First with Forbidden Lands, then again with The One Ring 2nd Edition, now Swedish tabletop game company Free League has cemented my belief that they understand how to launch a new RPG with their Dragonbane core set.
Although it’s in a box, Dragonbane‘s core set is certainly not a “starter” set—not in the sense that it’s a stripped-down version of the game, anyway! The box contains everything you’ll need to play Dragonbane, including:
- 100+ page Core Rulebook
- 100+ page Adventures book
- Solo play booklet
- Set of custom dice
- 2 decks of cards for treasure, initiative, rumors, etc.
- 2 cardboard pages of punch-out minis, plus plastic stands
- Region map of the Misty Vale
- Grid playmat for combats
- Pregenerated characters, plus 5 blank character sheets
Dragonbane contains everything you’d need to play the game except a pencil. The minis and playmat in particular caught me pleasantly off-guard. I can see plenty of kids opening Dragonbane as their first RPG, and being absolutely delighted to go adventuring. The immediate “play with me” sensation I got when opening the box was strong.
Rules-wise, Dragonbane feels to me like an enjoyable medley of design concepts from Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying (the foundation of the original Swedish Drakar och Demoner), 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, and Free League’s own Year Zero Engine. The latter I’m mostly familiar with from their hexcrawling fantasy game Forbidden Lands.
Player characters have attributes and skills on a rating of 3 to 18. You perform game actions by rolling a D20 under the relevant number. This is modified by having a boon or a bane (pretty much identical to advantage and disadvantage from D&D) to the action. Starting characters have base skills derived from their attributes, and get a bonus to trained skills from their profession. However, anyone can learn and use any skill through experience (like in the BRP family of games). I find this core mechanic satisfying because it’s easy to explain and use, and it’s consistent throughout the system.
Your hit points are equal to your CON, and your willpower points are equal to your WIL. The latter are used to activate heroic abilities. These abilities resemble Talents from Forbidden Lands. To those who aren’t familiar, they’re tangentially similar to a Feat in D&D (though a heroic ability’s impact on play is more significant). Each profession provides a unique heroic ability, and each non-mage gets an additional ability during character creation.
Players earn new heroic abilities after milestone accomplishments. This is emphatically not after every adventure. The Adventures book does a good job displaying how the designers expect the game to be played, indicating when players might gain a heroic ability, or what NPCs a player might learn new skills from.
Overall, the rules are well-presented and pretty straightforward. I didn’t have obvious questions after I’d finished the book. The system does seem very dangerous, and I think that’s intentional. It foregoes RuneQuest-style hit locations, but armor is low, damage is high, and if you hit zero you have to roll a critical injury in addition to death saves to avoid bleeding out. As an example of the damage math, a typical PC has 13 hit points. Armor maxes out at 8 points—reducing incoming damage—but 2 or 4 points feels like it should be common. Most weapons deal multiple damage dice, plus an NPC’s damage modifier (often a D4). A morningstar, for example, will probably deal 2D10+D4 damage, averaging 13 points of damage.
Combat is simple, because everyone has a single action. If you want to protect yourself by dodging or parrying, that’s your action. This simplicity does get broken down by a short but useful sidebar explaining how the initiative and waiting mechanics can be used to try delaying actions to see whether defense is needed. Healing is fairly easy so long as you don’t take a critical injury, but if you’re unable to rest a PC is unlikely to take more than two hits before reaching 0.
The Adventures book is the best example of Free League’s competence as a publisher. It contains eleven short adventures woven together into a dungeon-crawling campaign set in the Misty Vale. The book serves both as a campaign friendly to newbie GMs, and an example of how the designers expect Dragonbane to play. The adventures are simple, but not simplistic; there’s plenty of opportunity provided for roleplay. Alliances, betrayal, negotiations, and heroism is all on the table. The default mode is more hack-and-slash, but frequent nods are made to alternative approaches. There’s also some cool alternative adventures, like one inside a bubble of the past, or another in the dream of a cursed inn. This really empowers the GM to adapt to their players’ style, without needing to improvise or reinvent the material.
With just the one book of adventures in the core box, you’re looking at months of playable content. That’s my biggest reason for considering Dragonbane a successful launch—you can play with it for hours and hours, without doing an hour of your own work. Beautiful.
While I like the Dragonbane boxed set quite a lot—and at about $50 it’s an absolute steal compared to similarly-priced products, like the D&D Player’s Guide—I think it’s worth voicing a few criticisms.
The bestiary section of the Core Rulebook felt a bit short. To some extent there are limitations on what could fit inside, but I also found myself wanting to read more about the monsters, not just wanting more monsters. Oh, right, it’s worth noting that the monster style is pretty much the same as in Forbidden Lands. That’s not a negative for me, but it is worth mentioning. (Also, a box set with a bestiary? Yes please!)
The art throughout is high quality, but I would have liked some more which went beyond portraiture, especially in the adventure. A half-page piece or two showing in particular the climactic scenes of the adventure would have been fun.
The books inside the box are two softcovers, and like any softcover, they’re going to fall apart. I think it’s awesome that this is a product which encourages active, immediate use, but the Core Rulebook just isn’t going to stand up to weekly play. Maybe I’m just hard on rulebooks, but even every hardcover core rulebook I’ve ever gotten really invested in playing fell apart. The core set’s rules are indeed complete, but it does feel like they could be expanded into a hardcover. Of course then there’s the question of how to allocate probably-scarce publisher resources. I would vote more adventures.
Overall I’d call Dragonbane a home run. When I backed the Kickstarter I wasn’t pessimistic, but I was less excited than I had been for other products from Free League (like the Bloodmarch Kickstarter). Dragonbane seemed “neat,” not “exciting.” That opinion has changed, and now I can’t wait for a chance to take this for a spin.
Heck, maybe I’ll even try hacking Glorantha into it, see how it drives…
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