Off the Shelf: Hyperborea

Let's pull Hyperborea out of our storage crates and put the game back on the shelves.

Hyperborea is very similar to the classic first edition, and it's compatible with both Swords & Wizardry and OSRIC. It is a strange game meant for swords and sorcery and not high fantasy. Hyperborea is a better choice (for some) than Dungeon Crawl Classics, offering a more traditional experience that lacks much of that game's table-based play and randomness, while retaining an intense, gonzo, Conan-style feel.

I have not really gotten into Hyperborea, as I am more of a fan of first and second editions than I am heavily modified derivatives. Still, I see the strengths of a game like this, where the experience is more like savage sorcery than your traditional Arthurian knights. Modern Dungeons & Dragons tends to slip into a pseudo-Renaissance setting mixed with the Knights of the Round Table. These days, D&D is more an allegory for modern street adventures than anything in the fantasy genre. I like a heavily themed game that gives me a barbaric feeling, as this one does.

The game is contained in two books, one for players and the other for referees, and it is a tight implementation of the rules. It is 100% compatible with any first edition or even Swords and Wizardry, so you will not go without adventures or monsters.

The magic is more traditional and does not have spell failure or spell mishaps like Dungeon Crawl Classics does. The original game never had wacky spell failure, so I understand where they’re coming from. The gonzo and crazy nature of the world is where the focus is, instead of an internal focus where magic mutates you. Here, the focus isn’t on mutation and randomness. Referees and players, not the rules, enforce the gonzo, insane nature of the world.

This is the key difference between Hyperborea and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Hyperborea does not rely on randomness to convey its theme and feeling. The game will be as gonzo and insane as you make it. If you want something to happen, make it happen, and it does. There are times when Dungeon Crawl Classics feels like “gonzo with training wheels” when it is far easier to be less reliant on charts and tables and random results, and do it yourself, given what you know and like. You will always get the result and craziness that is closer to your heart if you do not use a table and let it tell you what happens next.

That is why some prefer Dungeon Crawl Classics as a game that you migrate from the fifth edition. The charts and tables tell you what can happen, and you need that level of training to understand what savage swords and sorcery all are about. For experienced groups and game Masters, it is far easier to say something crazy happens and then enforce the genre through direct rulings instead of chart results. I still like the tables in Dungeon Crawl Classics, but having played these games for decades, I don’t really need them. There are times when I find the results on the charts limiting and less imaginative than what's in my head. I suppose I would have more fun with the game like Hyperborea, where I can “say what happens just happens.”

This is going alongside my first edition collection and my second edition books, along with the grandmaster game of OSRIC, and joining my games on my living room shelf. A solid tabletop game, fewer books than my bloated DCC collection, and I look forward to reading this and having some fun.

Off the Shelf: Dragonslayer

This game does not get as much love as it should. Dragonslayer is front-to-back, page-to-page, pure awesome. Now that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is no more, people are taking another look at this game and realizing that sleeping on this book was a mistake. We are sort of in a two-way battle between this and the new revised Labyrinth Lord 2E, and this game compares favorably as a BX/1E mix that Labyrinth Lord Advanced once covered.

Page after page, the art in this game is fantastic. This game gives Goodman Games and DCC a run for their money, and the beautiful line art evokes the old-school style perfectly.

And this is a one-book game! One book is all you need for unlimited fantasy adventures.

Fighters in this game have a cleave ability, allowing one additional attack per two levels if the fighter kills a target. This is one extra attack at level one, two at level three, and so on. The fighters in this game are fun, and that cleave ability is greatly appreciated. In some old-school games, playing the fighter seems like punishment, and you get nothing to do except roll a d20 per turn and do damage. Here, they fold in the classic low-HD multiattack rules into the cleave ability (without the HD limitation), and it makes you want to be out there in the front ranks, hacking away at crowds of monsters.

The OSE fighter, in comparison, feels too basic. This is more of a "reference work" book, and once you add in some of the optional abilities from the Carcass Crawler zines, things improve for OSE, but you need to mod the game to customize how it plays. In the new OSE Advanced, I hope those optional rules are folded into the core book, and the game takes on its own identity.

The racial level limits in Dragonslayer are lower than OSE, but everything is more or less compatible between OSE and DS, or any old-school game for that matter. The hit-die scale is on 1E levels, with fighters being a d10, so the lower level limits are likely due to the bump in hit points. The game's power level is adjusted by focusing on fewer levels and more hit points.

Dragonslayer gives full hit points at level one. Nice. Please don't force me to play a level-one character who rolled a 1 for hit points. There is a fun to that, but most would throw that character away as an expendable rabble. If I want that, I will play DCC with my level-zero peasants.

A level 10 fighter in Dragonslayer with a +2 CON bonus will have 78 hit points on average. A level 10 fighter in OSE with a +2 CON bonus has an average of 61 hit points. In general, you are tougher in this game than OSE, and you do more damage.

If you don't want the complexity of OSRIC, but you want all the cool 1E "stuff" in a BX-like package, then Dragonslayer is a fantastic game. The base game feels like BX, and not like 1E's endless tables of modifiers and percentages to bend bars and lift gates, and it keeps things simple. The demons and devils are here, so this is not censored like 2E was.

Compared to Shadowdark? Dragonslayer is more heroic, no spell failure, no small-map play, no torch timer, more theater of the mind, and not as tightly focused. I love Shadowdark as a "small dungeon" game, almost as a board game, but if I want a more traditional game, Dragonslayer will fill that old-school need nicely.

Dragonslayer is a fantastic game, well worth your time.