King of Dragon Pass

DEVELOPER : A-Sharp
PUBLISHER : A-Sharp

 

System Requirements Pentium 100 Mhz, 32 MB RAM

Recommended Pentium 166MHz, 48+ MB RAM

Ratings
Code Issues Graphics: 6: some very talented artists, nice art, but a graphically unchallenging game Audio: 4: good music, gets a little repetitive.  Not much use of sound as a game tool. Interface: 8: very novel, iconic presentation and organization enhances atmosphere & presents information succinctly	Play Issues Solo Gameplay: 8: novel, you’ll not find it’s like anywhere else. Replayability: 7: lots of events mean never an identical game, but, it IS a finite number – eventually you will start seeing the same things. Multiplay: N/A – no multiplayer Learning Curve: 5: Being a fan of Glorantha is definitely not required, but it does help.
Other/Notes Documentation: 7.0 Brief but very informative.  Tutorial explains gameplay and gives player a good feel for the way the game should flow. Pros: I can’t think of a game whose situations and delivery are more creative – if you are looking for something DIFFERENT, this is really something you should check out. Cons: No flash or bang; takes a great deal of thinking and quite a bit of reading; non-English-speaking players and those looking for a “quick fix” will be disappointed.  No multiplay is too bad. Note: Reviewed version is 1.1; patch available at A-Sharp site  +1.0 rating due to novelty, originality More Glorantha information at http://www.glorantha.com   Overall: 7.7 "King of Dragon Pass is an immerse and original game.  Players will get a real feeling for the gameworld and the integral nature of magic and the Gods in Glorantha."

When Greg Stafford first penned his ideas for an imaginary world in 1978, I wonder if he had any idea of how far he would go in exploring it. Other RPG fantasy worlds of the time which were little more than a blatant pastiche of Middle-English legend (heavily ripped from the work of Tolkien, since that was what most everyone had read). Totally unlike them was Stafford’s Glorantha: a world with deep mythopoeic underpinnings and a society that developed logically from there. Elves weren’t just happy, skinny waifs with pointy shoes; instead they were the Elder Race created by the goddess of plants, with wooden bones and deeply hostile to humanity. Trolls, another Elder Race, were not gruff creatures that hid under bridges but rather the Elder Race of Darkness, driven (by another mythic event) out from their underworld onto the surface. There was very little actual evil, mostly differing viewpoints and a million shades of gray. Chaos was the “great threat” which (if anything) divided the good guys from the bad. But even Chaos was not uniform, and more importantly was rather dispassionate, only acting as a foil in a Wagnerian sense, driving the Gods to act in their self-defining ways. Differing cultures had different explanations of why things happened the way they did, and despite frequently being mutually exclusive, some, none, or all of these views were actually correct.

This relativism, this ambiguity, made the world of Glorantha ‘feel’ right. Despite its high-fantasy character, the ambiguity paralleling that found in real life succeeded in conveying the right flavor. On the narrow line between the fantastic and the real, Glorantha found the balance. It became the setting for the roleplaying game RuneQuest (Chaosium), which early on competed neck & neck with another fledgling RPG system from TSR called Dungeons and Dragons.

But before that it was a boardgame. With hexes, die-cut counters, and dice, White Bear and Red Moon was a classic, great wargame in 1980. Set in Glorantha’s Dragon Pass, troops of mercenaries, phalanxes, and magicians battled with superheroes, the dead, and seriously nasty giant bats during the Lunar Empire’s conquest of the region known as Sartar.

Fast-forward to 1999. The Gloranthan license suffered for more than a decade of neglect at various hands. Now, it anticipates a renaissance with the release of a completely revamped and novel set of rules (promising to challenge the paradigms of the RPG community as much as RQ did in 1978): Hero Wars, due out in Q1/2000. Timed to coincide (nearly anyway) with this release is A-Sharp’s King of Dragon Pass, poetically returning to the setting of the first published Gloranthan product.

A prequel to the Dragon Pass boardgame and the RPG that followed, KoDP places you in the role of a band of Orlanthi (barbarian, not unlike the early Celts or Goths) refugees. Fleeing a successful usurper, you have no choice but to brave the dangers and to settle Dragon Pass. This is a land of magic, mystery and death, uninhabited since the Dragonkill War in which dragonkind turned on its human allies and ate them all (including a human army in the hundreds of thousands), sparing none.

Once you settle Dragon Pass, you find that you are not alone – other disparate tribes have also settled in the area, and are already busy exploring, farming, and raiding each other constantly. The question is – will you be able to survive and prosper amongst the many dangers that face you? From other Orlanthi which will steal your cattle the minute you turn your back, to Elder Races that seem to peek from every shadow and forest, spirits that haunt the land, nomads from the east who raid the settled lands constantly, and not least the political and kin struggles within your own clan, your task is not an easy one.

