The campaign Ärans Väg (“The Path of Glory”) that started out in the previous installment here continues with Maktens Portar (“The Gates of Power”). Last time, my complaint was that the open-ended nature of the adventure, while nice in itself, didn’t make it a particularly good fit for the first part in a series. Let’s see how it goes on.
The adventure starts out by giving a bit more backstory for the setting, which states that the elder races – elves, dwarves, halflings and giants – used to rule the land, but fled with the coming of humanity. Some of the dwarves hid their kingdom behind a pair of magical gates, the Gates of Power, which were locked with three keys. Alas, the keys were lost, and the dwarves ultimately felt that they weren’t safe anymore and had to flee towards some unknown fate, leaving behind a great many treasures in their abandoned mountain halls.
Flash forward about 700 years, and there’s a war going on in the lands to the east. The warring parties are the necromancer Dakoth, the noble servants of the god Eledain, and the sinister-but-not-actually-the-problem-this-time minions of the god Sathmog. All three are scrambling for troops and equipment. Mogdath, a “death wight” in the service of Dakoth, discovered the Gates of Power. The treasures inside interested Dakoth, and so did the still-viable mines and foundries of the dwarves, so he sent Mogdath and a bunch of orcs, ogres and skeletons into the dwarven city through a magical portal. The orcs immediately managed to trigger some traps, so large parts of the city collapsed on top of them. Mogdath is now running a mining and weapon-forging operation with what manpower he has left while waiting for reinforcements through the portal.
Meanwhile, the players are assumed to have gotten hold of the keys and used them to open the Gates (it’s suggested that Doriath recruits them for an expedition through the Gates if they haven’t played the previous adventure). Things are about to get frantic.
Before the players get any further, though, a major NPC pops out of the bushes. His name is Tefalas and he’s a monk in the service of Eledain who’s been sent to killinate Mogdath. He’s been given a magic dagger who’ll suck Mogdath’s spirit into itself if he’s stabbed with it (which will be relatively easy with prudent use, since it’s got a single-shot spell on it that gives a +50% modifier and +10 damage to the first blow you strike with it, and he only has to take 1 hit point of damage to get dagger-sucked). Since he’s kind of crap with daggers, he’s happy to lend the thing to any player character who feels called upon, though.
After that, the major enemy NPCs get introduced. Mogdath is, again, a “death wight,” which is an evil ghost that’s so powerful that taken physical form. This is actually a hindrance in some ways, because it means it’s vulnerable to regular damage, but it does mean you can lift and carry things, which Mogdath makes use of by having magical weapons and armour. Mogdath also has two “dark wights” with him, who are a sort of in-between points between barrow wights and death wights – they are semi-solid, so they can kind of pick things up but it’s difficult, and they’re immune to any damage but fire and magic. They’re called “Daz” and “Gozer,” because this game doesn’t take itself terribly seriously. Anyway, his last lieutenant is a grouchy “night worg” named Sharch who’s an evil soul bound into the reanimated body of a two-headed wolf whose howling paralyses people.
There isn’t really a plot here; rather, the entire adventure is a big dungeon. We get told where all the NPCs are at the start, and also that Mogdath will get informed almost immediately after the Gates are opened. The GM is instructed to decide how he reacts to that news, with a few suggestions – he might investigate on his own, send Daz or Gozer to spy on the players, gather his troops to hunt them down, or just wait and see if they will oblige him by stepping on a trap. It’s noted that he will try to protect the orcs and ogres, since they double as his work crew – again, he’s less interested in the remaining treasure than he is in using the city as a mine and forge.
Some treasure is certainly to be had, though it’s inconvenient to get to – half of it is in the throne room where Mogdath is sitting, and half is still trapped and under guard to keep the orcs from trying to grab it and bringing down even more of the ceiling. Still, if the players can get to some of it, the sort of items they can wield are game-changers – there is an amulet that heals 3d6 hit points, without the need for a roll or the expenditure of Power Points, for instance, and that right there will turn the game a whole lot less gritty in a hurry. Of course, it’s noted that if Doriath is along, she’ll totally call dibs on everything magical.
The idea is for the players to fumble their way through the mountain, constantly attacked out of the darkness by terrifying creatures, and hopefully at some point be able to dagger-suck Mogdath. Though the GM is also mischievously informed that Tefalas doesn’t know what Mogdath actually looks like beyond “a wight,” so the players might end up catching Daz or Gozer instead, and after that the dagger is useless. Oh dear.
They are then supposed to get to the eastern land. They can technically do that by trapping a wight in the dagger and then tapping on the magic portal with it, which will cause Dakoth to think that a wight wants to get through and activate the portal… but not only do they have no real way of knowing that, but it’ll put them smack into Dakoth’s stronghold, so it’s probably not a great idea. What they are meant to do is break open the floor under the lavatories and follow the underground river beneath it out. I… am honestly unsure how they are even going to know that they need to do that, instead of just retreating out through the Gates like sensible people, much less how you can expect them to think of that particular, highly specific solution. Yes, Tefalas might tell them that the dagger needs to get to the east quite quickly so that it can be ritually destroyed, but come on, surely he had some plans for doing that himself that didn’t include underground rivers?
So the same problem that applies to the last adventure applies even harder to this one. But, other than that, it’s actually not bad, and the darkness and terror makes a nice contrast to the pastoral whimsy in the last one. Having actually run it, I can also vouch for it going pretty well, though I admit that I can’t actually remember how the players found their way out. Probably I railroaded them shamelessly. Oh well.
The trilogy will be concluded in The Heart of Darkness! Before then, though, we’re going to get our first look at the game’s main setting Ereb Altor in Kandra.
Today’s entry in the early history of Dragonbane is an exciting one for two reason. Firstly, it’s the game’s first attempt at an “open” adventure, one where there is no particular plot and the players are free to head off in just about any direction they want. Secondly, and somewhat paradoxically, it’s the game’s first attempt at a connected campaign of adventures, the first of a three-part series where each installment picks up where the last left off. Which does raise the issue of what you’re supposed to do if the players don’t do the things they need to do to ever make it to the next part in the series, because those plot coupons are by no means obvious to someone who hasn’t read the book… But oh well.
