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.

Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Seven

The seventh chapter, Bestiary, is one of the areas where Dragonbane shines, because of one peculiar feature of Dragonbane: monster attacks succeed automatically. My mind went boom 🤯 when I realised the implications. The days and nights spent at trying to create interesting challenges for my players, which they destroyed in a few lucky rounds… The yawn elicited at the mentions of the creatures I’d throw onto their player characters… If monster attacks succeed automatically, fear will change sides.

How does this work? The GM will draw an initiative card per each monster attack (monstrous creatures often have multiple attacks per round). When it is the monster’s turn to act in the combat round, the GM determines who the unlucky target of the monster attack is, rolls a D6 on the monster attack table, and applies the results to the hapless victim.

Each monster has its own unique ‘monster attacks’ table; it’s not simply a ‘roll D-something for damage’ (well, it can be, but it’s usually just one of the entries in the table).

Demons possess or curse their opponents; dragons flap their wings and create hurricane-strong winds; ghosts inflict all kinds of conditions… Even more mundane monsters such as giant spiders have deadly poison attacks or may mesmerise you with their many eyes.

The monster becomes the ultimate foe in an adventure, not a mere passing threat.

The only drawback is that, since each monster takes up several pages, the selection in the bestiary is quite limited.

Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Six

The sixth chapter, Gear, is all about the various pieces of Equipment that can be purchased by Dragonbane player characters, with a big emphasis on combat-related gear. Expect the usual [boring] lists of weapons, armour, etc. from frp games.

The Good

1. Heavy/noisy armour gives banes on various rolls, rather than minus something penalties.

2. Weapons are divided into bludgeoning, slashing, etc. categories, with optional rules to take this feature into account if you want more of a simulationist approach to combat.

The Bad

This chapter is literally a compilation of lists. Do not expect anything like the RuneQuest Weapons & Equipment book.

Actually, what is most fun about the Dragonbane gear is the vast array of improvised weapons, which however are not described in this chapter but on a set of bespoke cards that are part of the Dragonbane core set.

Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Five

The fifth chapter, Magic, explains how a player character may become a spell-caster, describes Dragonbane’s three different magical systems/schools, and gives all the in-game details of magic use. There will be many differences here, possibly much more than in the areas of combat and damage, between Dragonbane and the BRP family of games.

Firstly, Dragonbane is strikingly different from RuneQuest, where famously ‘everyone is a spell caster’, and is somewhat more like the Basic Role-Playing System, where access to magic depends on the PC’s profession.

Getting back to the professions post, remember how each profession had its own unique heroic ability? Well, the mage’s heroic ability is “Magic Talent”, meaning he or she can use magic – actually a single school of magic: each school of magic, of which there are three, has to be learnt separately, i.e., is a discrete Skill, with its skill level. Each given spell belongs to a school of magic and also has to be learnt separately (using up an experience check). The three schools of magic are:

1. Animism

2. Elementalism

3. Mentalism

Note that there is a short collection of ‘general’ spells that can be learnt by practitioners of any school of magic.

There are also ‘magic tricks’, similar to D&D’s cantrips, which are always ready to be cast and do not count against the limit of spells that the PC has memorised (see below).

Animism

Animism is slightly reminiscent of RuneQuest Battle/Spirit Magic, and/or of some of D&D’s druidic spells (like Entangle). 

Elementalism

Elementalism harnesses the powers of the elements and provides whizz bang spells, more reminiscent of RuneQuest Rune Magic or of D&D spells.

Mentalism

Mentalism makes use of the mage’s psychic abilities to affect others. It is a mix of D&D psionics and of RuneQuest shamanic abilities or Darkness-/Moon-related Rune Magic.

Learning & Memorising Spells

Spells are not skills but must be learnt separately. Each spell has a rank, a value that has no in-game effect except indicating the minimum skill level (in the relevant school of magic) necessary to learn it. Some spells also have a prerequisite, e.g., you cannot learn Purge if you haven’t learnt Banish before.

A starting mage receives three rank I spells from their school of magic.

The maximum number of spells a PC may hold in their memory, ready to be cast, is approximately equal to INT/2. The PC, however, may learn any number of spells… the player must just state, after each shift rest, which spells the PC has now memorised.

Casting Spells

This will be exceedingly familiar to players of BRP-powered frp games: casting a spell requires the expenditure of the relevant number of WPs and a successful roll against the skill level in the corresponding school of magic. If the roll fails, the WPs are still expended.

