The Serpent Was Subtle

It appears I spoke too soon when I wrote of the untimely demise of the Dragon Warriors role-playing game:

Dragon Warriors, the classic 1980s dark-fantasy RPG recently re-released by Magnum Opus Press, is moving to new British publishing company Serpent King Games.

From 1st April the game will no longer be available from Magnum Opus, which had published Dragon Warriors through Mongoose Publishing’s Flaming Cobra imprint.

Serpent King Games will keep the existing Dragon Warriors books available, and will publish new supplements for the game. The first new release will be the Dragon Warriors Players Book, in July 2011, with another two releases planned for the first year.

It would be bad form to repost the entire announcement, so if you're interested, there's more detail at the Serpent King Games website. Considering the individuals involved, the game appears to be in very good hands, and I'm more than happy to help spread the word.

I won't directly benefit from any of it, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Dragon Warriors' previous publisher, Magnum Opus Press, is selling all of the PDFs of the game line at less than half-price, and that Mongoose Publishing (the game's former distributor) has also reduced the price of the hardcopy books significantly - including an "ultimate bundle" that includes all seven books released thus far for $79.99. All indications are that the new Serpent King Games material will be fully compatible, so if you're thinking of checking out one of the UK's finest old-school fantasy RPGs, now is the time.

An Untimely Demise

Bad news: it looks as though Magnum Opus Press has lost the rights to the Dragon Warriors roleplaying game. This has evidently been known for some time, but since I didn't see it reported on any blogs I follow, I didn't learn about it until recently. The exact details are vague, depending on who you ask, but the end result is that James Wallis is no longer involved - a result I find disappointing.

The final releases for Magnum Opus' Dragon Warriors line are a revised printing of the core rulebook (incorporating the errata to which I contributed after it was first released) and the scenario compilation In From the Cold, which should be of interest to any fans of the early days of White Dwarf magazine.

Perhaps most frustratingly, this development means that the upcoming "player's book" for Dragon Warriors, which was intended to introduce several new character careers (including the much-needed Robin Hood-esque Hunter) is apparently going to be scrapped. This is a major disappointment, especially considering that by all accounts, the book was near completion. (Jon Hodgson even showed off the book's cover artwork - which I've used as the image for this post - several months ago.)

Whatever their reasons for revoking the license, the game's owners have expressed their desire to see Dragon Warriors continue, so there may be some hope yet for what is one of my favorite old-school fantasy games.

Once More Into the Breach

I'm recruiting for my forum-based Dragon Warriors play-by-post game once again!

Since I started the campaign some time last year, we've had a few player dropouts. At the moment, the game is on hiatus. I've only got three active players, with one potential recruit looking over the rules. I'd like to pick up one or two more and get the ball rolling again.

I'm looking for people who fit the following criteria:

• Like the Dragon Warriors game and have access to the rules (either the original Corgi digest paperbacks or the new Magnum Opus version - the changes are minimal).


• Don't mind playing through (tweaked) published scenarios, many of them at least partly dungeon-based.


• Are able to post to the forum at least a few times per week.

So, if that's you, and you think you'd like to give it a try, leave a comment to this post. Thanks.

[UPDATE: I've got enough players for now. Thanks, everybody!]

Changer of the Ways

This blog has always been somewhat stream-of-consciousness in nature. It's largely become a receptacle of little ideas that never really get used much in my own gaming time. I constantly spout half-baked campaign concepts or fiddle around with books I've acquired, but I haven't talked much about what I'm actually playing right now. So here goes.

First off, after a long love affair with the game, I've finally somehow managed to get my group to give Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a shot. I'm using the 2nd edition of the game, since I own literally everything that was published for it. There are a couple of people in my weekly group who I think were a bit skeptical about my insistence on random character generation, but we're now two sessions into the Terror In Talabheim adventure scenario, and the players seem to be having a good time rooting out a Skaven plot to poison the inhabitants of the nigh-impregnable fortress that is the Taalbaston. As much as I talk about wanting to run this campaign or that, I often find myself freaked out and frustrated once I'm actually behind the screen, but happily, I've avoided any such crises of confidence thus far. Maybe my love for WFRP overcomes the usual jitters, or maybe it's because the current plan is to run just this one scenario, relieving some of the pressure?

