Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Eight

Despite its title, the eighth and last chapter of the Dragonbane rulebook, Adventures, does not provide any adventures (those are in a separate book of the core set). What it does provide, though, is a miscellanea of GM advice and campaign game rules for ongoing campaigns.

Nothing really particular here, but a meaty selection of useful gaming advice:

Travelling

You get travelling times, including the effects of a forced march on the player characters; getting lost; a mishaps table for wilderness adventures (which is much more fun than wandering monsters), etc.

Foraging

To my taste there is waaaay too much detail on foraging in the wilderness and on the effects of not having enough food 🥱, but I understand this may sound ‘fun’ to other players (after all, why should combat be the only area where frp games rules are über detailed?)

GM Advice

This section is both classic and useful. We old timers may safely ignore it, but inexperienced GMs will find helpful advice. I particularly like the paragraph about managing mooks. In a stat-heavy game such as Dragonbane it can be tedious to keep track of fully-statted ‘low-level’ NPCs, and you get plenty of advice here as how to reduce bookkeeping in this area.

Creating Adventures

On top of useful advice about the kind of challenges the PCs may encounter, and when and where, there are a few random tables reminiscent of my own adventure generator 🙂

Monsters are such a central and peculiar part of Dragonbane, what with their automatic and diverse attacks, each with their own tables. Therefore I am slightly disappointed that there aren’t any guidelines for creating your own Dragonbane monsters.