An OSR Analysis of Elden Ring
A Ragnarök like Setting
So, after about 160 hours I finally completed Elden Ring. I’ve been playing it on and off ever since it came out. I was lazy and followed a guide and so ended up completing all quests and storylines. Overall the game is very good, so good in fact that it’s been probably a decade since I’ve spent so much time on a single video game. It was my first FromSoft game. I quite enjoyed it although will admit, am still probably not very ‘good’ at it.
This isn’t going to be a video game review. You can read plenty of those. This is going to be an analysis where I try to analyze what makes it unique and what lessons can be learned for table top RPG design.
The Story
The story of Elden Ring is opaque, almost frustrating so. In fact, it’s probably one of my actual criticisms of the game. If I hadn’t been following a guide, I would probably have been pretty lost. There’s a lack of UI features to help you keep track of NPCs, quests, and what you’re supposed to be doing. Additionally, most of the characters of the game talk in stilted dialogue and refer to people, places, and events that you only have a vague notion of. This makes it very hard to understand what is going on and become invested in the game’s storylines.
This all said, the game was still very fun. I’m not going to say much more about the story because at heart, the story of Elden Ring doesn’t really matter.
The Worldbuilding
What Elden Ring fails in story, it makes up for in worldbuilding. What I consider to be worldbuilding is generating a sense of atmosphere about a place. Not just an emotional atmosphere, like this place is spooky, or this place is wonderous, but a historical atmosphere where you wonder what happened here? From whence did things come and where are they going?
It does this through items, through monsters, through the very landscape itself. Very often you’ll come across ruins, strange crystals, a giant tree, etc. little things that allow you to make inferences about the past history of the world.
Elden Ring is a game that is fundamentally just fun to explore. In this manner I think it very strongly embodies a lot of the principles of the OSR movement. The NPCs, the characters don’t matter because the world is such a strong character in of itself. You piece together it’s history, form a relationship with it in a way, and are ultimately responsible for it in the various endings of the game.
It’s probably the game that I have played with the most interesting locations. Most games will have a couple of main biomes. Places where the landscape changes a bit. Desert here, forest there, jungle over here. Elden Ring goes beyond this, there is a sense of fantastic to it’s locations, a sense of dignified beauty, even if what you are seeing is horrifying.
Most fantasy that tends to be anything other than high fantasy (fantasy that deals with big political forces and events) tends to be, almost by default, grimdark. There often tends to be an emphasis on mud, blood, and grisly things where everything looks demonic and has a gray-black colour scheme.
There’s nothing wrong with this but it tends to make such works a little one-note in my opinion. You can only trudge through so much blasted war-torn landscapes before it gets kind of boring. You can only fight so many big beefy demon dudes covered in black spiky armour before it all kind of feels the same.
Elden Ring is different. There are many horrific things in Elden Ring, but even when they are horrific there is a sense of beauty, of dignity to them. They point to a lost grandeur. The design of Elden Ring remembers that awe, and not just terror, is a component of mystery, of the unknown. That the unknown is even more scary if it evokes other emotions besides fear as then it keeps you guessing about the danger.
Elden Ring really does show how the only thing you really need to run an interesting RPG is a bunch of weird locations for the players to muck around in. You don’t really need a strong story or clearly defined NPC characters with complex psychological personalities and backstories. You’re not writing a novel.
You just a bunch of interesting things and a couple greater events that you can allude to through the interesting things they poke.
While this stuff may seem trivial in the OSR movement, principles that have been long understood and stated again and again, it’s really refreshing to see them embodied in a video game.
Ragnarök Setting
What’s interesting to me the most is that Elden Ring essentially takes place in a Ragnarok like setting. What I mean by this is that at first glance it seems post-apocalyptic in the way that D&D is often is described as. Where there’s a bunch of ruins and dungeons and sense that society, the order of the world has broken down and the people still around are living in the remnants. The stereotypical dark ages where the ruins of the Roman empire still abound.
However, unlike D&D the apocalypse wasn’t a social or civilizational one. The elves didn’t decline, the dwaves didn’t retreat, the imperial empire didn’t just fall apart etc.
