Thoughts on Magic Realm

Magic Realm is a 1979 board game which badly wants to be D&D. Players take the role of adventurers seeking gold and glory in the titular realm. I’ve been digging into it over the past few weeks using Tabletop Simulator and the fan-made Book of Learning tutorial [1]. During that time it established a firm grip on my mind, to the dismay and mild concern of my friends. I think what I find so attractive about it is its sheer hubris. It sets out a fantasy world in miniature complete with monsters, adventure sites, magical items and loot, and even several factions of NPC you can hire and trade with. The game is designed to be incredibly replayable and provide a unique experience each time. Unfortunately it also kind of sucks to play and especially to learn. I’m probably going to come back to it at some point, but for now here’s some things I like and dislike about it.

Like

• Map generation. Tiles are large hexes with several clearings on them, and roads leading to the hex faces, generating a point crawl which meanders through several of the tiles.
• The chit system, despite its clunkiness. Other than special rules characters are defined by a “hand” of chits of various types. These mean each character plays completely differently. Action chits have both a strength and a speed, both of which come into play in combat. Wounds and fatigue are modeled as losing access to chits, giving interesting texture to attrition.
• The magic system. Casters need to know a spell, have a magic chit, and also have access to magic energy or “color” to cast a spell. Magic users can sink magic chits into providing color temporarily, or gain it from artifacts, map locations, or even certain calendar days. Spells have a magic school and color. This leads to neat characters like the Magician, who has one magic chit corresponding to each school allowing them to effectively cast any spell but forcing them to rely on outside sources of color.
• There’s a character called the Witch King which has no action or move chits, only magic chits. This leads to them being unable to carry items or manipulate the world except through their spells.
• Players write down actions for the day before they execute in a random order. Reminiscent of Diplomacy.
• The symbols for the characters and magic schools in the redesigned version I played. They just look sick as hell.
• I’m a big sucker for PvPvE and I wish there was more of it in games.
• I can call it “D&D at home”

Dislike

• Combat against monsters is mostly down to RNG rather than tactics, with more important decisions being about whether you should fight instead of the fighting itself. PvP seems like it could be more interesting and tense.
• The former combined with the fact that you’re going to need to fight at some point and that dying will basically end your run means combat is an exercise in frustration in my limited experience. Upon further play reframing the game as a roguelike experience helps but doesn’t make the game feel any more fair.
• Teaching the game to others. I was playing with players from my campaign and it quickly became a GM-like role, except instead of the game just working I had to dig into the rules I wasn’t sure about myself. I guess I should have understood the game better myself before teaching it.
• My impression based on the Book of Learning is that the game kind of relies on you already knowing exactly how it ticks from a strategy perspective.
• You only get two actions per day in caves and you’re going to have to pass through them in order to access other parts of the map.
• How close the name sounds to “Magical Realm”. If you know you know and I daren’t enter.

Although Magic Realm is a cited inspiration for Root (which borrows some of its terminology such as turn phase names and clearings) it most reminds me of Nemesis. Both are focused on replayability, genre emulation, and have a similar PvPvE element. Mechanically it’s even somewhat similar, as unique characters defined by their pool of card-like resources move between various rooms in a pointcrawl. A “refresh” of Magic Realm would lose the charm of the original and be wholly unnecessary, but cribbing mechanics from Nemesis wouldn’t be a bad idea.

It’s also an interesting artifact of its time, in a couple ways. There was a brief window where the Really Complex Game could exist, after people had the free time to play them but before video games were invented. You see the same thing with RPGs. Magic Realm exists in this space, but also in a unique space where RPGs had only just taken off themselves and began to carve off sections of the board game space which might otherwise have existed. It doesn’t seem particularly influenced by D&D to my eyes but I could be wrong. It’s also interesting in the sense that many of the various conventions and techniques in board game design hadn’t been established yet. I always enjoy digging up games like that, whether video games or tabletop to see “what might have been”. If D&D hadn’t existed maybe we’d all be big Magic Realm nerds who knows.

There’s a feeling of atomicity here, that the game cannot be tinkered with without losing something. It’s something I’ve only come across a couple of times, with other examples being Ars Magica and the little glimpses I’ve seen of Runequest and The Dark Eye. These are games you have to adjust yourself around rather than vice-versa. I wonder whether this feeling is a property of these games or a stage on a journey of understanding. Would mastering these systems allow me to open the hood and make alterations, or would they still be lessened by my meddling? The OSR hacks I’ve spent a lot of my gaming like tinkering with have the exact opposite feeling – they beg to be altered, modified, customized. Can you intentionally design a game (or other sort of system) to have either of these properties? I think that the modularity of the OSR is mostly accidental, and the atomicity of these other games a symptom of complexity and years of refinement through play that most RPGs don’t get. Intentionally tapping into either of those currents would be a difficult task.

1. The site I found this on is an excellent resource for anyone interested in getting into the game. I’ll also note that I was using the 3.2 edition of the rules, which were found elsewhere.