Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok ?

[silva]

Im on a viking fever lately and stumbled upon this, which weirdly Ive never seen or heard before. The art is awesome. Im curious about the system and how it plays out.

So, has someone played or read this ?

[Rasumichin]

I looked up a few reviews and one of the videos on youtube (they've actually got their own tutorial channel) and i'm intrigued as well.
When i heard that the game uses rune stones instead of dice, i was afraid that this would be incredible to mathhammer correctly and would lead to a very wonky, unpredictable system where the GM (i think he's called the Norn in this game) just wings everything. But the reviews talk about this being very tactical and geared towards finding good combos of runestones and whatnot. So maybe my first impression that this is too storytelly and not game-y enough may be unfounded.
I really wonder how this actually plays out.
Or how this whole "get your characters killed as heroically as possible for player rewards" system works in practice. It seems to be the norm that your characters don't grow particularly old and that getting a bunch of your dead characters into the various viking heavens is an integral part of levelling up. And it's full of stuff like that. There's so many ideas that are both very original and that seem to fit the theme perfectly.

But it's also ridiculously expensive (68$ for the basic rules or 368$ for the full box set with runestones and bags, play mats, screens, core rules, one sourcebook and the starting campaign/saga) and i'm reluctant to spend such a fuckhuge amount of money on this without an opinion from players i trust with their taste in games.
Hell, atm i'd be reluctant to spend that much money on a game even if it's actually the best RPG ever. And there's still a certain risk that this turns out to be Scandinavian WoD. It wouldn't be the first time that storyteller games have fucked the heads of European players into making gorgeous, but unplayable systems (Germany actually has two of these, de:Genesis and Engel).

Whatever this actually is, i'd like to learn more about it as well.

[Longes]

geared towards finding good combos of runestones

You've triggered my CthulhuTech flashbacks.

[Rasumichin]

Well, that just sets off another alarm bell.

[AcidBlades]

Can you stop making these threads that shills for random ass games. Maybe you should make "Indie Games" thread so you stop fucking making these random ass threads.

[silva]

Lol

AcidBlades you turdhead, this has nothing to do whatsoever with PbtA games. In fact, as Rasumichin says above, its has more similarities to fiddly tactical games like Warhammer 3 and D&D3/4 than anything else.

After looking up some reviews, it does look neat, if a bit too much on the complexity side for me. Another thing that worries me is that all videos I've seen of the system in action are about combat.

[Rasumichin]

Being combat heavy and crunchy would be a clear plus for me.

What i'm wondering is if they managed to make a system as exotic and unprecedented as this in any way sound and balanced, if it is tactically interesting and, most importantly, if it is strategically interesting - which it better should be if it's centered around building your cadre of martyrs for the final battle between gods and giants.
With the game's premise, balance as we commonly understand it may be very well irrelevant - character survivability matters fuckall when you win by sacrificing your characters in the most epic way possible. And that's cool, but it requires there's a large enough number of choices to die epicly. If most combos are shit, if there's glaringly obvious exploits that you're stupid for not taking, if there's a clearly superior route towards getting your valhalla points, i'm obviously out.
Given that several reviews mention that non-humans are vastly more powerful, this may get tricky. If humans still are a meaningful option because a heroic deed by a farmboy earns you more valhalla points than a heroic deed by a svartalf superhero, that may work. But all of this sounds really, really tricky to pull off right, because these concepts are largely untried and you can't go and say "D&D did it this way, RuneQuest did it that way, DSA did both in a crappy way, this is what we can learn from their mistakes". It's a core problem of innovative products that they by definition work with untried approaches and that they may have flaws that haven't been evened out over time.
So while the mechanical concepts of the game interest me, i find it impossible to say if they lead to a particularly awesome or a particularly horrible game experience.

