On the other hand, if you're really in the mood for an exciting and different kind of CRPG, read it all, and consider visiting the King of Dragon Pass website.Note, this review *is* under copyright, and remains the property of the parent company that first published it. I asked for, and received, their permission for this use.
Now, onto the review.
In a business that’s obsessed with “niche,” here’s a game that defies easy categorization: a turn-based RPG strategy title, and a menu-driven simulation that puts you in detailed charge of a barbarian clan.
King of Dragon Pass takes place on the world of Glorantha, in the Runequest pen-and-paper RPG. Its clans pursue typical barbarian activities: herding, farming, exploring, trading, feuding, building different defenses, worshipping gods, forming alliances and raiding neighbors. You’re not physically represented in the game, but you manage a clan ring that is, filling its seven positions with disputatious nobles and commoners (chosen from more than forty suitable candidates, each rated for seven unique skills, like Magic, Combat and Leadership) who willingly contribute their contrasting and distinctive viewpoints and advice at every opportunity.
Like any good, turn-based CRPG/resource management game, KoDP supplies dozens of activity options and forces you to make choices: two activities per season, in a five-season year. Even the simpler choices may contain a subset of selections that force you to think. Perhaps you need more farmers. Do you lower numbers in your other clan professions like hunting and guarding, buy the services of farmers away from other clans, offer farming land to passing vagabonds who then join your clan, or seek farmers from the land of your origins, far away? And do you offer incentives, like land, or land and cattle, to gain recruits? Action fans who prefer vikings endlessly hitting one another over their helmets will blanch, but this spin on Celtic cultural history is really involving. It gets you thinking about rulership in a way that simply ordering troops from one province to another simply cannot.
KoDP is also set in a fantasy universe inhabited by dragons, ghosts, trolls and other potential health hazards, which means swords can do only so much; magic is essential. KoDP allows you to build shrines or more effective temples to each of a dozen gods, who can teach or perform any of more than fifty blessing (and curse) spells with an appropriate sacrifice. Want to improve your chances during a raid? Sacrifice regularly to one of four or five gods, and you'll have a broad selection of positive effects to boost tribal battle readiness available. Or perhaps you might consider sacrificing to the earthquake or disease goddesses to harm another tribe; or even go to Eurmal, the Trickster god, who's as likely to laugh in your face as he is to magically steal another clan's magic and make it temporarily your own.
One of the most interesting activity choices you have in KoDP involves sending your most powerful nobles on any of two dozen heroquests. In good, authentically shamanistic tradition, these quests are trance-state attempts to recreate powerful legends, with the hero cast in the central role of a particular god. The gods don’t die in the legends, but if your hero strays from the appropriate responses or luck is against you, the quest may turn sour. Success conveys a range of specific but powerful magical benefits upon the clan, ranging from a magical treasure that increases the fertility of cattle (cattle are prestige, food and wealth to a clan) to an automatic end to a feud, to a sudden and profound increase in the quester's warrior skills or other abilities. Failure can mean anything from earth-scorching famine to your neighbors’ sudden hatred to the quester’s death. There are many factors that can help or hinder the likelihood of a given quest's success; but despite the dangers and uncertainty, no clan that wishes to achieve legendary status can afford to neglect them.
But the single most interesting feature in KoDP is the way it effectively becomes a different game every time its you play it. Yes, I know you’ve heard it before, but it’s never been attempted on this scale; for KoDP tracks more than a thousand clan variables and more than five hundred potential plots, at least one of which is randomly generated nearly every season of your clan’s existence.
Some plots are one-shot situations with immediate effects, like a proposed marriage between members of your clan and another’s which only requires shortterm negotiations. (Though if the marriage goes sour, you could end up in another plot a few years later as the local equivalent of divorce becomes messy.) Others create story threads that hibernate for long periods, only to burst into view many years later—like one noble I had on a ring, whose occasional, whimsically silly, non sequitur advice about the evil of Elves suddenly turned deadly serious after more than twenty years of excellent service, when he deliberately maimed three Elves in the clan woodlands, victims of his desire to force a war.
You are always given a range of four-to-seven options in every plot situation that go far beyond the usual good/evil stereotypes of so-called “interactive” gaming. Most choices offer equally effective solutions to the same problems, though with different attendant benefits and dangers. The apparently poorest reply to a given situation in one game could well provide the best results in the next, depending upon what gods you’ve worship regularly, who’s on your clan ring, your clan’s wellbeing, military might and diplomatic relations. All this environmental richness means that you can effectively create a clan tailored to your desires: a bunch of peaceloving traders, an uproarious bunch of raiders, a group into landgrabbing and conquest, etc. When I suggest that any of these can succeed in winning the ultimate prize, I'm not hazing you.
The interface is simplicity itself, a series of screens whose activities are grouped by subject. There’s a help mode that explains each screen, a very good in-game tutorial, and a hardcover manual that provides a great deal of highly readable detail in a well-organized format.
KoDP isn’t without its flaws. The game’s visuals feature colorful, attractive menus, but no animation—even combat is handled this way, via screen summaries. And while the other clans follow the same rules you do, it’s easy to regard them as passive spectators (they aren't), because you seldom see the effects of their actions unless you’re on the receiving end. There are few spies among Gloranthan barbarians.
You also expect to move to a new level of difficulty when your clan leads others in forming a tribe—after all, you’ve bargained away tribal ring seats to reach this point, and it seems reasonable to expect at least a periodic tribal meet to challenge your burgeoning diplomatic skills. But nothing of the sort occurs. At best, when one of your nobles is elected tribal chieftain, a few new plots affecting the tribe appear; still, it’s not much.
But I’ll gladly raise a drinking horn to toast the creators of such an original and rich game as KoDP. With variety, depth, and a Celtic folk soundtrack to die for, this game’s a solid keeper.
