Bifrost originally surfaced in the late 1970's / early 1980's and appeared in 4 Volumes. Here you will find scans of the original rules. Over a period of time more material will be posted here adding to and explaining how these work and how to utilise them to create role playing scenarios and entire worlds within which to enact them. First here are some links that will introduce you to the first volume "Faerie".

Bifrost Volume 1 - Cover, Acks, Intro, Setting Up Game  Bifrost Volume 1 - Game Content, Seq Actions, Choice of Char, Trg, Indiv Abilities  Bifrost Volume 1 - Alignment, Gods etc Bifrost Volume 1 - Social Pos, Prices & Equip, Maps etc, Campaign Surv, Fatigue Bifrost Volume 1 - Disease & Illness (inc Wounds)  Bifrost Volume 1 - -Tables - Incident Type Loc'n, Area Type & Creature Group Civ & Unciv  Bifrost Volume 1 - Tables - Creature Group Wild  Bifrost Volume 1 - Tables - Incidents Men, Human Group Civ, Unciv, Wild, Characteristics  Bifrost Volume 1 - Morale & Reacts, Weather, Playsheet, Progression & Advancement  As you will no doubt have surmised these are complicated and are not complete without further rules. Fighting is a key activity in any fantasy RPG of this kind. The second volume "Combat" introduced the game's basic mechanisms for determining the outcome of combat. Here are some links that will provide you with these:

Bifrost Volume 2 Part 1 Bifrost Volume 2 Part 2 Bifrost Volume 2 Part 3 Bifrost Volume 2 Part 4 Bifrost Volume 2 Part 5 Bifrost Volume 2 Part 6

Volume 3 dealt with Magic. There is a post (Here) dealing with this (and a link to a pdf of the rules which you will need to download due to its size.) Volume 4 expanded upon the original 3 volumes and it was written by a different group of players (of whom I was one). It provided complete lists of all the characteristics of the creatures in the creature description tables (see Vol 1) together with additional combat rules and handy sheets to use when creating characters and some play sheets summarising the rules for ease of reference during play. The additional rules included unarmed, mounted & aerial combat, combat fatigue, health of horses, primitive firearms, literacy and optional combat amendments. In some ways most importantly there were some basic guidelines as to how to play the game and hints regarding the use of magical artefacts to help provide structure and options for plot development during campaigns. Here are some links to these: Bifrost Vol 4 - Intro - Playing The Game  Bifrost Vol 4 - Additional Combat - Literacy etc  Bifrost Vol 4 - Creature Description Tables - Character & Play Sheets 

So Vol 4 delivered most of what had been promised plus more. There were still some gaps however that were never published in any form and as a result of several years play - that would eventually yield a novelised version of a longstanding campaign - masses of notes and ideas for expansion and improvements to the rules were created and would then languish for thirty years. The additional Bifrost material referred to above will be made available in due course, including all the written material that we used to create the world that our campaign took place within.  Bifrost is a complex rule system that would benefit from being "automated" in ways that either were not possible or were extremely difficult to achieve back then - but which are now fairly straightforward. We will explore this in future posts. The ultimate aim of this "project" is to recreate and revitalise Bifrost so that it can take its rightful place in the pantheon of RPG systems enabling future generations to explore and expand upon its many possibilities.

A conversation with one of my Bifrost colleagues

 A conversation with one of my Bifrost colleagues (Onogonath in the campaign) a week or so ago prompted me to look again at the Bifrost Rules with a fresh eye.

“Creature description tables – what’s the rationale?” he asked. “Why are the creatures there? What are they doing? How do they reproduce?”

“Well,” I attempted, already realising as I spoke that here I was, clutching at straws. “In the rules it does say that they may have strayed from one plane or dimension to another.”

“Hmm. And the descriptions ... some of them really need to be edited.”

“We tried to inject some humour into this.”

“Tried is the word. Let’s face it – it was of its time.”