Another crucial point would be how they work with the setting's premises. A succession war is a good kickoff for campaigns heavy on politics, but how do they work with that and do they avoid to make this seem tedious and irrelevant and stapled-on when the sun and the moon have just been eaten by wolves? Does it lead to me constantly facepalming over humanity not getting its shit together or is this about the players achieving that humanity gets its shit together and kicks frost giant ass?
While we're at that, how do they work with all the different factions that are openly at war with each other during what everybody knows to be the apocalypse? It's the well-known WoD problem - if the group has to sit down in advance and figure out if they want to play for Team Valhalla or Team Muspelheim, that's a problem and it doesn't sound like something they can work around if they want to be as true to the myths as they claim to be. If there's no easy and unobtrusive way to play a party that includes an einherjar, a frost giant, a svartalf and a wight, you end up not using large parts of the game and that would really, really suck.
The game being set in the second age of ragnarök also means that they can fuck up in important ways. There's two more ages to come before the super final endgame, so what's the win condition of fimbulwinter and, more importantly, does it actually matter? Does a FOTN:R campaign lead to meaningful results that influence the next stage of the apocalypse? This whole ragnarök thing runs a high risk that everything is moving on rails. There's events for the next two stages that are predestined to happen. Even the final outcome may be predestined, depending on how you work with the source material.
If all those martyr deaths mean fuckall and if it's not up to the players if aesir or fire giants or ratatöskr or whatever win ragnarök, that invalidates all the epic feats before that.

So yeah, while my first impression was "this gives off bad storyteller vibes" and my second impression was "hey, this may be full of win", closer consideration makes this a potential total failure, and it may sadly be because they're really trying something innovative.
But i may be wrong here. I really hope i'm wrong here and that they found good workarounds for the obvious pitfalls of a game with these premises.

[Prak]

Can you stop making these threads that shills for random ass games. Maybe you should make "Indie Games" thread so you stop fucking making these random ass threads.

I propose a thread called "Silva's latest hipster indie hardon"

I'm now interested in seeing how play actually works with runes instead of dice, but, yeah, this looks like a "terrible, but maybe fun with the right people" kind of game.

I'm also interested in hearing some informed opinions/a review of Engel, as I remember seeing the book in Borders a decade or so ago, but never really got a chance to do more than page through.

[Shrapnel]

Lol

AcidBlades you turdhead, this has nothing to do whatsoever with PbtA games. In fact, it's all about me be an obtuse retard who likes to shill every game I hear about so I can make threads about them and annoy people to give myself a boner because I have gnat's chance in hell of achieving romance with a woman.

I think that's what you meant to say.

[AcidBlades]

Lol

AcidBlades you turdhead, this has nothing to do whatsoever with PbtA games. In fact, it's all about me be an obtuse retard who likes to shill every game I hear about so I can make threads about them and annoy people to give myself a boner because I have gnat's chance in hell of achieving romance with a woman.

I think that's what you meant to say.

Or a man for that matter.

[silva]

Or both for that matter.

[silva]

Rasumichin, I thought all archetypes are mundane ? Shield maidens, Skalds, Seidkonas, etc ? Where did you see that Frost giants or stalvnkdhhtjtever are playable at all ?

[Rasumichin]

I think that at least alfar (elfs) and dwergar (dorfs) are options in one of the sourcebooks. I definitely recall that there's more to them than just some attribute modifiers, that they're more like fey creatures with plenty of magical powers.

The options in the core rules seem to all be more or less human, but they include several blends of mage and berserkers who can turn into horse-sized wolfs, so i wouldn't call them mundane. I mean, there's also skalds (bards), but i hope that they actually get to do something next to runecasters and horse-sized wolfs. It seems that crafting stories about dead PCs is game mechanically important in this thing, but that's just one more point where an interesting concept could run into balancing problems.

The gist of this is that there's some wild shit supposed to go down. And that has the potential to be completely broken, particularly when you have a highly unpredictable core mechanic and a strong focus on mood and emulation of myth. You're doubling or trippling up on your design goals and that makes it exponentially harder to fulfill all of them.
There's significant odds that this leads to a WoD situation where flaws in the rules make some options clearly superior and punish other options that you'd actually give a shit about because they've got really evocative and thematic writeups. Like the viking equivalent of wanting to play a vampire who can turn into a bat and control the weather when the game is actually all about the fastest Dominate in the West and tricking people into blood bonds.

