Posts tagged dragonwarriors
Dragon Warriors Week Day Seven
Aug 21st
……AAaaaaaaaand here we are at the end of Dragon Warriors Week. We’ve looked at how it handles combat and what made this wonderful, dinky role-playing game so unique. We’ve looked at it’s monsters, it’s magic, it’s maps and it’s puzzles - and we’ve barely scratched the surface of the game.
I’m going to leave you on this last day of Dragon Warriors Week with a list of just some of the things I’ve not covered. Any one of them is a terrific reason to download the game and take it for a spin. Go on. You know you want to.
- Assassins as a base class, complete with player usable Poison rules. Oh yes. They’re the Dragon Warriors uber-class, and work best in solo one-on-one sessions. Y’know – that thing that’s….. uhhh….. difficult in 4e.
- Eighteen complete adventures. Yes, 18, and most are playable in a single session. That’s at least one ready-to-run game session (if you play once a week) for over four months.
- Elementalists – including Darkness Elementalists
- Steath and Perception rules that work, just like in 4e D&D. 23 years ahead of time.
- Warlocks. Also 23 years ahead of time. Assassins + Darkness Elementalist + Warlocks = Dragon Warriors isn’t afraid of evil (or at least morally unconscious) characters
- The Grey Hood, Blue Men, Black Riders and White Ladies!
- Bloodrage!
- Kraken worship!
- Nightmare Huts! Pirates! Wreckers! Curses! Diseases!
- Fang Warriors straight out of Jason and the Argonauts!
- Spider Magic!
- THE Temple of Balor! Not just “A” temple, but “THE” Temple!
- The Isle of Albion!
- Crime and punishment rules including percentage chances to bribe a judge.
- Jousting rules!
- ……and much, much more.
Have you geekgasmed yet? I have.
Dragon Warriors is a classic role-playing game released in 1985 as 6 trade paperback books. It is now available for free download. Happy Dragon Warriors Week!
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Dragon Warriors Week Day Six
Aug 20th
“Find the fourteen upright of the twenty-six.”. The adventures included with the Dragon Warriors are full of old-school puzzles of a kind rarely seen nowadays. Here’s an example. Could you solve it?
Dragon Warriors is a classic role-playing game released in 1985 as 6 trade paperback books. It is now available for free download. Happy Dragon Warriors Week!
Dragon Warriors Week Day Five
Aug 19th
Hob’s Dell. I mean, the name says it all. When was the last time you set an adventure in a Dell?
Remember when maps came in just two colours – black and white – and weren’t marked in squares? Remember when players could go anywhere (at their own peril!) rather than follow Corridor 1 to Room A then onto Corridor 2 to Room B? Yep, so do I – and Dragon Warriors has maps by the bucket-load that do just that. Each adventure is fully mapped out, and across the six Books there’s enough maps to driven even the most hardened cartography addict (Alex, I’m looking at you) into a lustful frenzy.
It culminates with Book Six which covers the Lands of Legend, a complete (-ish) game-world that’s roughly modeled after Medeival Europe. There’s Albion nudging the coastline alongside Chaubrette. We’ve Algandy and Kurland, the Caliphate of Zhenir and the Nomad Khanates. Pure, wonderful Old School names that perfectly evoke all those maps you scrawled in the back of your exercise books with a biro during those boring Geography lessons. Admit it. There’s no shame.
Whether it’s one of Dragon Warriors‘ scenario maps, or one of the wonderful hand-drawn maps of Legend, they’re all places you ache to visit. The stark black-and-white pulls you in a way that today’s full-colour computerized sanitized maps just….. don’t. Pouring over these kittens feels like you’re the first (ok, second) person to see them, and they call out to the adventurer in us all.
And that, let’s face it, is what role-playing is all about.
Dragon Warriors is a classic role-playing game released in 1985 as 6 trade paperback books. It is now available for free download. Happy Dragon Warriors Week!
Dragon Warriors Week Day Four
Aug 18th
When was the last time you saw an image of fighting dice? Don’t know about you, but I think the d6 is in trouble.
We’re over halfway through Dragon Warriors Week and I’m still raving about Book One. With five more books in the series it’s time to step things up a notch with a look at Book Two, and how magic works in the world of the Dragon Warrior.
Book Two presents us with two spell-wielding classes – the Sorcerer and the Mystic – with Book Five adding Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Darkness Elementalists to the mix. In the Sorcerer’s case spells cost Magic Points to cast (one for each level of the spell) and they’re replenished to full charge at midnight. As Dragon Warriors is big on consistency, magical attacks are resolved in much the same way as a normal attack with a roll equal or less than MAGICAL ATTACK – MAGICAL DEFENCE on 2d10 for a spell to take effect. The blastier spells use EVASION to see whether the poor mook dodges out of the way. In either case, it’s consistent mechanics all the way. The only minor annoyance was that some things called for 2d10 and others for d20; we put that down to the low availability of d20s at the time the books were written, and used d20 for everything. Simpler that way :)
Remember that this was back in 1985 when AD&D was a mess of rules and inconsistency. Every mechanism in AD&D, whether it was hand-to-hand combat, unarmed combat, turning undead, checking skills or morale used a different resolution mechanic and remembering what dice did what demanded a mensa-like knowledge of the rules. Dragon Warriors was a serious breath of fresh air!