Then we've got my online forum-based Dragon Warriors campaign. I recently discussed some of the difficulties I've run into, both with the play-by-post format and with a rather poor choice of adventures I had made. We've finally slogged our way through The King Under the Forest, but the nature of the adventure combined with the fact that the characters started it just as the holidays were upon us has pretty much killed the campaign's momentum... and a good deal of my enthusiasm along with it. At the moment, I've put the game on hiatus until I'm finished with WFRP. When I start it back up, I will need to recruit more players (since one of my regulars dropped out), so if you're interested in playing a Dragon Warriors play-by-post campaign, keep an eye on this blog.

Lastly, I continue to participate in my good friend Bret's forum-based OSRIC campaign, set in his homebrewed (and wonderfully detailed) "Realms of Lakoria" sandbox setting. The AD&D rules have been a lot of fun to work with, and I have been having a great time playing a grumpy ranger character in that ruleset. For whatever reason, OSRIC really seems to get people into a fun, not-too-serious, old-school mode of play that's much different from the style I'm used to. It took a little while to get used to, and I sometimes think our party has been going about things in a more gonzo way than our DM anticipated, but it really is a blast.

And as a last random note, I just got a bunch of Creature Crucible D&D supplements in the mail yesterday. I picked them up on eBay with the inkling of ripping them off for use with Labyrinth Lord. We'll see how that works out.

So, yeah, a happy gaming time for me. Hope yours has been good as well!

The Puzzle Question

For several months now, I've been running a forum-based (PBP) campaign of Dragon Warriors.

Since the game was published in the mid-80s, I'm sure many proponents of the Old Ways (TM) would decline to describe it as a true "old school" game, but as it resembles nothing so much as a British version of Basic D&D, it counts as one for me. This being the case, I've done my best to run it in an old-school fashion; which is to say that I take published scenarios, tweak them to fit my tastes, and then let the players muddle their way through as best they see fit.

Much like Basic D&D, DW lacks systems for searching, spotting, outwitting traps, solving riddles, and the like. The GM is expected to ask players to describe what they're doing with a given obstacle, rather than asking for an attribute check or skill roll. In this way, we are told, old school RPGs become more a test of player skill than they are a demonstration of character skill. Players used to tossing some dice to find out if they notice a loose flagstone (rather than having to declare that they're looking for it) can find it difficult to adjust.

The scenario I'm currently running for my players is The King Under the Forest, the first adventure written for Dragon Warriors. Having been published before the setting of the game, Legend, was even fully conceptualized, it is considerably different in tone from the gloomy, mysterious scenarios that followed: in this adventure, the players investigate what would best be described as a magical puzzle dungeon. There are traps and riddles and enchanted fountains and rotating wands and a room with an honest-to-god dragon in it.

Now, with a group largely unaccustomed to the old-school mode of play, tackling the dungeon in question would be a time-consuming and frustrating process even if we were all sitting around the same table. Trying to run it in the often-sluggish play-by-post medium, especially when two of the players live in different time zones from the rest, has proven to be what I think could fairly be described as a quagmire. Some players expressed disgust with the nature of the dungeon as soon as they divined it, others are just having a hard time figuring out what to do. Frankly, I am unsure if I'd be able to do a better job of running it if we were all in the same room. At any rate, for now I'm throwing out a lot of hints, and am using the Stealth/Perception mechanics from the game as written to govern "spot checks", but I'm a little uncomfortable with that.

I know others out there, including self-proclaimed "leader of the Old School Taliban" James Maliszewski, have some experience with running old-school dungeons via play-by-post. Is the issue I'm running into something others have noticed?

Death And The Devil

I'm pleased to report that my Dragon Warriors play-by-post campaign is chugging along quite well. Our band of heroes is now probably about two-thirds of the way through the introductory scenario, "The Darkness Before Dawn". They're holding their own quite well so far, and the players all appear to have gotten a good grasp of the feel of Legend very quickly.

I'm surprised at how well running a game via an internet forum is scratching the Dragon Warriors itch. Sure, it's not exactly like a face-to-face tabletop game, and real life can slow down people's ability to participate regularly, but the PBP format has certain strengths. Foremost for me is the encouragement for players to stay in character more consistently.

You see, I find that during my face-to-face game everybody tends to, well, bullshit a lot more than I'd prefer. I'm as guilty of it as anybody else. It's largely because it's the only time many of us hang out with each other "IRL", and so we naturally want to goof off and joke with each other, since we don't get much of a chance to otherwise. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but I do often miss the deep roleplaying one could find themselves getting into in the old high school days. PBP largely removes my temptation to quote Ghostbusters and ramble about Saints Row 2 when I should be getting into the game at hand.