And such imbalances may be a lot worse in a game that is combat-heavy by default.
I mean, i don't quite get why you want a viking legend game and don't like combat-heavy games at the same time. While they've got their share of trickster myths, over the top violence is at the core of Norse mythology. The basic premise of their religion was "the world was created by dismembering a brutally slain giantess and the world will go down in an epic high fantasy battle". The source material itself is combat heavy from the start to the finishing line.
You don't get to play a game called Ragnarok and have your characters sit around drinking mead and discover trade routes to Byzanthium all day. If you don't go out and chop up Yormugandr, it's not fucking ragnarok, it's Viking: the Drinkhorning. Or Rowboat: the IKEAing or whatever.

[Longes]

Another crucial point would be how they work with the setting's premises. A succession war is a good kickoff for campaigns heavy on politics, but how do they work with that and do they avoid to make this seem tedious and irrelevant and stapled-on when the sun and the moon have just been eaten by wolves? Does it lead to me constantly facepalming over humanity not getting its shit together or is this about the players achieving that humanity gets its shit together and kicks frost giant ass?

A recent videogame "Thea: the Awakening" actually works with this fairly well.
In Thea the world has ended some time ago. Something happened, the Tree of Life burned down (literally), the sun disappeared, the gods disappeared and the Darkness rules supreme. The game starts when sun reappears, and gods are beginning to come back. They are weak, and can't really do anything, except for seeing through the eyes of their followers and offering guidance. The player, as a god, is trying to guide his group of post-apocalypse survivors to survival and also do something about the whole "burned down Tree of Life" thing.
Now, in the game you are the only god who woke up and there are no other human settlements on the map (there are random bandits groups and orks and dwarfs though). But tif you make your setting in a way where there is no looming evil organisation hell bent on world destruction, then you can totally have a setup where followers of various gods are clashing to rearange the pantheon.

[silva]

My copy arrived and after a superficial read I am... disappointed. Really, this is just a gimmicky combat "boardy" game with vikings theme. The only thing different are the runes pulling idea where you pull runes from a bag instead of rolling dice (they called it "wyrd", as in "seeing what Fate holds for you"). There are a dozen or so runes divided by three types (physical, mental, spiritual). When you face a challenge the GM assigns a type and difficulty and then you go pulling runes from that sack that match the type of challenge. Eg: you wanna swim across that river ? Sure, its a difficulty 2 physical test.

Now, sure, it gives the game some pretty neat twists, as the combat system (which comprise about 90% of the actual rules) offers a wide gamut of effects, powers and combinations (Eg: if you draw a mental rune during combat, you can probe an enemy level, and you get more info the more physical runes you draw; Also, you can mix and match different runes to combine and chain effects, etc). There are 5 classes in the core book (called archetypes here) and 5 more in the Denizens of the North expansion, and each one comes with its own progression card where you go picking different powers and abilities as you advance in levels. The sinergy between runes types and the specific class abilities (each class has 3 sub-types, each interpreting some types of runes differently, in special the Void/Ginungagap rune, which is a kind of joker rune) produce very different effects and possibilities.

In the end though, its just a neat combat game, not so different from D&D4 only using runes instead of dice. I confess I expected so much more. The example of play in the book is as railroady as it gets, with the GM narrating a story with the players taking decisions in certain pre-arranged points. No clan or land management rules, no season passing rules, no society rules, no worshipping rules, etc. I didnt expect it to have the degree of genre-emulation of Sagas of the Icelanders, but at least some of it like we see in Pendragon, The One Ring or even Runequest. But no, it has nothing. Its D&D4 in vikings clothes with runes.

On the other hand I can see a lot of folks around the Den liking it, as its super focused on tactical combat with a pretty exotical rune system offering lots of tactical depth and variation (oh, and the Ragnarok setting is cool as hell, having a Dark Souls-like vibe). It could even be a real gem in this [tactical combat] respect. Who knows ? I surely wont, as this is definitely not my style of game.

[Prak]

Well, it sounds kind of neat for a board game, I suppose.