Döda Skogen (“The Dead Forest”), part one of Ärans Väg (“The Path of Glory”), takes place in a forested area surrounding an unnamed inn where the players are assumed to start out. At the inn is a couple of different plot hooks for them to bite. There is a wine merchant named Dregil who got robbed by orcs and wants some adventurers to get his stocks back from their caves. There are a couple of rogues named Filundrus and Ivil who will try to convince adventurers that there is treasure buried in some haunted barrows that they can show them, but if the adventurers go for it they’ll rob them along the way and make a run for it.
Finally, and most notably, there’s a “warlockess” whose real name is Doriath but who calls herself Tuvinel. Since her real name has no particular relevance and the heroes are unlikely to ever learn it, I’m not sure why the adventure doesn’t just call her Tuvinel, but okay. Anyway, she’ll try to get some adventurers with her to rob another magician named Vindhand who she knows lives in an underground complex beneath a lake. She wants all his magical doodads, including “the conch shell” which is one of the keys to the Gates of Power (more of which later). She’ll lie and claim that he’s loaded with gold, though if push comes to shove she’ll pay for the right to loot his scrolls and talismans.
Doriath, by the way, is obscenely powerful compared to a starting character in this system, with a whoppin’ 14 spells that she’s got scores in ranging from 70% to 90%, 20 Power Points of her own and 25 more stored in a talisman, and just generally a level of competence that is downright implausible if we assume that she’s been built one XP check at the time. Yes, I know I keep harping on this, but it bugs me! And it’s only going to get worse, because at least Doriath has an actual finite list of spells – in later adventures, NPC magicians just have spell lists that read “all spells at 120%” or something…
Heading out into the wilderness, the players can run into random encounters, many of which are fun and colourful. For a start, there is a pair of minotaur brothers who jump travelers with cheerful cries of “WE HUNT FOR GLORY!” but can be sweet-talked into leaving without a fight, especially by women. There’s also a centaur who knows a lot about the area’s secrets if someone asks him, a band of highwaymen, a pair of other adventurers, and a group of elves making a pilgrimage to the Dead Forest. The Dead Forest, by the way, has very little to do with the plot of this adventure and only very slightly more to do with the next – it’s a patch of woods on an island where the trees never grow yet never die, because they’re frozen the way they were back when the elder races still lived in the area.
Two encounters that will have later significance is a “black knight of Sathmog” and three knights of Eledain who are hunting him. If you recall, Eledain has actually been mentioned before in The Secret of the Skeleton Village, so apparently we’re still in the same setting. The black knight tries to beat up and rob anyone he comes across, so helping the Eledain knights kill him is probably a good thing. We’ll see more of Eledain’s “Brotherhood of the Eternally Shining Star” in later parts of this series, along with more of Sathmog’s sinister warriors.
If the players go after Vindhand, they can find his lair easily enough. They’ll then be approached by a supposed “wandering monk” who’s really Vindhand himself trying to figure out what they want. If they express interest in the conch shell he carries, he can tell them that it forms part of the key to the Gates of Power and that he’s settled in the area to try to get his hands on it so he can open the Gates of Power and plunder the abandoned dwarven city beyond. That’s one way the players can get involved, though it does require them to just not killinate Vindhand immediately, as Doriath probably wants them to. It also doesn’t say anything about whether Doriath will recognise Vindhand – she has explicitly seen him before, albeit from a distance. His lair does have some valuables in it, but all are magical or at least scholarly in nature, so if Doriath got the players to agree to give her all things of that nature as her share, she’s royally screwed them (not that they can’t, ahem, re-negotiate with her on the spot – she’s powerful, but not to the point where fighting an entire party of adventurers wouldn’t be insanely risky for her).
The barrows that Filundrus and Ivil talked about actually exist and have some treasure in them, including a magic sword, but it’s guarded by barrow wights, who are bad news – they are invincible to non-magical sources of damage except for fire, and can suck out people’s Power Points until they expire. Still, delving down there is an option for suitably suicidal players.
The orcs that Dregil was robbed by can also be found and their hideout forms a fairly straightforward dungeon, with the orcs artfully sprinkled throughout it so they can be defeated a few at the time. The orc leader has “the black pearl” that’s one of the keys to the Gates of Power. There is also a sorceress named Elusia who lives alone, is friends with the centaur from earlier and possesses “the white pearl” that’s the final key, a hermit who also lives alone (it’s in the job description) and has a medallion with a cryptic inscription that hints at the keys and the Gates, and a temple with an oracle who answers questions in rhyme.
The idea here is that the players should end up with the white pearl, the black pearl, and the conch shell, and find their way to the Gates of Power which stands against the mountain side past a forbidding swamp. I am not confident about there being enough clues to lead them there, but I suppose they can fairly easily stumble on the black pearl or the conch shell and the GM can use that to hint strongly that This Is Somehow Significant, thus leading them to look around until they have the whole set? Either way, they are then supposed to insert the pearls into the gate and blow the shell, in accordance with the inscription on the hermit’s medallion. The Gates open and leads to the next installment in the series, The Gates of Power.
My quibbles with the tension between open structure and expected outcome aside, I really like this adventure. It’s got a nice bit of freedom to it, with plenty of things to discover, and a light and humerous tone (which is, as usual, maybe not quite suitable for the gritty, lethal mechanics, but that’s another eternal gripe). I’ve never actually run it – I never could find a copy, back in the day, though I did run the two other installments in the series – but I could definitely see myself doing that.
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.
