Greetings, Elric fans! We're all quite busy working on the Elric TTRPG. Today we are happy to share our first design diary with you. There will be more of these as time goes on, and those of you who follow this teaser page will get the notifications. Here, then, is Michael Curtis' first entry on the process of creating the Elric TTRPG...

Frank Herbert’s Dune contains a quote that always comes to mind whenever I start in on a new project: “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” Spending time at the beginning of any project to make sure you have what you need on hand, and how you’re going to proceed, helps avoid the pitfalls that can delay or even kill a project before its completed.

I learned a lot of lessons working on DCC Lankhmar and I’m applying all that knowledge to DCC Elric. Adapting a literary work into a gaming format presents challenges that aren’t readily apparent. Anyone can stat up a monster that shows up in a novel with some degree of success, but when it comes to entire worlds, there are subtle difficulties to overcome. Not only must one make sure you don’t introduce anything that contradicts what’s in the source material, but you also must keep the author’s voice in mind when transforming their work into a role-playing game. 

When I worked on Lankhmar, I kept a pair of notebooks which I filled with details about Nehwon pulled from Leiber’s stories, including direct quotes from the text. I wanted our game language to feel like something that Fafhrd or the Gray Mouser might utter on one of their adventures. I’ve applied the same strategy for Elric, albeit with a technical advancement. Rather than write out in longhand and in verbatim any pertinent details and language from the Elric stories—which is how I did it for Lankhmar—I’ve cut-and-pasted it from the Kindle versions of the six classic Elric novels into a Word file. 

Once I finished, I cross-referenced everything and added a table of contents. The result is a 180+ page “ready reference” document for all the writers and artists to work from. This way there are no errors about what the stories state about Tanelorn or the Forest of Troos or even what Elric wears. The Elric design team can just look it up, and since it quotes the stories directly, they can also easily search for that specific line in a digital version of the books if they want extra context when figuring out how to adapt it to a gaming format. It’s an efficient way to reference the text without having to flip through entire stories trying to locate a specific section or event.

Putting this Elric Ready Reference wasn’t a quick task, but now that it’s accomplished, it’s an invaluable source for our designers, writers, artists, and editors, both while we’re designing the Elric role-playing game and, in the future, as we further explore the Young Kingdoms in our planned line of Elric gaming products. We’ve taken great care to ensure our balances are correct, so it’s time to get started in earnest. We hope you’ll love the final result.