The first edition of Dragonbane / Drakar & Demoner wasn’t particularly long-lived. Two years and two published adventures (and, admittedly, two issues of Sinkadus magazine to add some extra content) it was already time for the second edition. Let’s have a look.
That guy on the cover is Elric of Melniboné, by the way, taken from one of Michael Moorcock’s novels about him. It has nothing to do with him, his world, or the game of Stormbringer other than using similar rules, but I guess Äventyrsspel didn’t have a budget to commission its own covers at the time.
So, the rulebook starts with a choose-your-own-adventure section where you go investigate a haunted mine, fight a bear, and get in a scrap with a wizard and his goblin (?) minions. I still love these things, but I’ll note that here, the task resolution rules used for the choose-your-own-adventure are completely different from the ones in the actual game, which does seem like a flaw if this is meant to give you a sense for how the game runs… Oh well.
Character creation has changed a good bit since last time. There are still seven base stats that are rolled up with 3d6, but Skill has been renamed to Dexterity, Power is now Psychic Power, and Body has become Physique. There are now ten character classes instead of four: you can be play Merchant, Thief, Wizard, Warrior, Scholar, Hunter, Bandit, Pirate, Knight or Monk. There is also an entrance roll for all of them, so there isn’t a “default” option of being lawless if you fail to qualify for any of them. That seems a bit needlessly unhelpful. Though I’ll grant you, you still have Dexterity x 8% chance at making it as a thief, so unless you’re terribly clumsy you’ll usually have it to fall back on.
Anyway, each class gives you a spread of skills, and you choose three of them as your Expert skills and five as your Normal skills. Each skill is based on a stat, and your starting score is 50 + 2 x that stat for an Expert skill, or 20 + 2 x that stat for a Normal skill. Any skill you don’t choose either starts at 0% or at the related stat in percent. So you’ll be looking at something like three skills at 70%, five at 40%, and the rest at either 0% or 10%.
Which, I must admit, is a lot nicer and more streamlined than the fiddly-specific rules from first edition, while also giving you more of a chance to set up your character the way you want. You’re still going to get horribly killed by the kind of monstrosities the published adventures sends you up against, but at least you’ll be roughly competent.
Wizards have some additional rules. Spells are now divided into four levels, with the fourth level being completely forbidden for starting characters, and the other levels determining what your starting score is if you choose that spell as an Expert or Normal skill. You’ll end up with a score between about 60% and one about 5%, with about 35-45% being the average. So if you start as a wizard, you start as a fairly sucky wizard, which is pretty much the same as in first edition. Oh, and magical healing is a fourth-level spell, so you’re not going to have a healer in your party. That’s going to increase the meat-grinderiness considerably.
Also, wizards no longer start with any fighting skills, at all, and they can’t carry metal or their magic doesn’t work. They’re amazingly squishy.
The skill list is basically the “effective” skill list from first edition, but here they’ve streamlined it. All the knowledge skills that scholars used to get are here, for instance. Since all the classes work the same now, scholars also no longer get a base chance in all the knowledge skills, so they now have a few rarely-relevant specialties and the rest of the time they are pristinely useless. Don’t play a scholar, kids.
Persuasion – you know, just talking people into things – has gone from being just 5 x Charisma in first edition to being a skill here. And to add insult to injury, it’s one you start at 0% in, so you don’t even get a base chance unless you’re trained… and no class has it on their list of selectable starting skills, except for wizard and there I think it was an oversight (wizards can choose to know any skill that isn’t a weapon skill, see). Did… did someone just completely abuse Persuasion during playtesting and convince the designers that it was grossly overpowered?
Improving in skills has gotten a lot tougher. See, you can’t just train in your off time, you also need experience. Which in this game means successfully using a skill in the course of play – never mind that you might just have a 5% chance at that, it’s still the only way to improve. An even getting experience doesn’t necessarily raise the skill, you still have to succeed at an improving roll at the end of the adventure. Not the game session, mind, but the adventure. So basically, if you didn’t pick the skill at chargen, you’re pretty much never getting good at it – you’d need to play for a thousand years for it to happen.
And that super-handy healing spell? Yep, can’t pick it at chargen. You need to learn it during play, starting at 5% (in first edition, you could learn new spells and they started at Intelligence x 3%). Which costs a ton of money to even get to that point. So yeah, the designers apparently felt that the game wasn’t deadly enough.
Combat is mostly unchanged. Weapons are no longer as breakable – depending on which of two optional systems you use, a weapon can break after taking a single extremely powerful hit, or it can break after taking a number of still pretty hefty hits. All weapons except quarterstaffs and longspears can potentially break a weapon. Impaling rules have disappeared.
Oh, and casting a spell now… seems to take two rounds? Like, this is something that after thirty years I am still trying to figure out, but that seems to be what it says – you cast the spell with one action, then you release it with your next action. So that’s nerfing wizards even harder. This was not the case in the first edition, as near as I could understand how it worked there, and in the fourth edition it seemed not to be the case in the core rules but then became the case in the advanced rules that came later… Yeah. If someone has a clue, let me know!
Magical items are much the same, they give you the ability to cast the spell that’s in them at 95%. Weapons and armour with permanent enhancements and potions that affect you with a spell of a certain strength when you drink it also exist. Demon weapons seem to have disappeared, though funnily enough they’ll be making their return in a late third edition adventure, aaaaages from now.
The bestiary has been extended, and like a bunch of other things different creatures have been put on a more similar level – no more giving elves a ton of spells just for existing! All the creatures from first edition make their return except for wolves – I think we can assume that they still exist and just didn’t make the cut, or maybe meek Swedish players didn’t feel like killing an endangered species. Trolls are among the ones that return, but have turned a lot dumber and are no longer noted as being great magicians – they’re now more lumbering Tolkienian brutes than the cunning folk from Swedish folklore. That feels like a shame.
Among the new arrivals we have… the ducks (“mallards” in the modern English translation). Who are ducks, like Donald. Yeah, one day I’m going to really do my research and figure out where this idea came from – I know it didn’t start here, they were imported from Rune Quest, but why they made sense there I have yet to discover. We also now have orcs and halflings, again bringing us closer to Tolkien, and a few other fantasy standards like unicorns, griffons, harpies and centaurs. Oh, and ghouls, for some reason. They’re called likätare (“corpse-eaters”), but whatever, they’re ghouls.
The sample adventure with this edition, Sarkath Hans Gravvalv (“The Tomb of Sarkath Han”) apparently has the distinction of being regarded as the worst adventure ever published for the game. I’m not entirely sure I understand why, though. It’s very basic, certainly – the players get sold a map to a tomb full of treasure, they cross some wilderness including a troll bridge that has gotten taken over by elves, and when they find the tomb it turns out that the trolls who used to run the bridge have come here to plunder it. The only really annoying part with it is that the players can pick up hirelings in town that are statted out in a way that’ll make them ridiculously more powerful than the players are likely to be. Oh, and one of them starts out with a staff that stores Power Points, which is something that doesn’t even exist in this edition, and back when it did exist in the first edition it was something that cost a ton of money and took a year for a player to create. Like, can we just play as these guys instead? They seem like they’re better suited to be the heroes! But other than that, it’s a fairly by-the-numbers mini-adventure.
Overall impression? I think this was a step in the right direction, and certainly less messy, though a few cool things were lost along the way. Fourth edition would eventually come along and change things beyond recognition, but funnily enough the current edition has in many ways returned to what the second edition set up. Having actually run this edition, I can also vouch for the fact that it plays pretty well. I house ruled those skill raises pretty thoroughly, though.
Mister Monster's Workshop 
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