The other day I was thinking about future Dragon Warriors releases and what they might entail. I know the game's current steward, James Wallis, has mentioned possible books on the Fay and the Church, but for whatever reason I ended up pondering what a DW-based megadungeon might look like. I thought back to William Cobbett's disparaging nickname for London, "The Great Wen", and felt that it would be a pretty cool name for an underworld site: a great swelling of the earth, like a massive boil caused by some sort of subterranean malignancy. A place where Hell seems not far from the world. Frame it in terms of a Crusade, and have adventurers drawn to it for the same reasons people took the cross in medieval times - some for glory and profit, some for religious fervor, some because they seemingly had nothing better to do. You could have your usual shanty town - complete with camp followers, apothecaries, blacksmiths, and sellers of indulgences - sprung up around the site, to cater to those that come to ransack it.

Okay, yeah, it's vague, and possibly not entirely in the spirit of the game or its setting, but if there's any game where you could make a dungeon and put the Devil at the bottom of it, it's Dragon Warriors.

Onward, Dragon Warriors

My longtime friend Kent Bonifield drew an excellent sketch of the player characters from my Dragon Warriors PBP that I had to share. From left to right, we've got:

Iblis Smythe, a.k.a. "Ib the Pale", Assassin (played by my brother Chris)

Taebryn Kayatlaen, Barbarian (played by Bret)

Tobias Strangwald Wroxley-Nott, Sorcerer (played by Kent)

Olethros, Warlock (played by Keith)

Sir Yezekael of Rozhan, Knight (played by Dave, a.k.a. noisms)

Kent's art will soon be gracing the pages of at least one professional RPG publication (which I'm not allowed to mention by name just yet), but until that day, you can see more of his work here.

Tinkering With Initiative

So, after about a week of running my Dragon Warriors PBP, with only one combat, I'm already messing around with the rules.

Dragon Warriors has fairly straightforward and simple rules that often remind me of gamebooks like Lone Wolf and Fighting Fantasy. One of the things I ran into as I was reading the rules again that I thought would bother me was the way weapon damage is calculated, or rather, isn't. If you hit an opponent and roll over their Armor Factor, you inflict a set amount of damage based on the weapon being used.

As I said, I thought this would bother me, and the editors of the revised rulebook must have anticipated this, as they included an optional chart telling how to roll damage for different weapons. However, when I started running the game, I decided to stick with the original rules as written before I started mucking around with them. First, I wanted to understand the system and the intent of its authors, Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson.

As it turned out, the fixed weapon damage didn't bother me at all. What did bother me was the way you determine the order in which combatants get to take their actions: they go in order of their Reflexes characteristic score, highest to lowest. Combatants with the same score go at the same time. Now, there are a couple of stumbling blocks here, at least for my taste.

One is that monsters don't have Reflexes scores. You're told to roll 3d6 once for all of the monsters in the fight, and use that for their Reflexes (for this purpose, at least). This means that if you're fighting five feral dogs, all the feral dogs go at the same time. This is a little unrealistic, but realism isn't really a major concern in role-playing. It does keep things streamlined and simple, so I'm willing to go with it.

Another, bigger problem for me is that this system means the player characters will always go in the same order, every single time they get into a fight. To make matters worse, characters with identical Reflexes scores will always act simultaneously, in every combat. It's workable, but quickly becomes repetitive and silly when you're describing battles in narrative form, as I'm doing for this PBP campaign, especially when you consider that the player character party we're currently using has the following Reflexes scores: 14, 14, 14, 13, 10. Our Barbarian, our Assassin, and our Knight would always act simultaneously under the rules as written. That would get old fast.

So, here is my simple fix: all combatants (including groups of opponents, at the GM's option) roll a d8 and add their Reflexes score to determine the order in which they take action. I'm using the d8 because I think a d10 or higher value die will add too much variability, and because I think the d6 is boring. The variability thing could be complete bullshit - I suck at figuring out probability curves and don't really care to improve. But we'll see how it works soon enough.

I imagine that as time goes on I will continue to tweak Dragon Warriors. House ruling is fun!

At Long Last

Sorry for the lack of updates recently, but I finally got my Dragon Warriors play-by-post up and running! I guess a slight delay is to be expected when you're using a ruleset most of the players aren't familiar with, but I thought I was going to lose my mind waiting for everybody to finish up their characters.

The good news is that everybody's on board now, and we've got a nice mix of professions and personalities so far, both in terms of characters and players. I'm also excited to be playing with my older brother Chris again. He's the one who ran my first RPG sessions, and it'll be fun to turn the tables on him after all this time.

I've had a couple of people ask if they can lurk on the campaign forum, but for now I'd like to keep it private. I may well post occasional updates here on the blog detailing the characters and their progress, though.