I felt bound to agree: There we have it –it  pains me to admit it but the rationale and some of the descriptions are somewhat lacking in the cold light of day outside the trance-like state of mind that is most ideally suited to Role Playing Game participation  (although it was evening at the time and we were not hunched over a kitchen table rolling dice and calculating our chances of survival; we were actually hunched over cold drinks in The Merchants Inn, Rugby, UK ).

In the rules’ defence I should point out however that as anyone who has taken the trouble to read the previous blog entries and to peruse the links they contain will be aware, there is plenty of material attempting to establish a rationale for Magic - in some cases material that was written nigh on 30 years ago in the context of setting up our Bifrost campaign. Part of the Rule System deals with Cosmic Magic.

The Rules actually state (Volume 3 - in the section “On the Origin of Monsters” – p82 – my italics):

“The monsters described as existing on “Earth” would all have required different physical, chemical and biological conditions and laws (Not including magic) to have evolved. Thus it is our theory that these monsters originated in other dimensions and have accidentally found themselves on “Earth” through stumbling through portals and being whisked here from the void.

                “If this is assumed then other dimensions are likely to be populated by these monsters, in fact some will be the dominant life-form. Thus even humans will be found settled in other dimensions, cosmically shipwrecked by the vagaries of the ever-shifting void. This will save the referee many headaches trying to invent hundreds of new monsters as he can fill up dimensions with monsters already known, but under different conditions.”

One of the difficulties back then was where to find useful material that could be incorporated into our campaign – in fact anything (let alone Magic) that required research and the ferreting out of information was a major task. Nowadays of course that is no longer the issue. The quality and reliability of sources may be a concern but a dearth of sources there certainly is not.

There were two fundamental points that came out of the discussion above. The first one has to do with the nature and origin of all these creatures and the second one has to do with why they exist at all.

Any attempt to address either point will not be trivial. One of the strengths of Bifrost (and arguably one of its major weaknesses as well in terms of playability!) is that the rules try to model “reality”. To achieve that effect requires internal consistency. Anachronism that jars or goes against the “feel” of the scenarios presented by the GM pretty quickly kills the game.

But this is Fantasy I hear people cry – what does it matter?

Try playing the game and you will quickly see why it matters, is all I can say to that.

In the next posting I will look at the nature and origin of these creatures and why they would exist ayt all. This is not a trivial subject and nor are the implications of it, either.

And after that?

If we want to really modernise and make playable this remarkable set of rules then we would do well to consider the fact that Bifrost takes place within the mind – it is a shared experience, enjoyed by a group of minds. It is an act of collective creative effort; mind modelling “reality” and deciding whether that “reality” works well enough to convince.

What Bifrost really needs therefore is a set of tools to make the rules more streamlined and playable - luxuries we did not have back in the day. The creation and testing of these will be the main focus of this blog going forward. Armed with those the mind can free itself from constant distractions - rolling dice and doing frenzied mental arithmetic on the hoof mainly - and can concentrate on the enjoyment of the experience.

Bifrost –Volume 3 - Magic.

At last! Volume 3 “Magic” is now available.

I “temporarily” parted company with my personal copy of the 3^rd Volume of the Bifrost rules about three decades ago so that friends of mine could translate it into a digital format. Only recently (within the last few days) has the actual physical manifestation of the text returned to me. A friend of mine visited a mutual friend (who happens to be a real Cleric, ie not the kind that we encounter in our RPG scenarios!) and the actual volume that I bought 30 years or more ago is now on my desk here, next to me, as I type.

In the intervening years various transcripts in Word format and even HTML have found their way into my inbox but to have at last the real paper version back in my possession after so long is (to my way of thinking, at least) a sign.

Prior to this I also received a scanned series of jpeg images from another source that I will use for other purposes but because this one is in pdf format and supported by a “real” copy I feel that this is the one so I have decided to make available via this blog.

So .... here it is:

Bifrost Volume 3 

There are several interesting points to make about Volume 3 that to my mind mark it out as a thing apart from the other sections of the rules. As far as I am aware what I am about to describe makes Bifrost rather unique in this respect – though I may be wrong and it would be interesting to hear from anyone if they know of any RPG rules that also take a similar line. 

