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.