Review: King of Dragon Pass

Let me first acknowledge that I might not be the ideal reviewer for a computer game. I don’t have a particularly good computer, and I don’t spend a lot of time or money on computer games. In fact, I spend none of either. But I have in the past, and I figure I know a decent strategy game when I see one, regardless of format. That said, on to the review of Hero Wars.

King of Dragon Pass is a strategy game set in the world of Glorantha, setting of the cult favorite RPG Runequest and the brand-new Hero Wars. In King of Dragon Pass, you take control of a clan of refugees from the kingdom of Heortland, which is being menaced by a usurper who calls himself the Pharaoh. Your clan has migrated into the wilderness of Dragon Pass, a previously taboo area which is now being settled by lots of little clans just like yours. Like you, these clans are Orlanthi, farmers and cattle herders whose culture is similar - but not identical - to a combination of the Celts, Saxons, and Scandinavians of Earth's Dark Ages.

The objective of the game is to weld a number of clans into a single tribe, and - through political, military, and mystical means - become King of Dragon Pass.

KoDP’s presentation is light on flashy graphics. Scenes are presented with still pictures (rather attractive paintings, actually), and there is no real-time control of any kind. You manage your clan’s resources, conduct the appropriate rituals, choose tactics when going to war, and decide among possible courses of action when a crisis develops, but you never move little men around or zap things. This is fine by me; I’ve never attached an awful lot of value to impressive graphics (although, as I say, the pictures are very pretty), and it reduces the difficulty of running KoDP on my not-so-great computer. The only part of presentation which really costs KoDP points is the music. It’s kind of cute, but there’s only a limited number of themes, and after an hour or two of gameplay, it gets really tiring.

Let me go back to those graphics. I keep saying they’re nice, but I don’t feel that I’m sufficiently emphasizing the weight they carry in conveying what life is like in Dragon Pass. I was so inspired by the excellent impression of the Orlanthi culture that KoDP gives that I went out and bought the Glorantha book for Hero Wars. I only wish it were anything like as nicely presented.

Gameplay in KoDP is divided up into phases, each of which represents a season. The division of the seasons focuses strategy into particular areas: during the Sea season, it’s time for planting and attention should be devoted to the clan’s crops. The Fire season is time for raiding, while all hands are needed for the Earth season harvest, and so on. this isn’t just winter, spring, summer, fall, though - there are five seasons in all, plus a period called “Sacred Time” in which the clan’s magical resources are allocated.

Advising you on your options are a council called the Clan Ring. Each Ring member has different abilities and opinions; no member is always right, but each has something to consider. Each Ring member is devoted to a different god, but there are far more gods - and far more clan nobles - than seats on the Ring. Picking your council is an important part of succeeding at KoDP.

All of this pretty much standard strategy game fare. The really neat and interesting thing about KoDP is the way you win (or so the manual tells me; I myself haven’t done it yet). You win KoDP by acting like an Orlanthi. You can have the most cows, the most troops, and the most money (wait, I already said cows) in Dragon Pass, and it won’t do you a blind bit of good if the other clans think you’re an un-Orlanthi stickpicker. Winning the game requires doing well on the magical plane, and how you do on the magical plane is determined by how well you uphold the example of your ancestors. This doesn’t mean you can’t kill and plunder - the Orlanthi are cattle-raiding barbarians, after all. But you have to kill and plunder according to Orlanthi moral precepts, which are in many ways different from ours.

Throughout the game, crises will occur - from hunting down terrifying Chaos monsters to finding a bride for an unattractive clan member - which must be resolved in an Orlanthi way. This doesn’t mean picking the one right answer, either: there are lots of Orlanthi ways of going about things.

The richness and detail of the culture is also evident in the heroquests. Heroquests are rituals in which picked clan members enter into the realm of the spirits to reenact the great deeds of the gods which took place before time began. Success in heroquests requires you to understand the Orlanthi legends and to behave in a manner befitting the god your champion embodies. The myths all have that irrational yet compelling feel which marks real legends. Greg Stafford, the man behind Runequest’s impossibly detailed cosmology, has obviously borrowed a lot from Celtic and Scandinavian sources for the Orlanthi mythology, but it's different enough from real-world mythology that it has a nice otherworldly feel about it. You have to pay close attention to absorb the lessons of the heroquests.

If it weren’t for the intriguing Orlanthi morality and myths, this would be a competent but unremarkable strategy game. But the richness and vitality of the Gloranthan setting adds a role-playing aspect to King of Dragon Pass which makes it enjoyable and engrossing.