I Am The Dragon That Flaps In The Night? Dragonbane Core Set Review
If you go onto popular tabletop RPG groups, like reddit.com/r/rpg and look around enough, you’ll see a common trend over and over again. Any time that someone asks about a RPG recommendation, or their favorite RPG producer, one name comes up more than any other: Free League Publishing. The Swedish company originally made famous with Mutant: Year Zero and Tales from the Loop (I’m sure there were older ones but these were the first I recognized) has exploded in recent years. Free League now has a long line of RPGs that are supported with new material and loved by a very vocal section of the RPG community.
While I haven’t (prior to this article) actually played a Free League game, I’ve definitely gotten and read some of their books. The artwork that Free League uses for its books always draws in prospective players and immerses them in the various settings of these RPGs. In fact, it was the artwork that drew me towards today’s game: Dragonbane. Last year, at Gen Con, I saw a poster with a Duck Rogue that reminded me of a certain gas gun-powered superhero. With Darkwing Duck being one of my favorite cartoons growing up, I had to find out more about this game.
I am the surprise in your cereal box…
Dragonbane began as Drakar och Demoner (Dragons & Demons), a RPG released in Sweden in 1982. While Dungeons & Dragons was becoming the name brand of RPGs in England and the US, Drakar och Demoner was apparently the game of choice in Sweden. According to the Dragonbane Preface, the game was originally a translation of a Chaosium game called Magic World. Over the next few decades, the game became its own thing and produced many editions of the game.
Dragonbane is Free League’s revision of the classic Drakar och Demoner game, pushing the game out into the rest of the world that had no idea the original game existed. The concepts of the game will be very familiar to those who have played other D20 based games. The biggest difference of Dragonbane is that you are trying to roll under a score instead of higher than. If you have a Strength score of 15, then any die roll of 15 or less results in a success. My guess is that this aspect traces back to the Chaosium origins of the game, as rolling under scores is the mechanic behind Call of Cthulhu.
Looking at the included character sheets for Dragonbane, it doesn’t look that different from a 5th edition D&D character sheet. You’ve got the standard 6 ability stats, hit points, death rolls (3 successes or 3 failures needed), skills, etc. The biggest standouts are the “conditions” listed at the top of the character sheet and the “Willpower points” at the bottom. There are 6 conditions, one associated with each ability stat.
Whenever you want to make a re-roll, you mark a checkbox for that condition and can re-roll any roll, narratively saying how the action made you that condition (exhausted, scared, etc.). When all 6 are checked, you can no longer make any re-rolls. However, certain abilities can also give you conditions (like the ill-tempered ability, see below), so if you already have that condition checked, you cannot use that action. Willpower points act like spell slots, but for magic and other class based abilities.
Let’s Get Dangerous…
First things first, Dragonbane puts all other “Starter Boxes” to shame. Yes, the box is $50 compared to the D&D starter box at $30, but the Dragonbane Core Set contains everything you need to play the game. As in, you really don’t need to buy anything else - the box has the full rule book in softcover for you. There’s a hardcover version for sale on Free League’s website, but the only difference is the hardcover contains an introductory adventure. The Core Box, however, contains a whole different book that has 11 different adventures you can run.
There are also a lot of “standard” items inside the Core Set that you will see in other boxes, such as a set of dice, premade characters, maps, and standees for popular monsters you will see. In addition to that and the books mentioned above, Dragonbane also includes decks of cards to help with gameplay. The initiative deck replaces initiative rolls with the GM shuffling the deck and passing out spots to everyone. The treasure and adventure decks are very similar to versions for other game systems, where the GM can use them to simplify their session planning and keep loot & monsters fresh in each game. There’s nothing particularly “new” in this Core Set, the striking thing is just how much that box includes. Several of these components would be stand-alone purchases in other systems.
You might wonder if Free League cut back on the quality of the items in the box to keep it at that $50 price point, but you’d be wrong. The production quality of all the components is top notch. The artwork inside the 2 books is just as good as you’d expect given the box art. Each of the character sheets is printed in color on a higher quality of paper than regular printer paper. The map is a full color spread of the area showcased in the Adventures book. Even if you don’t have a regular game of Dragonbane going, the map’s artwork is cool enough you are going to want to hang it up in your game room (might get your players to give the game a chance…).
Suck Gas Evil-Doers!