Along with their spells, Sorcerers also picked up skills in Calligraphy (creating scrolls), Alchemy (brewing potions) and Artifice (making Amulets and Talismans). These were covered in just over three pages, and worked. 3e D&D Crafting rules, take note. This is how it’s done.
On to the Mystics. Where the Sorcerer’s arts were magical, the Mystic was psychic. Yes folks – Dragon Warriors has psionics, right in the core game! Unlike a Sorcerer, the Mystic didn’t rely on predictable Magic Points as a power source but instead had to make a Psychic Fatigue Check after casting each “spell”. A failed roll meant that the Mystic was out of power until dawn the following day – bad news if you fail your first roll. With powers like Mirage, Pursuit, Telekinesis, Steel Claw and Duel, the Mystic made for a fun class to play too. One of my long-time Dragon Warriors characters was an Elven Mystic. Happy times.
Book Two also covers treasure of both the mundane and magical kind. There’s the usual batch of random treasure tables as well, and magical items pretty much follow the same style as D&D with enhancement bonuses for weapons and armour being the order of the day. By far my favourite item is the Ring of Agonizing Doom which fires an emerald bolt of lightning at 2-8 foes. Nice. After the usual magic items you’re treated to no less than 12 artifact write-ups and rules for creating Holy Relics.
As if that’s not enough, there’s two more scenarios to finish off the Book. Dragon Warriors is a miracle of compact, efficient writing that puts todays’ verbose, rules-lawyering tomes to shame. Lessons could be learned!
Dragon Warriors is a classic role-playing game released in 1985 as 6 trade paperback books. It is now available for free download. Happy Dragon Warriors Week!
Dragon Warriors Week Day Three
Aug 17th
If the the landing doesn’t get you (5d20? Ouch!) the sneaky Kobold will.
Let’s talk monsters.
Book One of Dragon Warriors gives stats for 46 different critters covering all the staple fantasy bases (Orc, Goblins, Dragon, Zombies, etc) as well as throwing few few more unusual beasties into the mix. My favourite new monster is the Volucreth – jungle-dwelling beak-headed Barbarians. I mean – what’s not to love?! As this is the land of old-school gaming, each monster gets a single statblock (unlike 4e’s lovely multiple blocks per monster), and you’re encouraged to tweak and customize to your heart’s content. Somehow Book One manages to pack into it’s tiny covers complete Random Encounter Tables and sample character stats for all levels from 1st to 12th (about as high as Dragon Warriors can reasonably go) too, meaning it’s usable from the get-go for spur-of-the-moment gaming. I used to take the first three books with me every family holiday, slipping them inside the edge of the suitcases, and always managed to find someone to game with while we were away. Do that with D&D and you risk going over the weight limit. I know. I’ve tried.
46 monsters might not seem like a lot in this day and age where a couple of Dragon articles could contain a similar number and Monster Manuals are filled with hundreds of critters, but this is a case where less really is more. Give me ten different monsters and I can populate a region with enough gaming goodness for months. Give me 200 and it’s hard to know where to begin. Don’t get me wrong – I love monsters, and the Monster Manuals (and their non WoTC varietys like the Monsternomicon and Tome(s) of Horrors) are my favouritest game supplements – but it’s worth remembering that every single critter doesn’t need to be in every single campaign world.
This is something Wizards’ needs to learn too. The Forgotten Realms doesn’t need Dragonborn as a native player race, and it’ll be all the weaker for it. Uniqueness comes from knowing what to take out as much as what to add in. If a player wants to be a Dragonborn in your Realms game, let him be a unique being pulled through a plana wormhole or something. This makes the player feel special, and retains the flavour of the Realms too. Subtraction is a Good Thing when world building. But that’s another post for another time, eh?
Back to Dragon Warriors. Each book added more monsters to the mix, and every adventure gave us something special too. Back in Book One, “The King Under the Forest” puts the players in an encounter with Tapestry Warriors who step out of a tapestry behind the players and attack with all-too-solid cloth shortswords. That’s so balls-achingly old school!
Book Two gives us the magical professions – the Sorcerer and Mystic – as well as the rules for Treasure and items Magic and Wondrous, with two full scenarios giving us yet more monstery goodness. In “Hobb’s Dell” there’s Zombies aplenty and a powerful Barrowwight to contend with, and “Hunter’s Moon” pits the players against Moon Dogs, Spectres and Skeletons. As is typical with Dragon Warriors, each scenario is short and designed to be played in a single session. They’re an exercise in perfect minimalism that all game designers should study. More on the adventures another time, though.