KoDP is a turn-based strategy game, where the player must pursue a number of different goals simultaneously while facing a constant diet of challenges and opportunities. It’s definitely not an easily explained product. Unlike most “classical strategy” games, there’s not really a map on which you move units, nor a “resource pool” from which you build forces. I guess at its most basic level, it’s a lot like MECC’s Oregon Trail computer game. Rather than consulting combat charts and hurling units at each other, the player is required to manage the resources of the clan and successfully deal with the events that happen throughout the span of time.

But lest the reference lull you, this is NOT Oregon Trail. That was an educational game for kids. King of Dragon Pass is a stunningly deep and representational strategy game that uses a similar mechanism. For example, the player is not the chief of the tribe. Rather, the player has a roster of tribal members with varying sets of skills (commonly based on their deity of worship – Orlanthi religion is a pantheon of different gods with differing aspects and interests) that advance and regress over time. This list of tribal members (whose leaders and main actors are organized by the player into a ruling council or “ring”) is dynamic, with their portraits showing them as they mature into middle age, wither, and eventually die. Likewise, there is a constant flow of new blood in the form of young characters entering the scene – woe to the player that doesn’t keep a careful eye out for a ‘groomable’ candidate for clan leader, war leader, or lawspeaker as their original leaders age.

Further, each of these people has a personality – some are paranoids, whose advice invariably hints at threats that are better ignored. Some are narrow minded, offering advice only in their chosen field. Some even are insubordinate, and you can be confronted with incidents that a reckless an independent ring member has called down on the clan through rash action.

This tribal ring is shown in portrait at the bottom of almost every screen, and each member can be counted on for advice in almost any situation. Of course, whether you listen is your choice. Certainly, sometimes many agree making the decision a fairly simple one. But as the adage goes, “if you have a hammer, every problem is a nail,” so is the advice characteristic of the individual’s talents. Your war-leader will usually advise attack, if you are the stronger party. So in this sense, KoDP is even sort of a management simulation where you must acknowledge people’s strengths and weaknesses, and apply them to roles accordingly.

The challenges start with simple survival. You have herds of cows, sheep, pigs and horses, all of which are as vital as your fields of wheat, barley, and rye to the prosperity and health of your people. Various friendly and not-so-friendly neighbors will trade with or raid you making the protection of these resources one of your prime concerns. Your crafters can produce goods, either for trade or sacrifice, and hunters roam the forest of your tula (clan land) for game.

Diplomatically, the challenges are less concrete, but no less dangerous. Feuds drain your soldiers with raids, and injured farmers can’t help in the fields. Enemy clans will send trouble your way – anyone know why the Dragonewt is asking us for its body? If you do a good enough job (and have performed the right rituals successfully) you can form a tribe, making you more resistant to disaster by having a group of neighbors that will help you readily. Other tribes will soon form, and the competition just spirals upward into larger raids and longer-lasting feuds. If you earn the respect of enough tribes, settle your feuds and are mythically potent enough, you can even become the King (or Queen) of Dragon Pass.

Everything in this game is interdependent, making the choices hard and the consequences sometimes hard. Need goods? No problem, assign more farmers to be crafters. However, not only will you be losing the productivity of the missing hands in the fields, your farmers will grow more disgruntled as the crafters do not have to serve in the fyrd (your clan’s militia and lower-quality warriors). More hunters are good, since they not only bring in food but also are more skilled at forestcraft, spotting enemy cattle raids earlier and thus increasing the chance of successfully summoning the fyrd to arms. But hunters need a lot of land to operate, and are quickly subject to the law of diminishing returns. Explorers (along with the obligatory troops – Glorantha’s not a safe place) can be sent out to discover the secrets of the ancient land and uncover new clans, enemies, or just really weird things.

Up to this point, it’s basically a simulation of the life of a dark-ages village. The comparison is an apt one. But as I mentioned early on, Glorantha is most famed for the integral presence of magic, and KoDP carries this throughout, never letting you forget for a moment that there is a whole magical ecosystem out there of which you know painfully little. A major focus for the player is addressing the religious necessities – sacrifices to the gods bring concrete benefits, and the construction of shrines, temples, and even Great Temples make these benefits permanent. Obeisance to the gods is expensive however, and it’s a rare clan that can afford the sacrifices in sheep, pigs, and goods that are required by more than a handful of permanent worship sites.

