[Games] Ballads of Eldoru (2nd Edition)

[jordangreywolf]

Yesterday, JackMann posted a review to the SomethingAwful forums -- on a thread that seems to be reserved for reviews/rants about particularly dreadful RPGs.

If you care to check it out, the link is here. Warning: bad language on the forum. Also, other games are being discussed, with questionable content.



Here are some excerpts from the review:

Ballads of Eldoru, by Oscar Merlyn Moffett Are you ready for dreams to become reality? To face adventures undreamt of? To face challenges that would make lesser men quail? No? Good, because we're going to review Ballads of Eldoru instead. Ballads of Eldoru (2nd edition) is an RPG conceived of, written, edited, and published by Oscar Merlyn Moffett in 2003. It is a melding of fantasy and sci-fi adventure, promising Waterdeep meets Star Wars, with fantastic monsters, strange technology and magic, and warriors bearing swords and ray guns. Or it would be, if Moffett hadn't been heartset on making it as boring and clunky as possible. If you've never heard of Oscar Merlyn Moffett, he used to be semi-infamous in gaming circles. He wrote letters to Dragon under various pseudonyms before getting bits of work here and there on actual RPG products. He finally sank his parents' investment money to fund his own gaming empire, which lasted a total of seven books. He was a bit of a crank. He believed strongly that there was a true, right way to play roleplaying games, and by god the rest of us were doing it wrong. Especially you. Stop doing that. You're having the wrong kind of fun, drat it! Ahem. Anyway, after some forgettable "smells-like-D&D" supplements in the 90's, he started coming up with his own systems and settings, starting with Bloodstain (about vampire janitors), through Gadgets and Gargoyles, until finally making Ballads of Eldoru, which was what ultimately caused his company to implode and left him a forgotten relic of the old days of gaming. As we'll see, there are a number of really clever ideas in the game, and they are all as poorly implemented as possible. At every possible juncture, Moffett dodges letting the players do anything remotely interesting in favor of his high-powered NPCs. Instead, players characters are chained (in some cases literally) in the most boring, uninteresting part of their setting where they can get up to such adventures as fighting low-level bandits, committing warcrimes, and getting in on the lucrative turnip trade. Tune in next time as we learn what he thinks a roleplaying game is! Chapter 1 The book starts out with the standard "What is a roleplaying game?" Moffett meanders a bit while talking about other RPGs, starting with Dungeons and Dragons and RIFTS, then talking about his previous games, Bloodstain (a forgettable Vampire clone where everyone's a janitor) and Gadgets and Gargoyles (a gothic spy game). Anyway, a roleplaying game is a game where you... You know what? I'm just going to let Moffett speak for himself. In a role playing game, or a simulation exercise, you create a structural framework of skills, attributes, hindrances and philosophical facets that you can control in order to best interact with and overcome the formal axioms of the rules construct in order to simulate the workings of a fantasy universe. Your second-order attributes (wealth, level) increase over time giving you greater and greater ability to interact with those axioms in a meaningful way. There is no ultimate goal to this, though your structural framework (or character) may have goals associated with it that you can complete. So yeah. That's an RPG, kids. Then he introduces the setting for Eldoru. Eldoru is the "primary" arm of a spiral galaxy located fifty thousand light years from our own world (or well within the Milky Way; I don't