Goodman Games has picked up the licence for Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, the publisher revealed at Dungeon Con over the weekend. It's a small announcement with a lot of weight behind it: Elric hasn't had an official English-language tabletop RPG in 19 years.
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Find events near youGoodman is the studio behind Dungeon Crawl Classics, the OSR system built around the pulp-fantasy "Appendix N" authors that shaped Gary Gygax and early Dungeons & Dragons. The publisher has already adapted Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar and Jack Vance's Dying Earth for DCC, so an Elric line slots neatly into that lineage. Moorcock's brooding, doomed albino prince and his soul-eating sword Stormbringer are arguably the most cited Appendix N influence on D&D, and he's been on the OSR community wishlist for years.
The Elric licence has had a curious life on the tabletop. Chaosium's Stormbringer arrived in 1981 using its Basic Roleplaying System and ran through several editions, while Mongoose's Elric of Melniboné followed in 2007 on RuneQuest. Both have been out of print for a long time, and the licence is reported to cover the first six books in the saga, the run that includes Elric of Melniboné, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate and Stormbringer itself.
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Start organising for freeThere's no system confirmed yet, though DCC RPG seems the obvious fit given Goodman's catalogue. The publisher hasn't said whether this becomes a full DCC Elric setting in the same mould as Lankhmar, a separate game line, or both.
For UK players, Moorcock is hometown reading and the Eternal Champion and the wider Young Kingdoms have a cult following stretching back decades. A new Elric RPG coming from a respected publisher is genuine news, even if it's months away from a public preview. Worth keeping an ear out for system details over the summer, and if you're itching to try the existing Stormbringer or RuneQuest editions in the meantime, find a group on Backseat Gamer and roll up an albino prince of your own.
Sources: Tabletop Sentinel | Basic Roleplaying Central | Goodman Games
