Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Two

Unimaginatively, the chargen chapter is titled Your Player Character.

It’s all very standard fare, but the layout is clear, uncluttered, and the optional rules stand clearly separated in sidebars with different colours. So kudos for the layout.

Kin

The first choice to be made is the PC’s kin (i.e., race). The choices are completely consistent with the overall vanilla fantasy look and feel of the game, except that the Chaosium roots of Dragonbane appear through the possibility of playing a Mallard (i.e., a humanoid duck). Each kin/race gives you an innate ability, which again slightly smacks of D&D rather than BRP.

Humans are nondescript. They are the last born of the young races and they can be found all over the world. Halflings live in hilly farmlands; dwarves feel a connection with rocks and fight with axes; elves are aloof and mysterious. Please kill me with the Tome of Western Fantasy Clichés.

Mallards (ah!) are a common sight in the world— so more defining a feature than in RuneQuest (where they’re only supposed to be found in the Dragon Pass area). Also, all backgrounds are open to them.

Wolfkin are the other nonstandard race. They are muscular wolf-headed humanoids and do apparently peacefully live alongside the other humanoid races.

Except for the innate ability, race doesn’t seem to affect your PC’s stats.

Profession

The second choice to be made is the PC’s profession. There are ten professions to choose from:

1. Artisan

2. Bard

3. Fighter

4. Hunter

5. Knight

6. Mage

7. Mariner

8. Merchant

9. Scholar

10. Thief

Again, these smack more of D&D classes than of BRP professions (which are really only pre-defined ways of allocating your skill points), because each profession yields a unique heroic ability. The Mage, for instance, gets to use magic, and none of the other professions may use magic (at least at character creation).

The Bard, the Fighter, the Mage and the Thief are really the equivalent of their D&D namesakes. The Artisan is a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades. The Hunter is a D&D ranger, the Knight a D&D paladin, and the Mariner a D&D thief-acrobat.

Note that I am OK with these D&D-like professions, as they give Dragonbane an OSR patina.

The only professions that really reminded me of BRP/RuneQuest are the Merchant, the equivalent to an Issaries cultist, and the Scholar, the equivalent to a Lhankoring.

Distinctive Features

The following choices to be made are the PC’s Name & Age.

Characteristics

The PC’s six characteristics (STR, CON, AGL, INT, WIL, CHA) are rolled as follows: 4D6, remove worst die, then assign in whichever order. I think this is pretty generous compared to both OSR and RQ.

I just find it odd that this isn’t the very first step, but then it is consistent with the fact that you choose your PC’s profession first.

Derived Characteristics

This step is very similar to what you would do in a BRP-derived game, with a few differences:

 - Damage Bonus is STR-based only (since SIZ has been dropped), and AGL-based for ranged weapons.

 - Hit Points are equal to your CON (again, because SIZ has been dropped).

Skills

This is where Dragonbane shows its BRP roots and is furthest removed from D&D-ish frp games. There are lots of skills, and by reading the examples of play it is obvious that they are at the heart of Dragonbane’s engine.

The skill base chances of the core skills are directly derived from the PC’s characteristics. In this aspect, Dragonbane is actually much more similar to Mythras than to BRP/RuneQuest.

Then there are secondary (i.e., specialised) skills in which PCs do not get a starting base chance.

Heroic Abilities

As written above, each given profession yields a heroic ability. These are quasi-magic abilities that do not function like skills but more like (Battle /Spirit) Magic spells from BRP/RuneQuest. For instance if you are a Thief you get the Backstabbing heroic ability: by spending 3 WPs, your attack cannot be dodged or parried, and you get damage bonuses.

I quite like this, because (a) all PCs will need Willpower Points, meaning WIL won’t be a ‘dump stat’, and (b) there’s a limit on how often you can use your heroic ability, without this limit being completely arbitrary (as in D&D’s “You can only cast one spell per day – Why? – Because REASONS”).

Gear and Encumbrance

Starting gear is given by a die roll. Good, I hate it when my players spend hours looking at equipment and price lists in order to choose their starting gear.

The Encumbrance rules are quite simple: you can carry STR/2 “items”, with heavy items being worth 2, 3 or even more “items”, and tiny items not being counted against the total.

This is similar to RuneQuest, where you can carry the average of your STR and CON in “things”. RQ is more lenient though.

Experience

I won’t go into details, but globally the Experience system is similar to the BRP/RuneQuest one, with skill box ticks. Skills, however, cannot go beyond 20 (i.e., 100%); instead of increasing your skill, you gain a new heroic ability.