 

There is no question that the original writers and play testers of these rules had previously done some research into the subject of Magic. How can we infer this? One glaring clue is the section “Referees Notes on Demons” (page 60). Even back in the day when I first purchased my copy I immediately recognised that these were actually a list of demons from the Renaissance Grimoires because I had some years before read Idries Shah’s book “The Secret Lore of Magic”.¹

The author(s) throwaway comment on page 52 is also revealing: “To produce our own demonology would have been a waste of time as we have an extremely comprehensive one in our own folklore.¹

Their appreciation of how difficult it is to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to researching the subject of magic is also made apparent in the section “Gaining Spells” where (referring to the method of consulting libraries) they write: “Magical Knowledge that is not simply meaningless ritual or esoteric mumbo-jumbo will be hard to find.”

I could have based an entire campaign around Volume 3 with most of the characters being Magic Users and it would have been completely different to the game that we ended up playing. If I was going to create a campaign now then I would probably do that but at the time I was more interested in creating an entire planet and linking it to other worlds and other themes which I could then feed into novels or future campaigns. A lot of that didn’t however come together for reasons that I have explained in other parts of this blog. In response to that this blog is an attempt at being the culmination of many years work in the sense that it not only acts as a record of what went before but it also proclaims itself to be the “jumping off point” for new creative efforts that will unfold over the next few years.¹

Back to Bifrost after that slight digression: I nevertheless created lists of “Magic Users” who underpinned the political system in my version of WestReim and some of them played a part in the events that unfolded (and which are detailed and embellished for literary purposes in my novel Kcrargon) but the overall shape and narrative of the campaign that we played back then was not overtly driven by “magic”.

That said, let us take a brief leisurely stroll through the magical realm as it is portrayed from the “Bifrostian” perspective.

Magic consists of some White, mostly Grey and some Black spells that depend for their effect / success primarily upon the amount of energy that the characters have. Factors such as the time spent performing a spell, the emotional state of the caster, a random factor and the resistance to magic of the target (if there is one) apply as well. If characters are to become more skilled at magic then they need a certain mental capacity (for example the ability to retain spells in memory is important – reading them off a scroll or out of a grimoire does not serve to improve a character’s efficacy). Energy can be pooled by a group of characters. Energy is recuperated using meditation. Energy is increased by successfully casting spells.

There are many instances where the rules fall back on the adjudication of the Gamesmaster to determine how to play out the results of spell casting. In a way this is as it should be though – magic (as discussed elsewhere on this blog) is such a fundamental premise underpinning any Bifrost campaign that the nature of the world created by the Gamesmaster is to a large extent determined by the kind of magic that the feel or the ambience of that world carries along with it – all too easy for the wrong kind of interpretation to jar with the effect sought, leading to a sudden surfacing out of the immersive experience and back into the stark reality of the room in which the players are seated (nb we never actually played Bifrost outdoors and seldom standing up) – a rude jolt from the Bifrostian Reams into “reality” which no one wants (Players or Gamesmasters!)

There is a whole section on Cosmic Magic which deals with inter-planar and inter-dimensional travel; the notion of the multiverse, basically. There is a complete rationale to this system that covers modes of travel and mechanisms for dealing with different time flows, anomalies, energy required to make the trip and so on. The rules also explain that the diversity of creatures in the game’s incident tables (Volume 1) can just as usefully cover other planes / dimensions – some movement of beings from one place to another takes place all the time resulting in encounters with similar beings in other dimensions. This also applies to humans so that there will be places where humans encountered could be displaced persons who have been swept through planar gateways out into the other worlds, for example. That said, nothing prevents a Gamesmaster creating creatures and beings that are unique to a plane or a dimension – in Bifrost the only limits are those of the participants’ imaginations!

 

More on Magic and Volume 3 in later posts.

