Issue 5 - Dragonbane: Early Musings

I’ve started running a short Dragonbane campaign for some pals, and I’m noticing some interesting things about the game…

May 23, 2024

Greetings, everyone. I’ve got a short piece today regarding Dragonbane, Free League’s recent high(ish) fantasy RPG that’s aimed straight at a “mirth and mayhem” experience. I just started running the game for the fortnightly Thursday night crew I’m a part of, and after some significant technical issues with Foundry that I still haven’t gotten to the very bottom of, we recently got through session zero and managed to kick the campaign off with about thirty minutes of play.

*Dragonbane* is **loaded** with incredible art. Check out the giant’s armor here — those are shields!

As of this writing, I don’t have much experience actually running the system yet, but I’ve already noticed some intriguing things — some quirks and features — that I’d like to surface here in the hearth.

So, stray thoughts, in no particular order, about this game…

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT THE GAME

Dragonbane has an interesting heritage, being the latest version of the 1982 Swedish RPG, Drakar och Demoner, which system-wise has roots in Runequest and Basic Roleplaying (BRP). Elements of that heritage are still highly visible in the system, but there are also strands of DNA that come from more modern d20 and YZE1 games, especially the flawed gem Forbidden Lands. This should be no surprise, as the lead designer of Dragonbane, Tomas Härenstam, also penned the system portion of the well-respected hex-crawler.

Dragonbane is d20-powered, but focuses primarily on player-facing, roll-under mechanics. There are feat-like abilities, derived stats and a long (too long, I think) skill list. There’s a pushing mechanic and some resulting Conditions, a la Vaesen or Tales from the Loop. Magic is unreliable and dangerous, and healing other than from rest is fairly hard to come by. Monsters have a d6-powered table for their attacks, just like Forbidden Lands. Initiative is powered by a card system YZE players will recognize, and there’s a lean but reasonably interesting action economy. Armor soaks damage rather than making hits less likely, and hit points are relatively low, staying that way even as characters advance and get better. Lasting wounds are not modeled by hit point loss, but by a table of Severe Injuries. It’s a very deadly game — but more on that below.

MY OBSERVATIONS

Really just getting started playing this game so there will be more to come, but first impressions have me making mental notes about the following:

Weapon Damage Far Outstrips Armor Soak

Weapon damages in the game are high. Unarmed damage sets the baseline at d6; things like daggers (d8), handaxes (2d6), longswords (2d8), and two-handed axes (2d10) up the ante considerably. Here’s a sample of the weapon table…

When you combine these beefy damage rolls with the likelihood that combatants will have a BRP-style d4 or d6 damage bonus from their Strength or Agility, a warrior with a long sword could easily be dealing an average of 12-13 points of damage per hit.

Now let’s consider the armor values in the game:

Not hard to see that even with Plate Armor and a Great Helm (combined armor rating of 8), the wearer will still take about 4-5 points of damage from that hit. Given that the average PC has about 12hp (derived straight from CON, which is generated with a 4d6-drop-lowest roll), that’s a pretty heavy blow. Combat, as a result, looks to be bloody and quick. This is a purposeful design decision; it’s all geared towards the blows that land being telling ones. Not a lot of nickel and diming going on here.

Note that this cuts both ways. This emphasis on hard hits also means that monsters can go down quick to larger parties, especially if the dice are hot.

Aside: all this reminds me of some the great arms & armor advice in Fate Core, which can be summed for our purposes here as “don’t make everything balanced, as that’s boring.”

So, don’t have light (+1), medium (+2) and heavy (+3) armor, and then simply offset them with Light (+1), Medium (+2), and Heavy (+3) weapons. Zero-sum stuff in RPGs can be a bit ho-hum at times, and there’s a risk of producing lots of ‘nothing happened’ results.

RPG “Condition” Mechanics Aren’t Often Something I Enjoy, But…

Whether it’s Dragonbane, Masks, certain flavors of Cortex, or Vaesen, I’m generally not in love with “Condition” mechanics — tags or status effects along the lines of Exhausted, Angry, Hopeless and the like. They seem neat enough in the moment when they are applied, but I personally find it challenging to continue to remember to roleplay my character under the effects of whatever the condition might be. This is particularly irking if the conditions are difficult to clear — if they are long-lasting, persisting through what might be several scenes and a long span of time in the game.