think astronomy was Moffett's strong suit). There is a council of races that have formed the Union of Trade. Organized into competing corporations, these races look for now planets to trade with and exploit enter into mutually beneficial political ties. The book tries to have it both ways with the space races. Some of them are described as scrappy, enlightened entrepreneuers who want to make deals that are best for everyone, while others are corrupt, exploitive, and about as well-intended as the Chiquita Banana Company. One of these planets is Skynight, a planet where--gasp!--magic exists. All of the races are trying to find the best way to trade there. They naturally have the people's best interests in mind--haha, no, they're gonna exploit the gently caress out of them. Many of the natives don't trust these strangers from the stars, and these "backwards savages" have taken up armed resistance against the invaders--I'm sorry, the intrepid capitalists. The players are expected to be natives of Skynight, helping to raise up the level of civilization on the planet and pacify the less enlightened races. That's very nearly a direct quote. There are a lot of references to bootstraps and savages in here. It's at least refreshing to hear not-Europe referred to as backwards savages, I guess. Though there's an implication that the rest of the planet is even worse. He then describes the various regions. They're mostly your standard fantasy places. Your "savage wilderness full of barbarians," your "plains with horse people," your "oriental adventures." There are some cool ones, though. There's a cave that leads to an underground Prester John style land, a republic of wasp-men who live in a flying hive hiding in the clouds, and a clockwork city that's also a living creature. Then he focuses in on the Southern Plains, which is basically generic medieval Europe, only more boring. This is where the bulk of the game will be played, if Moffett has anything to say about it. It's a patchwork of different kingdoms. And when I say kingdoms, I mean each and every one of them is ruled by a king. No warlords, no emperors, not even any queens. They're all using the same feudal system, they all have the same basic laws. The only things that really change are the names and how long the king's beard is. Literally; he has art for each king, but they're all the same picture with different facial hair drawn on. Arguably the worst part of the area is that there's not much to do there. The kingdoms are all involved in peaceful trade, they've signed non-aggression pacts, and there's not much room for conflict. Even in the case of space dudes coming in, Moffett tells us that they would never sabotage each other for fear of looking back and losing that trade. It's all so jam-packed with enlightened self-interest I want to gag. There are monsters in the region, but we're told the most dangerous are either far from the kingdom, or else are dealt with by the armies of the kingdoms. It would be foolish to entrust defense of the kingdom to random vagabonds, therefore the contrivance of other simulation exercises of the adventuring party is not found here, out of respect for verisimilitude. He then suggests the following for the kinds of adventure that players can expect to dive into: The party has acquired a large supply of blood turnips, and must decide whether it will profit them better transport them to Noriskil or to Candleburg. The town guard believe the players have been engaged in smuggling. They must clear their names or convince the king that the tariffs are unjust. A fug troll has been spotted near a township. The players must reroute their journey to avoid it until the proper authorities can deal with it. That's basically it for chapter one. Next we get to character creation.

