description of what the gods look like, but it is left to our imagination what terrible sight could burn a person on the spot. 

The trouble with Elves

Autumn Nightmares - Changeling the Lost

Before you read on, one word of warning: If you are an avid devotee to JRR Tolkien's work, you may find that this post will cause offence and you may be very unhappy about it. I would suggest that you do not read on. If, however, you are a devotee to Tolkien but can accept a different point of view, do read on.

The trouble with Elves started for me with "The Lord of the Rings". I first read the Hobbit when I was around 10. At 12, LotR followd. However, I had known Elves (Alben, Alfen) for several years prior to that. I had first encountered them in the Northern sagas of the Edda and in the Germanic legends. Later, at around age 11, I had come across the "Little People" or "The Gay People" as the Elves are called in the British Isles. They all had one thing in common: the Elves of European legend were deathless, ageless and terrible, yet quite often beautiful, perhaps soulless, but always enthralling to mortals. To meet them was potentially lethal or damaging. Many a boy or girl were taken away and either never returned or returned decades later, just to find their families and friends long dead and gone.
A subset of these Elves were the Fates and their sisters which you can find around Western mythology and faery tales, who either curse or bless humans (especially babies, hence "evil faery god mother"). All types of Elves have one thing in common, they are not of this world, unconcerned with it, solipsistic and yet, every now and again, their paths cross the paths of mortals and some form of interaction (sometimes beneficial to the human party) ensues. I have always liked these Elves, because to me, they embody the true spirit of immortals. They are not unlike the immortals from Greek and Roman mythology, with their self-centred attitude to life. This type of Elf can be found in the RPG Changeling: the Lost, where the Fae exactly these types of behaviours and traits.
Then came Tolkien (and I must say that I have read Tolkien widely, not only his works, but works about him and his sub-creation, so I am well-versed in his mythology, although it would never become my desert-island-pick). Tolkien also models his Elves as immortals, but they come to share the world with other, lesser races (lesser because they are mortal). The Elves are described as something like guardians of the world, they awaken in it, are called West by the gods, dwell some time in their great land and in the end many of them come back and colonize the world from the West and make it their own (and in the Silmarillion, the Elves are actual not really very different from human beings: they fight each other, quarrel, behave as petulantly and irrationally as children sometimes, kill and get killed, fall from grace, get thrown out of the garden, in one word: their story is quite a lot like the story of mankind from the very beginning of biblical creation to the expulsion from Eden, with the only exception that not all Elves were thrown out).
In the Silmarillion, Elves are like human beings, except that they can theoretically live until the world ends, are stunningly beautiful and really like trees. So, this first iteration of Elves, because they will be quite different in LotR, is essentially a group of beings that are human but without the one horrible flaw which all of us are cursed with and all of us (including and perhaps especially, devout Catholic and WWI veteran, JRR Tolkien) hate: mortality. So, they are us, only with no end-of-life date. They kind of resemble in some ways the Greek gods. They are a little closer to original Elves, except that they ally themselves with humans and co-exist with them and teach them.
In his second iteration, as we can see it in LotR, the Elves really become annoying. They turn into ever-grieving, miserable characters that only seem to lament the passing of their age and, in the face of the greatest danger, only basically sigh and look to the West as their road out and to the East as to the lands they once owned, but which are now going to pass to someone else. And it is this grief and this pain that does not work. Because in order to feel pain and grief, one must truly be mortal and live under the threat of annihilation (even Elves that have been killed are not gone, their spirits linger and are reborn, with all their memories intact). So, Elves can never really lose anything permanently. And as beings that are already thousands of years old, the changing of their environment should not come as a surprise nor should it make life miserable for them. Tolkien has fallen into the trap that everyone falls into who tries to turn an immortal being into something that can relate to human suffering. By definition, this is impossible, because the ultimate suffering cannot be experienced by someone who is not subject to death. (And some argue that the story of the coming of Christ was invented as a way to explain to people how the god of the Bible is able to understand human suffering, because he himself became human in his son and died. A very interesting and highly-sophisticated psychological tale.)
This problem is so great for me that LotR loses all its charms as soon as the Elves enter the story (Gildor in the Shire is still okay, because he only whines for 3 pages or so), but everything as of Rivendell is just plain annoying. Faced with the threat of utter destruction by ultimate Evil, mankind, dwarves and halflings rally to fight (and their possible results are: death and being annihilated, subjugation by Sauron if they lose, and, least likely: winning and surviving). The Elves, on the other hand, have decided to leave ("I will diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel". I felt like saying: "Good for you, babe, don't let the door hit you on the way out, and thanks for nothing.")
As beings bound to this world, and no blissful eternity to go to, human beings by definition only have the choice to lie down and die or fight on, no matter what. That is the "human condition", and no deathless being can ever begin to grasp it. I believe Tolkien should have been able to see this due to his Catholic faith (see above). But he didn't and he therefore failed in making the Elves worthwhile in  his story.
I recently discovered an interview with Christopher Tolkien in which he explained that, towards the end of his life, his father was mainly interested in the metaphysical aspects of the Elves and what it means to put an immortal being into a mortal world. Unfortunately, Tolkien never came to any conclusions and these questions were never addressed. But this remark indicates to me that Tolkien understood the problems he had created with his Elves and they did not work as a race (especially not in LotR) and that they needed to be rewritten.
I, for one, would have been very grateful if he had managed to do it.