Now, having said that, Dragonbane has a pretty damned neat set of condition mechanics. Here’s the gist of it:

It’s pretty tidy and fairly easy to remember that your condition affects all the skill rolls governed by an attribute. Even better, conditions in Dragonbane are not nearly as difficult to clear as they are in some other games. A “Stretch” rest is about 15 minutes long, and there are lots of cool bits throughout the system where certain Heroic Abilities can clear conditions for your PC pals. Characters can also buy and enjoy services and goods that will clear a single condition — a bath, a haircut, a good goblet of wine or tankard of mead, etc.

It’s a fun little system, and one that’s easy to expand on. I dig.

Character Improvement Looks… Slow

From the pre-release Quickstart Guide of the game through to the final product that now has both a box set and hardcover editions, the skills changed significantly.

The skill list expanded from 16, seen below…

To the 30 seen here, in the final game:

I’ve no proof of this, but I suspect that feedback from fans of the earlier editions of the game (and BRP, and Runequest) probably influenced Free League to almost double the skill count. Why? To differentiate characters, but also, I have a feeling, to slow down progression in the game — to make it more suitable for longer form play.

Another Aside: I vastly prefer the shorter skill list, but that’s just me not liking the overlap I see between skills like Acrobatics and Evade, between Bartering, Bluffing, Performance, and Persuasion, and between Beast Lore, Bush Craft, and Hunting & Fishing. I understand the differences between them, but I tend to like trim skill lists more than all-inclusive ones. I mean I ran GURPS for years… I understand the lure of the all-in skill list.

The strange part here is that the advancement system is already slow. To improve, you tick skills when you roll a 1 (a Dragon) or a 20 (a Demon), and you answer some questions at the end of each session to tick a few more of your choice. To improve each of those ticked skills, you have to roll over their current value with a d20 — in the style of The Black Hack. So it gets harder and harder to improve them as they increase… and the only way to actually add new Heroic Abilities to your PC (other than through the GM handing some out as a reward to completing, say, an epic quest), is to max a skill at 18. That could take quite a while if you do all the percentages!

In any case, there are some other nice features like teachers / trainers and such, but it strikes me that improvement is going to be slow.

Combat is Fast

Contrasting with the ‘leveling’ system I just described, combat is fast and furious. From the card initiative to the relatively few hit points and the player-facing rolls where no difficulties need to be set, fights seem pretty breezy in terms of tempo. I need to see it in action a few more times to be sure, but I think I’m a fan.

The Lore Sucks Feels Unfinished

Not much more to say about it than the headline. There’s just not much to go on (Law vs. Chaos, woo), and I have a strong feeling that Free League is going down the Symbaroum path here, which is to say that the lore will come… with future adventure and campaign books. We saw this with Raven’s Purge as well, where a lot of Forbidden Lands lore was surfaced in the first big campaign for the system. I’m just not a fan of that style of lore presentation, probably because I generally don’t like to run large published adventures2. Or even read them.

This isn’t My Preferred Fantasy Fare. And Yet…

I’m generally an OSR guy when it comes to fantasy, and a down and dirty one at that. My die-in-a-ditch games tend to be a little more filled with miserabilism, cockney accents, lice, maggots, mud, blood, viscera and such. Magic is rare and dangerous, mortality rates are high, humans are the baseline so that wonderous and terrifying stuff can be discovered in-game rather than just be an also-ran part of play, that sort of thing.

Dragonbane doesn’t fit this mold very well… and for that reason it feels like a breath of fresh air for me. It’s loaded with more traditional high(er) fantasy fare, tropes and such, but still has a focus and a very specific mood.

It’s not “anything goes” fantasy, which I often refer to as junk fantasy or kitchen-sink fantasy. It’s evocative in a different way with all that gorgeous art, and I’m perhaps surprisingly here for it.

So! Thats it for initial impressions and such. More to come as the group digs in. Hopefully see you all here next week / month / whenever I next put pen to paper on the blog. In the meantime, feel free to ask in the comments or wherever you might see me on Discord about various things you’d like to see further explored in the games I’ve been writing about.

Cheers.

Break camp, mount up and ride off!