I learned from a recent episode of the podcast Ludonarrative Dissidents about an RPG that interested me quite a bit. It's called Bloodlust. A French-language game released in 1991 which centers on a topic I love, and one that's weirdly underrepresented in RPGs: sentient weapons.
I'm a huge fan of the Elric books (shocker there), and I love a lot of the subsequent fantasy media that riffed on Stormbringer (which is itself a riff on the One Ring, of course). Although plenty of RPGs from D&D onward incorporate evil, intelligent weapons, I wasn't previously aware of one designed around the conceit.
From my limited understanding (more on this in a sec), in Bloodlust, you play as the bearer of an Incarnate God (deity in the form of a weapon, for reasons), but also the Incarnate God itself, which will have different goals and agendas than the bearer, and will almost certainly care much less about their survival than the other way around.
This is a really neat idea, but I have several major problems with the game, any of which would prevent me from running it myself. That's on top of my not being fluent in French. That said, I can read Spanish well enough that the similar grammar is comprehensible, and by looking up the words that aren't cognates with Spanish or English, I can read the book well enough to at least verify and build on my primary source of information on the game, this RPGnet review.
Anyway, in this post I will enumerate my issues with Bloodlust, as well as the salvageable ideas that I am using as the basis in designing a new game around the central conceit.
Problem #1: Problematic* (Handling of) Subject Matter
Let's just get this one out of the way. I'm being kind of tongue-in-cheek calling this game "problematic" because I take issue with the use of that word in Online Discourse (TM), but there's a lot of unnecessarily horrible shit in this game. Mostly, I don't mean the inclusion of taboo subjects in itself, but the way they're written about.
I think the best example is the Seduction skill. First of all, that's a thing, which carries a lot of gross implications about the roles that sex and autonomy are expected to play in the game. Worse, the associated stat varies by gender. Men Seduce with the Force stat, which governs physical strength as well as your intimidating personality as a warrior. Women seduce with Agility, unless they're members of the amazon race, in which case they still use Force. Yeah.
Bloodlust wants you to struggle with both your weapon bearer's sexual urges and those of your God Weapon. I'm not inherently opposed to that, although it would be nice to have that be an optional mechanic for groups that understandably don't want to engage with that kind of theme/content. But there are so many reasons this is a bad way to do it. The mechanics all but force you to play a rapist, or, best case scenario if you roll well, someone who's always on the verge of raping between their pillaging and looting. Again, not inherently a subject you can't put in an RPG, but I do not get the sense there's a shred of sensitivity given to the subject.
Granted, I can't read the book cover to cover, but it's clearly a swords and sorcery game that embraces all the most sexist aspects of its source material. In pretty much every group I've played with, at least one person has sexual violence as a hard line. And frankly, playing a game where you give that subject the caution it deserves doesn't sound like much fun to me, either.
There's a lot of racism too, similarly cribbed from works like Conan without any introspection. This is also hardwired into the mechanics in a completely inextricable way. There are no character classes, but your race (all human racial groups in this game, which makes the shittiness all the more overt) determines a ton. Every member of the "primitive" jungle-dwelling race has a lower Willpower stat. The aforementioned amazon race always goes around murdering all men and kidnapping all female children. There's another "savage" race called the Thunks. You can address racism in RPGs, and I'm more of a proponent than including it in a setting honestly than conveniently omitting it for the sake of players' white guilt, but the authors' vision of their world is so clearly bigoted that I can't imagine engaging with it in a productive way.
Anyway, enough said about this stuff. It doesn't invalidate the premise of the game, but it invalidates the game as a whole.
Problem #2: 90s Crunch
This one is a bit subjective, but I don't think many people playing RPGs today are looking for a system with incredibly fiddly rules for combat, from 3 different melee attack skills to overwrought weapon types, the whole shebang. The people who like that stuff have a system they use for it already, and odds are they've been playing it for decades already.