Oh joy. We have gotten to the Drakar & Demoner Expert rules. The ones that were the basis of the bloated, nigh-unplayable fourth edition. The ones that added complexity for the sake of complexity and page count for the sake of pagecount. The ones that were the worst idea ever.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Sigh… well, let’s get through this. This box of two books (labelled Rules and Magic) is, in theory, a set of optional additions to the second edition core rules, made so that the GM can choose which ones to include and which ones to ignore. The introduction assures us that it’s all on popular demand, and that “more skills,” “more spells,” and “more wilderness survival rules” were what players were clamouring for at the time. As I was four years old at the time, I can neither confirm or deny that, though I’ll admit that wilderness survival does come up a lot in fantasy roleplaying…
RULES
First up is an extended character creation system. We’re explicitly told that we can choose to play a non-human, this time – in both the core books, this was clearly a possibility but more sort of implied or mentioned in passing. We’re warned that some races, like elves, are especially challenging to play properly, though. Right…
Stats can now optionally be generated either by having one die for each stat automatically roll the maximum (e.g., humans have Strength 3d6, so you’d roll 2d6+6 for your Strength) or by rolling three full sets of stats and choosing the one you prefer. Okay, that’s actually a big improvement given that my constant gripe is that PCs will otherwise end up with far humble stats than most named NPCs. You also need to roll for social standing if you’re a human, dwarf or halfling, with some classes having restrictions – you can only choose to be a Knight if you happen to be of noble birth, for instance. All white ducks are burghers and all other ducks are paupers, apparently, I’m not sure what’s up with that. Any “uncivilised” race, like orcs, are also considered paupers. Oh, and all settled giants are peasants, while all other giants are paupers. Which implies that you can choose to play a giant – not sure that’s going to be a good idea in a game all about exploring cramped ruins, mind you. Class also determines your starting funds under this system.
You can now choose your age. Higher ages get worse stats but more points to spend on skills and higher starting funds.
Classes are about unchanged but still repeated here to include new skills. There’s one new class, the Jester, who’s effectively a Thief with some additional fighting and wilderness skills. It’s noted that the GM should be lenient about letting players pick whichever class they want regardless of their race, but to also not go too crazy with it, because a dwarf pirate would be “just silly.” I don’t know, they love gold, drinking and singing and they have impressive beards – I feel like there’s some overlap there… Percental rolls to see if you can choose a particular class seems to have been done away with in favour of classes just having a minimum stat requirement, except for Wizards who still have them.
Skill score are no longer percentages, instead the system is 1d20 roll-under with your score being effectively your percentile score divided by 5. I admit that that makes a lot of sense given that scores are going to be in the 1-20 range, that stats are already in that range so now there is a single rule for both stats and skills, and that the math is the same but you don’t need to roll two dice at once and keep track of which one is which digit.
Skills don’t get picked anymore, they have to be bought with Background Points. A skill starts either at a base value of 0-4 determined by its base stat, or at 0 if it’s too complicated to have a base chance. Then you have to spend points to raise it, with the cost for each stat being the base cost for the skill multiplied with the base cost for your existing skill level. For example, let’s say that you have rolled a Dexterity of 16 and you want a skill of 13 in Draw Weapon. Draw Weapon gives you a base chance from Dexterity, and for Dexterity 16 that’s 3. So you need to first buy seven points at a cost of 2 points each (Draw Weapon has a base cost of 2, and the 1-10 range has a base cost of 1) for a total of 14 points, and then another three points at a cost of 4 points each (still base cost 2 for Draw Weapon, times 2 for the 11-14 range) for a total of 12 points and a final cost of 14+12=26 points. Gaaaah.
Look, I get it, I get it! It’s supposed to give you greater freedom in getting precisely the character you want. But all I can see is endless finicky point-counting and equally endless opportunities to screw yourself over by mistake, not to mention your stats becoming a lot less important since they only affect your base chance, and that only for the skills that have a base chance; being incredibly smart now has no bearing at all on whether you can start out great at e.g. Botany, since you’ll just be buying it up from 0 points anyway. It’s just… dreary.
The last part of the chargen chapter yells at you to ROLEPLAY, DAMN IT!!!! and offers you a selection of life goals for your character. You’re encouraged to pick a couple, but since they have drawbacks (acting contrary to your life goals gives you a penalty) but no real benefits I don’t see much reason not to choose the absolute minimum you can. The goals themselves are fairly simple, things like Chivalry, Romance, Humour, Power, Wealth, Freedom. Fair enough as a roleplaying tool, but not exactly inspiring. Also, we’re told that elves absolutely care about nature and you can’t play one who doesn’t. Well, I wasn’t going to, but now I kind of want to just to spite you!
Skills! As I already hinted at, we’re switching from the percental scores. Instead, we’re doing d20 roll-under. Which, admittedly, is mathematically identical and requires keeping track of smaller numbers, so fine, I guess, but I still think that percentages have more charm. A critical success is now achieved by rolling a 1 and then getting a success when you do the roll over. A botch is a 20 followed by a failure.
And here come the eeeeeendless skill lists, boo hoo hoo hoo! Mathematics. Skiing. Dressing up. Shadowing, when we already have both Sneaking and Hiding. Bribery, because apparently offering to pay someone is so hard that you have to put points into it. I mean, that’s the problem with this whole “add a new skill for this thing someone might like to do” – it turns something that might have been an option for anyone to something you can’t even contemplate unless you have sunk a ton of resources into it at an early stage.
Some skills are okay, I guess, the ones that actually lets you do something that you explicitly couldn’t before. The aforementioned Draw Weapon is nice, for one thing, since it gives you a way to get ready for battle in a flash. There is also “Judo” and “Karate,” though they’re not really about the martial arts styles per se but just used to mean “throws” and “really good unarmed strikes.” Monks are the only ones who can start out with Karate, I notice, and they can also start out with Judo, so I guess now they’re a cross between their original Friar Tuck depiction and kung fu-ing shaolin badasses?
There is now also a specific dual wielding skill. Probably for the best, having two attacks per round instead of one is pretty powerful. Also, weapons are now divided into types, and your skill at any weapon of a type is at least one third of your highest weapon skill within that type. Which means that you’re not going to be completely hopeless with a shortsword if you know how to handle a broadsword… but still, it’s kind of stingy. Having Broadsword 18, which makes you a pretty serious badass, still just gives you Shortsword 6, and that’s in comparison to the 2 or 3 you’d have in base chance anyway. Oh well. Baby steps.
The more convoluted skill system needs a more convoluted experience system, so now we no longer get experience checks, instead the first time in a day you use a skill successfully you get an XP in that skill, and whenever you go a week without getting into trouble your accumulated experience points can be used to raise that skill for the same cost as with Background Points. You can also train during downtime, in which case you make a roll for the skill’s associated stat once a week (two if you have a teacher) and if you succeed you get an XP. It still takes foreeeeeever to get better in a skill, but I’ll admit that it will probably go a little bit faster. It’s very beancounty, though.
New combat rules! We can now include specific hit areas, so that multiple hits to e.g. the right arm means that you become unable to use it even though you’re otherwise still on your feet. Where a blow hits gets randomly determined. There are new lists of armour pieces, so you can wear armour on some bits but not others, or different kinds of armour on different parts.
There are grappling rules. They are mercifully brief.
If you have a score of 20 or more in a weapon skill, you can fight two opponents at once by dividing your skill between them – so if you have a skill of 26, you might attack one opponent with a skill of 12 and parry a blow from another with a skill of 14. Fair enough, though I’m not sure how often that will come up given how slow character progression is…
There are rules for different materials for weapons and armour, from wooden arrows to mithril swords and dragonshide mail. Weapons of silver get mentioned, which I think actually do come in handy for some critters in the Monster Book.
There’s some pretty finicky rules for morale, which I really think could have been simplified down as “roll Psychic Power for NPCs under such-and-such conditions to see if they run away.” Still, I do appreciate that it’s there.
Heroism! Characters can now be given Hero Points for doing mighty deeds. In fact, the deeds are so mighty that I’m not sure how you’re supposed to get even a single Hero Point – it starts with “kill a young dragon,” and I’ve seen the stats for those things, I don’t think it’s humanly possible to take one down by the rules that have been outlined! Like, there’s bound to be some kind of super-strategic ways of doing it like luring it into a mine and then collapsing it on top of its head with a well-placed system of pulleys, but there’s not exactly a mechanic for it.
Anyway, you can use Hero Points to buy up your stats, which is pretty much the only way you can get permanently higher stats after chargen, or buy some moderately useful but not overwhelming special powers like “speak any language enough to get by” or “heal naturally twice as fast as normal.” Heroes are warned that they’ll attract rivals who want the glory of being the one to take them down.
Some tips for worldbuilding are provided, like how much you earn on honest work in a week, and how much it costs to maintain your lifestyle. There’s some general explanation for how medieval social classes work and what separates a burgher from a peasant. We get some handy fantasy archetypes with suggested inspirations (the writers seemed to have been fond of Tolkien, John Carter, Star Wars, Lakhmar, The Belgariad – apparently not yet translated to Swedish at this point – and something called Ladyhawk that I should probably look into) and stat blocks. They include “damsel in distress (badass)” and “damsel in distress (floozy).” 80s gender representation at its finest!
MAGIC
So let’s see what more they came up with to nerf magic-users with…
Well, for a start, wizards can no longer learn any spells. No, first they need to spend points in a school that gives access to a particular set of spells, and the more powerful the spell the higher your score in the school has to be before you can learn it. So that’s a pretty blatant point tax right there.
The schools are animism, which is nature magic; elementalism, which controls elemental forces; mentalism, which is vaguely like psionics, with spells for mind reading, levitation, protective forcefields, and some general buffs; necromancy, which is creepy death-magic; and illusionism, which creates illusions. There is also symbolism, which is a weird one wherein you don’t cast spells, you draw runes and when you activate them they affect anyone who looks at them. Different races have restrictions to what schools they can learn – humans can learn any of them, but halflings can only learn illusionism, dwarves can’t learn animism or illusionism, elves can’t learn necromancy, and so on.
A wizard can only cast a spell with a degree of effect equal to or lower than his score in the associated school. Since you need a minimum score of like 3 to learn the simplest spells and a degree of effect of 3 means a -4 penalty on a roll that you probably start with having a score of like 10 in, I don’t see that coming up too often. Likewise, the fact that a wizard can only keep as many spells in his head as his score in the school is not much of a restriction, because again, you’d be lucky to have five or so spells in total.
Because here’s the thing, the XP cost for spells is brutal. Something like Invisibility has a base cost of 6, so raising it up from 0 to 10 will cost you 60 XP. If you train for an entire year, you’ll maybe be able to get that much together, and that still makes you pretty bad at casting that spell. Oh, and if you’re of average size, you’ll need two degrees of effect to cover yourself with it, so subtract -2 from every casting, so effectively you have studied a whole year to have a 40% success chance at turning yourself invisible. Cheesus, I know that no one in this game is especially cool or heroic, but they really didn’t want caster supremacy, did they?
Magic scrolls make an appearance, but they’re sort of crappy. To cast a spell from a scroll, you need to succeed at an Intelligence roll and a roll for the spell’s school, and it takes you a bunch of minutes besides. The scroll disintegrates when the casting is complete, and you probably spent enough silver on it to buy a pair of horses.
Spell range and duration are now calculated from your score in the spell. This serves very little reason except to make it harder to eyeball.
Spell lists! Animism has gotten all the spells that felt “nature-y,” like weather control and talking to animals. It’s also got healing and, for some reason, raising and lowering stats (not that changing a stat by a few points does terribly much in that system, but still…).
Symbolism, as aforementioned, works by creating a symbol which can then be activated, and which has an effect on everyone who is looking at it at the time of activation. It can do things like prevent them from approaching, striking them blind, drawing them forward, or afflicting them with seizures, all of which lasts for a few rounds per degree of effect. High specialised, but might be useful in the hands of a creative player – certainly there is something to be said for getting to cast the spell and then keep it in store so you know it’ll take effect when you want it to.
Elementalism is about throwing fireballs and spreading darkness, and also enchanting or cursing weapons, for some reason. You can also learn to summon elementals, the four basic ones in the core and an additional three: light, darkness and cold elementals.
Illusionism can create illusions, natch. It can also be used to confuse people, make them stumble, place people in enchanted sleep (?) and make yourself look super-impressive. Invisibility is for some reason not an illusionism spell but is mentalism instead. Yeah, I don’t know. More serious illusion spells can create illusions that are so realistic that they are effectively solid constructs, though they can’t be better at anything than the illusionist himself is.
