Dragonbane Offers A Box Full Of Classic Fantasy

It seems that RPG boxed sets are everywhere from online sales to the shelves at the local Target store. There’s something primal about cracking open a box and digging into a brand new fantasy world. Even if the majority of these boxes are built as starter sets that offer up a fun experience in the hopes that the table will buy a core book to continue their adventures beyond the one contained within. Dragonbane, from Free League Publishing, offers a full campaign experience in this boxed set much like their Forbidden Lands and Twilight: 2000 boxes. You can tell lead designer Tomas Harenstam is in for the long haul. There’s a heft to this box that caught me by surprise when Free League sent the physical review copy. Is Dragonbane worth its weight in gold pieces? Let’s play to find out.

Dragonbane is a modern update of Drakar och Demoner, aka Dragons & Demons, which blended elements of Dungeons & Dragons and Chaosium’s early fantasy work into a game that a lot of Swedish kids played in the 1980s. I’m not familiar with the game beyond what I’ve read in the introduction of the boxed set and a few interviews with designers but I can say that this game blends those old-school influences with modern designs such as 5e and Free League’s own Year Zero titles. Attributes set up the base chance for 30 skills which players must roll under to succeed on a d20. Classes determine which of those skills can be improved. Individual skills are improved in play by earning a check and rolling higher than the skill after the session. On the modern side, the game uses advantage and disadvantage, or what it calls boons and banes, to reflect difficulty adjustments rather than hard modifiers. Heroic traits are gained on a rare occasion in a manner similar to milestone levelling.

Players can choose to reroll if they risk taking a condition that affects their character such as getting angry or exhausted. Each condition affects one of the attributes and the skills connected to it and forces a bane on all rolls on that attribute until the condition is cleared. (For those min/maxers in the audience, Constitution has the least amount of skills and Agility has the most, so keep that in mind in play) This is one of many optional rules called out in an emerald green sidebar, but reading those optional rules made me want to play this game with all those switches turned on. They are one of the many things that help differentiate Dragonbane from the many wonderful OSR games on the market.

The art also puts Dragonbane in its own class. Johan Egerkrans is the lead illustrator here. His style is one of the big draws to Vaesen and he and his collaborators here bring that same aesthetic to this game. While most throwback games go for gnarly line art or weird doodles that wouldn't look out of place in a third period Spanish class notebook, there’s an animated quality to the art in this game that still feels of the period even if it's more polished and colorful. I think that black and white art can be evocative for throwback games like this, but the painted illustrations here kept bringing me back to the Rankin-Bass Tolkien films and the paperback covers in the fantasy section of my long gone Waldenbooks. That art spreads out through the accessories included in the box: the maps, the pawns, the pre-generated characters. Even the treasure cards have unique illustrations of just how much gold a player might find in a particular room.

The box includes a campaign that charges the players with looking for a magic sword. First they have to find the pieces of a statue that unlocks the tomb. Then they have to get the sword and put it to use against the forces of evil who want the sword for their own nefarious purposes. It’s pretty basic stuff but it’s very well executed. The nature of the artifact hunt gives the players the ability to tackle the adventures in whichever order they want except for the final confrontation. Each adventuring site is built for a night or two of adventure and while there is dungeon plundering a plenty to be had, many of the sites also come with rivals or potential allies to talk with during the exploration. Each of these NPCs comes with a character portrait and a well-defined motivation which help the adventures stand out from the usual dungeon crawls.

Should the players wish to keep going (or the GM wish to break up the storyline with some standalone adventures), the boxed set provides two adventure generators. The first has the GM roll one of each fantasy die type to put together some writing prompts for an adventure. The second are a set of solo rules written by Shawn Tomkin of Ironsworn fame that give one site something of an endless dungeon feeling. Perfect for players who miss a session but still want to get involved in a story or for those unfortunate souls who haven’t convinced their table to try something other than D&D that want to enjoy the world of Dragonbane.

I think this game is an excellent opportunity for GMs who want to play other systems but have tables that are too locked into D&D. A lot of this is familiar; dungeons, sword, magic, d20s, but there are some elements that are different. Perhaps if the table enjoys pushing rolls, for example, they might be up for some Tales From The Loop after this game ends. There’s also an appeal to a campaign that lasts between 12-24 sessions with options in the box to expand the story if everyone’s really enjoying themselves. I wouldn’t be adverse to more Dragonbane either with new boxes exploring new ancestries, locations and storylines. It seems ripe for playable goblins to go along with the duck people and the talking dogs.

