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.