Necromancy can create zombie minions (also skeleton or mummy minions, with some extra effort), control existing undead creatures, and spread supernatural dread. It’s also got a high-level spell that can suck the Power Points out of someone else, and another that lets the necromancer “claw his way towards the enemy’s heart” – it causes 1d6 damage per round for a number of rounds equal to its degree of effect, ignoring armour. Creepy.
Mentalism, finally, lets you fly, teleport, read minds, get psychic visions, and some similar utilitarian stuff.
Players can invent their own spells. It takes a year or more of studies in a highly expensive laboratory, as well as some tricky rolls, but if the GM agrees that the proposed spell is within the wizard’s abilities, he ends up getting it at a starting value of 2-3 or so.
Magical objects can be created, but require very high school scores. There is one spell for impressing a single casting of a spell in an object, another that makes the impression permanent, and a fourth that supplies it with its own Power Points instead of drawing from the user’s. Players are pretty much never going to get to do this unless the campaign has literal decades of training times. There is a rather simpler spell that just stores Power Points in an object for later use, though. There is a list of example magical objects, all of which are from mythology or fiction (e.g., Aladdin’s flying carpet) – not sure if they are meant to exist within the game world or not.
Alternate universes exist, and there is a high-level spell that lets you move between them. Universes are primarily defined by how far they are from the different elemental poles, so there could be places full of fire and darkness, places of wind and snow, places of light and stone, etc. A fairly handy way to come up with new ones in a hurry, I guess, though again, not sure when it will become relevant because who’s going to learn this stupid spell that costs 12 XP per point and has no obvious application other than to get yourself in even more trouble?! The life-extending spell that follows it, likewise, seems to exist only to justify why wizards so often seem to be immortal.
Wizards can summon familiars, giving them loyal and sentient animal companions at the cost of a permanent point of Psychic Power. Cool, cool…
There follows a section on herbs and potions, and this is actually a place where those extra skills are justified – each potion requires a roll in a certain one to make, so you can learn to mix poisons or to create healing poultices. For each herb that’s used as an ingredient, there is a later listing that tells you what sort of environment you can look for it in. That’s kind of cool, it’s practically a crafting system.
And that, barring some extra gear, is that. As my exasperated tone implies, I’m not a fan of this one. There are a few handy bits, but for the most parts this is rules added for the sake of rules – and them claiming that they were all optional didn’t stop them from making them all mandatory in the fourth edition, did they? Resist rules bloat, people! Rules once introduced never go away, they just hang around and clutter up the place! Hrmpf.
Next up is the Monsterbook. That one I recall is inoffensive enough.
Before we start on the meatier supplements of the second edition, let’s get a couple of stand-alone adventures out of the way. They are neither of them terribly interesting, but I’m all about the completeness, yo.
First off, Dimön (“The Island of Mist”). In this fairly basic dungeon crawl, the players are hanging out in a small village called Utkante (“Outskirt”) when they hear about a mysterious island where something magical has apparently gone down and are offered the chance to buy a map to its treasure. The island, it turns out, is a magical nexus where spells are easier to cast, and that has made it the dwelling of a number of evil magicians, the latest of which just got killed by a demon he summoned. Thus, his underground lair is now ripe for the plunder, though it’s still riddled with traps and guardians – for instance, there are two demons bound in pentagrams that bar the way forward, a lazy troll who still lives in the basement, and a bunch of skeletons ready to be activated.
It’s all pretty basic, though some of the traps are downright mean-spirited – there’s one in the main treasury that not only insta-kills anyone careless enough to blunder into it, but also destroys the treasure while it’s at it. I’m not sure it’s described in the most helpful way at times – for instance, the dungeon is located underneath a lake in the middle of the island (which lies in the middle of a bigger lake, so things are already a bit complicated) and you have to submerge to reach the stairs leading into it, but then you… walk up, apparently? Because the water recedes around you? So I guess I guess the actual dungeon is inside like a hill at the side of the lake? Yeah, I don’t know, it just bugs me. And also, apparently the magician’s last, ill-advised ritual was performed on a sort of elevated platform elsewhere on the island, but that’s not connected to the dungeon itself, which caused me some confused flipping back and forth the first time I read it.
Also, my pet peeve rears its ugly head again: what’s with the uber-NPC hirelings?! The players have the option of bringing a pair with them from the village, and these guys have stats that didn’t get rolling no damn 3d6 seven times in order, I’ll tell you that much! Okay, one of them has actual skills that are nothing to write home about, but the other one is a monster with 90% in Broadsword and 95% in Medium Shield – effectively, he’s close to unbeatable in single combat by anything other than a super-strong monster! If he comes along, the players will effectively be his bumbling sidekicks! I just… why were you like this, Äventyrsspel?!
The module also contains a detailed description of the village of Utkante, complete with references to nearby lands. The writers seem to be very proud of it and like they mean for it to be the hub for multiple adventures, but… it’s honestly not that interesting? It’s stressed how everyone is happy and friendly and no one really wants anything, so the amount of conflict and plot hooks is effectively nil. The village priest is secretly guarding a dark evil magical sword, so I guess that’s something, but other than that I don’t quite know what I’m supposed to do with this image of pastoral bliss.
Havets Vargar (“The Wolves of the Sea”) seems to have been intended to launch its own setting for the game, but as near as I can tell that didn’t happen. The premise is that it’s medieval Scandinavia, except that monsters, magic, and non-human sentients like elves and dwarves exist and are fully accepted, just like in the default game. I feel like that raises a lot of questions that the module never goes anywhere near, but okay, I can kind of see the reasoning: since the implied setting for the game so far has already been “medieval Sweden, with fantasy stuff in without really changing anything important,” why not just go all the way and make the setting be literally that? Hey, it gives you a full set of places, languages and cultures without needing to come up with them, and there’s even already a “Pirate” class that can easily be renamed to “Viking”…
Anyway, the players are hanging out in Kaupang in Norway and get recruited on a trip down to Spain, where they’re going to loot and plunder the keep of a robber baron. We get a lot of information about Kaupang, with special emphasis to what happens if the players try to steal stuff. Considering that nothing much happens there in the story, that’s another thing that makes me feel like this was meant to be only the first installment of many… Be that as it may, the players get on the crew and start rowing. They might get attacked by pirates along the way, for which eventuality the module includes sea combat rules. They may also run into a peaceful merchant ship, in which case their boss pointedly does not allow them to attack and plunder it. So I guss we’re oddly well-behaved Wolves of the Sea, huh?