...

So, he basically goes on along this line, posting his pre-written "chapters," but also sprinkling in with responses to some of the posts from other forumites. Some other fellow reports that he has a copy of the book, too, with the original 3.5" "floppy" disc pasted to the back (Mac format) with digital character sheet and other "goodies," and some folks go on a side-talk about how hard/easy it is to order an old-style disc-reader from China on Ebay. At some point, it's brought up about how Moffett, on something-or-other game forum, argued nastily in favor of an octagonal grid for movement rather than squares or hexagons, even though several people pointed out that octagons don't tesseract. It took someone the trouble of having to sketch out a visual example to get the point across, whereupon Moffett abruptly dropped off the thread and wasn't heard from for a while. Apparently there were other shenanigans involving people having critical opinions of the 1st edition of his game, and his free tossing around of lawsuit threats to anyone so much as mentioning his game in a less-than-praising manner.

The game details shared are quite ... well ... detailed, to the point of excess, and presented in their bug-ridden, broken glory. But he's amazingly even-handed about it, pointing out points where Moffett ALMOST stumbled across a usable game mechanic or an intriguing adventure hook possibility, yet tragically took a hard left turn into mundaneity and unplayability in the end.

The real crown of the whole exchange is JackMann's last post on the topic:

Summary As you can see, this is a very... interesting RPG. There are some interesting ideas and hints of a better system and setting, but Moffett veers away at every possible opportunity. Publishing his own game gave him all the freedom he needed to make his vision come alive. Unfortunately, his vision was hamstrung by his inability to think his rules through, his insistence on controlling what players could do, and his weird obsession with trade and economics. Really, I think the biggest take away is that you need to have other eyes on your work, and you have to be willing to listen to them. Moffett reacted poorly to criticism at every juncture, taking even the mildest criticism as a personal attack. As a result, his game bankrupted him and he's now barely remembered. I'd love to see a game that tackles the basic premise of a sci-fi setting crashing into a D&D one. Something like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but a full campaign setting instead of an isolated adventure. I think you could have a lot of fun with it. Lots of systems have both magic and technology, but I'd love to see one that actually looks at the tropes of Space Opera and Dungeon fantasy and works them together. You could get a lot of material out of the old pulps for something like that, back when sci-fi and fantasy were considered part of the same genre. For the record, I think that the basic system could work okay. 2d10 roll under can work out okay if you control the math better. It's a compromise between the tighter bell curve of 3d6 and the much swingier d20. But you'd need to actually figure out how the math works and keep it simple. Obviously, Moffett failed to do that. He just went with whatever notion popped into his head and called it good. I could almost forgive him, since he had to come up with mechanics for over two hundred skills, but then, he's the one who made it a system with way too many skills that all work differently. Of course, most of us haven't come up with full game systems, and it's harder than it looks. But there's a reason most people don't. It takes work, and if you don't have a critical eye for what you're doing, it's going to turn out incoherent. Leaving aside the failed system and the waste of a setting, Moffett clearly had a specific idea of what he wanted in a game, but couldn't get away from the basic framework of D&D. It's clear he wants the game to be about trade and agriculture, but the rule system is still clearly based around the old D&D model, despite his railing against the "contrivance" of adventuring parties. It leads to a frustrating situation where the system is built around adventurers, but then throws everything Moffett can think of to keep you from adventuring. So, in summary, if you want to know the real take-away from Eldoru, read the first letter of each paragraph in this post.

This was posted yesterday, after all. :)

Comments

[tuftears]

Heehee! Got me. Did you contribute the cover art knowingly for this?

[jordangreywolf]

Yeah. :) NinjaTheWolf helped out by posing for the cover as one of the spacemen. One of my younger coworkers did the pose for the other. I deliberately used PAPYRUS as the typeface for the title, used a cheap Photoshop "chrome" effect for the lettering, added a generic "leather" border, and -- most important of all -- threw in a gratuitous LENS FLARE. :D I was gratified when someone noticed each of those points on the forum thread.

The obnoxious "WARNING!" label is a reference to Grimtooth's Traps, which used to put an obnoxious "warning!" message on the cover as well. I tried to make the "ELMSTAR GAMES" brand logo look like something that had been originally hand-drawn (so of course, it WAS, complete with stippling), and evocative of the general feel of logos such as the old I.C.E. (Iron Crown Enterprises) logo -- not to mock it per se, but just to evoke a more "old-school" feel.

The big work I put onto this was with the distress and stickers. I printed the mock-up cover, laminated, and then distressed it, putting a lot of care into giving it a fold along the binding point/gutter where it seemed to be in actual softcover books.

I used stickers from some actual former clearance items (from Sci-Fi City) I still had around the house; the choice was deliberate that the ORIGINAL sticker is well up in the corner, to be relatively unobtrustive, while the first clearance sticker obstructs part of the title. The "50 cent" sticker was an actual orange circle sticker I applied and used a marker to write in the final "desperation" clearance price. I scanned it all back in (for the appropriate moire effect that happens when you print something and then scan it back in), then used Photoshop to alter the details of the original store sticker for the fictitious "Ballads of Eldoru" product (taking care to still keep "JPEG scatter" around the letters and numbers).

[tuftears]

Nice work! Well done. ^.^

I snerked at 'May be too complicated for players of other RPGs.'

[jordangreywolf]

Heh. Yeah, it's the sort of thing that's supposed to be a "facetious warning that's really a boast" -- but, in light of what's actually in the book, is actually a warning after all. OH IRONY!

[rowyn]

The "9.99" and "50 cents" stickers are a particularly nice touch. :D

Very convincing!