Crom (by Crom!)

[Hobgoblin]

I bought Crom yesterday from Matakishi's Tea Room.

After some very hasty printing out and assembly of cards either side of dinner, my son and I played an inaugural game. My wife and daughter were planning to play too, but dropped out pleading fatigue.* So my son took on the three heroes in a modified version of the first scenario in the book, and off we went.

This is a great little game. It's more abstract than many; what it most reminded me of was Ganesha's excellent Battlesworn, although it's entirely different. The sole similarity is that both games use highly abstracted rules to give pleasingly concrete results.

What works so well about Crom is the constant decision-making and the fine risk/reward balance. Each character has a dice pool (12 for Conan or the like and 10 for other heroes or major villains). Minions have their dice pre-allocated to moving, combat and shooting (sometimes), while characters allocate them for each turn. There's a strong resource-management element to the game, as using up all your dice leaves you defenceless to attacks (which cost you dice permanently). And you can sacrifice ("burn") dice for the rest of the game to achieve a 6 rather than rolling. So heroic feats can be achieved - a hero could run 60" across the table and back in a single turn - but at a cost: that hero would collapse.

Our cut-down version of the first scenario was a raid by two mouslings and a snakeman to rescue a kidnapped mousling princess. Not quite the stuff of Robert E Howard (by Crom!), but a fun way to test out the mechanics. My son really liked it - he also very much enjoyed our recent games of Sword and Spear Fantasy, in which dice pools and allocation feature heavily too.

We inevitably made a few mistakes in our first game - principally in the resolution of combat against diceless victims. But we're keen to play again (with the two absentees next time). On the basis of the first game, there are some outstanding things about the system:

1. Its unified resolution system - combat, shooting, movement, skills, special activities - all of which require constant decision-making and resource management;

2. Its speed of play and fast 'time to table' - even with preparing the cards, we spent no more than an hour all in on the first skirmish.

3. Flexibility: there's no need to be confined to Hyboria (I confess that I struggle with Howard's awful prose and like the idea of his stories more than the stories themselves); these rules would work well in any setting that features outsize heroes. They could be used for modern or sci-fi too, I think: modern weapons could add dice to shooting pools just as horses add to movement.

4. This is the big one: a skirmish game that really works well with multiple players. That's a big gap nicely filled. Song of Blades and Heroes can work very well with multiple warbands, of course, but it's a different sort of game - grittier and less heroic. In SBH, giving several players just one character each is a risk, because it's very easy to kill anyone through outnumbering in SBH: more Boromir and less Conan. But the balance of multiple hero players and single antagonist players in Crom gives it a really nice 'few stood against many' feel - and the dice-burning mechanism complements this nicely. There's plenty of room for a character to sacrifice himself in a dice-burning round of all-sixes combat to put some giant monstrosity out of action.

And it's only a fiver!

*My daughter had evidently burned out her dice pool creating this rather fine cat just before dinner:

[The Bibliophile]

Nice review and game report. Ive owned Crom! For a while now but haven't tried it out yet. This post renews my interest (though I'm still having a ball with Adv. Song of Blades and Heroes these days.)

[matakishi]

Many thanks for your positive review. I'm glad you enjoyed the game.
The cat is awesome 

[Severian]

I can only echo praise of Crom! It's a great game with bags of potential for any fantasy setting you choose.

Of course, since the original 1982 Conan film coincided with my most impressionable early teenage years, the Hyboria stuff works for me. Although you're right about Howard's prose; and yes, the ideas of his stories always work better than the stories themselves. Nevertheless, there's something endlessly intriguing about Hyboria, and Atlantean magic, and all that apparatus obviously borrowed from other genres (Picts as Red Indians, pathan tribes, khitai &c &c), which may be why (to me, anyway) even fairly pedestrian iterations of the Conan cycle are worth a look (although I passed on the recent kickstarter) and often are in some ways as satisfying as the originals.

And of course it's always good to have a reason to get out one or more of the numerous not-Conan figures I've accumulated over the past three decades...

[Hobgoblin]

This post renews my interest (though I'm still having a ball with Adv. Song of Blades and Heroes these days.)

I'd say that Crom occupies a different ecological niche to ASOBH (which is an excellent game). ASOBH is very much band versus band, whereas Crom is a few heroes versus baddies. ASOBH is more realistic, in that even a hero swamped by goblins will go down, whereas Crom provides lashings of over-the-top derring-do. Both rulesets are fast to play and would fit nicely into an evening's gaming, I reckon.

Of course, since the original 1982 Conan film coincided with my most impressionable early teenage years, the Hyboria stuff works for me. Although you're right about Howard's prose; and yes, the ideas of his stories always work better than the stories themselves. Nevertheless, there's something endlessly intriguing about Hyboria, and Atlantean magic, and all that apparatus obviously borrowed from other genres(Picts as Red Indians, pathan tribes, khitai &c &c), which may be why (to me, anyway) even fairly pedestrian iterations of the Conan cycle are worth a look (although I passed on the recent kickstarter) and often are in some ways as satisfying as the originals.

Yes: the pulpy, throw-it-all-in setting is a lot of fun. I actually like reading about Conan and Howard more than I like reading the stories themselves - I've always found them a bit of a struggle, in a way that (say) Lord Dunsany's proto-S&S stories aren't.

This podcast is good on the way Howard's cram-it-all-in approach was refined by subsequent authors to create a more coherent "universe":

http://thesometime.com/seminar/84-the-coming-of-conan-the-cimmerian/


I do like this, of course:

"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

[Bogdanwaz]

I love the Crom rules and have found them very adaptable.  I used them for a Solomon Kane game at the Fall In convention a few years ago.

http://bogdanwaz.blogspot.com/search/label/Solomon%20Kane

[Hobgoblin]

That looks great!

I meant to say: another good thing about Crom is you don't need to refer to the rulebook much if at all during play. Once you know how combat works, you're up and running. The record keeping is done through the dice pool, and the unified system means that there's no need for a QRS.

[Kamandi]

I'll have to revisit Craig's CROM - not to be confused with new Conan: Rising of the Monsters Game KS'ing in June - since I'm looking for a light narrative game.

[DivisMal]

Crom is a real jewel of game design! I love the elegance and simplicity..the only thing that's bad about it is that there is not MOARE of it! )

[matakishi]

There's a bestiary in the works that will be out later this year.

[DivisMal]

There's a bestiary in the works that will be out later this year.

Really? Those are good news indeed! And may I suggest that a short appendix with rules for other heroes like Cerebus, Elric, Corum etc. would be great as a furure supplement?

[matakishi]

Sure, why not