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Prince Valiant: The Storytelling Game
Simple and elegant game system set in the world of Hal Foster's classic Prince Valiant comic strip, with valuable guidelines for role-playing.
128 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 29, 2016
I personally think that King Arthur Pendragon (and the related The Great Pendragon Campaign: For Pendragon 5th Edition) is Greg Stafford's roleplaying masterpiece. But Prince Valiant is a mighty fine game too. It beautifully adapt Hal Foster's classic strip with a system and a description of the setting that feels very authentic to the original. That system is also very simple, making it accessible to new players, without sacrificing the emotional depth possible in a strong Arthurian game.
The result is a superior game, rendered all the better by the great Foster art throughout. I'm looking forward to seeing it in a new edition that will presumably have the beauty and polish of a modern-day roleplaying book. (And I was thrilled to be able to contribute an episode to the game.)
The result is a superior game, rendered all the better by the great Foster art throughout. I'm looking forward to seeing it in a new edition that will presumably have the beauty and polish of a modern-day roleplaying book. (And I was thrilled to be able to contribute an episode to the game.)
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January 17, 2025How? Someone was selling a Prince Valiant bundle and I was curious--it's by Greg Stafford, writer of the great Arthurian genre-emulating work, Pendragon, but it's also clearly meant to be a starter game.
The bundle I got included the original book, the 2017 reprint, and adventure/episodes book.
What? I am not familiar with the Prince Valiant comic, but this book is immeasurably helped by having the Hal Foster art to set the tone, which is: high-tone adventure in a semi-historical Arthurian time. No setting in that time can ever be truly historical, but this is missing the fantasy elements that are central to D&D-style fantasy.
Like Pendragon, this is knight-centric, and offers heroic battles and experiences: helping the down-trodden, fighting off Saxon/Hun/Viking invaders, rooting out corruption among the nobility. And everything is, I don't want to say kid-safe, but well, you could print out anything here (in the core book) in the Sunday comics section without trouble.
The system is likewise pretty welcoming: you have two traits (Brawn and Presence), there are some skills, and you build a dice pool out of a trait plus a skill. And the dice? D2, otherwise known as flipping a coin. Brawn is also your HP, so if you get hit, you might have less chance to attack next time. That's kind of it as a player -- though there is a chapter on advanced options, including non-knight characters, new skills, and, most Pendragon-y of all, personality flaws just like all the Arthurian knights have. (There's also a thing about trading GM duties off, giving someone a chance to GM a scene, and then getting a certificate that they can pay to get some special effect.)
There's no monster section, no magic section, only a short section on the world, which is about what you would expect / what say a film serial might have in the time. (That said, I was a little surprised that Valiant got around so far, with adventures from North America to Africa.)
The reprint is almost an exact reprint, but in color, which I didn't really need; the episode book is a collection of adventures by diverse hands, as they say, with each being about 1-3 pages long. In the main book, by Stafford himself, he includes episodes like A Woman in Distress, Ragged Children, Robber Knights, A Saxon War-Band, Rescued by Lancelot. There's two troll episodes: one featuring a fake troll, one featuring a real troll. But otherwise, mostly it's non-fantasy, non-magic stuff.
By contrast, the episode book has adventures involving a ghostly forest, the Wild Hunt, a fairy trickster, and three(!) involving giant octopi.
Yeah, so? I love the storytelling game aspect of this: a simple system, an explicit attempt at genre emulation, and a note to play other games or none at all.
(The reprint is fine, though they make a big mistake in layout by including two pages about a castle not as a spread, as the original does. Woof.)
I don't know if I will play this, but I'm not rushing to get rid of it -- I only imagine it being hard to get a game going of this Pendragon Jr. style game because no one is clamoring for the source material. (I checked and my library has volumes 4, 5, 6, and 44 of the Prince Valiant collection.) But as a beginning-level game, I think this might be a lot of fun to play with kids, who I think will get the knightly heroics.