Notes:

What I didn’t know (or had omitted to pay attention to) was that Idries Shah had actually taken these from The Lemegeton (or “The Lesser Key of Solomon”) a translation of which is freely available in pdf format from various sources. The authors of this translation were Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers and Aleister Crowley. The former was one of the founders of The Golden Dawn, a magical order, and the latter (after being a member for a while) the founder of Thelema, a magical system, and the O.T.O. , a magical order also. Both of these orders and Thelema have been around for many decades – I delve into this material in more detail on my other blog - click on this link if you are interested: Exploring the Deep Caverns of the Mind

Bifrost: Beyond The Basics

Bifrost : Beyond The Basics

So if you have taken a look at the post "Bifrost: A Sword & Sorcery Role Playing Game."

on this blog the material on offer more or less begs the question: “What next?”

One of the most immediate impressions I had when I acquired Volume 1 was that the rules were incomplete and I had to wait for more. I obtained the subsequent volumes eventually but even though I had the first 3 there were still more rules and topics referred to that were lacking.

Neverthless I utilised a lot of material that I had already created for the purpose of playing RPG scenarios to set up a Bifrost campaign. We were seasoned RPG players, by the way, and I and others had already created Dungeons set within RPG worlds and had been doing so for around three years or more before Bifrost even existed.

We played out a campaign over a few years and we shared a tremendously entertaining and deeply absorbing experience together as we all contributed to the creation of a living world. The campaign drew to a close simply because everyone had lives and after a while we were not able to meet up on a regular basis; as so often happens with these things.

Nevertheless my fellow gamers and I felt that we had experienced something that we wanted to somehow share with others so we decided that in order to do that Volume 4 needed to appear. We contacted the publishers and they were amenable to the idea so we set to work and Volume 4 duly appeared.

We attempted to contact the original authors of the first 3 volumes but they had dispersed a few years previously and we had no means of contacting them. It seemed pretty evident that the whole of Bifrost needed to be revised, improved, corrected, added to etc and maybe condensed into one (or maybe, for reasons of size, two) volumes.

In those days we had to type all the pages on A3 sheets and make corrections by hand using white correction fluid. Photocopied images had to be glued into place. Printing had to be done via printing companies and a run of volumes produced at a time in sufficient quantity just like book publishing.

Desk top publishing did not exist then.

So it was a lot of work and for not very much recognition or interest.

We had no resources to heavily advertise the rules and in any case there were no copies of the first three volumes around in any great quantity and the publishers had no plans to print more. Even if we had tried to promote Volume 4 we had no means of obtaining the rest for our “customers”. At no time were we ever really interested in doing this “commercially” – we had jobs and careers so we didn’t need to think like that. Instead we did everything because we enjoyed doing it and we knew that we had something special here – for all we knew we were possibly the only people doing this and to this day we still do not know. I have never met anyone who referee’d a Bifrost campaign of the kind that I am going to describe in the pages of this blog.

We did all of this work and then we, just like the original authors, dispersed and got on with our lives ...

Except that I decided to capture the essence of Bifrost and to preserve for posterity the essential “story” of the campaign that we played out over many many hours for a period of around three years.

I was the GM so I had all the material needed to do this. I set to work and after even more hours over a period of about two years I created a novel using a BBC Micro Model B computer, a daisy wheel printer and floppy discs in a very ancient format using desktop publishing software called “Word”.

I sent the manuscript around to a few publishers in the UK and the US but no one was interested.

The novel languished for years. Long after my BBC B and its peripherals were consigned to oblivion I decided to convert the format of the files to allow me to revise the text using “modern” computers. I duly rewrote and reformatted the novel and decided to waste no more time with mainstream publishers (who would be interested anyway?) and so I contacted a self publishing company in the US and they created a book for me. I put it up online and guess what? No one was interested.

I still keep in touch with my Bifrost colleagues from time to time and through them I discovered that Bifrost appears on a very few websites with the usual comments ... “what a great set of rules but we cannot find them anywhere and by the way it looks so complicated that we wonder if there was ever anyone who played it?” or words to that effect.

Well – now you can get the rules here and yes, people did play it.

Spurred on by this tiny glimmer of “hope” I have decided to take on the mantle of the "Torchbearer" and since I suspect that all these years I have subconsciously cast myself in the role of Bifrost’s “Keeper of the Flame”, perhaps it is appropriate that I do so.