Welcome to Legend, travelers... hope you survive the experience!

Recruiting For Dragon Warriors

If anybody is interested, I'm recruiting for a play-by-post Dragon Warriors campaign. I have three players so far, and am looking for two more. You don't have to have the new book, but access to some version of the rules (old or new, print or electronic) is a good idea.

I'm not vastly experienced with PBP games, but have been having a good time playing in them recently and figured I'd give it a shot. This will also be my first time running Dragon Warriors. I'll be using published adventures, mostly, so if you've already read them (or played them) you might want to sit this one out.

It's still in the early stages, but I will be setting up a dedicated forum specifically for the campaign in the near future. Comment on this post (preferably with your email) if you're interested in giving it a shot and we'll talk.

Looks like I found my two players. Thanks!

The Work Of Demons

The book I'm currently reading, A Distant Mirror, is proving to be endlessly inspiring, especially for quasi-medieval games like Dragon Warriors. The following passage from Tuchman's book is a near-perfect summary of the mindset that I believe the setting of Legend seeks to evoke:

"People lived close to the inexplicable. The flickering lights of marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants. In the terrible trembling and fissures of an earthquake or the setting afire of a tree by lightning, the supernatural was close at hand. Storms were omens, death by heart attack or other seizures could the work of demons. Magic was present in the world: demons, fairies, sorcerers, ghosts, and ghouls touched and manipulated human lives; heathen superstitions and rituals abided among the country folk, beneath and even alongside the priest and sacraments. The influence of the planets could explain anything otherwise unaccounted for."

Of course, in Legend, the flickering lights really are the work of goblins, the seizures are the work of demonic forces, and the fissures in the earth lead to underworlds dreamlike and nightmarish.

Must... run... game... now...

The Siren Call Of "Old School"

I'm still thinking about running a campaign.

Currently, I'm leaning towards trying my hand at something "old school", in the fantasy genre, simple to prep and easy to run. This approach seems to be in vogue right now, so I do feel like I'm hopping on the bandwagon a bit, but I'm not going to let that stop me from exploring something in which I'm genuinely interested. I own a few games that potentially fit the bill:

Dungeons & Dragons (Rules Cyclopedia version). I like the RC a lot, and obviously have been spending a good deal of time thinking about D&D lately. This particular version of D&D has plenty of compatible supplemental material. It's a familiar system that would be relatively easy to tweak. The problem with that idea is that players have certain expectations of what they're going to be getting when they play D&D, and I think my tweaks and play style might not be in line with those expectations. Also, I have a feeling most people wouldn't get why I picked "basic" D&D over AD&D, v3.5, or 4e.

Tunnels & Trolls (5.5 edition). I'm currently playing a character in Scott's play-by-post T&T game and having a good time with it. It's a neat game, but a little too cutesy for my default approach to fantasy, at least as written. I guess you could say it falls a little too far on the Otus side of the Erol Otus-Dave Trampier continuum for me. There's lots of support for T&T, though I'm not a huge fan of how it handles combat - I prefer a bit more granularity than just saying "add up the dice on each side, roll, and see who wins."

Dragon Warriors (Magnum Opus Press version). In case I hadn't already made it clear, I love this freakin' game. The rulebook is simple yet comprehensive like the Rules Cyclopedia, the setting is right up my alley, the published adventures are pretty cool, and there is a modest (but growing) amount of fan support available online. I've been wanting to run this game for years, but nobody I've shown it off to has seemed particularly interested, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to recruit players.

All right, so it seems like I've pretty much made up my mind to run Dragon Warriors. Now I just need to figure out the logistics of when/where/how/with whom I'll be running it.

Gloom Of Legend

I've gushed about Dragon Warriors before, but I don't believe I sufficiently emphasized the quality and power of Dave Morris' prose. Here's an excerpt from the rulebook's description of the land of Molasaria:

"Frightened peasants quake under the rule of a hundred local despots. Terror soars aloft on membraneous wings by night and sifts the carrion in lonely churchyards... Black-clad priests trek from valley to valley, but the peasants are always torn between faith and fear. Spend a few days in any of the mountain villages and you will see a funeral procession wending a path down through the narrow streets - old men whose lined faces show the scars of many losses, grim youths with jaws set in sullen defiance, veiled women sending up a shrieking lament, and wailing children who have yet to learn the injustice into which they have been born."

This is the sort of thing I'm talking about.

I love Dragon Warriors.