Each Sacred Time (the two weeks at the end/start of each year in which the magic of the universe is renewed) the clan has an amount of magic allocated to it by a number of things. The bases for this are many: how ritually faithful it was over the previous year, if its clan leader worships the clan’s specific god, if it has the mythically-correct distribution of worshippers on the clan ring, among other things. These magic points can be allocated to different categories (such as war, the herd, diplomacy or children), having a beneficial effect on that aspect of the clan for the next year. Auguries are available to suggest what may (or may not) happen, but auguries are vague and sometimes wrong. Of course, the wise clan will leave some surplus magic available for use in the emergencies throughout the year such as the nigh-inevitable Troll attacks during Dark Season.

Success in Dragon Pass isn’t a matter of how many cows you have, however, no matter how important your animal expert makes them sound. Key to winning the game is the completion of heroquests. Heroquests are religious reenactments of mythical events, which with the application of sufficient power actually become real and are capable of affecting the entire world. During the heroquest, the selected clan member takes on the role of their god and completes some mythical act (usually consisting of a number of situations that you have to solve) for a desired result. HQ’s can do anything from something as mundane as making your cows healthy or finding a magical treasure, to causing the undead to avoid you. Completing heroquests not only fulfills victory conditions (the short game requires you finish fewer than the long game, for example) but also raises everything from the morale of your people to the esteem in which your clan is held by others. But be warned – a failed heroquest can ALSO affect the entire world, such as the knowledge-god (Lankhor Mhy) heroquest I bungled that caused everyone’s – not just mine, but every clans’ – maps to become unintelligible. That was a bit of a diplomatic failure, to put it gently.

Heroquests are, as the name implies, the stuff of heroes. You will send your strongest and best onto the God’s Plane to try to complete the rituals, and hope they come back.

I found the heroquest mechanism an intriguing one, but the one that invited the player to do the old “save/restore” shuffle. With little information about what you were going to be facing, nor any real game-method to prepare for it, some of the heroquest situations smacked of the old save-or-die randomness. You can of course contribute more magic during Sacred Time to heroquesting, assign someone with “heroic” ratings in every category to the quest, and have the assistance of all your neighbor clans, but it still comes down to a random thing. Even if you answer the questions right, you can die and that sucks.

Don’t get me wrong – I haven’t a better suggestion for how to implement such a subjective and nebulous mechanic. By and large it works. But you’ll lose more than a few hero-types completing the “Elmal Guards the Stead” heroquest, I don’t care how good you are. And those heroes are not terribly common.

There were few other things that bothered me, surprising for a self-published game. A-Sharp should be commended for producing a game that barring a last minute patch that didn’t get included in the first 1000 burns of the CD was apparently bug free and totally stable.

The graphics are of generally high quality, but if you are looking for something to tax your 3d-accelerator, go elsewhere. Nothing in the game is animated, and the action is presented in summary and cut-screen style, which may be off-putting to some of the more visually oriented among us. The interface is very well done – venturing into innovative territory by using a pseudo-runic paradigm that takes a little learning (meanwhile atmospherically emphasizing Glorantha’s emphasis on runes) but quickly becomes second nature.

Sadly, there is no competitive multiplayer. The task of creating the game, inventing the format, and trying to simultaneously synchronize multiple storylines and consequences for different players was beyond the spec on this one. But I say competitive for a reason – I play a lot of games on the laptop, and spend a lot of time playing them in airports, lounges, and hotels while traveling for business. I have never had so many people cooperatively enjoy what I was doing. They found the stories amusing, the events startlingly creative, and it was downright fun being the one who could introduce so many people (most clearly NOT computer gamers) to such fun. I know there is a strangely large number of people coming home from Kansas City smiling with the phrase “they really were very funny-looking cows!” stuck in their heads.

Of course, your actions are a little channeled by the format of the game. You can’t – for example – pursue a diplomatic marriage with another clan unless the “event” for such crops up. Your actions are limited to raiding, trading, recruiting, exploring, sacrificing, and questing. But the event engine holds (I understand) more than 450 events, most random, but many triggered by actions or combinations of actions that cause certain circumstances to be in effect. Typically each season you will be able to accomplish a couple short activities (such as recruiting, sacrificing, exploring) or one major act – raiding, for example.

As a good clan leader, you develop a pattern to your clan’s events that’s in synch with the seasons. Only a fool raids in spring when hands should be planting, and for every warrior raiding during the fall that’s just more food left in the fields un-harvested. You brace yourself for the Troll raids in the snows of Dark Season, and restock your herds through ‘neighborly acquisition’ during the summer. Life has a rhythm, and Gloranthan life is more vibrant than most.

King of Dragon Pass reflects this vibrancy better than average, and promises the open minded player a novel and immersive experience not to be found in any other game I’ve ever seen. It’s not glitzy, but it’s a great game.

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Reviewed by Steve Lieb