Dragon Warriors is a classic role-playing game released in 1985 as 6 trade paperback books. It is now available for free download. Happy Dragon Warriors Week!
Dragon Warriors Week Day Two
Aug 16th
Dragon Warriors is so cool that no one has body odour, and everyone walks around with their arms in the air. At least, that’s what the book covers would have you believe. So it must be true, right?
This bears repeating, in bold: paperback book gaming! Back in 1985 Corgi Books did something with Dragon Warriors that D&D still hasn’t managed to do, to this day.They got a real, honest-to-goodness role-playing game onto the Fantasy section of every bookshelf on the planet, right next to David Gemmell, Terry Pratchett, Anne McCaffrey and every other fantasy author worth their salt. This meant that here in the UK in 1985, pretty much every single fantasy fan owned a copy of these books, whether they knew what Dungeons & Dragons was at the time or not. Go to any long-term fantasy fan’s bookcase in the UK, and the chances are that you’ll find at least a copy of Book One there.
Putting this into a more modern context – in my local bookstore, the D&D section is in the oversized books aisle, under the manga and graphic novels. The fantasy novels are in the paperback fiction section, several aisles away and never the twain shall meet. Over by the D&D shelf you’ll see the D&D geeks; in the fantasy aisle there’s the students, goth chics, housewives, businessmen and….. well, everyone else – all potential role-playing gamers if only the role-playing games were there!!!! In 1985, they were, and it was called Dragon Warriors. And boy, did it sell!
Picture this: a copy of D&D that contains a few races (Human, Elf, Dwarf maybe) and a couple of classes (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue) in a paperback book that contains all the rules you need to get started with D&D. Throw in a handful of Monsters and an intro scenario – and watch those students, goth chics, housewives and businessmen start to take an interest in the hobby. That’s got to be a Good Thing, right?
Of course, this begs the question of why we’re playing D&D now and not Dragon Warriors if it’s so damned good and was so well marketed. One word: distribution. Each book became progressively more difficult to get hold of (and in some countries, downright impossible) until eventually the whole thing died an ignoble and sadly undeserved death. Like all good death things though, it’s coming back! As David reminded me in the comments Magnum Opus Press is producing a new edition.
Of course, if you want to get in on the act right now, the original is available for free download. Happy Dragon Warriors Week!
Dragon Warriors Week Day One
Aug 15th
Reasons Dragon Warriors rocks, Number One: combat explained as a comic panel. Forget your diagrams of blast radii and pictures of plastic on battlemats. If you’re going to show players how to play the game, show it as a comic and get right into their imagination!
Click to embiggen
Where Dragon Warriors stands out is that it’s strictly old school from back in the day when old school was new school. Character generation is fast, and combat doubly so. There’s none of this “using minis” nonsense either – it’s pure unadulterated in-your-head gaming where a you can say that your character backflips onto a table without picking up your mini and acting it out. I’ve seen gamers do that, and it’s not pretty.
With Book One you get a choice of just two classes – a plate armour wearing Knight, or a mighty Barbarian. No mere Fighters for this game! You won’t find magic-users or any spells in Book One – that’s reserved for Book Two – but you will find more than enough in it’s 197 pages.
Combat is slightly unusual in that each weapon does a fixed amount of damage (for example, a Morning Star does 5 points) but each hit also has to make an Armour Bypass Roll to make a successful hit count. Armour is rated from 0 (none) to 5 (plate), and the weapon must roll higher. Your Morning Star rolls 1d6 for the Bypass Roll, so needs a 6 to get past Plate, but any successful hit is going to hurt an unarmoured foe.
It’s a great combat system in play as it differentiates between a swing that misses, one that is deflected off the armour, and a good hit – all with just the same dice rolls as Classic D&D. Nice. Compared to Classic D&D, working out the to-hit roll is easier too – just roll equal or less than your ATTACK – your opponent’s DEFENCE to strike a blow. Quick. Simple. Old school.
Dragon Warriors is a classic role-playing game released in 1985 as 6 trade paperback books. It is now available for free download. Happy Dragon Warriors Week!
Dragon Warriors Week
Aug 14th
Every now and then I blog about one of the greatest unsung role-playing games of all time – Dragon Warriors. This is the RPG that broke all the rules; it was trade-paperback in size, and was playable from the get-go as the first book in the series contained character generation, combat, monsters, GM advice and even a full scenario. In a paperback about half the thickness of your average fantasy novel. For £1.75. Hey, it was 1985!
I’m going to fly in the face of 4e and declare that starting tomorrow, it’s Dragon Warriors Week, running Friday to Friday. Y’know, like weeks normally….. uhhhh……. don’t. Each day I’ll post a snippet from the world’s greatest unsung RPG, and I swear that by the end you’ll be burning your Fourth Edition D&D manuals and dancing round the flames.
Thanks to the miracle of the bits of copper wire between all the computers, Dragon Warriors is available for free download in it’s entirety, right now.
So what are you waiting for? Go get it!
Happy Dragon Warriors Week everyone!
