Almost 10 years have passed since I did this interview. During that time, the roleplaying game Järn has spawned several successful descendants, like Hjältarnas Tid, Kopparhavets Hjältar and Troubleshooters. With the current popularity of Troubleshooters, it seems like a good time to revisit Krister Sundelin’s original thoughts on the d100 rules powering the game.

Clarence Redd

In 2015, the Swedish roleplaying game Järn was released, written by seasoned RPG designer Krister Sundelin. The game took the classic Basic Roleplaying rules (BRP) as a starting point, then went off in a new trajectory. When rumours spread of an English version, I contacted Krister to talk about his new game.

Krister Sundelin is a well-known RPG designer in Sweden. He has published many successful games and scenarios, winning several awards for his work. The history of BRP in Sweden goes back to the early 1980s. Since then, it has been one of the most widespead RPG systems, used by many local bestselling games. A kind of love-hate relationship has emerged over the years and now Järn proposes a new path forward for the d100 system.

You write in the book that Järn is a version of BRP that "you can live with." What parts of BRP did you find most troublesome?

I have three main issues, and a lot of smaller ones.

I have never been too fond of how attributes and skills coexist in the classical BRP. Skills are used in one way, while attributes are used in another way – if used at all, after having derived other values like base chance, mana points and hit points from them. It’s like two different systems, at least, and they don’t cooperate. There are systems that integrate attributes and skills seamlessly – Fuzion and World of Darkness comes to mind – but BRP is not one of them.

Another issue is BRP’s feature creep. Feature creep expresses itself in so many ways – new skills, new subsystems, new procedures, advance initiative, action slots etc. It’s almost as if BRP was designed bottom up from feature creep, adding skills to a system based on attributes, and that feature creep culture kind of got hold. The hackability of BRP is a mixed blessing, really. It’s so easy to add stuff to the basic core that game designers often just add stuff, not thinking of the consequences or total weight of the system. I really like Sandy Petersen’s approach in Call of Cthulhu where he actively works against feature creep in version after version.

The third issue is what I would describe as blandness, especially of the basic core. Now, there are some people that prefer a system that doesn’t get in the way of the acting, and I respect that. In some cases, it’s even preferable, especially if compared to the weight of a feature-creep BRP. However, coming from a neo-trad perspective, I prefer systems that support my game, rather than systems that don’t get in the way of my game.

Now, you may think after this tirade that I hate BRP, but the core is extremely flexible and intuitive. The percentage value directly translates to a chance of success, and you just have to change the skill list to get a complete game for a different genre. And there, I think, is the core and basic strength of BRP: percentage skills. So when building Järn, I started from there.

Did you craft the rest of the system from the ground up, with the d100 skill mechanic at the center?

Pretty much. I kept hit points too as I felt that was integral to the BRP feeling, but as I got rid of attributes as well, I couldn’t base hit points on SIZ+CON.

And then I borrowed bits and pieces from other RPGs I enjoy. Opposed rolls work as in Pendragon, critical success and failure work as in Unknown Armies. I use a staged hit point system akin to Vitality/Wounds in Star Wars d20, skill challenges from D&D4, combat stances from Greg Stoltze’s Usagi Yojimbo RPG, fail forward and hard choices, and so on. Some of these are BRP-based games, most are not.

I definitely didn’t want a game where a failed roll meant that you just made another attempt at the task. I wanted a game where failures meant that the story progressed anyway. Some of this has already been modeled into games, almost as an afterthought. In old D&D and OSR games, each attempt means greater risk of encountering wandering monsters, but that is a consequence of time management and rolls on the Wandering monsters table.

So I looked at indie games for inspiration. I built a conflict system where a failed conflict meant that you either had to accept the consequences of your failure, or escalate the conflict to higher stakes. I had fail forward built into the game: the story progresses but in an new direction as a result from a failure, rather than comes to a halt. So you can move to the new location even if you fail your roll, but then you have to get your bearings on the next turn. You can climb the wall even if you fail the roll, but you get discovered, or you lose the rope so that the others can’t follow. You can remain undetected, but you leave traces behind or can’t get to where you want in time. It's not just system, it is also a culture that has to be nurtured.