That said, I have mixed feelings about the episode book, for what might be obvious reasons. Some of the adventures here seem like things that Hal Foster/Greg Stafford could come up with, like: you find a group of forest thieves trying to kidnap a monk to officiate a wedding -- who do you help? Some of them seem like Foster/Stafford things, like "have a tournament" -- and you can understand why the other writers here tried to get more interesting. But some of the interesting things feel a little outside the tone of the game as written.
The bundle I got included the original book, the 2017 reprint, and adventure/episodes book.
What? I am not familiar with the Prince Valiant comic, but this book is immeasurably helped by having the Hal Foster art to set the tone, which is: high-tone adventure in a semi-historical Arthurian time. No setting in that time can ever be truly historical, but this is missing the fantasy elements that are central to D&D-style fantasy.
Like Pendragon, this is knight-centric, and offers heroic battles and experiences: helping the down-trodden, fighting off Saxon/Hun/Viking invaders, rooting out corruption among the nobility. And everything is, I don't want to say kid-safe, but well, you could print out anything here (in the core book) in the Sunday comics section without trouble.
The system is likewise pretty welcoming: you have two traits (Brawn and Presence), there are some skills, and you build a dice pool out of a trait plus a skill. And the dice? D2, otherwise known as flipping a coin. Brawn is also your HP, so if you get hit, you might have less chance to attack next time. That's kind of it as a player -- though there is a chapter on advanced options, including non-knight characters, new skills, and, most Pendragon-y of all, personality flaws just like all the Arthurian knights have. (There's also a thing about trading GM duties off, giving someone a chance to GM a scene, and then getting a certificate that they can pay to get some special effect.)
There's no monster section, no magic section, only a short section on the world, which is about what you would expect / what say a film serial might have in the time. (That said, I was a little surprised that Valiant got around so far, with adventures from North America to Africa.)
The reprint is almost an exact reprint, but in color, which I didn't really need; the episode book is a collection of adventures by diverse hands, as they say, with each being about 1-3 pages long. In the main book, by Stafford himself, he includes episodes like A Woman in Distress, Ragged Children, Robber Knights, A Saxon War-Band, Rescued by Lancelot. There's two troll episodes: one featuring a fake troll, one featuring a real troll. But otherwise, mostly it's non-fantasy, non-magic stuff.
By contrast, the episode book has adventures involving a ghostly forest, the Wild Hunt, a fairy trickster, and three(!) involving giant octopi.
Yeah, so? I love the storytelling game aspect of this: a simple system, an explicit attempt at genre emulation, and a note to play other games or none at all.
(The reprint is fine, though they make a big mistake in layout by including two pages about a castle not as a spread, as the original does. Woof.)
I don't know if I will play this, but I'm not rushing to get rid of it -- I only imagine it being hard to get a game going of this Pendragon Jr. style game because no one is clamoring for the source material. (I checked and my library has volumes 4, 5, 6, and 44 of the Prince Valiant collection.) But as a beginning-level game, I think this might be a lot of fun to play with kids, who I think will get the knightly heroics.
That said, I have mixed feelings about the episode book, for what might be obvious reasons. Some of the adventures here seem like things that Hal Foster/Greg Stafford could come up with, like: you find a group of forest thieves trying to kidnap a monk to officiate a wedding -- who do you help? Some of them seem like Foster/Stafford things, like "have a tournament" -- and you can understand why the other writers here tried to get more interesting. But some of the interesting things feel a little outside the tone of the game as written.
May 3, 2020
This game looks like a ton of fun. If you're looking to do some Arthurian Fantasy, but aren't ready to dive deep into Pendragon, this might be the game for you. It's also a reminder that 'rules-light' games aren't something new. It was originally published in 1989 and is about as light as they get. No dice, just a throw of a few coins. Heads are good. Even stuff like the "mass combat" rules are very easy. There's less bookkeeping and obsessing over the exact number of coins in your purse. The game does a good job of capturing the spirit of comic strips. I could see it translating to a Flash Gordon or The Phantom game pretty easily.
December 8, 2022
99% of the time if I want to play or run an Arthurian RPG, I'd just use Pendragon, but for the remaining 1% I'd be tempted to use Greg Stafford's other groundbreaking, astonishingly ahead-of-its-time Arthurian RPG. Full review: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews