Previous installments in this readthrough of Drakar & Demoner / Dragonbane:
- Dragonbane, first edition
- The Pyramid of the Spider King and The Twin Mountains
- Dragonbane, second edition
- The Island of Mist and The Wolves of the Sea
- Dragonbane Expert
Having gone through the first two edition cores, a couple of published adventures and (sigh) the Expert rules, we today arrive at Monsterboken (“The Monster Book”), effectively a combination of antagonist section and additional character options. While not a setting book – those are still a few installments away – this one adds to the meta-setting lore by presenting a number of races and species as they exist within the game world. Let’s have a look.
The first section of the book covers normal animals. There isn’t terribly much to say about it, except that it seems to have been guided more by what the writers thought was cool than by what would actually be relevant to the Scandinavian-coded implied setting for the game so far. There is a tremendous number of exotic animals – more, in fact, than the sort of critters you might run into in a place that resembles the described environments in the published adventures. Also bison, for some reason. And polar bears. And saber-toothed tigers. Like, it’s all awesome animals, the sort you’d put in a children’s book because they’d catch the reader’s attention. Which is nice, I guess, but what I’d be more likely to need would be stats for wild boars and elks… Oh well. At least they put in wolves again after the core left them out.
Oh, and bat swarms are terrifying in this game. If one of them attacks you, you suffer 2d6 attacks per round, and any attack that rolls over your armour on 1d10 you lose 1 hit point. Even in full plate, that’s going to start hurting real soon! Meanwhile, a successful attack with a slashing or crushing weapon kills 1 bat, in a swarm that has 1d100 x 10 bats in it. Yeah, these things are gonna strip you to the bone, is what I’m saying. They’re the piranhas of the air. Stay clear.
Humanoid creatures are next, starting with those mallards again. White mallards are all merchants, black mallards are all pirates, and brown mallards are “usually warriors.” Still don’t know if there’s some sort of backstory or hidden joke there or what. Karkions are new – they are apparently some sort of lion-men with wings. Heeeey, I remember one of those from The Crystal Bull! He was this multiverse-wandering poet who got brainwashed into playing arch-angel for an inept demiurge. No, really. There is some crazy stuff coming up.
But back to early second edition. Karkions are wise and prone to being mystical hermits. They have an evil counterpart in the Onaqui, who are creepy bat-men who like to feast on human flesh. They move through the night in perfect silence, but their hearts beat so loudly that you can hear them if you listen carefully. Okay, that is wonderfully creepy.
Cat-folk and wolf-folk make their appearance, the latter of which is a core race in the latest edition. They are not to be confused with werewolves, who are humans (mostly) who have been afflicted with a disease that turns them into rampaging hairy monsters for three nights of every month. They take half damage from anything that isn’t magic or silver. Only unspecified “powerful magic” can cure a werewolf, though eating wolfsbane can stave off the transformation for one night.
Dwarves, giants and cyclopes turn out to be part of an overarching category called “stone folk” who grow weak when their feet aren’t on solid ground (which is probably why a dwarf pirate is “just silly” as per the Expert rules). Orcs, ogres, goblins and trolls are likewise grouped together as “dark folk,” with a common language and general brutishness. They are not necessarily evil, though, just stand-offish. Dark folk also include an even-smaller type of goblins that I can’t think of an English word for – svartnisse translates roughly into “dark house elf.” The closest equivalent I can think of is Warhammer Fantasy‘s snotlings.
“Elven folk” is another category, including elves and other beings who are as cloyingly perfect as they are. Elves have four subspecies: wood elves, who live in the trees, silver elves, who live on a floating island in the sky called Caranor, grey elves who sail the seas in ships made from living trees with leavy canopies for sails, and cave elves, who live underground.
Nymphs are sexy nature spirits associated with trees (dryads), springs (naiads) or mountains (doreads). They die if removed from their native habitat. They can heal injuries and try to seduce attractive men passing through their lands. Oh, and there is an honest-to-goodness nude picture of a comely nymph. I am torn between snarking that someone was clearly typing one-handed and being nostalgic for a time when some honest fan service hadn’t yet been declared Problematic.
Sexual politics aside, satyrs are goat-legged people who like to play the flute. They can raise their effective Charisma by successfully playing a song, and that would be useful if Charisma actually did anything other than affect training times. Swan maidens are more hot chicks, except these ones can turn into swans. Fairies are teensy little creatures with wings who can turn invisible and whose arrows can put people to sleep or inflict amnesia.
Woodwights, finally, are the token eeeeeevil elven folk who try to seduce travelers into getting lost in the wilderness. They look like naked women from the front, but on the back their skin is bark. They can mind-whammy most men, but not male elves or (interestingly) male dark folk.
The third section is of legendary creatures – monsters, basically. Ambisnakes are giant serpents with heads in both ends. If you cut them in half, both halves will eventually regenerate into a new ambisnake. Basilisks are lizards with rooster heads that can turn people to stone with their gaze – seriously, it’s a save-or-die roll. That seems a bit brutal… Giant squid is in this section instead of the animal section for some reason – I mean, granted, real giant squid do not and cannot actually attack ships on the surface like they do in fiction, but they’re still a real species, and the animal section included fully sentient whales. Oh well.
Dragons get a ton more description than in the core rules, including a chart to randomly determine what they’re doing when you enter their lairs and stats for all the different parts of their life cycle. All of them except maybe the youngest ones are effectively unbeatable by an adventuring party, by the way. Dragonflame alone will fry anything within reach. So, like, this is a lot of rules for something that you’re only meant to run away from.
Hmm, hydras, unicorns, wyverns, nothing very surprising here… Gorgons have stepped straight out of mythology, in that there are only three in existence, two of whom are immortal and always return from death while the third one isn’t. If you look them in the eyes you turn to stone, so again a monster that it’s inadvisable to try to fight.
Insectoids are a little more interesting. They are big ants ruled by a queen and a group of leaders, who are the only ones who are sentient – the rest are messengers, diggers, warriors and workers. They are completely amoral and will do whatever they think is in the colony’s best interests.
Giant amoebas are Dragonbane‘s equivalent to all the gelatinous cubes and whatnot that inhabit D&D – basically just big acidious blobs that eat things. Roc birds may just be the only thing in this book that’s more OP than dragons – they have such insane amounts of HP and damage bonus that they really could tank a fire breath for long enough to rip the dragon apart. Spinxes are winged lions who try to eat you if you can’t answer their riddles, but honestly, they’re not that tough and a warrior in armour can probably take one.
Acid lizards and tunnel worms are both creepy crawlers who dig through the ground. Acid lizards are sentient (if not very bright) and can communicate with each other telepathically, in addition to being able to spit acid. Tunnel worms just sort of eat anything that they run into. Their tunnels are used by a variety of sentient races, though – possibly this is meant to justify why the underground is crisscrossed by so many handy caverns?
Ancient trees… They’re ents. I mean… they’re just ents. I guess that, along with “hobbit,” that’s a word that no one dares to use because of copyright?
The final section concerns the undead. Skeletons, ghouls, and ghosts are straight out of the core, and here we also get mummies (last seen in a published adventure) and zombies.
Vampires also make their first appearance. They survive by sucking people’s blood, which causes Physique to be permanently lowered unless cured with a healing spell. At Physique 0, the victim dies and will rise as a vampire, with a number of abilities and weaknesses. They can turn into rats, bats, wolves or clouds of smoke, and also speak with those animals. They can paralyse people with their gaze. They can only be harmed by silver or magic, and only be permanently killed by sunlight, a critical hit from a bladed silver weapon, or hearing a rooster crow at the dawn when outside of their coffins. If they’re killed by any other means, they turn into smoke and flees back to their coffins to regenerate. On the other hand, they can’t approach holy objects or cross running water under their own power, and they are under the psychic control of the vampire that created them.
A final… interesting item is the “angel of death,” who is your basic grim reaper. It’s ridiculously powerful and even if you somehow kill it it will just come back, so it’s apparently more meant to turn up and be spooky. It apparently works as the messenger for some vague “powers of another plane” and can show people what will happen if they don’t change their ways. So… it’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, basically.
Well, this wasn’t exactly mindblowing, but it was fairly solid. The variety of dark folk and elven folk provides an interesting ecosystem of sorts, though I kind of wish there’d be more stone folk – where are all the dwarven subspecies, darn it?! Likewise, I like the vampires and werewolves offering a chance for a more Gothic story where those silver weapons that got tauted in Expert might come in handy. Hey, I’m a sucker for something Gothic.
Next up is The Path of Glory, where Dragonbane makes its first attempt at epic campaign-building. We’ll see how that goes.