It may be that by doing this future generations will enjoy experiences of the kind that we were priveleged to have had. That thought is reward enough.

In this blog I am going to tell you how we played it and I am going to give you everything you need to play it.

I am not going to sell you anything – the rules are free.

I am going to rewrite and revise some of them and add rules that we devised to assist us when playing and creating the campaign. Maybe the version we envisaged (condensed, two volumes) will emerge from that and again I will make it available for free.

I am also going to provide material that I used as a GM (Gamesmaster) when I put the world of our campaign together to assist future GMs – a word on this in a moment.

First things first though.

This is where I started – the first thing I did was to create the essential framework upon which everything would hang and that was The Quest.

Setting Up The Campaign.

A common theme that runs through fantasy and science fiction fantasy is that of a quest or a journey. Actually, it doesn’t restrict itself to the two genres I just referred to, this was often the basis for stories that were written long ago as much as it is for works of fiction written in more recent times. The journey or quest is a universal theme. The important point for our purposes is that essentially what happens during a Bifrost campaign (which is tailored towards SF and SF/Fantasy) is that a story unfolds – a collaborative process hopefully that includes input from all concerned. So what we need is a framework to hang everything on but that framework has to be flexible and there must be scope for going off at a tangent with methods of bringing the narrative back on track without appearing to be manipulative or controlling (on the part of the GM, I mean).

Before we get too much into this I should point out that there is a fundamental premise underlying the Bifrost system which runs counter to many other RPG systems and that is that no one is going to spoon feed you with ready-made games that you just simply buy / acquire and you play by following the instructions. In other words, you are expected to do some work and you are encouraged to create games that are unique to you and to your fellow gamers. This probably stems from the fact that Bifrost was never a commercial venture. We discovered that the original authors were at university together and spent many hours putting the rules together in the Computer Science department! So straight away you can infer that these people were intelligent, thought logically and were working with programming techniques that at that time would be pretty difficult to do (as everything to do with computing was in those days!) There are also other clues as to who these people must have been as well – but we will get to that later. Anyway – the point I am making is that I am going to show you my approach but it is not the approach. You are expected to do your own thing.

Ok – now that that is clear, here is what I did:

1. I considered lots of plot ideas then settled upon the idea of “rescue”.

2. How many stories in the SF / SF Fantasy genre have to do with this? The main point is that we have to decide who is/are being “rescued”.

3. Ok – so also we have to consider why this “rescue” is going to become the main focus of the game. Surely it has to be something more important than merely saving a character in the game from jeopardy?

4. I hit upon the idea therefore that whoever was to be “rescued” not only had to be someone important at the level of the entire world of this campaign but also that there had to be a reason why it would matter to the player characters in the game.

5. So I developed the idea that the one being rescued and the rescuer were somehow related. I also decided that in the end the player characters would not have to really care about this in order to participate – in other words they should feel as if they were part of something bigger than themselves whilst at the same time they would be serving the needs of their characters (in the game). A little bit like real life, really.

6. I gave it some thought then decided: Let the one being rescued and the rescuer be ... brothers. So far so good - but, again, so what? Why would that be anything significant (to the player characters, I mean)?

7. Now it so happened that I had been working upon several ideas for novels and one of these involved a relationship between a very far-advanced “human” and another species resembling “humans” and that kind of struck a chord in this context so I thought, ok, well let us have one “brother” come from some place else – that is to say, “off-world”.

8. That immediately begged the question - if one of these “brothers” was “here” and the other one was coming from elsewhere to effect the “rescue” then how could that be?

9. I thought about this for a while then it came to me – these “brothers” were not related to each other in the same sense that we understand the term. In fact one would be of a certain kind and the other of a different kind. The reason a “rescue” was needed had more to do with politics than familial loyalties.

10. Sometimes the best thing to do is to stop thinking and to chill. So I left this alone for a while and at some point had a few beers and ... I had one of those moments when everything came together. It suddenly became abundantly clear that the one coming to do the “rescue” was the one who would, eventually, become the focus of the “rescue”. In other words the whole game would be about a mission gone wrong.

