King of Dragon Pass

"Generosity brings credit and honour, which support one's dignity"

Anglo-Saxon rune poem... basically a very long-winded way of saying G by writing X

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"en óvinar síns

skyli engi maðr

vinar vinr vera"

Wardruna - Gibu

(basically a very long-winded Old Norse way of saying G by writing X)

(an English translation)

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Both my previous mentions of King of Dragon Pass pointed out one of its core features.

1) Despite its strategy game appearances, its lore is deep and integrated enough into gameplay to rival the best cRPGs. After a couple of failed attempts, I finally succeeded as a peace clan banking on the goddess of earth / plants and the god of wisdom, which tracks my usual role of elvish druid / wizard.

2) It (often infuriatingly) obfuscates events behind the scenes, but as you fumble about dialectic mazes of Bronze Age favor-currying you also find yourself drawn into the long-term repercussions of your actions, so that even a "cards on the table" strategist like myself will rarely feel entirely cheated by the dice being rolled behind a screen.

And yes, at its core, KoDP's turn-based resource management.

Its greatest inspiration (aside from the setting of Glorantha) seems Lords of the Realm, a classic rarely given enough credit for its impact on strategy genres. You play as a tribe (which is about the only valid scenario in which you would ever deserve to call yourself a "they") settling a patch of frontier land to be exploited via crops, cows or hunting, and occasionally raid or get raided by your neighbours. It's the secondary mechanics fleshing out this basic precept which make KoDP so difficult to define.

Much like other resource-management games trying to capture an ancient-flavored setting (Dawn of Man, Northgard, etc.) it devotes a lot of effort to recreating the pre-industrial dependence on, fascination with and folkloric overtones of the changing of the seasons. Warring during planting or harvest season demolishes your food take-in and venturing out of your territory during winter snows is all but impossible, forcing you to schedule activities like raids, trade, exploration, diplomacy or magic rituals around the stringencies of the five (yes five, lousy Smarch weather) seasons to make the most of both limited opportunities and dead time.

Depending on your awareness of historical trends, you might find it difficult to get into the mindset of a Bronze Age chieftain, arranging marriages and taking slaves and making life-or-death choices based on arbitrary superstitions, but through it all your peanut gallery of seven clan "ring" members will feed you stats, lore details or advice (sometimes comically terrible (especially from disciples of the trickster god)) on most issues.

 

Far from the passive SimCity styled advisors, their selection will cause you no small number of headaches, as not only do their personal skills (combat, trade, etc.) scale their efficacy, but the gods they individually worship affect your magic points and options to handle various events.

Ah yes, events. The other half of the game. You can make two active decisions per season, but you'll almost always have to deal with at least one (often more) random or ongoing events between your own actions. While I find their integration as full-screen pop-ups disruptive, they in other ways exemplify good reactive gameplay avoiding degeneration to sheer whack-a-mole. From minor squabbles over pasture boundaries to inter-clan peace treaties to the epochal finale itself, these constant dialogue pop-ups tie together the various strategic elements and lend them a surprising sense of continuity. In some cases, lots of continuity (picture's a minor spoiler)

Event chains often build on themselves for decades, characters aging as their defining feature is revisited again and again. Much like the in-depth attention to the changing of the seasons, the constructive sense of permanence thus imparted trumps RPGs' usually rushed feel of headlong adventure. They also incorporate a surprising amount of humor - avoiding anything too spoilerish, the... "climactic" third trial's solution to become king had me literally laughing out loud. Though I must admit, it's no more ridiculous a hieros gamos than feature in most religions.

 

King of Dragon Pass has its problems, sure, chiefly its deliberate design choice of obfuscating the requirements and outcome of events until you have no idea whether you're even winning or losing. In some cases (e.g. "Elmal Guards the Stead") it can skew into meaningless randomness. The writing, while usually excellent and doggedly in-character, may sometimes raise an eyebrow. "The Pharaoh has turned out to be a chaos worshipper" for instance comes across as a nonsense phrase. Ancient Egyptians as far as I know were utterly obsessed with maintaining and re-enacting ritualistic order. Also, forcing you to split your tribe if you grow too successful (while not a complete disaster) punishes the player much too avidly for playing well.

Nevertheless, the attention to detail fleshing out every event prevents you from feeling deprived of (albeit obtuse) choices, and nobody else has quite this mix of strategy, role-playing and lore delving all in an un-animated medium which nonetheless never feels as static as some city sims I could name. KoDP amazes not only for being a unique game at its time but still unique twenty years later! And while I'm looking forward to its sequel, Six Ages, I have to wonder how we're not seeing more copycats now that interest in it has revived.