PLAYED
HYPERBOREA 3E
Antiquated is an understatement
Designer: Jeffrey Talanian | Publisher: North Wind Adventures
Hyperborea 3e is a frustrating beast. In many ways it’s the best and worst of the kind of thing that the OSR has to offer. It landed in my hands as two lavish hardbacks and a massive map book of the titular land beyond the west wind. The Player’s Manual gives you the core mechanics, essentially unchanged since the seventies and bound to be immediately familiar to the book’s target audience, while also offering enough character options to satisfy even the most spoiled of power gamers. And those 22 subclasses are at the same time familiar and inventive; the poemwielding Runegraver or the horse riding Cataphract, each with one or two unique little abilities that set them apart from the also included classics of Magician, Fighter, Cleric and Thief. The Referee’s Manual similarly cuts straight to the quick, dispensing with oft-repeated DM advice, or the kind of random generators that plague modern OSR books, in favour of content: interesting monsters, exciting treasure and detailed adventuring locations. These are books that want you to be playing with them for years and they give you the tools to do that.