Call of Cthulhu RPG – Foregoing revenue?

I have always been fascinated by the CoC RPG (Chaosium Inc.), but due to a lack of interest in my group, I need to rely on playing solo adventures. Now, you will say “If it is solo, then it is not an RPG anyway.” And yes, you are right! A group’s trials and tribulations and adventures being run by a good GM cannot be beaten by any solo experience. Still! If you want your fix, you need to get it somehow. And Chaosium got this! So, in the 90s they published a series of “Alone…” books (Alone against the Dark, featuring a huge adventure in which you travel around the globe, burning through 4 pre-generated investigators, Alone on Halloween, Alone against the Wendigo), in addition, a series of solos set on Grimrock Isle was released.

Now, I did not buy them, because, back then, I just did not have time to do any RPGing. Now, 20 years later, they are unavailable anymore. I checked everywhere, and I could only find pirated PDFs on the web. In addition, I found (and bought) a print-on-demand version of Grimrock Isle!

So, I wonder: what is keeping Chaosium from either selling the PDFs for downloading (I would pay!), or (even better) as print on demand?

The same goes for many other Chaosium publications which are out of print now (Horror on the Orient Express, anyone). I’m sure many people would love to get them/download them and pay for it. But no, they remain unavailable. I don’t understand why a company would forego that kind of easy revenue.

Changeling the Lost - Campaign - Post 2 - Conceptualising the True Fae

What attracted me most about Changeling the Lost was the concept of the True Fae. As a student of ancient languages, culture and mythology, the stories told about the True Fae and the Changelings reminded me strongly of, among other myths, Ovid's Metamorphoses: Omnipotent, callous beings (Greek/Roman gods) pursue and abduct humans, who are changed beyond recognition as a result (Daphne, who is turned into a laurel tree to escape Apollo is a perfect example of an elemental Woodblood; Arachne, who beats the Greek goddess of wisdom, warfare and weaving, Athena, in a weaving contest, is turned into a spider because Athena was so enraged that she had lost. Arachne would be your perfect Skitterskulk or Venombite beast).

Other tropes come to mind as well: The Greek gods especially were, even in Greek times, feared and considered immoral and callous (they tend to laugh a lot in Homer, but this Homeric laughter is not really all that merry or positive). Being immortal and forever unchanged, they cannot understand the human condition no matter how much time they spend with humans. They do consort with them, sire children with them, but usually, the mortal partner is not going to be all that happy afterwards. Anchises, whom Aphrodite had fallen in love with, tried everything to avoid a union on account of mortals always suffering after a union with a god. Seeing as Aphrodite as the goddess of sexuality and lust had decided to seduce him, his efforts were, of course fruitless.

