Broken Sword, Broken Elves

As a teen I read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions but never got around to its slightly later-written companion volume, The Broken Sword, until recently. Both can rightly be said to be foundational works in fantasy literature and gaming, influencing both Moorcock and Gygax with their supernatural struggles between Law and Chaos. But what's also informative is what Gygax didn't pick up from this "Appendix N" novel and put into Dungeons and Dragons.

The trippy UK paperback cover.

The Broken Sword uses many of the concepts and adversaries from Three Hearts; elves, trolls, Christendom, witches, a magic sword, and the Law-Chaos divide. The mythic terrain changes, from a fantasy world based on Carolingian legend to a semi-historical Norse England. So does the point of view; instead of a transported modern hero we have an omniscient, archaism-dotted narrative of a Norse jarl's son fostered in Faerie and the changeling who replaced him.

The Law-Chaos war in Three Hearts is straightforward, but the main matter in this novel is a war between two powers of Chaos, the elves and the trolls. The conflict is tragic rather than heroic, because its Pyrrhic outcome heralds the weakening and fading of the hosts of Chaos. Our lawful world, as in Tolkien's and Moorcock's fantasies, must somehow be arrived at from these narratives set in a dim and unknown past.

Although cruel and evil, the fey races and their mortal allies cannot help but be read as the antiheroes of the story. Law is also more complicated; although Christian belief and oath protect against Chaos, the "White Christ" is far offstage, compared to the Lawful Norse gods - in particular, Odin - who are shown taking a more active hand to set Chaos against Chaos. This situation has parallels to the further complications of alignment in AD&D. Strife can happen within the camp of Evil (Chaos) as well as Good (Law).

Now, about those elves. Anderson's elves, trolls, dwarfs and other fey creatures inhabit a parallel world. They are normally invisible except to those humans who have been granted "witch-sight" through sorcery. However, their deeds sometimes manifest as omens, portents and misfortune for humans.

(As an aside, this would be a great campaign rationale. Ever wonder why the king with his retinue of knights can't go after those goblins threatening the village? They need the adventurers, witch-sighted all, to actually see the goblins.)

Fey creatures also cannot handle iron and are harmed by it. This means that a fostered human or changeling, as well as the dwarfs who are not iron-shy, become valuable tools in the elf-troll war. We catch a glimpse of this in the OD&D and Holmes D&D logic of elves choosing to be fighters or magic-users each day. Holmes apparently elaborated on the reason for this in a novel. Simply enough, the choice to wear iron armor and weapons would nullify the elf's magic. But although games like Runequest took the idea and ran even further with it,  AD&D dropped it cold.

If people complain that elves are overpowered in AD&D and later editions, perhaps one reason is that Gygax chose to go with the Tolkien view of elves as benevolent, superhuman beings. What would have happened instead if he'd taken up the Anderson view of elves as powerful and innately magical, but limited by weakness to the inexorable forces of Law and metallurgy? We'd have perhaps a darker D&D, one with the kind of fey elves that other new-old-school settings have embraced (here, here and here as notable instances.)

The Epic Fantasy Wargame: Survivals

Not only did the hex-and-counter game suffer a sharp decline in the 1980's, but the medium was not that well suited to depicting a fantasy epic. There's a limit to how much information a counter or map hex can hold, and most of these games creaked under the weight of a mass of special rules that had to be constantly looked up.

There is also a kind of first-kiss syndrome that paints a halo around these old games. I think a lot of the positive feelings old-schoolers associate with them are residue from anticipating how cool it might be to try them, as well as a much less critical outlook when actually played. Not by coincidence, gaming companies in the 70's and 80's also seemingly chose to produce games largely on how cool they sounded. They had a naive (by today's standards) outlook on usability, play balance, elegance, replay value, and other factors that have come to gamers' awareness in the Internet decades. Again and again in comments on BGG - and in some comments on previous posts here - we hear that the rules are incomplete and baffling, the gameplay either simplistic and obvious or swingy and random.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame Catalogue:1980-1991

As obscure as the counter-based epic fantasy games from the 70's are today, the ones I presented previously are actually the better-known of the lot. The list below from 1980 on is largely a product of Boardgamegeek (BGG) research; I only have definite memories of seeing Barbarian Kings, Valley of the Four Winds, and of course the late arrival Greyhawk Wars.

The Epic Fantasy Wargame Catalogue:1975-1979

All right folks. After a lot of jogging of the memory and a little trawling through Boardgamegeek, here is the first part of what I believe to be a complete catalogue of the epic fantasy counter-based board wargame genre, as defined in my previous post.

Photo by Ray on boardgamegeek

The Epic Fantasy Wargame: Introduction

In the 1970's and early 1980's, the established hobby of board wargaming cross-fertilized with a wave of interest in fantasy literature and adventure. The result? A genre of game largely neglected in the ongoing old-school revival: the epic fantasy wargame.

Below I'll catalogue the central elements of this genre; the ones in bold I think are essential, the other just typical.

Photo by j.mccracken at boardgamegeek

Epic-scale map board. The map takes in kingdoms and even continents, on a grand-strategic scale. It depicts either an invented fantasy world; a fantasy world taken from fiction; or potentially, a real-world area given a fantasy treatment.

Hexagonal map grid. Although this was typical of games in that era, there were some games (like the Elric one, or Greyhawk Wars) that dispensed with this, using movement by areas instead. Arguably, you don't really need the kind of precise rendering of maneuvers and battlelines that hexagons give when gaming large-scale pre-conscription warfare, in which small armies cruised across a huge landscape without much operational subtlety, and clashed at designated battlefields.

Photo by Richard Maurer at boardgamegeek

Die-cut cardboard counters. Another standard feature defining the era's wargames. The success of Axis and Allies in the early 90's would create another related genre of game using plastic figures, but that belongs to a later time.

The counters represent armies as well as individuals ... Without the armies, it's not a wargame, but an adventure or quest game (as in Greg Stafford's King Arthur's Knights). Without the individuals, it's not epic - typically, one of these games would have rules for heroes leading armies, as well as going on quests, conducting diplomacy, and other things that armies can't accomplish.

.. and there is a lot of flavor and color through other means. Counters for monsters, artifacts, special locations; cards, tables, or numbered paragraphs representing events, nations to be won though diplomacy, relics ... all of these are very typical of the genre and helped give each game the special flavor of its world.

With all these elements, the play and objectives of one of these games were fairly similar to the historical equivalents. Armies fought by comparing strengths and a die roll on a chart, and the object of the game was to capture territory; or at least doing so won victory points. Less typical, though, was the "epic" layer in which heroes moved around the board attempting various things, gaining magic items and allies, which in turn could serve as an alternate victory condition or contribute to victory points.

In the next post I'll attempt a catalogue of these games, and ask for your help in identifying any I may have missed.