Magic Realm
There’s a saying about the Velvet Underground & Nico: their first album only sold 10,000 copies, but “everyone who bought one started a band.”1 Would that be a great album? This Project suffers from that same tension between “Best,” and “Influential.”
Some great games aren’t influential, some influential games aren’t great.
And then there are …. Velvet Underground situations. Or perhaps Atonal music. It’s obscure, and not well liked; most listeners turn it off after the opening bars.
But some who persevere are enchanted.
Richard Hamblen’s Magic Realm is … difficult to play. Hamblen (who we met last week with Merchant of Venus) threw lots of ideas into Magic Realm that were unique, or at least very unusual. In some sense, he was inventing the wheel, when he could have easily re-invented it. Magic Realm arrived hot on the heels of Dungeons and Dragons and tried to capture that D&D / Lord of the Rings vibe, but in board-game form. To Hamblen’s credit, he didn’t just rip off either but thought about fantasy would translate into a board game. Because D&D has an active game-master, and Lord of the Rings was a book. Hamblen himself talks about this in an excellent article published at the time in Avalon Hill’s Magazine, The General2.
Hamblen pointed out four key problems in creating a great fantasy game: it needed variety (not play out the same way each time), detail, it had to feel fantastic, and it had to surprise the players.
Magic Realm is great because it achieves these goals, but obscure because you have to suffer through immense, nearly-impenetrable rules to play. How can you surprise people who have read the rule book? Hamblen’s answer was to have a large number of interlocking systems. Moving may trigger magic. Trading may trigger a combat (or magic!).
I tried and failed to play Magic Realm multiple times until devotees on the Internet re-wrote the rules and created tutorials.3 The original (version 1) rules had a structured learning and the first section was “How to set up the game.”
We lost.
But with the support of those souls who took it on themselves to teach the game, I slowly unlocked (some of) the secrets of this Grail Game. And after much effort and time Magic Realm felt … magical.
For example, in D&D, one of the things you could get is a “+1 Sword.” It’s a sword, but … better. That’s it. Magic Realm has better weapons and armor to be sure, but it also has weird things. The Flowers of Rest will instantly restore you to full health … at the cost of knocking you unconscious for the day (cancelling any plans you may had had).
Items may also unleash a dormant magic spell. Sure, a fireball is nice and flashy, but when was the last game where you unexpectedly turned into a giant octopus?4
Unlike D&D there are no ‘hit points.’ If you hit a monster, you kill it. Unless your weapon isn’t strong enough, at which point … you can’t do anything to it. There are sixteen playable characters in the realm, but the White Knight plays completely differently from the Witch or Pilgrim, even though the rules are identical for all characters5. The Witch couldn’t even carry around the Knight’s armor … it’s too heavy.
Hamblen took the limitations of a board game and somehow worked around it. You can see the entire map; this isn’t a computer game that can hide things from you. But you won’t know what monsters will show up and where they’ll be6. And even when you can see them on the board, they might have moved before it’s your turn … because there is a delay between when you write down your moves, and when they actually occur. This key rule gives the game a fog of war, and terror, particularly in a large game.7
There are dozens of sub-systems8 but even if you play with only a subset of the rules, the world comes alive. I’ve seen a Sorcerer get into a massive bar-room brawl and saved only because he’d just hired an archer away from a group he insulted. I’ve seen a White Knight kill two dragons, then get pecked to death by Bats.
I’ve also had a dull game where you go exploring and find … nothing much. The other side of the world saw all the action. The price you pay for a game capable of creating surprise is that sometimes the surprise is … mediocre. Sad Trombone.
All of this is buried under rules, more rules, tiny cards, chits, charts and trippy art.
After days and days of studying the rules, and a few dozen games of Magic Realm, I can now teach about 80% of the rules in … two hours. If you wanted to just play the White Knight, I could cut that down to 30 minutes. Magic Realm is what I call a lifestyle game (like Bridge), one of those games where you don’t really ‘get it’ until you’ve put in a lot of time and effort into the game, including many games where die a horrible death right away.
Perhaps Magic Realm isn’t one of the 100 Most Influential Games of the 20th Century. I think it might just sneak in there; I won’t be surprised if most people disagree. But if you are reading this, you might be one of those few people who play this game and … start a band.
Actually who said it and for which band is disputed, see this article on Quote Origin.
All quotes come from this archived copy of the article, rocking some very hard to read web-design.
See for example, The Magic Realm Tutorial Project, The 3.1 Rulebook, or Magic Realm in Plain English. Just to give you a hint as to difficult, the last PDF clocks in at over 100 pages.
I got better.
Characters do have ~2 special powers each, but most of the differences are due to their strengths, speed, and abilities encoded into 12 chits.
And there are effectively hidden levels that will only be revealed by exploration.
Because each player’s turn may summon or move monsters, or even the landscape itself!
Such as Moving, Hiding, How Monsters show up and disappear, size and strength, ranged attacks, magic system, fatigue, trading with locals, hiring other people, horses.
Other than the obvious Dragons Down, what games do you think drew inspiration from Magic Realm's design? It doesn't have to be fantasy adventure; one can be inspired simply by the courage to break the mold at every level.