The clan-making rules have received much praise. What part do they play in the game?

The clan has two distinct roles. From the characters’ perspective, the clan is home, family, insurance policy and retirement home, as well as a political battleground. It’s where you belong, but also your greatest opponent. A lot of the stuff that happens to the characters happen inside the clan.

In the meta perspective, the clan is a source for stories, an extention of the characters, and the players’ property. The players create the clan, so they invest in it and care for it. That means that any story that the GM digs out of the clan is a story that the players will care for and be motivated to participate in, as opposed to any mission that an NPC may offer to the characters.

Basically, the clan is about mapping relationships. There are some nodes already on the map, to give the players somewhere to start. With a blank sheet of paper, players are often stuck at the beginning. But give them a few seeds and their shared creation will grow.

So, the relation map starts off with the characters at the center, and some important clan NPCs around them – the thane, the war master, the weaponsmith, the godi (speaker of the gods), the völva (spirit caller), the shipwright, and so on. At the edge are some important things from the surrounding environment, like the Governor from the Empire, the Underworld, the Mountain, the enemy clan, etcetera.

Participants, including the GM, take turns to define these roles and draw relations between them and the player characters. This goes on until the GM can identify at least one conflict that can be used to initiate the first adventure. That first adventure is given in skeleton form: have a conflict – the one that the GM identified – have the conflict lead to a journey, travel, have a fight, and return home. The GM can fill in the blanks using the relation map and all the stories that evolved with the map.

The clan is also a living breathing entity that changes and evolves over time. When the characters return home from that first adventure, the fight and the conflict will both add something to the relation map. Until the next session, the GM uses the scheme to come up with the next story, which in turn will evolve the relation map even more.

And since the new adventure is firmly grounded in the relationships that the players created, there will not be any problems starting the next session. You will never have to accept the previous unknown uncle inviting you to his mansion, because he was never unknown to you in the first place – you invented him!

Collaborative creation and storytelling are big parts of clan construction. What effects have you noticed in actual play?

Well, it’s their clan. They care about it as much as they care about their own characters. They’re emotionally invested in every aspect of it.

So when I use a particular person as a villain, they hate that NPC, and they love to hate her. But then, there are the entanglements to people that they like, and those will have consequences, so they can’t just kill her. They stop and interact with the villain, rather than just go Off with her head! at the first opportunity. Instead, they go to political manoeuvering and emotional manipulation to destroy the villain’s character before they can kill her.

In a similar manner, if some NPC that they like sides with the villain, they take it very personal. It’s a betrayal of trust.

One effect of this particular implementation is that the players get to slot certain labels on relations, for instance “despises”, “is lover to”, “has a debt to”, “hates”. Nobody loves or is loved by everyone. There will be tensions in the clan, and they’re a godsend to GMs. Adventures write themselves in a way, or perhaps the players unwittingly write them for the GM. They’re all there in the relation map, ready for you to pick up. Sooner rather than later, there will be repercussions from the characters’ actions, causing a response from other clan members or from the enemy clan or even the Empire, and boom! you have a new adventure for the next session.

I have seen parts of this before, when good GMs pick up on cues in characters’ background stories, when players pick up on the GM's recurring NPCs, or when the campaign grows complicated and you have to build relation maps for NPCs to see the big picture. But unless you start with doing relation mapping at character generation with the players, you rarely get these emotional investments from start. You get it eventually, but not from the start.

The drawback is that it’s trickier to publish adventures for a player-generated clan. You simply don’t care about the old mysterious man in the corner of the inn holding an old mouldy map. You have to build tie-ins to the clan for him instead, and as an adventure author it’s hard to make tie-ins to a clan that you have never seen.

Järn is treading new territory with its striking graphic illustrations and gender conscious content. Taking a broader view, will RPGs in general ever stop depicting women as sexualized objects? I read a comment by Neil Gaiman that superhero comics are male adolescent power fantasies – is that where RPGs are stuck too?