Arriving in Spain, the players set out with two dozen crewmates and have some encounters along the way, including an optional mini-dungeon in the form of an orc-infested cavern. I feel like in addition to the ship combat rules, this module could have used some sort of mass combat rules, because they’re going to spend most of the aventure having a whole bunch of mates along. For that matter, I also feel like the behaviour of their employer – who will, after all, be right with them the whole time – should have gotten more space devoted to it, because carrying out his orders (or not) will reasonably be a major focus. Oh well.
The robber baron’s keep is a fairly standard dungeon with guards, magical traps, hidden doors, and a few monsters in the sub-basement. Actually, the players should preferably stay out of the sub-basement altogether, there isn’t much there except for the creepy-crawlies and once they find the way there they’ll already have found the main treasury.
Oh, and this adventure has optional pre-gen characters. You should absolutely play one of those rather than rolling up your own, because again, you are never in a million years going to end up with stats this high if you try to get them the honest way.
All in all, nothing terrible, but not very inspiring either. Next time, we dive into Drakar & Demoner Expert, the advanced rules. This will probably inspire some strong language and tearing of hair.
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 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.
ETA: Here I must write a correction, since I spotted a line in the book I hadn’t noticed before. A wizard’s starting score in a new spell is his Psychic Power in percent, rounded to the nearest multiple of five. So realistically, once you get the 4000 silver coins together to learn the healing spell, you’ll likely start with it at 15%. Still pretty brutal, and far below the first edition’s relative generosity, but not quite as demoralising.
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.
All right, being entirely too tired, depressed and headachey to post anything innovative, this week I’ve decided to read a little more of the classics. A while ago, I read the very first roleplaying game ever published in Swedish – Dragonbane, first edition. This time, I thought I’d move on with the only two supplements ever published for it before the second edition kicked in.
Starting with the very first roleplaying adventure published in Swedish: Spindelkonungens Pyramid (“The Pyramid of the Spider King”).
There’s actually three different version of this thing: one for the first edition, one technically that was sold along with the second edition but actually runs on first-edition rules, and one that was sold on its own where they had translated it to the second edition. Yeah, I don’t quite know what’s up with that.
In this adventure, the players find themselves in the caravan city of Cerand, which lies at the edge of the Toora Desert (which is a pun, by the way: in Swedish torr means “dry”) beyond which lies the exotic land of Faar. Get used to the punny names, by the way, because there’s going to be a lot of them. At one point the players get attacked by two giant spiders named “Spinn” and “Dell” (from the Swedish spindel, “spider”), there’s a demon called Puutch (from puts, “polish”) who has been bound to polish a pole for eternity, there’s another, crocodile-like demon who is hanging around in a pool of soggy goo and is called Träsck (träsk = “swamp”)…
Anyway, they’re hired by a one-legged dude named Assar the Sorcerer to break into a nearby pyramid and get him three particular doodads from it – all other loot they can keep. I kind of like the fact that there’s a built-in reason why he can’t just go with them and help them with his presumably uber-strong magic skills… The pyramid is the burial site of Arach the Spider King, who I think we’re quite free to picture as The Rock, and is guarded by, well, a whole bunch of giant spiders, including a big bugger called Lepera.
So it’s a dungeon, basically, with a lot of quirky traps like a room that starts spinning wildly when you enter it, a paper floor with the aforementioned crocodile-demon beneath it, a bucket that contains a liquid that’s harmless in itself but makes you smell delicious to spiders… And yes, there is a really big spider guarding the final treasure room.
Something that gives it all some extra flavour is that there are ways to circumvent the main path, but that it’s not necessarily a good idea. If the players look around, they can find a hidden stairway in one place and a pole to slide down in another, and if they follow them all the way down they end up in the catacombs beneath the pyramid. And there they can find a bunch of trolls and goblins, under contract of a nearby tyrannical king, have dug themselves in and are now working on setting off an explosive under the main treasure chamber so they can get at the goodies. The adventure notes that these rival adventurers aren’t necessarily hostile and that some arrangement might be made with them, so there’s a possibility for some diplomacy in the midst of the spider-squashing.
All in all, it’s really colourful and funny, but I also can’t help it note that, much like the sample adventure in the rule book… that this thing is a meatgrinder. Like, every monster has a gazillion hit points and hits like a truck, and this is a game that’s very unforgiving about how many hits you can take. You’d want to have a whole bunch of big guys in plate armour if you were going to push straight through. Possibly you could finesse it, but that would require a lot of creativity and an agreeable GM, because there’s not really that much you can do about a monster coming at you through a narrow corridor.
Oh, and the second two editions of the adventure comes with a bonus adventure called The Secret of the Skeleton Village. It was originally published in the company’s newsletter, Sinkadus, before turning up here. It’s kind of forgettable, so I’ll spoil the ending: the secret is that there’s a chest with gold and silver in it in the church. Which is guarded by skeletons. So… yeah. The only two things that stand out is that one, there is a reference to a priest casting a spell, which is a thing that only happened in the first edition, and two, there’s another mention of the chivalrous god Eledain and his noble knights. The latter actually gets picked up in a second-edition adventure, making it quite possibly the only example of consistent worldbuilding for the game’s original and rather sketchy setting.
Tvillingbergen (“The Twin Mountains”) is a more bog-standard dungeon crawl. The players hear a rumour that two bickering wizards were buried together with their treasure by their sons, who got along rather better and who later left the area. They investigate, and sure enough, there’s a tomb full of skeletons. And a ghost (this edition was big on ghosts. I think there was at least one in every published adventure). And also, the mummies of the wizards will rise and attack if you disturb one of them, but if you disturb them both at once they’ll both rise and attack each other, which is a fun touch.