Instead, there were Gods. These Gods exist kind of like the Greek Gods do, where there’s a very convoluted family tree. Some gods are more powerful than other gods and there’s kind of vague power level differences between them and the drama between them is what dominates the world and the various social orders and forces within it. These Gods had some kind of dispute, fought some kind of battle, killed a couple of each other, and what’s left of them is greatly diminished. The very world itself has fallen into disorder as the laws of the natural world begin to wind down. Things decay, a status quo sets in. The world hasn’t ended as much as it’s just stopped.
Thus, you enter and have to navigate what happened, which gods to kill, who to help, and with what philosophy you want to try and change the status quo.
I find it very interesting that despite the post-apoclyptic nature of most table top RPG settings, either implied (like in Lord of the Rings) or explicit, I don’t think anyone has done a Ragnarok like setting.
The closest thing I can think of are the Icons in 13th Age RPG. In the 13th Age RPG there’s basically 13? 14? Powerful beings (either outright gods or powerful people) who dominate the setting. The are things like The Conqueror, The Lord of the Forge, The Iron Throne, etc. Your characters, I think, are allied with one of them, although different characters in the party can be allied with different ones. In essence 13th age has built in factions, and these factions are headed by very powerful, very archetypal personalities pulled from high-fantasy.
However, 13th Age is much more high fantasy in the sense that the world it presents is very much still in working order. The Icons are in their prime and none of them has gained the upper hand quite yet and their history with each other is somewhat still young.
Elden Ring presents a much older world, one where some serious shit has already gone down, where most of the Gods are shells of their former selves, where the world has wound down and is ready to begin anew with some new force or philosophy at the helm.
It’s a very interesting concept and I think would make for a very interesting table top RPG setting.
How I would Create a Ragnarök Setting
This is a bit of a thought experiment. But I think if I were to create a Ragnarök setting, it would probably go like this:
Create a convoluted extended family of Gods. Have the relations of some seem very clear but others confusing, contradictory, or even just plain mythic like Athena being born out of Zeus’ head.
Have a theme for each God. This can kind of seem like a ‘domain’ but don’t ever make it explicit that they are actually in charge of something. The themes could be anything like lots of snake symbols, lives underwater and looks vaguely amphibious, has wings and is angelic, etc.
Think up a couple of big events that form a very loose cycle of myths. The winged god falls from heaven. The amphibious god lies sleeping under the ocean. The fire god was put out and his body of hardened metal cracked and lies scattered across the realm.
Repeat these themes in monsters, cultures, and locations. Make a race of fish like people. Do they worship the underwater god? Who knows! They might of once but even they probably don’t know the meaning of their strange rituals. Have a temple location that’s full of light and with carvings of birds. Was it a church of the winged God? Maybe? The players find a piece of strange super hard metal that sings when struck. Is it a cracked fragment of the fire gods body? Can they forge a sword out of it? Could they forge a new god?
Have all the NPCs seem somewhat mythic. That is, the don’t feel like real people with actual psychologies and every day relatable concerns. They feel more like representations of the past and are living in this past. They espouse old philosophies that seem unmoored, they uphold bygone traditions for a society that no longer exists, they are concerned with people and events that happened so long ago they barely remember, they practice rituals almost by route the original meaning lost, they have roles like ‘watcher’ or ‘deceiver’ and seem compelled or fated to carry out their role. This is a world whose spiritual clockwork has wound down.
Don’t worry about piecing things together too much. Don’t have things too clean. Don’t worry about contradicting yourself with the lore you make up. Don’t worry about who’s good or who’s evil or any of that. The players will probably want to learn more about world. But at a certain point, if you’ve done things right, they’ll probably also realize that some things are truly lost. That no matter how much they search, they’re not going to get answers to some of their questions, they’ll be unable to make fully informed judgments, because the people who would have known such things, the records, the history, it’s simply gone.
Point towards rebirth. While the setting is post-apocalyptic it’s not totally grimdark in the sense that while the players may never really know exactly what happened, know exactly who is good or evil, right or wrong, its a world that primed for rebirth. Once they realize they’ll never really truly know the answers to what happened, the question remains, what are they going to do about things? As an active force, how are they going to shape what comes next? The new world?
But why ruin your first "blind run" spoiling yourself with a guide? That's the opposite of OSR
Great stuff here! I don’t get the chance to play video games often but am aware of them and like to hear about them especially in the context of tabletop games.