I think that Neil Gaiman is quite right about superhero comics, and you’re right too: RPGs are to a great extent male adolescent power fantasies. But that is slowly changing.

One problem is that the makers of RPGs in many cases are fans of the adolescent male power fantasy, often the same fans that made games in the naughties or nineties, in some cases even the eighties. Many simply do not see the problem since you can choose your character’s gender and do whatever you want. Some even think that they would lose customers. They got it completely wrong.

First, both superhero comics and RPGs can be a lot more than just adolescent male power fantasies. Look at Marvel’s X-men for instance: the longest running relation drama in comics ever, and itself a commentary on minorities civil rights (sadly, many never realised)! In RPGs, this realisation is slowly coming from indie games and story games, that actively look to explore a premise rather than just murderhoboing.

Second… let me go back to the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. It didn’t sell that well to the regular RPG audience at the time. It sold well, yes, but not to D&D players. Nobody could touch that mammoth. By trying to play for the same market, they just couldn’t compete with the gorilla. D&D owned the market.

But Vampire did something different: it opened up an entirely new market, incorporating the aesthetes, the goths and the romance novel readers – the other group of lonely outsiders at the time. And half of them, if not more, where female. Yes, Vampire was a power fantasy too, but the point is that it was aimed at a new unexplored market. I still don’t know if it was marketing genious or a happy accident.

The lesson from Vampire is that when RPGs (and comics, for that matter) are just male adolescent power fantasies, they effectively cut out half of the potential market.

It’s not that hard to change. You don’t even have to leave the power fantasy. Pick up your D&D5E, and read the section that includes transgender characters. Look at the illustrations: the illustration of humans feature a coloured woman in a role of power and agency.

Having people across the entire spectrum of ethnicity, gender identity and many other aspects – not just in illustrations, but in example characters and important NPCs – invites to your power fantasy and enables them to create their own. One person of colour told John, one of the illustrators of Järn, “finally I found myself in a game!” Open up your games like that, and you have practically doubled your potential market overnight. To not do that is just plain stupid from a market standpoint.

We’re still not good at it, but we are learning. I learned a lot from Ronja and John, the illustrators of Järn.

The only thing I’m not willing to give up is the adolescent. I’m still 13 at heart.

After a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign, Järn has also received excellent reviews in Sweden. Moving forward, what are the plans for the game?

I’m not completely finished with the crowdfunding campaign. There are still stretch goals to be written, but that’s coming along nicely.

We’re looking at translating the book to English, but the cost is rather high. I could translate it myself, but I would need an editor – cheaper than a translator but still a big cost – and it would tie up my writing time to that project.

In the future I want to write more books for Järn – adventures, campaigns, setting books, that kind of stuff. I’m not done exploring the world-tree in Järn, not even with the stretch goals. That will just be the introduction.

I like Pathfinder’s adventure path concept: a series of adventure books that comes together as a campaign from level 1 to 15ish, with a corresponding setting book and player’s guide. If I can find additional writers, I would like to have a rather high publish rate, like a new book every two months, but as long as I’m the only writer, I think the rate will be limited.

I think that the future books of the Järn line should be thin, 64 pages at the most and preferably thinner. One of Järn’s main selling points is that it is not a 500-page tome, but rather 112 pages.

I don’t think that I will write an official world book for Järn. The core of the game is the clan and its surroundings that the players create by themselves. It’s their world. I don’t have to dictate how the world is in detail. Instead, I want to give them resources and inspiration, a smorgasboard that they can pick and choose from. I think this approach, and thin books, will work nicely with the adventure path concept.

When we end the conversation, I feel that Järn is a game close to Krister Sundelin’s heart. We will probably see more support for the rules in the coming years. The combination of a downsized BRP engine alongside collaborative storytelling makes it a compelling offer on the RPG market.

Clarence Redd is a Swedish RPG writer and illustrator. He runs Frostbyte Books and has published several BRP-based games, like M-SPACE, Odd Soot, Comae Engine and TREY. You can read more about his books at DriveThruRPG.