Hyperborean Adventure

Pleasing One's God and Acquiring Treasure
One of my favorite games at this year's Origins game convention was Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea. I love saying the name of this game, even to myself. Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea (AS&SH) is an old school game which seems to most resemble Advanced 1st Edition. There are some changes to make the game feel more like a swords & sorcery product, such as the PCs being human, floating airships and other lost ancient technologies and some weirdness in the vein of H.P. Lovecraft.
The scenario I played at Origins was a creation of the referee running it so I hesitate to go into too much detail regarding his module. We played a group of Hyperboreans, the original inhabitants of Hyperborea who are tall, pale humans, tasked to perform three labors by our god. The game involved weird science, puzzles, combat aliens and playing morally ambivalent PCs. The referee had prepared each of the pre-generated characters with an interesting background, motives and personality quirks that made them easy and fun to role-play. The players and referee all got into the game and for about four hours we were able to suspend disbelief (as they say) and enter the magical weird world of Hyperborea.
Hyperborea is what sets AS&SH apart from other simulacrums and is the real selling-point for AS&SH for me. Hyperborea seems to be a pocket dimension connected to other worlds by the arboreal northern lights. In my own running of the system I took PCs from earth under the aurora borealis, landed them in Hyperborea alongside a nation of whose ancestors had also come from Earth, but had been in Hyperborea since the time of ancient Greece. Hyperborea contains a number of trans-located peoples from historic Earth including Vikings, Kelts, and Eskimo as well as native inhabitants. The setting is highly evocative of author Clark Ashton Smith and such settings as he might have created.
I really enjoy an atmospheric setting thick with an alien and weird feeling and Hyperborea can deliver that as well as any setting or milieu I have experienced. A talented referee can use word choice, pacing and tone to enhance any game and potentially evoke such an experience in players. There are certain rules and settings which are specifically written to assist the referee in this process. The ones I am most familiar with include Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, Call of Cthulhu and AS&SH. It can absolutely be done with White Box and other systems, but the ones I mention have specific tools in place to assist the referee in achieving the weird feeling.

The version of the game I have is a boxed set of two spiral bound booklets, a map and some old fashion polyhedral dice. AS&SH author Jeffrey Talanian is planning a fall release of a new hardback edition of the game published by his North Wind Adventures company.  I met Mr. Talanian at a Gencon several years ago when he was working with Gary Gygax and Troll Lord Games on the Castle Zagyg project. Meeting game designers and talking shop with them is another of the perks of attending a game convention.