Review: Dragon Warriors

A couple of posts back, I promised a review of an old RPG I was happy to see back on the shelves. That game is the classic British fantasy game known as Dragon Warriors, recently re-edited, re-packaged, and re-released late last year by James Wallis' Magnum Opus Press.

(I should warn readers that I find talking about game mechanics at length incredibly boring. If you're interested in the particulars of how swinging a sword or casting a spell works in Dragon Warriors, I recommend perusing the reviews section at RPG.net.)

Dragon Warriors originally saw life as a series of six digest-sized paperbacks released by UK-based publisher Corgi Books. Dragon Warriors appeared in the mid-80s, as gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf were at the height of their popularity. Dragon Warriors, unlike those books, was a full-fledged RPG, rather than a "choose your own adventure" style game. It enjoyed a good amount of success in Britain (and also in Australia and New Zealand), but the books were unavailable in the United States. Magnum Opus Press recently collected all of the rules and setting material from across the six original books, did a little bit of editing and tweaking, added new artwork, and re-released the game. This new version of Dragon Warriors has been distributed worldwide. So, while many outside the US view Dragon Warriors with a fond sense of nostalgia, the vast majority of Americans are now reading it for the first time.

I have described Dragon Warriors in the past as the UK's answer to "red box" D&D, the introductory version released by TSR in the early 80s, but now that all of the rules and world information has been collected from across the various original books, a better point of comparison would probably be the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, a book that has largely become accepted as the definitive one-book fantasy RPG. But what makes Dragon Warriors shine in comparison to it is its attention to mood and atmosphere.

The game's introduction, written by co-creator Dave Morris, describes the goal of Dragon Warriors as putting "something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing." Morris relates that he and Oliver Johnson wanted to create a vivid, folkloric Dark Ages setting in contrast to "the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons and Dragons."





In that goal, Dragon Warriors succeeds admirably. Even the brief example of play at the beginning of the book - which, in a nice touch, consists of several knights meeting and getting into a discussion about tourneys, the Crusades, and pagan gods - labors to set the tone of the game even as it discusses the most basic nuts and bolts of roleplaying.

Character generation likewise evokes the tone of the setting. Unlike the bulk of fantasy RPGs, there are no races to choose from - all player characters are assumed to be human. (As Dave Morris writes in his introduction: "Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.") Dragon Warriors also eschews D&D's generalized character classes in favor of more flavorful professions - so, rather than fighters, thieves, and magic-users, DW characters are assumed to be Knights looking for something to do after returning from a Crusade, Assassins on the run from secret societies, left-handed Sorcerers feared by the peasantry, and so on. The magic spells and artifacts available to players also evoke a world with history. Yes, there are the fantasy staples of magical swords and bolts of fire, but also terrible curses and saints' relics.

But I don't want to make Dragon Warriors sound like a "historical" fantasy game. The Lands of Legend are clearly inspired by medieval Earth, with some regions essentially being real-world locations renamed (such as the assumed starting point of Ellesland, which is much like medieval England). However, there are also high-fantasy elements, such as the blasted plains of Krarth, ruled by the descendants of powerful magi, or the bizarre bridge-city of Rathurbosk. But throughout is a feeling of deep mystery. Never do the setting's creators let magic seem everyday or predictable. This is a world where magic is old and terrifying. This is Legend, where a goblin is something that lives in your rafters and curdles your milk, an elf is as unpredictable and cruel as a child, and a dragon is the very symbol of evil... and this is a game that dearly makes you want to play in that world.


I should point out that Dragon Warriors is over twenty years old, and while its system is simple and straightforward, there are some odd warts here and there. There is something approaching a "unified mechanic", where one rolls under a target number on a d20... unless you're using magic, when you use 2d10, plus there are a few "special case" rules that work quite differently (such as poison, morale or the dreaded Fear Attack). The abilities of the professions themselves - which include the aforementioned Knight, Assassin, and Sorcerer, plus Barbarians, Mystics, Elementalists, and Warlocks - vary considerably in complexity and customizability. The description of the Barbarian, for example, takes up scarcely a page, while eight pages are devoted to the highly mutable Assassin profession. This may rankle fans of modern RPGs, as some professions certainly offer less options to the player, though they aren't necessarily weaker for it. Again, however, I feel that the game's strengths vastly outweigh its weaknesses.

Happily, the new incarnation of Dragon Warriors seems to be doing well for itself. There has been a steady stream of interest in the game on various RPG message boards, and it has received glowing praise from Mike Mearls, co-designer of the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I am optimistic about Dragon Warriors' future, and am hoping that it leads to more old gems being uncovered, polished, and readied for release.