The True Fae are very much like that as well: Immortal and omnipotent, they don't need anyone or anything else to live a life that is agreeable to them (in fact, the only thing that they hate is boredom). Seeing as they are completely autonomous, they are unable to empathise with anyone else (human or Gentry). They are described as positively solipsistic. This inability to understand another's needs leads to behaviours that, to humans, may seem totally alien and cold and inconsiderate and possible even cruel. A Keeper might have brought a lovely human to Arcadia to be their lover, but being unable to truly love them emotionally, the human will suffer emotional neglect. Whether this is true cruelty, which, to my mind, implies that the person inflicting the cruel abuse is able to understand what this behaviour causes in the other, or whether it is just inadvertent, but "normal" behaviour, is unclear. The True Fae remain ambiguous. And this is what makes them so terrifying and wonderful at the same time. Many of them are terrible and beautiful to behold, many durances are both wonderful and horrible for the Changeling. Not all Keepers abuse their Changelings, some treat them very well indeed and dote on them, what makes the stint in Arcadia unpleasant is the fact that the Wyrd inflicts changes on the human that change them inadvertently into something else. Imagine an "Old Lady in the Woods"-type Fae who abducts a young boy and dotes on him like she would on a cat, as a result, the boy is turned into a beast True Friend Changeling. He is exceptionally well-treated, but he is stripped of his humanity entirely. This, in itself, is terribly cruel, but was it intended? Hardly.

What makes the Fae formidable is the fact that they are so different and alien that humans and Changelings can never hope to understand them. This leads to great opportunities for gaming. The True Fae can be whatever the troupe want them to be. They could behave completely unpredictably. They could even come through the Hedge and walk right past a motley, merely ignoring them unless challenged, because, at that moment in time, they have their sights on something else. They could even ally themselves with a motley for a while for their own gain. And some Changelings might even choose to stand with their former Keepers in a conflict because their durance was not bad at all, they just escaped because they wanted to go home again.

As far as antagonists go, the True Fae are among the best.

Changeling the Lost - Campaign - Post 1 - Coming to terms

Changeling the Lost - a Storytelling RPG from White Wolf, set in the New World of Darkness. 

I don’t recall precisely when I first heard of Changeling the Lost. I only remember that it was well before 2009. I also recall that it was quite an unusual incident, because I had not been involved in RPG or RPG-related tasks for a very, very long time (more than 15 years). Additionally, I was not aware of any gaming going on anywhere near me, no groups, no cons, nothing. I also don’t quite remember how I found out about it, only that my first contact was through the internet. And somehow, I recall that there was music involved as well.

Anyway, what I did hear back then was somehow both offputting and fascinating at the same time: An RPG about a group of characters who had been abducted by monsters straight from a fairy tale (yes, those evil fairy godmothers exist, and you don’t want to meet them!). After their abduction to Arcadia, these characters were (ab-)used, generally either as tools or toys. Their uses ranging from lovers, muses and entertainers (dancing till your feet bleed and then some more) to hunters (putting the falcon in falconry), prey (the deer being stalked) to plain slaves to be worked (and changed in the process) till they became so adapted to their tasks that their physique and mind changed, sometimes dramatically. Many of them did not survive, some managed to make their way back to the world of mortals, but the changes they had undergone could not be reversed, they would forever be different, apart, lost.

This premise led me to investigate the game, and I read up on the discussions on the web how this could be play, whether it was too dark, was too close to the abuse-storyline to be played at all. I came across a demo pdf, which I downloaded and read, and did not really find inspiring. I then abandoned the topic, as I did not quite grasp the concept (I had never played World of Darkness, old or new) and, of course, had noone to play with anyway.