Dragonbane offers a throwback experience that has everything the GM needs to play in one hefty box.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I'm curious if they're going to reimplement some of the stuff from the old source books. OG Dragonbane, that being Drakar och Demoner, was usually pretty light on mechanics and crunch, but there were a few systems and things that might work if modernised.

1: Chronomancy was part of the least popular edition of DOD, Chronopia. It's the 4E of DOD, basically. Except rather than causing controversy by changing the rules, they caused controversy by changing the setting. Chronomancy was a school of magic that allowed to do things like speed up people, age them faster, slow down movement etc.

2: Staff magic and harmonism were two schools of magic available in one of the older books (Might've been Drakar och Demoner Magi). The former was a small school with magic related to transforming your staff to do cool things, and the latter was about voice and singing magic.

3: Pain Points was introduced in I forgot which book, but it was basically a second set of hit points. I think the idea was that you could not die from losing PP but if you dropped to 0 you fell unconscious. PP regenerated faster than regular hit points. I don't remember all the details. It's been a while.

The skill system used to be quite different. You had roughly the same skills as in Dragonbane, but you started with a pool of points that you could spend on improving skills. The cost per improvement step depended on which type of skill it was: primary, secondary or class skill. When you rolled a crit, at the end of that session you got, I believe, 1d4 points that you could later spend on improving that particular skill i you accumulated enough points to pay the cost... It was fairly clunky, but functional.

Playable ancestries functioned very differently. You had had Build Points that you spent to build your character, and some ancestries cost more BP to purchase but in return gave you more benefits.

I'm glad they managed to simplify the system in a way that makes sense and seems to be quite faithful to the original design idea.

 

[aramis erak]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Do you have a preferred adventure from the core set as a starter? Folks generally seem split between Riddermound and Troll's Spire.

I started with the introductory encounter in the pass, as the book says to, and then on to Riddermound. We then went to the Wailing Tower. Do note that the book says that they can be run in ANY order... but Riddermound is very straightforward.

 

[aramis erak]

You are thinking of Justifiers, I think.

Ironically, Gideon is one of the better known Furry-naughty-art artists, and yet, his RPG is one of the best hard space opera games out there. And totally not his usual lasciviousness.

 

[aramis erak]

One other thought - if a player is planning on a defensive talent, due to the way things work, the spend WP to Evade is mechanically superior to spend WP to Parry.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

One other thought - if a player is planning on a defensive talent, due to the way things work, the spend WP to Evade is mechanically superior to spend WP to Parry.

Defensive (Parry) does unlock with any weapon skill being 12, so as a very small niche it's easier to qualify for if you didn't start with Evade 12...

But yeah, parrying as an investment is just so bad defensively compared to evading, because you need a second feat (Shield Block, 2 more WP cost) to be able to block monster attacks (and only physical ones at that), and another feat (Deflect Arrow, 1 more WP cost) if you want to block ranged attacks without a shield, while evading just works on everything (and gives you combat mobility).

That's a lot to put into it, on the slim hope that you get to counter-attack on a critical parry.

 

[Staffan]

2: Staff magic and harmonism were two schools of magic available in one of the older books (Might've been Drakar och Demoner Magi). The former was a small school with magic related to transforming your staff to do cool things, and the latter was about voice and singing magic.

Harmonism was originally from Drakar och Demoner Gigant, an expansion to the 1984 version of the rules, and got some additions in Drakar och Demoner Magi.

Staff Magic was a bit more involved than that. Drakar och Demoner Magi introduced some rules that made it harder to learn magic skills of highly different types – I believe it split the magic schools into four different categories, and made it twice as expensive to learn spells and skills outside your primary category (as if it wasn't already expensive enough). Staff Magic let you bypass that restriction as long as your Staff Magic skill was higher than the others, and it also allowed you to place up to half of your POW stat in your staff where it would be doubled (essentially giving you a +50% buff to starting POW). The few spells that were actually in the Staff Magic school were kinda neat, but not the main point.

3: Pain Points was introduced in I forgot which book, but it was basically a second set of hit points. I think the idea was that you could not die from losing PP but if you dropped to 0 you fell unconscious. PP regenerated faster than regular hit points. I don't remember all the details. It's been a while.

They were introduced in Krigarens Handbook (The Warrior's Handbook) for the '91 edition. They had three selling points:
1. You recovered them much faster than regular hp.
2. Weapons would do different amounts of HP and PP damage – generally speaking, blunt weapons would do more PP damage.
3. Armor would also absorb different amount of HP and PP damage, and the ceiling on how much PP they'd absorb was far lower.

It was a fairly complicated system for making heavy blunt weapons the best way of dealing with heavily armored foes.