Once you have run out of WPs, you may cast spells by ‘sacrificing’ your HPs. This is a great rule, but it may have been more fun to restrict this ability to a certain category of mages (e.g., “blood mages”) rather than make it generally available. This adds to my general impression of the game: the rules are great but they do not manage to impress a particular “flavour” of fantasy in my mind… 

Casting a spell is the PC’s action in combat. Period. No complex strike rank calculation, or initiative by spells, ranged weapons, and mêlée combat. As a lazy GM, I love this.

If the skill roll was a critical, the mage may choose one of three effects:

1. Spell damage or range doubled,

2. The spell doesn’t cost any WPs,

3. The mage may immediately cast another spell but with a bane on the roll.

If the skill roll was a fumble, you roll 1D20 and check the magical mishaps table. This is pretty fun, with my favourite ill effect being ‘you vomit a frog the moment you tell a lie’.

Edit− Resisting Offensive Spells

There is no BRP-like Resistance Table in Dragonlance, nor anything like the Mythras opposed rolls.

Spells which affect unwilling living targets all have different ways of being resisted/avoided:

- Spells that create a tangible threat like e.g. Fireball or Lightning Bolt can be dodged or parried as a ranged attack. Others like Pillar (which suddenly creates an earth o stone pillar) can be avoided via a successful Acrobatics roll.

- Some other elemental spells, e.g. Frost or Whirlwind, simply cannot be avoided in any way.

- Some area spells (e.g., Ensnaring Roots) cannot be avoided when first cast, but the target can then break free from the area of effect.

- Most mind-affecting spells, like e.g. Dominate or Sleep, can be resisted via a WIL roll. Some others, however, like Mental Strike, cannot be resisted.

Spells – Some Personal Considerations

The spells are quite diverse, with a good mix of D&D favourites (Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Sleep, Stoneskin) and RuneQuest ones (Countermagic, Detect XXX, Enchantment, Farsee, Fear, Summon/Control XXX Elemental)

My main beef with the spells is that the implied setting is ‘vanilla fantasy’/Old School D&D, yet most of the spells feel ‘magic-user’-ey; there aren’t many ‘clerical’ spells beyond the obvious Cure-like spells, and the Banish/Purge spells (which work like the Turn Undead power of D&D clerics).

Globally, there is a total lack of clerics/priests in the implied setting. I am OK with that – Tunnels & Trolls is one of my favourite frp games, and it doesn’t feature clerics/priests either. But then Trollworld is atheistic, whereas Dragonbane’s implied setting constantly mentions demonic threats (both in the rulebook and in the core set adventures) so I would expect either clerical PCs whose role is to protect the world from demons, or evil NPC priests à la Robert E Howard trying to bring forth demonic dominance into the world.

Also as a diehard RQ fan no gods/deities means no cults.

Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Four

The fourth chapter, Combat & Damage, tackles exactly what it says. As with any frp game, combat in Dragonbane is paramount, and I will try and delve into some detail here, again emphasising the differences between Dragonbane and the BRP family of games.

Initiative

The chapter starts with a long explanation as to how Dragonbane manages Initiative, which makes sense since it is quite idiosyncratic. Each player, and the GM who manages all the NPCs/monsters involved in the combat, draws a card from a deck containing 10 cards numbered 1−10. The card will indicate the drawer’s turn in the combat round (lowest goes first). At the beginning of the next round, everyone draws a card again. Obviously, the GM may decide to draw several cards instead of a single one, especially if there is a ‘boss’ and their ‘mooks’, or different kinds of opponents (humanoids and monsters, for instance).

A few spot rules allow the GM to factor in further elements like surprise, delaying one’s attack, etc.

Actions & Reactions

During their turn in a given combat round, each combatant may move and act (one move and one action, in any order). Parrying or dodging uses up one’s movement and action for the combat round, meaning you must carefully plan whether you attack or keep your action for later on if you’re fighting a particular dangerous opponent or if you do not have many HPs left. I’m not particularly fond of this rule, but obviously since I’ve never played Dragonbane I’d have to run a few sample encounters to form an opinion. I also suspect that player co-ordination is much more important in Dragonbane than in BRP/RuneQuest.

Casting a spell, using a noncombat skill/heroic ability, or helping another character all also count as one action. Disengaging from an opponent doesn’t count as an action but will give your opponent a free attack, which cannot be parried or dodged, if the relevant skill roll is failed.

Mêlée Combat

The various details of mêlée combat are quite similar to what you’d expect in a BRP-powered game. The main improvement, I think, is that a lot of peculiarities that would entail percentage modifications in BRP/RuneQuest are simply (and elegantly) managed by the bane/boon system in Dragonbane.

As mentioned in yesterday’s post, rolling a 1 is a critical, and rolling a 20 is a fumble, period.