About 2 years later, sometime in 2010, I came across Changeling the Lost again, this time again by chance, because I had seen some articles on the web and heard it mention in podcasts. This time, it was players who had given it a spin and talked about scenarios, chronicles, story arcs, and it started to make sense. I was still without a gaming group, but now I started to look for more material, and I found loads: message boards, character sheets, entire chronicles, several youtube films, which ranged from trailers to a very evocative monologue by a GM soliloquising about a chronicle he was going to run and thoughts and ideas he had been collecting. My interest was now seriously piqued. Even without the prospect of ever playing it, I just enjoyed thinking about the concepts and listening to/reading up on actual plays: People were having serious fun with this! And the depth of the world they were creating was fascinating.

Fastforward to 2011, I became part of a gaming group, and half-way through the year, we moved to RPG. I also got more involved in actual play podcasting and came across a great CtL-podcast on flamingsofa.com. That’s when I decided I needed to give this a try. I started buying the books and now, after several months of reading and research, am ready to go.

But before I start running (and documenting) a chronicle, just some thoughts on the material and the game itself. There are 10 books altogether, in addition to NWoD core rule book. The books are really well made, great artwork, good to excellent writing (the fluff is very evocative), and the covers are something to behold (take the back of each book and scrutinize it carefully: the front illustration is repeated, but overlaid with the Thorns from the Hedge: you see the world through the Wyrd, really great idea, it took me 2 weeks to see it, and then I had to check every single book to make sure it was there throughout).

The material is so intense that it is very overwhelming, so, I have decided to start slowly, I will ease the players into the world and introduce them to the concepts in-game rather than trying to outline them upfront. The idea of the Changelings being reborn to the mortal world and having to learn how to live there again makes it a perfect starting premise: You don’t know much, decades might have passed, you need to come to terms with the new reality. This perfectly fits the theme of displacement, anxiety and looking for stability and patterns.

Runebound 2nd Edition - a solo player's take

This is a copy of an article I published at boardgamegeek.com.



Runebound is one of my favourite games, and I have been reading and posting in the forums for several years now. During this time, I have seen various arguments about strategy (or lack thereof), about whether the game is broken, about whether it is even worth getting, about why people seem to heavily house-rule it and if the sheer number of fan-variants is not an indication of the fact that the game is faulty to begin with.

This has led me to write this overview. And I will begin by saying what Runebound is not: it is not a strategy game like Puerto Rico, but it is also not a dice fest (you roll more dice in Arkham Horror or Descent), the highest number of dice you will ever roll at any point in time is 5, and those are movement dice.
It is an RPG-fantasy-based boardgame with character development, but not with character creation. It can be played by 1-6 players quite well. Depending on the number of players, their age, their interest (PvP yes or no) however, the rules may have to be adapted. The rule book provided by Fantasy Flight Games helps with this matter: it makes suggestions as to how to speed up games or slow them down, how to make more challenges available to players and how to do cooperative and PvP gaming. This proves one thing: Runebound is a very adaptable, open platform that anyone can tweak, improve on or change, depending on what they want to get out of the experience of playing it.

Brief overview over the mechanics:

Runebound is a character-levelling game in a fantasy setting. Each player randomly draws a character at the beginning of the game. There are fighter and magic-user classes. Checks are made using two d10. There are three stats plus fatigue and life. All these five can be increased when the character levels up. In addition, artefacts, weapons and armour as well as events, challenge cards etc. can modify the basic stats in a positive or negative way. Each character can have up to two allies.
Movement on the board is done by rolling up to 5 movement dice which terrain symbols. A maximum of 5 steps can be taken in each movement phase, depending on whether the relevant terrain symbols have been rolled. Artefacts and events can modify movement.
Experience is gained through resolving challenges, which usually involve fighting an enemy. Players usually receive experience counters and “money” rewards when solving a challenge. The money can be used to heal damage, buy artefacts, weapons and armour or hire allies.
Fights are played out in 4 phases:
Before combat
Ranged
Melee
Magic
While the before-combat phase does not always take place, all other phases take place. A player attacks in one phase and has to defend in the two others unless an ally steps in on their behalf.