 

[Reynard]

Qucik Question: I plan on getting Dragonbane and the Bestiary in print for myself for my birthday. Should I get the boxed set or the hardcover of the core rules? Why? What makes you suggest one over the other?

Thanks!

 

[Von Ether]

Qucik Question: I plan on getting Dragonbane and the Bestiary in print for myself for my birthday. Should I get the boxed set or the hardcover of the core rules? Why? What makes you suggest one over the other?

Thanks!

That's tricky.

The box and standard bestiary is only $10 more (compared to the standard core book and standard bestiary) but you get standees, a 11 adventure campaign (which is another 100 + page book), a good sized map, card decks (for treasure, improvised weapon, and initiative), and a few other bits. The books are all softbound, though.

The hardback core replaces the treasure and improv weapon decks with random charts and provides a sample adventure. So you get quite a bit for $10, but if you don't want or need the standees, map, or softback books, then go for the two hardbound books.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

The choice to introduce a will resource as fuel for all class abilities is really interesting. Do people feel it works well in actual play?

Harmonism was originally from Drakar och Demoner Gigant, an expansion to the 1984 version of the rules, and got some additions in Drakar och Demoner Magi.

Staff Magic was a bit more involved than that. Drakar och Demoner Magi introduced some rules that made it harder to learn magic skills of highly different types – I believe it split the magic schools into four different categories, and made it twice as expensive to learn spells and skills outside your primary category (as if it wasn't already expensive enough). Staff Magic let you bypass that restriction as long as your Staff Magic skill was higher than the others, and it also allowed you to place up to half of your POW stat in your staff where it would be doubled (essentially giving you a +50% buff to starting POW). The few spells that were actually in the Staff Magic school were kinda neat, but not the main point.


They were introduced in Krigarens Handbook (The Warrior's Handbook) for the '91 edition. They had three selling points:
1. You recovered them much faster than regular hp.
2. Weapons would do different amounts of HP and PP damage – generally speaking, blunt weapons would do more PP damage.
3. Armor would also absorb different amount of HP and PP damage, and the ceiling on how much PP they'd absorb was far lower.

It was a fairly complicated system for making heavy blunt weapons the best way of dealing with heavily armored foes.

Thanks for the refresher. Last time I played Drakar och Demoner was back in the 90s. I had completely forgotten about that staff magic stuff, though I now can vaguely recall a cousin talking about how you could make some really OP stuff by combining staff magic with some spell called Nexus though I have no idea what it actually did.

 

[Staffan]

The choice to introduce a will resource as fuel for all class abilities is really interesting. Do people feel it works well in actual play?

Thanks for the refresher. Last time I played Drakar och Demoner was back in the 90s. I had completely forgotten about that staff magic stuff, though I now can vaguely recall a cousin talking about how you could make some really OP stuff by combining staff magic with some spell called Nexus though I have no idea what it actually did.

Nexus was a spell (or rather a ritual) used for making magic items.

Classic Drakar och Demoner (pre-1991) had a method for creating magic items that was entirely based on spells, and used three or four different spells/rituals to do so.

The basic one was Sigill (Sigil), where you would cast both Sigill and another spell, and that would make it so the other spell would be cast, once, when some condition was fulfilled. This would make a single-use item. The power for the spell would be drawn from the user.

The second one was Permanens (Permanency). This was a ritual that would make a Sigil permanent – so every time the condition was fulfilled, the spell would be cast, again drawing power from the user. Casting Permanency would cost the caster one point of permanent Power.

Third, there was Nexus. Adding Nexus to a magic item would make it self-powered, but it would cost the caster two points of permanent Power per spell (one for the actual spell and one for the Sigil).

You also had a fourth spell, Laddning (Charge), that would allow an item to store temporary Power. This could either be used to power spells cast from the item or spells the user cast themselves.

These were all very advanced spells. In classic Drakar och Demoner, each spell had a "skolvärde" (school level), indicating the skill level you needed in the appropriate magic school to start learning the spell. These particular spells could be accessed via any school, but they had school levels of 14 (Charge) to 20 (Nexus). That also meant that in addition to sinking ridiculous amounts of XP into your school skill, the spells themselves would cost enormous amounts of XP to learn.

I'm not quite sure how Nexus would interact with staff magic in particular. Maybe there was a different interpretation of staff magic in the 1991 edition and its "Magikerns Handbok" (The Wizard's Handbook, a splatbook for magic use)? One of the issues when discussing old-school Drakar och Demoner is that there were multiple editions that were only sort of compatible with one another.