Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok

Frigid ground crunched beneath fur boots as the hunter stalked through the forest's eternal darkness.  His eyes burned, open wide to the cold, intense wind, ever vigilant in their search for his prey.  The soft, constant slither of fur against bark and brush rippled through the air.  He could feel it.  It was close.

A puff of moisture expelled from his lungs as he spun.  Without looking he heaved the axe upward, and in an instant a mist of blood erupted from the snake's jaw.  He dove, two giant fangs piercing the ground where he had stood only a moment before.  A fistful of fur helped him swing up onto the snake's neck, where he plunged his sword deep within the back of the beast's skull.

No really - there's a fucking giant furry snow snake as a monster in this game.   

That's badass, and the game is too.

Fate of the Norns: Ragnarok is the latest of a series of viking games (all "Fate of the Norns") that received a fairly sizable chunk of kickstarter funds.  With a focus on combat, it pitches the players into the viking world of Ragnarok: a period of time where there is no natural light, and a three year winter before the end of the world is at the forefront of humanity's worries. It's indie, it's unique, and it's complicated as all hell.  They may have blown all of their cash on art though, I'm not sure.

Pros:

• Violence & Gore - good old viking style.
• Hundreds of pages of full color, gorgeous, themed artwork.
• More setting ooze than most setting books (to be fair, it's basically a viking mythology textbook).
• Extremely unique gameplay that uses NORDIC RUNES instead of dice or cards as the randomizer.
• "Rune Chains" let you manipulate your character's actions and powers, customizing their effects to the situation at hand.
• Extreme customization in character building.
• Extreme customization in monster building.  This is probably one of my favorite parts.

Cons:

• Terrible book layout. It's hard to read, understand, and reference.
• Overly complex in some areas (e.g. character sizes), but falls short in other areas (e.g. tactical hex combat).
• Action economy ends up being more frustrating than actually fun.  When you have to spend runes to do anything, each rune sacrificed to minor actions, defense, and condition care feels like a huge loss.
• High amount of GM prep required.
• Requires tons of extra printed material on top of the books.
• High cost-of-entry with the books + physical runes.  Even the PDF is expensive.
• The math of the basic resolution mechanic doesn't add up...

If you dig in, Fate of the Norns can be your dream game.  It's got everything: an epic setting, angry gods, lore beyond lore, monsters, bar fights, heroics in life, and heroics in death.  It starts the players as heroes, turns them into legends, and finally brings them to a demi-god state where they fight with divine powers, all to prepare them for the final battle of Ragnarok.  Everything in this game is unique, except maybe the actual setting itself... but even the way the viking world is presented is unique, given that it focuses on exactly what players of the game need to know.

First, players build their characters with only two simple stats: essense and destiny. From these you pick specific nordic runes and assign each to a variety of powers.  These powers are accessed in a grid, such that when you pick one power it unlocks all of the adjacent powers to be chosen next. Each character class's grids are connected to each other in the corners, so cross-classing is handled smoothly and elegantly.  What you end up with is characters so unique that you could play the same starting class twenty times and have completely different strategies.  There are 10 classes, each with 3 specializations, and each with three 5x5 grids of unlockable powers.  That's a lot of options - making it a very fun and engaging character building system.

And you do this with monsters too.  No two monsters will likely ever be the same.  With random rune selection, even monsters that choose the same set of powers will play differently.  The GM could spend hours creating and tweaking the next session's monsters!  The only issue is... the GM must spend hours creating and tweaking monsters.  Even though it's fun, and trust me it is, this game requires heavy GM prep, rivaling the prep time for similarly crunchy games, like Shadowrun.

That said, let me re-emphasize how awesome combat actually is.

Like any good viking game, the mechanics center around being in combat.  So much so, that even the standard action resolution mechanic changes awkwardly when in combat.  But, the basics of play are fun, and the shifting of runes around your play mat feels a lot like Magic: The Gathering.  Combat even has four phases, that include "draw" and "upkeep".  But it's MTG where you can choose to smash spells together to form unique effects while fighting on a hex grid, and the end result is something so epic that you can almost forgive the game for it's complexity.  Almost.

One of the biggest issues I have with the game is it's core mechanic: draw runes out of a bag to determine success.  Basically speaking, it's ass-backwards from what it should be.  Because you draw a number of runes equal to your destiny, and the number of runes in your bag is equal to your essence... that means that as your two stats increase (from gaining levels), the variance of your character's actions and outcomes increases.  Worse yet, if you choose to gain more essence, all you are actually doing is messing with the chance to pull a given rune type.  So let's say I had 3 physical runes, 3 mental runes, and 1 destiny. I have a 50/50 chance of drawing either rune type.  But let's say I leveled up, and gained 3 more physical runes.  Now, because I became stronger, I have less of a chance to succeed at drawing a mental rune.  That's nonsense - I'm not actually leveling up, just diluting my chances one way or another.  But the absolute worst part is if I always chose to increase destiny to it's maximum; I could have something like 5 runes and 5 destiny.  In this scenario, I always draw every rune I own, meaning there's not a lick of randomness to the game: I will always know if I will succeed in an action or not.

The Rune System for basic action resolution is straight up broken.

When it comes right down to it, I want to love this game.  My friends said they want to love this game.  There's just so much of this game to love!  But... wow is it hard.  The rules are written in a minimalist way, yet it's a game about very specific actions and mechanisms.  The result is a book chalk full of more questions than answers, and a game that screams for more attention.  I have faith that, if we put in a good amount of time and effort (and house ruling), that the payout would be amazing.  But it's hard to get that buy-in when the initial cost is so high, and that's unfortunately where the game falls flat on it's face.  It's beautiful, lovable face.