Artefacts, weapons, armour and allies usually become available during the market step in the cities. During a market step, a player adds one card from the market deck to the market stack of the city they are in. They can then search through that stack and shop for any cards they can afford. In addition, some events add cards to the stacks, allow players to search the deck and some challenge cards even turn into allies or weapons/artefacts or armour.

There is also a PvP-element to the game as well as the possibility of using certain cards to influence other people’s play (for example changing their movement dice etc.)

Brief information on strategy:

Although this is not a strategy game and chance plays a great part (dice rolling as well as drawing cards and random character selection), there are certain strategic elements to Runebound that need to be taken into account. The most important thing to note is that you need to adapt your strategy during the game.
Depending on your character’s stats, you need to decide in which areas you want to invest in first when levelling up. A magic user will therefore look to their ranged and melee stats because due to the phase-based approach, by the time the magic phase starts, a magic user could already have been taken out in phase one or two. Also, depending on the availability of weapons, artefacts, armour and allies, you may decide to concentrate on levelling up on certain stats rather than others. If a magic user manages to get a really powerful sword, they may decide to invest in melee over magic. On the other hand, the availability of a magical artefact may tip the balance for your fighter in favour of the magic phase.

Playing the game – some considerations:

The following are my own personal considerations that I have come up with myself or by looking at the forums and files on BBG to make Runebound an exciting personal experience for myself. They are not intended to explain how the game works or how people should play it.

There are several things that I do to adapt the base game:
a) Buy additional cards to get additional challenges as well as items and allies.
b) Add player variants (Midnight Doom track, Cities of Adventures by Judd Jensen, adapted slightly).
c) I add flavour-based changes to the mechanics to enhance the fantasy-based experience.

As described above, item and ally cards become available when a player performs a market step in a city. Depending on the number of players, this may mean that there will only be very few cards available (at the start only 7 cards are laid out). In addition, the costs for the available items and allies can be too much to buy at the outset. This can lead to a huge dilemma because money is made through solving challenges, which can be very bad for your health or even deadly if you go into them on your own and more or less “naked”. So, you battle the challenges with no weapons and allies (worst case scenario) and earn very little money for these and then have to spend all your money on healing and as only very few cards get revealed and the doom track is ticking away, you may be quite soon on the road to failure. In addition, with so few market steps, all the cool cards that I have added to the decks are hardly ever revealed. Thirdly, I don’t like the idea of randomness in this area. Here, I prefer flavour and logic. I go to a city, and then I have to rely on chance whether I can buy a weapon or armour, an artefact or an ally? I’d much rather prefer a choice. So, I have split the deck into 3: one deck for my allies, one for artefacts (to indulge the magic user in me) and weapons and armour. When I perform my market step, I can decide if I go to hang out at the inn where all the allies hang out, or whether I go and seek out the local armoury or visit the old hag who sells all the magic stuff. This ties in nicely with the Cities of Adventures variant, which introduces a die-roll on entering the city and (completely in keeping with the locale) offers different events that can happen to the character.
I also lay out 3 cards each in each city (not missing out Tamalir) at the very beginning and my character can have a market step at the very beginning. I do not outfit my character with anything nor do they get more than 3 gold.

I adhere religiously to the Doom track. When my time’s up, my time’s up because evil has spread so far that the end game is launched, ready or not. I play a different knock out system. I play semi-soft. I keep my experience counters (why would I lose my experience?) but I lose everything else. The reasoning is, I’m unconscious and get robbed, my allies view me as a useless leader and flee. However, I get found and put into the Halls of Healing in the nearest city and wake up fully mentally and physically restored. I do not get a market step but do a Doom check straight away.

This is my way of playing Runebound, and perhaps it gives you some ideas about the game.