Personal Conclusion

I really enjoy the whole Dragonbane chargen system: at character creation, the PCs will neatly fit into the usual OSR roles, but given the experience rules and the fact that you can purchase heroic abilities irrespective of your class, er, profession, you may customise your PC as you like without the added vapourware of feats and whatnot from the more recent editions of D&D.

Dragonbane Readthrough, Part One

One year ago, I downloaded Dragonbane’s Quickstart and posted my very first impressions about this BRP-inspired Swedish fantasy role-playing (frp) game here.

One month ago, there was a sale on DriveThruRPG and I purchased the fully-fledged Dragonbane core set. I plan to publish a series of posts much more detailed than the ‘first impressions’ entry from last year in the following days. These posts will follow the structure of the core rules as I peruse the PDF.

Dragonbane is beautifully illustrated and (unless I’m mistaken) all the pictures are from a single illustrator, which helps set a particular ‘grimdark’ tone. However, except for this peculiarity, the book’s chapters are pretty standard fare for an frp game, and the implied setting itself doesn’t seem to deviate much from your standard vanilla fantasy world (but more about this in a later post).

The contents of the rulebook are as follows:

1.Introduction

2. Chargen

3. Skills

4. Combat & Damage

5. Magic

6. Equipment

7. Bestiary

8. GM Advice

As written above, nothing revolutionary here. This could be the table of contents of pretty much any frp game.

The other PDFs from the core set purchase add further stuff (mostly gadgets that must look terrific in physical form like battle mats, cards, standees, etc., but which are unfortunately pretty useless as a set of PDF files). However, there’s a 200-page Adventures book with eleven adventures that form a campaign if played in a succession. I think this is pretty cool for a core set.

Now let’s get back to the rulebook and read the introductory chapter, In the Oldest Times.

It starts with a mood piece about dragons and demons having been arch-enemies in the past, having almost destroyed each other, and having thus paved the way for the rise of younger races– like humans.

The usual blah blah about the GM, the PCs, the NPCs, the dice... follows. And then we have an overview of the system itself. As explained in my June 2023 post, Dragonbane is descended from the original Magic World, so I will again emphasise the differences with the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) System: some attributes get a name change (Agility instead of Dexterity, and Willpower instead of Power), and Size has been removed altogether. Magic Points/Power Points are now called Willpower Points.

Then we get the definition of three important units of time used throughout the rules: the Round (10 seconds), the Stretch (15 minutes), and the Shift (6 hours). These are really important and I suspect they are more of a D&D influence than a BRP one because a lot of things the PCs may recover (HPs, WPs, spells…) depend on a round rest, a stretch rest, or a shift rest.

Note: a round in Basic Role-Playing is about 12 seconds long, and a full turn is 5 minutes.

RPG A Day 28−31

Day 28 — Great Gamer Gadget

I don’t like gadgets— at least not for tabletop role-playing games; I’ll happily purchase gadgets for my wargames, like mounted mapboards, deluxe cards, bespoke dice, acrylic counters, you name it. But the action of a role-playing game unfolds in your mind... it doesn’t need any physical media!

Day 29 — Awesome App

Sorry it’s in French but the best answer to this stupid question is definitely imaginos’.

Day 30 — Person You’d Like to Game With

I’ve mentioned at the Day 19 entry that I’d only managed to have the missus play once. It was a D&D game and she was playing a fairy. She was awesome (not very surprising since she’s into improvisational theatre) but alas she never wanted to play again... she prefers family boardgames. So that’s it: the person I’d like to game with is my wife!

Day 31 — Game or Gamer You Miss

Well, as a Gloranthaphile, I obviously miss Greg Stafford. Technically speaking, he wasn’t a great GM (all of us who have had the privilege to play with him have anecdotes on this subject) but he was such a marvellous and mesmerising storyteller.

I miss you Greg!

RPG A Day 25−27

Day 25 — Desirable Dice

Desirable Dice?? Dear Lord, what kind of “question of the day” is this?

Like all roleplayers, I do have a fetish for dice, but I do not remember having ever desired a particular die, even though there are a few it took me some time to get hold of, like the ‘D4 that rolls’ (actually a D8 numbered 1−4 twice), my polyhedral dice with Chinese numerals, or my fancy weather dice.

Day 26 — Superb Screen

I am not very keen on ‘official’ TTRPG screens. Sure, I regularly purchase the ones that are made for the games I referee, but I usually leave them at home and use my all-purpose, house-made screen instead in which I can put the tables I need and not the ones someone has decided I should need. Or I even usually simply place my binder upright on the table: et voilà... a superb screen!