Bloodlust is certainly not the worst offender in this regard, and there are some roleplay-oriented mechanics that I imagine were pretty innovative for the early 90s. But even if I could read the book well enough to properly learn them all, there are too many mechanics that add complexity without interesting choice for me to want to play them as is. And as mentioned, all the grossness is blended into the mechanics across the board.
Problem #3: Missed Opportunities
I can't say either of the above problems surprised me at all, although the extent of the horribleness was still dismaying. But they really didn't do nearly enough with the idea that gives the whole thing a redeeming quality!
As far as I can tell, the Incarnate Gods' personalities mostly serve to fuck up the bearers' best laid plans by forcing them to do atrocities once in a while. They're closer to Call of Cthulhu's sanity mechanic in that way, which longtime readers of this blog will know is not a good look IMO. There don't appear to be any mechanics for their long-term master plans, because the book doesn't give much thought to what those might be, nor advice to GMs or players about them. They're literally gods in the mortal world! I guess in the lore, they just took the forms of weapons to indulge in all their nasty vices? Without any plan to turn back??
Like, I do think the conceit of evil, sentient weapons is going to inherently strain suspension of disbelief to a degree, but you could do much better. And perhaps more importantly, it robs the Incarnate Gods of their ability to serve the story in ways as interesting as Stormbringer. They do have some cool details, like refusing to allow themselves to be brought aboard a ship for fear of falling to the bottom of the sea, and are incorporated into the worldbuilding well sometimes, but they don't really feel like characters in their own right.
I have more ideas that are, in fairness, certainly informed by more recent divergences from the narrative structures of trad RPGs, but I will say that Ars Magica predates this game, so the idea of fucking with the traditional "1 PC per player" format and the idea that a character is always controlled by the same, single player in any context was already out there.
So What?
Why am I interested in trying to salvage anything from this game instead of just coming up with a totally unrelated system that leverages the same concept? Well, I already mentioned several things above. Overall, I do like how hard it leans into sword & sorcery, despite it embracing the shittiest parts of the genre without qualms. I couldn't call myself an Elric fan if that didn't appeal to me at all.
A detail I like a lot and would probably keep is that there's almost nothing supernatural in the setting outside the Incarnate Gods. It really lends itself to the pulpiness of sword & sorcery, in a good way, and helps differentiate it from the D&D assumption that every village has a guy who can conjure food and water from thin air every day.
Lastly, as flawed as the execution is, the Desire mechanic bears promise. It reminds me a lot of Unknown Armies' Passions, which is of course a good thing. And as much as CoC's Sanity irks me, it's the mechanical genesis of the shock gauges in UA, which I love even more than Passions. If the Incarnate Gods were more fleshed out and implemented in a more narratively interesting way, and the bearers were expected to do more than go around marauding for no real reason, this could be the basis of a really cool game.
The sense I get from Bloodlust is that the designers wanted the "main characters" to be the bearers, leaving the mechanics to be a bit confused about the role of the Incarnate Gods. I think centering the games on the weapons, perhaps even focusing mechanical complexity on them and making the bearers' high likelihood of dying in combat a feature rather than a bug derived from 90s RPG expectations, might be a better move.
Next Steps
I've been eyeing the Year Zero Engine, the basis of the highly swords & sorcery-inspired Forbidden Lands as well as a number of other RPGs I like, as the template for what I'm currently, uncreatively calling "Bloodlust But Good". I'm a bit unsure how well that'll work with the Incarnate Gods as the main PCs, since the system does follow similar trad RPG assumptions as to who plays which characters, but there are a lot of other potential points of mechanical congruence, and of course there's an SRD, so I can freely poach the parts I like.
As a last note, I freely admit that my inability to parse this book's text fully means any number of my above claims about Bloodlust may be off to some extent. If you can/have actually read it, and this is the case, please let me know! In fact, if you speak French but don't have a copy of this 24-year-old book, let me know, and perhaps we can work something out in the piratical spirit of swords & sorcery.
This post is a part 1, so stay tuned for when I've got more figured out.
