Steal your strength and guard your soul: this week, the Vintage RPG Podcast looks at Chaosium's Stormbringer RPG. Designed by Ken St. Andre, Stormbringer is a high power and high risk RPG set in the world of Michael Moorcock's Elric stories (for our money, perhaps the greatest fantasy series ever written). One of the more straightforward of the games using Chaosium's Basic Role Playing system, it has piles of fatalistic atmosphere and dark themes, perhaps most notably the magic system that relies on mind altering substances and is entirely arranged around summoning and binding demons and other supernatural entities. Most Stormbringer games end in death or corruption – the fun is in figuring out which is the better fate.