All of this implied that the world of the game would have to be put into some kind of context – that is to say that if NPCs (Non-Player Characters) were to be introduced from “off-world” then where were they supposedly being introduced from?

The Bifrost system allows for this – a quick consultation of Volume 3 will lend credence to this assertion – so my reasoning would lend itself to a playable “plot”.

Excellent (I thought) so – what now?

What I needed was a world, basically, within which the events of the game could unfold. I already had several worlds that I had been developing prior to Bifrost so all I had to do was, presumably, develop them. This proved to be more problematic than I at first thought. For a start, most of the worlds I had envisaged up to this point were not inhabited by “humans” so to try to play them out in any meaningful way would not really work unless the people behind the player characters were on my wavelength – highly unlikely, I decided. That left me with little alternatives – I opted for a world not unlike this one but with a history of initial coexistance between two races ... or maybe three to make it even more interesting / dynamic; in essence, “elves”, “dwarves”, “humans”. Notice how Bifrost is derivative ... how Tolkienesque, how much it owes to the works of Vance – especially The Dying Earth series. Yet despite these apparent cliches,as GMs we can work with this material according to our own personal style – as I will demonstrate in due course.

By the way, well done to anyone who has persevered so far – this is a long and winding trail but in the end it does lead to a kind of promised land ... believe me. It is worth the effort!

I needed a world, maps, connections with other worlds, a feeling of dynamism that would create the sense of a changing environment with lots of things happening at once just as in the “real world”, a political setting and a history for the player characters to refer to or to help put events in context.

“WestReim”is the world that the original authors refer to in Volume 1. I thought I might as well use that name but of course there is nothing in the rules that tells us much about their campaign and so I have no idea whether our campaign even remotely resembled their’s. That is the beauty and strength of Bifrost – it will be a different experience every time rather than a series of boxed sets of instructions that everyone can follow.

There is usually a war in the past between races in all of these genres – one race in exile, the possibility of a return ... in my case I put the Elves (I called them Cidhe) off-world (for now) and the Dwarves (I called them Drakar) in the Wilderness having been ousted from a large area of the world (but not defeated) by Humans. Actually I didn’t tell the players this but they were really playing the parts of mostly indigenous beings on a planet called “Thelgor”. Humans in this game would be from off-world. The players would meet a few of these humans in the guise of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) along the way.

Now let us return to the “rescue”. I envisaged some Cidhe still hidden here and there plotting to find a way to return and recapture the planet. Why? I came up with a rather convoluted idea but it served my purpose in that it gave impetus to the game whilst remaining something of an enigma. This world, I postulated, contains an entity at its core (actually this is a widespread belief – that every planet and indeed every star etc has a kind of “soul”) which has in this case originated on a different plane and has gained entry to this plane through a gateway somewhere deep inside the interior of the world. An envoy – an Emissary – from the Cidhe arrives from off-world to warn of this incursion from “elsewhere” and intends to do so with the assistance of his “brother”. However, I added a twist. His “brother” has fallen foul of a race of Undead beings (I called them the Twice-Born) and is under their sway and these beings are in league with this entity I just referred to. I was always a little vague about what their intentions were (and that of the entity itself) mainly because it represents something horrenduous and catastrophic that must be resisted at all costs whilst the motivation behind it is clearly completely alien and perhaps a complete mystery that is not understandable by beings on this plane (ie on WestReim).

(My nod to Lovecraft, there, obviously.)

The game’s setup became focussed upon the rescue of the Emissary (who falls into the clutches of the Enemy working in league with the entity) by the players who would be “recruited” by the evil brother intent upon betraying everyone so that he could escape from this world. (I envisaged him in exile for reasons that at that time were also unclear – they have since come into focus as a result of further work that I did after our campaign but that is part of the broader scope of this blog and not directly to do with Bifrost.)

