The Gaming Den

I've heard about this game for years, even back when I started D&D, but I never got the motivation to try it out (nor purchase the box).

Does anybody have opinions on the original or even the 'official' conversion?

There's a rather neat video game of it I played on occasion while visting relatives. It's fun, though even more horribly Scry and Die biased in the actual adventuring parts because they forgot to have DOORS to the treasure rooms in most dungeons. The stratagy layer was far more fun. Also, IIRC the gorgon was level 100, multiclass wizard fighter. gladly the simplified stratagy layer meant that if you sent in 5 high level casters and dumped most of your spells he would be forced off the field, and only his spells and retinue of slightly superior skeletons had a combat effect anyway.

I've not played the role playing setting, though.

I played in a game once. It was our own 2e/3e patchwork version. It was interesting. Though the most interesting parts (basically ruling a kingdom, killing people and taking their power, tapping into regional power) are only available to blooded character.

The mass combat system was also kinda cool to play with, if a bit simplistic.

I think that killing people and taking their power makes unblooded characters blooded, though that might be just setting and not rules.

I own the box set, although I never actually played it. It strikes me as a mix of truly cool concepts and frustratingly ill-thought-out ones.

First, the cool stuff. The history is awesome - the gods bestrode the land and fought and died in order to defeat their evil brother. They had vast hordes of mortal followers, and those closest to them when they died absorbed their divine power and became the new gods. Those that absorbed Azrai (evil god)'s power - but not enought to become deities - became twisted monstrosities of incredible power.

Some warriors absorbed just a touch of divine power - enough to get Kewl Powaz without sprouting an extra head. They eventually became rulers, since divine bloodline let you rule better. However, if you kill a scion (divine-blooded individual) you steal his power and strengthen your own bloodline.

I also like that there aren't 10,000 miscellaneous humanoid monsters running around - there are, like, 5-6 common ones. The different races and cultures actually feel different, not "Elves are pointy-eared humans.' And hey - there are distinct human cultures! What a concept!

Bad points: Although there are a huge number of awnsheglein (warped Azrai-blooded monsters) running around, there are surprisingly few ersheglein (non-evil monsters based on the other gods) - this despite the fact that Azrai was outnumbered eight-to-one or thereabouts.

Blooded characters aren't remotely balanced with non-blooded characters.

Blood powers are poorly not balanced.

Much of the box set is taken up by the paraphernalia for the mass combat game you're supposed to play once your blooded PC becomes king. It may work fine; I don't know because I don't care much for mass combat minigames and resent being told I should play one.

TL;DR: The fluff and flavor text rocks despite strange inconsistancies. Bloodlines have balance issues. Mass combat.

Bad point 1: That's because Azrai is the evil dude and also kicked more ass than the other gods combined. Also, his blood turns people into monsters more often explicitly.

And if the mass combat minigame is like the one in the computer game, it might actually be worth playing. That one was fun if simple. again, don't know about the rules but i think most main characters are supposed to be blooded.

Does the box have an empire minigame too? Seems like it would be nice to play a few rounds of that between adventures or somthing.

name_here wrote:Does the box have an empire minigame too? Seems like it would be nice to play a few rounds of that between adventures or somthing.

As in "running a kingdom"? Yeah, it does.

It's an interesting attempt to rationalize verisimilitude problems with the AD&D rules. After all, if being a high level character lets you do all this crazy shit, why isn't the world over run by a constant churning of new characters achieving high level and upsetting the applecart. The answer provided is that only people with the divine bloodright to rule actually can achieve high level, so the king is already a virtually untopplable sorcerer lord because he's the only person in the kingdom for whom that's an option.

There follow many other design decisions that I cannot agree with and some truly epic bloodline unbalances - but it is an effective hack to make D&D into the crushing feudalism that people seem to want sometimes out of their fantasy. It does deliver on the whole "medieval fantasy" promise that so many other settings fail at.

-Username17

I was always partial to the Kingdom of Kalamar approach, where divine right is exactly that - kings, and nobility in general, get support from the gods to keep their place.

I remember a player in an AD&D group back in the mid-90s mentioned desiring to slip in a little Birthright.

The DM and a handful of other players cackled until my ears rang before launching their unique brands of tirade against the notion, but didn't explain much about it when I asked.
Some reading online didn't help because, at the time, the internet was still developing a stable basis for sites of various kinds. I remember a few fan pages but there was virtually no concept of a "downloadable scanned PDF" and neither did the (only) local gaming store have a copy to even peruse.

I remember it had something to do with armies and inherited superpower heroes but that's it.
Looks like there's some reading to be done.

Talisman more or less has the right of it about Birthright.

The Birthright mass combat mini-game is entirely unintegrated with anything else in the box. Instead it's an abstract battlefield (15 areas of nebulous size) and a bunch of cards each representing terrain types or units of about ~100HD of creatures. Combat resolution consists of picking two unused unit cards at random, then comparing the icons on those cards to a matrix of combat results on another card pulled from a hand of 9 resolution cards. It's quick, but very abstracted.

The 3E update is mechanically much too involved (and the iconic NPCs and Awnshegh far too fanwanked) for my simple tastes. Just represent a divine bloodline with a Tome-style feat or such.

Ideally you should be able to use the material from the Birthright boxed set as-is with a level-limited version of 3E. Divine blood gets you access to PC classes and high levels, everyone else just gets NPC classes...