If you roll a critical, instead of starting a string of complex calculations based on the kind of damage the weapon inflicts (crushing/impaling/slashing), as in RuneQuest, you simply choose an outcome out of three possible ones:

1. Double weapon’s damage (before applying damage bonus)

2. Immediately perform a free second attack against another opponent

3. Ignore opponent’s armour

If you roll a fumble, you roll 1D6 and check the fumble table. The results are quite similar to the ones in the BRP/RuneQuest fumble tables, with less variety.

The effects of a critical parry are different than in BRP/RuneQuest.

Ranged Combat

Most of what I’ve written above also applies to ranged combat. In case of a critical, only effects No.1 and No.3 may be chosen.

Parrying a ranged attack is possible, but only with a shield.

If a target is partially covered, the attacker gets a bane.

Damage, Death & Healing

Alas, Dragonbane doesn’t use hit locations (of which I’m very fond). As a result, armour provides the same protection on the whole body; wearing a helmet simply adds further protection.

Dragonbane manages weapon durability in a much simpler way than BRP/RuneQuest: a weapon is either intact or damaged; you do not tally the weapon’s hit points.

Again, since Dragonbane doesn’t use hit locations, only the total hit points of your character will determine their state. Once the PC’s HPs reach 0, you start rolling against your CON each round and must tally successes and failures. After three successes, you recover 1D6 HPs; after three failures, the character is dead.

Surviving death, however, yields after-effects (you roll on a table) that take between 1 and 18 days to heal. Some after-effects (teeth knocked out, a severed finger) are permanent.

On top of magical healing, Dragonbane PCs may recover lost hit points via a stretch rest (1D6 to 2D6) or a shift rest (all HPs). I hate this… it smacks so much of D&D: “Oh, I got hit by a sword and I have this huge gash in my abdomen. No worries, a good night’s sleep and it will be forgotten!”

Spot Rules

This chapter also provides spot rules for Darkness combat, Disease, Drowning, Falling, Fear, Improvised weapons, Mounted Combat, Poison. These are all well thought out.

Dragonbane Readthrough, Part Three

As mentioned in my previous posts about Dragonbane, Skills are at the very heart of Dragonbane’s engine.

It is hence no surprise that the third chapter, Skills, doesn’t start with a skill list but with detailed explanations as to how skill rolls are resolved.

In a nutshell, the Dragonbane engine is the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) System, but with a D20 instead of a D100, i.e., everything is divided by 5, so that the Characteristics are consistent with the skill values– kind of the opposite of what CoC 7th edition did.

This entails some simplifications: rolling a 1 is a critical, and rolling a 20 is a fumble; no complex computations of what is or isn’t a critical/a fumble any longer.

Instead of penalties/bonuses expressed in terms of negative/positive modifiers to the skill value, Dragonbane has a system of banes and boons. A bane is when you roll two D20s and keep the highest roll. A boon is when you roll two D20s and keep the lowest roll.

At first I thought this was a blatant rip-off from D&D 5th edition’s advantages and disadvantages. Well, maybe it is, but it has been skilfully blended into Dragonbane’s underlying BRP engine and I suspect it works marvellously (more about this later).

You can also push a roll, but this works quite differently from CoC 7th edition: you simply re-roll and, irrespective of whether the re-roll was successful or unsuccessful, you get a condition on one of your Characteristics: all further rolls on skills whose base chance is based on said Characteristic get a bane until your next stretch rest.

Then we get to the list of the core skills, all 30 of them (of which 10 are weapon skills). This is somewhat like Mythras’s standard skills, and about half the number of the core skills in BRP/RuneQuest (and yet I do not really feel like anything important is missing).

The list of the core skills is followed by the list of the heroic abilities. There are 44 heroic abilities, and they are extremely diverse: some of them read like hugely specialised skills (e.g., Backstabbing), some others are quasi-magical (à la Sense Assassin in RuneQuest), some others are a one-off benefit (e.g., Robust, which gives you +2 starting HPs), and some others give bonuses to a single core skill (e.g., Hard to Catch, which gives a boon to Evade rolls).

I also quite like these heroic abilities. Not that they are anything revolutionary (if I remember them correctly, the legendary abilities from Mongoose RuneQuest worked in a similar way), but they are a nice way to add, er, heroic skills to your game without having a looooong skill list on the character sheet– a common criticism levelled against BRP/RuneQuest [which I have never understood in the first place; if you think there are too many skills, just remove the ones you feel are unnecessary!].

I can also imagine adapting Dragonbane to the world of Glorantha, and instead of giving PCs heroic abilities based on their profession, giving them based on the cult they belong to, e.g., the already-mentioned Sense Assassin.

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.