I acquired a map, changed most of the names of places by hand then took parts of it and added more game-specific details. I worked out a sequence of broad events that needed to happen to give the game a narrative flow. I made a list of places, figured out who was allied to who and what their circles of influence were. I wrote down lists of possible random events related to the quest that I could mix in with the random incident tables. I drew rough sketches of places that would be significant during play. I made a list of NPCs (Nobles, Magii, Pirate leaders etc) and worked out a few trade routes and economic justifications for the existance of various groups of people and the places where they lived. I positioned the key places where artefacts would be found that would be needed to effect the rescue and I set the scene that the players would find themselves in at the outset.

We met for our first Bifrost session over a weekend and everyone rolled dice and created their characters. I assigned them various roles within the context of the game. I stated their initial mission (a mundane task involving the delivery of stones) and we were off.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Some Guidelines & Notes that might help

Keypoint: All of the “real”events that take place in Bifrost occur in the shared imaginative experience of the game – rules, calculations, fancy drawings, elaborate maps etc are just tools to help get the job done. All of these probably can be quite basic in their presentation but as long as they serve the purpose of feeding the imagination then they are good enough.

If this “world” does not come across to the players as a vibrant living place with credible back story and a feeling of history underlying it then you are not playing Bifrost. You are playing a dice game.

At the time we played out our campaign I didn’t know this but I have since realised that Bifrost is really an exercise in Pathworking. It is a controlled visualised journey undertaken by a group of friends as they enter into the realms of the visual imagination. Bifrost takes place on the Inner Planes if it is done correctly. It focusses solely on the rolling of dice and the making of notes on bits of paper if it is not. Use music, incense, candlelight .... anything that helps to create atmosphere - dress up if you want, become your character!

Here are some of the notes that I used to play out our story. You will notice, no doubt, how rough and ready some of them are – but I was a GM in a hurry back then with a dozen or more players eager to get going so I didn’t have the luxury of providing slick props. As it turned out we didn’t need them – these days if I was doing this again it would be a lot easier to put some impressive visuals together to support the imagination but in a way that could be a drawback. If everyone has to work at this and really visualise what is being described and shared – right down to sounds, sight, smells, touch, tastes, emotions, feelings etc – then you can see how Bifrost is a really valuable system to help train the imagination and to develop individual creativity. We had to act our parts without props. We learned to put aside our self consciousness and to enter into the mindsets of our characters and their world. So anyway – for what they are worth and purely as a footnote in the history of these rules – here are some examples of the notes I used. I apologise in advance if you are not impressed – but my only consolation is that all the great experiences in cinema and on stage probably started with material of similar quality to this!

You need maps and some history - I gave this to the players

Some more history notes for my benefit

I took a real map, changed all the names then listed the places and their resources etc

I thought about the Rulers - how powerful were they?

Which Ruler owed allegiance to who?

Only if a place became important did I dig in a little deeper

I thought about trade

If a particular aspect of trade became important I went the extra mile

As the game opened up I started to do the same for uncivilised areas

For particular parts of the journey I created player specific notes

After a while it becomes imperative to keep track of all the NPCs in the game

So that hopefully shows some useful examples of the kind of background notes that the GM should put together.

Once a place becomes a real focus (and this can of course be planned well in advance) then you need some more detail.

Moven Mountain was always going to be where the campaign would reach a climax - so I had to get a real feel for the setting. This is just some of the material I used:

Sketches and plans help

We had to do this by hand back then

Imagination was the key - these 3D visualisations were just a way of assisting with that

The campaign generated the need for rules to help resolve scenarios and so we put these together but not all of them would find their way into Volume 4. Here are some examples:

Villages - how do you justify them? How do you pay for them?

Social advancement - promised in Vol 1 - never really hit prime time but we had a notion that it would be complex and this indicates that maybe we were right

Some more rules - slightly controversial so we kept them out of Vol 4

These are not Bifrost rules but we were going to adapt the basic idea behind these to use for the next campaign which unfortunately never happened

We had several meetings over the course of a few months and we mulled over the experience - eventually leading to Volume 4. These are the notes we made and then after that I wrote some additional material that I envisaged either as articles in support of Bifrost assuming that it would "take off" (which it never did) or that we could incorporate in a Volume 5 (which also didn't happen).