Day 27 — Marvellous Miniature

Being of the theatre of the mind persuasion (see Day 8) I am not big on accessories/gadgets; this is hence again a difficult “question of the day” for me. I don’t own any minis. Not even a single one. So when I run a game in which visualising one’s surroundings is really important, I print mirror-sided pictures of the PCs/NPCs, glue the two sides on heavy paper or cardboard, and put the resulting paper minis in standees. Works for me!

RPG A Day 21−24

Day 21 — Classic Campaign

Shadows on the Borderland is my favourite product from the ‘RuneQuest Renaissance’ of the early 1990s, one of the few original Avalon Hill RuneQuest supplements that was not a re-issued or a re-packaged product from the RQ2 range.

Shadows on the Borderland was not officially presented as a campaign, but as a series of adventures set in the same area (Prax) and with a common theme: the ever-present threat of Chaos in this uncivilised part of central Genertela— which of course enabled resourceful GMs to build a campaign out of these adventures (which is exactly what our GM did).

Day 22 — Notable Non-Player Character

What is a ‘notable’ NPC? One that is central to the ‘lore’ of a role-playing game? In this case, Arkat, Argrath, Harrek, Ralzakark and many others are notable NPCs, especially Argrath, who is supposed to play a major role in the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha line.

Or is it an NPC that the player characters are bound to meet over and over again over the course of their adventures, and who acts as a useful deus ex machina tool for the [lazy] GM? In this case, le Club Pythagore from the French role-playing game Maléfices ticks all the boxes.

Or is it an NPC that you and your fellow gamers will remember from a great role-playing session or from a memorable campaign? In this case, everyone will have a different reference as to who is a notable NPC, irrespective of how well the NPC was presented in a given gaming supplement. From my recent sessions as a player, I have fond memories of Zaleena Silver-Tongue, a Lunar schemer from The Eleven Lights campaign written for HeroQuest/QuestWorlds.

And, last but not least, me and my friends have notable NPCs from our house campaigns. These NPCs won’t mean a thing to you, but we of course love reminiscing about them. One such NPC is Sturm Martex, a dream magician from Orathorn who kept thwarting my players’ plans during our Chern Durel campaign. I think his appearance is what made him so memorable... he had no body, just a head that was carried around on a silken cushion resting on a precious palanquin supported by his slaves. He had tinkered too much with dream magic, and his body got stuck in the Dream World. 

Day 23 — Peerless Player

Anyone who has ever attended a role-playing convention and enthusiastically played in a one-shot with total strangers is a peerless player 🙂

Day 24 — Acclaimed Advice

As someone of the show, don’t tell persuasion, I enjoy learning from experienced GMs at cons during the course of a game or at a panel.

For inexperienced GMs I will recommend the book Mener des parties de jeu de rôle (in French), which is a collection of articles written by French TTRPG professionals with loads of useful tips.

RPG A Day 20

Day 20 — Amazing Adventure

Oh my days, there are so many.

For me the best adventures are the ones with well-defined NPCs that you will still fondly remember years after the adventure has been played, but I am not going to mention my favourite TTRPG campaigns again (that was Day 12), so I’ll have to think of something else.

One that truly stands out from my recent years of GMing is a free Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes adventure titled the Curse of the Midnight Sun by Michael Paul. It is supposed to be set in upstate New York in 1953, but: (1) I have moved the action to Normandy in 1902, and (2) I have adapted it to Maléfices.

Well, what was supposed to be a one-shot adventure ended up as a fabulous mini-campaign with very endearing NPCs, scary villains, and two mysterious siblings.

RPG A Day 19

Day 19 — Sensational Session

We are a family of hardcore gamers. Well, me, my son, my daughter, and my son’s girlfriend are. My wife and my son-in-law less so. The missus loves family boardgames à la Ticket to Ride, and my son-in-law likes short, fun games with simple rules. I’ve only managed to play D&D once with my wife, and my son-in-law started playing in my Maléfices campaign but dropped out after two or three sessions.

So that was the situation until I convinced everybody to play Arkham Horror (3rd ed.). And that was truly a sensational session— we played the Feast of Umôrdhoth scenario, and even though Arkham Horror is not exactly a role-playing game (your player character does not progress beyond amassing gear, and the choices you make are limited by the scenario) my wife and my son-in-law were completely immersed in our desperate fight against the chthonian horror. Next step, a real role-playing session? [I hear there is an Arkham Horror rpg in the works...]