Along the way, there are trolls, a newly introduced race called reptile men that were totally D&D troglodytes with the serial number filed off, some will o’ the wisps, and a couple of new spells that get dutifully described for player use. Also, the loot includes one of those demon weapons that were mentioned in the core.
I’ve actually run this one, but I got to admit that I nerfed the whole thing shamelessly to avoid killing my players. Because again, the NPC stats are kind of ridiculous. I kind of feel like there is a certain mismatch between the tone of the game, with its pleasantly pastoral Swedish Astrid Lindgren descriptions, lovably silly NPCs, and punny names, and the absolutely brutal rules. Like, I can get behind some dark and dangerous gameplay, but then I’d expect the setting to be described as less… cosy.
Still, maybe everyone just did precisely what I did, and scaled down the opposition to something the players could handle. Certainly I don’t remember the game as exceedingly lethal back when I played it. Of course, for some reason my players were always walking around in full plate armour and swinging claymores, so maybe I was just way too nice about starting equipment…
This week, I’ve somehow ended up messing around with some nostalgia. I did say I was going to occupy myself with something that wasn’t actively painful, though this wasn’t quite what I had in mind…
So, let’s go back to even before the sanctimonious edginess of the late 90s. It’s 1982. For the past eight years, Dungeons & Dragons has been doing the Lord’s work in socialising mildly autistic teenage boys. Not only does it dominate the field, but it very nearly is the field; a thousand flowers have yet to bloom. The World of Darkness is not even a twinkle in Mark Rein-Hagen’s eye. Kevin Siembieda has yet to decide that the problem with D&D is that it’s too restrained and thematically coherent and create Rifts to fix it. MIke Pondsmith won’t be replacing wizards and dragons for hackers and evil corporations in Cyberpunk for quite a few years yet, and of course that means that it’ll be even longer before someone decides, “hey, what if we had wizards and dragons and hackers and evil corporations?” and Shadowrun is born.
Still, there are always people who look at the trailblazer and go, “hmm, pretty cool, but I think I could do it better.” RuneQuest appeared a few years ago, and it’s already spawned regular runners-up Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu. And in Sweden, a bunch of cheerful amateurs whose experience is entirely with making board games realise that there are tons of mildly autistic Swedish boys who’d probably go gaga for roleplaying games if they weren’t written in a foreign language. So they license the RuneQuest rule system, and they release… this.
Drakar & Demoner (“Dragons & Demons”; these days known as Dragonbane in its English translation, presumably to make it less confusing) has arrived. Swedish dorkdom will never be the same.
The rulebook is a slender little 54-page booklet, including the sample adventure Among Goblins and Trolls. Precisely how much of it is original is something I’m still not clear on, but apparently a big chunk of it is just a (decidedly shaky) translation of RuneQuest’s more generic version, Basic Roleplaying. Well, keeping in mind that I’m not sure who to credit, I’ll just tell you my impressions.
The start is quite charming, being a short description of how an unassuming farmhand makes a journey to a nearby village, hears some interesting rumours of haunted ruins and the like, and faces a few limited difficulties, with the narration frequently discussing the different ways they might deal with them. It’s nice and flavourful, giving a sense of low-key, whimsical setting that evokes the peaceful Swedish countryside. It’s also kind of completely different from anything you’ll encounter in the game, giving the impression that the whole thing is more of a pastoral slice-of-life affair than a gritty dungeon-crawler. Oh well.
The rules are… quite decent, as far as they go, but they’re presented in a jumble that takes some time to figure out. The system is d100 roll-under, and you get a base chance in most everyday skill (climbing, sneaking, listening, etc) in about the 40% to 60% range. Anything racier than that, like weapons, tend to start at 20% or less, with clubs having the highest base chances, axes somewhat lower, and swords pretty much hopeless to hit with without training. You also roll 3d6 for seven different core stats, which decide your hit points, your carrying capacity, your spell points, and your percentage chance at a bunch of non-skill abilities like dodging and persuasion.
You may attempt to roll to start the game as a Warrior, a Magician or a Scholar, with the first being relatively easy (the percentage chance is the sum of all your stats) and the latter two being a bit trickier. If you can’t make the roll for any of them, or you choose not to make it, you can start as an Outlaw instead.
Warriors start with a horse, armour, and a couple of different weapons, and they get skill with those weapons as well as riding and jumping (for… some reason?). Outlaws start with a shortsword and dagger and skill in those and in a whole bunch of non-combat-related skills, including pickpocketing and lockpicking. They both also get a comfortable amount of starting cash, having looted or stolen it, respectively.
Scholars start with a decent chance at knowing stuff in one particular academic area, a poor chance of knowing something in any other academic area, and one close combat weapon. I would strongly advise against playing one of these, having the power of Knowing Stuff is fun in theory, but in practice, you’re just not going to get much mileage out of being well-versed in Astronomy when dungeon-crawling. At most, I could see a scholar working as a poor man’s healer, since they get first aid skills, but only in a party that didn’t have a magician with a healing spell.
Magicians start with a weapon of their choice and four spells at somewhat unimpressive success chances. The spells can be pretty cool, though, if not earth-shaking – turning invisible, seeing into the past, and lifting small objects with your mind are all possibilities with a lot of utility, and of course you can take the healing spell, which is a game changer in this game given how slow hit point recovery is and how scarce healing potions are (they can be store-bought, a fact that is hidden at the end of a paragraph somewhere in the gear section, but they cost a freaking fortune, so unless the GM is kind enough to leave plenty for you to find, you won’t be able to rely on them).
The book mentions that magic is divided into “ceremonial magic” and “sorcery,” with the latter being the sort of quick-casting spells that adventurers have access to, and the former being the explanation for magical items, potions, demons, undead hordes, and other stuff that adventurers will run into a lot. It takes ages to use and requires extensive training – ceremonial magicians might have been adventurers at one point, but they’ve since retired to pursue their studies. Okay, that’s a nice touch that I wish had made it into later editions, it answer the question of, “but why can’t I do all that stuff that the NPCs can apparently do?” pretty satisfactorily.