Post mortem discussions

Realistic Fantasy (1)

Realistic Fantasy (2)

Function & Use of Magic

What happened after that was that I decided to use all of this experience and material to create a novel.

That came about after considering several ideas at the time so it might not have happened if I had decided to write something else, of course.

Decisions - how "Kcrargon" came about

You can obtain a copy of Kcrargon from Amazon for a modest sum if you are interested. I would say from a Bifrost perspective that it at least demonstrates that the Bifrost System worked for us and we did create a pretty complex and vibrant world as a result of our efforts.

The revival starts here - a revamped version of Bifrost in some kind of Ebook format.


I am working on it.

Bifrost: A Sword & Sorcery Role Playing Game.

Bifrost originally surfaced in the late 1970's / early 1980's and appeared in 4 Volumes.

Here you will find scans of the original rules.

Over a period of time more material will be posted here adding to and explaining how these work and how to utilise them to create role playing scenarios and entire worlds within which to enact them.

First here are some links that will introduce you to the first volume "Faerie".

Bifrost Volume 1 - Cover, Acks, Intro, Setting Up Game 

Bifrost Volume 1 - Game Content, Seq Actions, Choice of Char, Trg, Indiv Abilities 

Bifrost Volume 1 - Alignment, Gods etc

Bifrost Volume 1 - Social Pos, Prices & Equip, Maps etc, Campaign Surv, Fatigue

Bifrost Volume 1 - Disease & Illness (inc Wounds) 


Bifrost Volume 1 - -Tables - Incident Type Loc'n, Area Type & Creature Group Civ & Unciv 

Bifrost Volume 1 - Tables - Creature Group Wild 

Bifrost Volume 1 - Tables - Incidents Men, Human Group Civ, Unciv, Wild, Characteristics 

Bifrost Volume 1 - Morale & Reacts, Weather, Playsheet, Progression & Advancement 

As you will no doubt have surmised these are complicated and are not complete without further rules. Fighting is a key activity in any fantasy RPG of this kind. The second volume "Combat" introduced the game's basic mechanisms for determining the outcome of combat. Here are some links that will provide you with these:

Bifrost Volume 2 Part 1

Bifrost Volume 2 Part 2

Bifrost Volume 2 Part 3

Bifrost Volume 2 Part 4

Bifrost Volume 2 Part 5

Bifrost Volume 2 Part 6

Volume 3 dealt with Magic.

There is a post (Here) dealing with this (and a link to a pdf of the rules which you will need to download due to its size.)











Volume 4 expanded upon the original 3 volumes and it was written by a different group of players (of whom I was one). It provided complete lists of all the characteristics of the creatures in the creature description tables (see Vol 1) together with additional combat rules and handy sheets to use when creating characters and some play sheets summarising the rules for ease of reference during play. The additional rules included unarmed, mounted & aerial combat, combat fatigue, health of horses, primitive firearms, literacy and optional combat amendments.

In some ways most importantly there were some basic guidelines as to how to play the game and hints regarding the use of magical artefacts to help provide structure and options for plot development during campaigns.

Here are some links to these:
Bifrost Vol 4 - Intro - Playing The Game 

Bifrost Vol 4 - Additional Combat - Literacy etc 

Bifrost Vol 4 - Creature Description Tables - Character & Play Sheets 

So Vol 4 delivered most of what had been promised plus more. There were still some gaps however that were never published in any form and as a result of several years play - that would eventually yield a novelised version of a longstanding campaign - masses of notes and ideas for expansion and improvements to the rules were created and would then languish for thirty years.


The additional Bifrost material referred to above will be made available in due course, including all the written material that we used to create the world that our campaign took place within. 

Bifrost is a complex rule system that would benefit from being "automated" in ways that either were not possible or were extremely difficult to achieve back then - but which are now fairly straightforward. We will explore this in future posts.

The ultimate aim of this "project" is to recreate and revitalise Bifrost so that it can take its rightful place in the pantheon of RPG systems enabling future generations to explore and expand upon its many possibilities.