At Gen Con this year, I actually had the chance to sit down and try out Dragonbane during a short 2 hour session. Obviously, with a shorter session, the game is going to be a bit more railroaded than normal, but I’ve found with a brand new system sometimes it’s easier to stomach 2 hours vs 4 hours, especially when you never know what kind of GM/other players you’ll have. In our game, we basically fell into a hole and had to work our way through a dungeon to get back up to the surface. Of course I played the Mallard Knight, because he looks awesome.
The biggest issue I had was the rolling under vs rolling over scores. My brain is so trained on D&D and Pathfinder where I default to seeing high numbers on a D20 as good and low numbers as bad. For Dragonbane, the opposite is true. I never had that problem in games like Call of Cthulhu, but that game uses D10s so I’m rolling different dice than I am in other games. Then when you throw in Boons & Banes, where you are rolling 2 D20s and taking the lowest/highest (respectively), again your brain is used to grabbing the highest for good rolls. It’s not a serious problem, just a habit you have to break through.
(I’m going to caveat the next couple of sections with the fact that it’s entirely possible we weren’t playing right. In which case, please let me know in the comments the correct way to play and I’ll make sure to note it.)
Then there are some mechanics that are just a bit off to me, especially during my first play of the game. The game features a “dodge” and “parry” mechanic to make combat more immersive. Basically, you can use your action to respond to an enemy attack by either dodging away or counter attacking. However, this uses up your action in the round, so you don’t get to do anything else. While I can see the practical side of dodging to avoid an attack, I don’t know why I ever would. It’s like when you use your turn to do something awesome, only to roll bad on the dice - it feels like you wasted your actions. Sure, I’m keeping my character from possibly getting hurt, but I’m not progressing the story in any way - I’m just responding to it.
While on the surface, parrying seems like the better way to go, there are problems with that too. Since you have to use your action to parry, this means that you have to wait until the enemy goes to perform your action. In my sample game, I was the tank, which means I’m trying to draw the attention away from my less-healthy teammates. So I want to go before the enemies, so that I can get their attention. While Dragonbane lets me trade initiative cards with party members to do so, I’m now locked in that position. Thus, I can’t parry at all because I’m always going before the enemies.
Speaking of tanking, another problem I had was the way armor was used. Initially, it was explained to me that armor acts like “soak” in other games. By this I mean that it takes some of the damage and the character takes whatever is remaining. However, after I got attacked, I was told that my armor then decreases by 1 every time it gets hit. So after about 6 attacks, I no longer have any armor. This makes “sense” in that my armor is getting beaten on time and time again, however it’s not any fun. After about 6 attacks, I’m no longer able to really do the thing that my character is supposed to be good at (which is the same problem I had with D&D 3.5 and spell slots - I don’t want to be spending most of my time with my wizard hitting baddies with a staff).
(That last bit definitely might have been the GM misunderstanding the rules, as I can’t find anything about it in the rulebook. There is durability, but it applies to parrying with weapons and causing weapons to break. There’s nothing in there about armor breaking. Again, let me know in the comments if you’ve got a better understanding of the game.)
While I was super excited to try out the game leading up to Gen Con, the game that I played there sapped a lot of the energy I had towards Dragonbane. It’s entirely possible that I just had one bad experience with the game, and I’m very much open to trying it again under different circumstances. Just that given the history that I’ve had with running my RPG group through other alternative D20 systems (*cough*Cypher System*cough*), I’m pretty certain they might not enjoy the game as much as other RPG systems out there (No, we don’t just play D&D5e). It is a shame though, because as I was sitting here writing this review and flipping back through the books, the artwork began to bring back that excitement that I originally felt towards the game. There’s a reason that people enjoy Free League products as much as they do.
Conclusions
If you’ve ever been worried about getting your money’s worth out of a RPG, the Dragonbane Core Set is probably the best deal in RPGs. The rule book alone could be the cost of the box, and it has everything you need to play a months-long campaign of the game before you could even think about purchasing anything else (other than perhaps the GM screen).
While I don’t really see myself playing the game much, the issues I have with Dragonbane are more surface level and specific to my game group. If suddenly I had a couple of players that were interested in trying out the game, I would be more than willing to run a one-shot or series of adventures for them.
Ultimately, if any other game system incorporates Mallard Rogues into it, you are going to sucker me into looking into your game in more detail (the same goes with cats).
Notes/Disclaimers: I generally assume I know nothing. So if I've missed something, let me know in the comments. Or let me know on Facebook. If you like these types of posts, consider subscribing to our patreon. Lastly, thanks to Free League Publishing for providing a review copy of this box.