Notably, you don’t necessarily have to be a magician to learn spells, it’s just a lot easier that way. Again, something that I feel is quite charming and that unfortunately didn’t last – as the editions went on, the gatekeeping around magic just got more and more determined, I am sorry to say.
Spells can be cast in levels of effect, but everything over the first level imposes a cumulative -10% penalty to your chance to get it off. Which, given that you start out at 45% if you’re lucky and will pretty much never get as high as 100%, would seem to ensure that you’ll always be casting at near level one, but that doesn’t stop the text from slapping on a lot of restrictions to how high a degree you can use as if that is ever going to be a problem. Yeah, I don’t know, really. Oh, and you have to spend as many spell points as the levels of the spell, even if you fail the casting, so you’ll get winded pretty fast if you try to spam a low-probability casting.
Magic items exist. If you have one, and you know how to trigger it (there is a spell that lets you discern how to trigger a particular object, and you can hire an NPC magician to cast it for you if you can’t pull it off yourself), you get a chance to cast the spell at 5 x your Power stat, at whatever level the item is set for. There are also demonic items which have minds of their own and can cast one or more spells for you if you manage to bend them to your will, but if you botch with it the demon breaks loose. Oooooh, pretty cool. I’m guessing that’s probably taken from Stormbringer,
Combat! Everyone go in strict order of their Skill stat (renamed “Dexterity” in later editions). You can attack or parry once per round, and you have to decide whether to parry before an opponent’s attack is resolved, so if you’re fighting someone with higher Skill than you and not carrying a shield, you’re at a definite disadvantage – you can’t just wait for him to miss so you can take a swing of your own, you have to bet on him missing or accept some damage every time. All of which of course means that heavy armour is king – if you’re a knight in full plate, you scoff at most regular weapons and can swing your claymore around without even bothering to parry. The second best thing is to have a shield, because then you can parry with that and attack with your weapon in the same round.
Parrying an attack from a slashing (like an axe) or bashing (like a club) weapon damages the parrying weapon, and so does failing an attack against an opponent who succeeds at a parry with a slashing or bashing weapon – as in, these things have a shockingly low survival rate and you shouldn’t get too used to them. Parrying with a shield doesn’t damage it, but instead of flat out deflecting the attack, it “only” subtracts a lot of damage from it.
Impaling weapons (like spears) have a low chance (like, one to five percent) of doing a ton of extra damage, though if they do they become stuck in the enemy and have to be yanked out. Heh, that’s kind of cool, and offers at least some limited hope of poking through a knight’s armour when all you have is a dagger or something. I kind of feel like there should be some mention of the effects of fighting with a spear sticking out of you, mind…
Hit points are limited, and will rarely if ever get higher no matter how experienced you get – a couple of hits with a regular sword will kill you. Recovery is slow, you’ll be laid up for months. Wear armour! More is better! None of that Errol Flynn crap, we’re being gritty and medieval here. And again, try very hard to have a magician with the healing spell in the party so you don’t have to go on extended sick leaves after every adventure.
There is a limited monster manual consisting of two semi-benevolent humanoids (elves and dwarves), two semi-malevolent humanoids (trolls and goblins), two undead (skeletons and ghosts), two monsters (manticores and chimeras), two regular animals (horses and wolves) and, to justify the titles, dragons and demons. Both of the latter two, by the way, are way way way too tough for you to ever want to fight them with these super-gritty rules.
The humanoid races are all playable, and there are hasty additions that explain what chances that makes to the character creation process. Elves are cheaty bastards who start with a bunch of spells without needing to be magicians. Trolls are likewise kind of overpowered, and are not stupid brutes but actually have better long-term memory than other races, but they make up for it by being unable to stand sunlight.
Then, finally, there is the starting adventure which is stated to be for the use of 3-6 starting-level characters. Absolutely no experienced parties, it fussily admonishes you, or it won’t be challenging enough! Well, I rolled up a couple of characters and made a solo game of it, and…
DEAR FREAKING LORD.
This thing is impossible! My party didn’t even make it past the first room before they got zapped unconscious by a couple of flying jellyfish with four insta-knockout attacks per round! I decided to try to roll with it and have them wake up in a cell and have to free themselves, so they did that, but then they got TPK:ed by a single templar who was wearing full armour (meaning he was all but invincible) had more hit points than anything human should be able to have by the rules, and did a crapload of damage with his attack which had a 85% success chance. And there are six of those things running around the dungeon!
Did… did no one playtest this? Am I just missing something obvious here? I couldn’t even figure out any way to finesse it – like, those jellyfish have crazy-high initiative, fly faster than a human can run, and have a 100% success rate at sneaking. Along with, again, four or five attacks per round that, no matter how carefully I try to read the rules, seem to paralyse anyone it hits regardless of his stats or armour, so even if you had super-experienced characters with hit chances of 120%, they’d probably still get creamed, because there are just no reasonable countermeasures to these things.
Yeah, I had to give up on this one. It’s a shame, because I actually kind of liked the ambience. I mean, the jellyfish are OP, but… giant demonic jellyfish! Plus fire-breathing demon wolves, black knights, and a creepy living wall that is the physical manifestation of an evil god. It looks like it’d be great fun if it was actually playable…
Well… that’s the very first Dragonbane book. I admit myself to being kind of fond of it, for all its shaky bits. There were a lot of ideas being thrown against the wall here, a lot of which didn’t make it into the second edition, and a lot of blank spaces that later editions went rather too hard at filling out (the currently extant edition of Dragonbane has, for the most parts, dialed back on the complexity to the point where it is if anything simpler than the original one). It’s crude, but it’s pretty usable, and it actually looks like it would be fun.
Alas, I never got to try it. In 1982, I was still occupied with mastering potty training, and by the time I got old enough to discover the awesomeness of roleplaying, the fourth edition was in full swing. And the mental scars I have from that should probably be the subject of its own post…
