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Original Elemenstor Battles Character Creation Rules

The original 1989 release of Elemenstor Battles was a single 226-card boxed set containing eight element decks and eight familiar packs. The game also contained a stack of 24 Event disks and 24 Quirk disks that were used for special optional rules. Finally, there were 8 character cards for the familiars, and a stack of 100 blank character sheets for the players. In RPG tradition, the first step of play was for each player would construct their character for use in the game.

In general, character creation produced several problems for the game. While players were allowed to re-use characters from a previous game, this was generally announced before the creation process, which would allow his competators to make design decisions that would help to defeat specific attributes of his character. As a result, most players would re-roll their character for each game, which was a very time-consuming activity. Also, there were the usual problems of having characters with random attributes, with fights involving fair rolling and rerolling.

Despite the problems, many players still prefer the more intricate and complex gameplay provided by the original rules. As such, there is still a world tournament based on a modified set of the 1994 rules held in Boise every year. Unfortunately, playing requires one complete set of the entire 1583-card collection for every four players. Larger games can be accomplished with the same 1583-card set, however contention over preferred high-power cards will make the selection and creation process extremely unbalanced. To minimize card imbalance, most top-level tournaments require one full set per player.

In general, the character-related rules were far more flexible than the main game rules, and as such were revised a great deal over the course of the expansion releases.

Decks

The eight element decks that were included with the original set included 4 lesser and 4 greater decks for each major element. The "lesser" and "greater" nature of the cards has become analogous to the "common" and "rare" of the modern game. A third tier of "high elemenstation" decks was introduced in the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs expansion pack. Further element decks for nature and dark elemenstation forms were introduced in later expansions.

Attributes

First players would roll their initial attributes using two 8-sided dice. These attributes would heavily affect the game afterwards, and so the rolling process was often hotly contested. The attributes were as followes:

- Rubian (Yes, as odd as it sounds, each player's starting rubian supply was random)

- Stamina

- Grimoire

- Elementstation

- Charisma

- Magnance

- Agility

- Initiative

- Wealth

Most of these attributes should be obvious, but some will need explanation:

Initiative

Oddly, the Initiative attribute was only used during character creation. The initiative attribute was used to resolve challenges where different players attempted to claim the same deck or familiar.

Agility

Apparently, the agility attribute was an accidental hold-over from earlier plans by Holhik to create Elemenstor Battles as a boardgame. It is never actually used in the game. While the expansion packs never officially corrented this oversight, most players simply decline to roll this attribute.

Charisma

Charisma is needed to maintain the good behaviour of your familiar. This will be explained in greater detail below.

Grimoire

The "grimoire" attribute was used to determine which and how many of each deck the player could choose. Low levels of Grimoire would allow the player to select only one elemenstation at low level, higher levels of Grimoire would allow selection of high elemenstation or different decks. As expansion packs introduced more decks and higher tiers of power, the grimoire calculations were made more accomodating. Grimoire points could also be used on "schism", which would allow the player to maintain multiple seperate draw decks instead of forcing the player to shuffle their cards all together.

Wealth

The "wealth" of the player allowed the player to purchase Quirk disks and Familiar decks. Starting buying points was equal to wealth-4. This meant that it was possible to start with negative wealth, such that a player must take Adverse Quirks to even their balance.

Note that the original Relay: The Wanderer set included an optional point-based system for attribute configuration rather than the traditional dice-rolling method. While generally shunned by purists, it is popular for use in tournament play.

Familiars

Based on their wealth (and related to their initiative) players may buy one or more Familiars. Each of the 8 original Familiar decks represented the powers of one creature that was combined with the player's. The problem is that familiars had to be controlled with Charisma - attacks on the familiar could be used to entice it into another player's control. Also, the familiar was much weaker than the player itself, so they could be killed and their cards eliminated from the game. In the original rules, the familiar decks would be shuffled in to the player decks. To avoid the frustration at removing these decks during the betrayal or death of the familiar, players would often develop house rules or simply use schism to keep the decks seperate. This became an official optional rule in Relay: The Wanderer. In addition, the familiars themselves were creatures in play. The rules for individual familiars were often very complicated because of the balancing needed to allow a full-fledged monster at the beginning of the game.

Quirks

Additional and Adverse Quirks were special powers and weaknesses that the player could purchase with wealth points before the game. For example, Cube Formation was originally a positive quirk disk, but was reformatted into a card for the '96 rerelease.

Events

Another feature that was left out in the '96 rerelease were Events. Every turn, players would roll an 8-sided die. On a 1 or 2, a single event disc would be randomly selected. The event disc would describe a game-wide change for the turn. Events could be mundane (each player loses 1d8 magnance for the duration of the turn) to extreme (all familiars have mutinied - use normal charisma rules to reclaim the wild familiars).

In an attempt to lighten the tone of the game, Krahlkins included a set of "party-game" oriented event discs in Reflections: The Palace. They would generally include things like singing one's declerations of elemenstation, demanding that players disrobe until their number of articles of clothing is equal to their number of stamina points, and similar absurdities. These discs are generally used as coasters.

While generally considered optional rules, the event-disks provided a crucial instability to the game. These random events helped to eliminate deadlocks in an overly balanced game.

Problems

To say that the character creation rules slowed the game would be an understatement. The character creation process would often take an hour if the proper double-blind selection planning procedure was followed. Plus, since several decks were shuffled together, post-game cleanup would involve sifting through every single card in play and sorting them back into their elemenstation and familiar decks.

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