In my last article, I shared a fairly extensive (if tongue-in-cheek) ‘wish list’ of what I wanted from a tabletop RPG. I didn’t expect to find a game that would fulfil so much of it, so quickly—but Dragonbane might be it. (Full disclosure: Free League sent me a review copy of the starter set some time ago. I can’t remember when.)
What is Dragonbane about? The box cover reads ‘mirth and mayhem roleplaying,’ and of all the Free League games I’ve played, this is by far the closest to D&D—and to be honest, it’s still quite different in many ways. It is based on a Swedish game called Drakar och Demoner (‘Dragons and Demons’) from the early 80s, but it has been updated with some modern mechanics like advantage and disadvantage. It is very much a d20-based game, except in Dragonbane you roll under to succeed. In my opinion, this is a very good thing—more on why in a minute.
As you would expect from a Free League game, the production values are outstanding, probably the best in the business. Everything they make feels like a piece of art. The beautiful Misty Vale map by Francesca Baerald just won the Ennie for best cartography, and the starter set contains a rules booklet, and adventure booklet, character sheets, bright green dice, lots of cards for randomized treasure and so on, a small battle map, and cute little card standees, which are a very fun alternative to minis and tokens. I say ‘booklet,’ but the rules and adventures are really quite substantial; there’s enough here for a mini campaign at the very least. For £40 ($50), you are certainly getting what you pay for. The GM screen is great, too, and worth fishing out extra for (it’s not included). Pleasingly, you don’t need any fancy new dice for this game, and your regular math rocks will be fine.
How does it play? Let me put it this way:
I really, really like Dragonbane.
I’ll go through some of the ways it’s different from 5e, as this is what most readers will be familiar with.
- As mentioned above, it’s a roll-under system. This might feel a bit odd at first—a 1 is now a critical hit or ‘dragon’ and a 20 is a critical fail or ‘demon’—but it doesn’t take long to get used to. Crucially, rolling under means the GM doesn’t have to set target numbers, and the players don’t have to do any maths, which speeds up gameplay and reduces cognitive load. This is fantastic. It also means ability scores actually matter (unlike in 5e, where you are almost exclusively use the modifier).
- It’s also a skills-based system. There’s no such thing as a character level in Dragonbane. You choose a class, but all this gives you is a list of class skills and a special ability like ‘backstabbing’ or ‘guardian’ (and even then you can change your special ability to something else—several of the pregens do). You level up skills, but your hit points and ability scores never really change. This keeps the game feeling a bit more grounded and puts the focus on the adventures at the table. ‘Optimization’ isn’t really a thing. (Incidentally, skills are also where character growth happens: you have a chance to improve skills at the end of each session.)
- Speaking of classes, there are your familiar fighter, mage, bard, plus the knight (a bit like a paladin), the hunter (basically a ranger), and a thief (rogue). The other classes are a bit more unusual: artisan (repairs armour and weapons), scholar (lots of knowledge skills and has an ‘intuition’ ability), merchant (can sniff out treasure), and mariner (which strikes me as a little odd given how landlocked everything is).
- Your kin (species) will also give you a special ability, but they don’t otherwise affect your character (ie, there are no ability score bonuses or anything like that). You’ve got humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings, plus wolfkin and—controversial—duck people (called mallards). At first I found the duck people extremely offputting, but they’ve grown on me. Including them in the game feels like a statement of intent: ‘a bit of silliness is OK.’
- You’ve probably noticed this by now, but it’s a low magic game. Only one of the classes is a spellcaster, the mage, and the spells available at the start of the game are fairly rudimentary like ‘gust of wind’ and ‘ensnaring roots.’ You choose from three schools of magic: animism (which feels a bit nature-themed), elementalism (earth, wind, fire, and water), and mentalism (which feels like all the other wizardy stuff like divination, flight, and telepathy). Spellcasting can go wrong, and there are cool rules for drawing power from your body when you run out of willpower points (mana). And learning new spells requires effort, like searching for grimoires and finding a teacher.
- Pretty much everything is a skill roll, even spellcasting and weapon attacks. Something we really enjoyed was the option to push your roll: essentially, a chance to reroll a miss but at the cost of disadvantage on all future rolls with that ability score. The players really seemed to enjoy doing this!
- The game has a one-action economy. What does this mean? Well, D&D 5e is increasingly moving toward a three-action economy: action, reaction, bonus action, plus movement, and many optimization guides push you towards using all three. In Dragonbane, you only have one action, and if you take it on someone else’s turn (as a reaction) then that’s your turn. I’m a big fan of this. As well as making combat move more quickly, it also means your actions matter more. For example, if you use your turn to attack, that means you can’t dodge or parry when someone attacks you. There are a couple of new actions, too, like ‘rally’ (persuade a dying ally to keep fighting) or ‘round rest’ (which lets you recover willpower points).
- There is a battle map, but the game would probably play quite well without it or with looser zone-based combat. I wonder if this is because there are fewer spellcasters, so area of effect options rarely come into play. I normally dislike tactical combat and find it pedantic and immersion-breaking, but I didn’t mind it in Dragonbane. It felt like an old-school board game somehow.
- One more thing I want to highlight: armour as damage reduction. I love this. It just feels right somehow. There’s something cool about seeing the knight soak up 8 points of damage every time someone hit him. There’s no ‘AC’ in Dragonbane, so if characters don’t want to get hit, the need to decide to use their action to parry or dodge a blow—a much more active decision than 5e.
I could go on, but this is in danger of getting a bit too granular. Suffice to say, the game works. I could see the players leaning in, talking tactics, getting invested. At the end of the session, I think everyone said they would be happy to play another session, and one player said that of all the D&D alternatives they had played, this was the best. I agree. I haven’t been this excited about an RPG in years.
Was there anything I didn’t like or would do differently? Maybe—but it’s all quite minor stuff. One player said it would have been nice to have a rules reference sheet of some kind. I agree. A spell sheet would have been nice for the mage character, too. Occasionally there were rules interactions that could have been clearer; for example, if a creature is resistant to damage and also has armour, which gets applied first? Perhaps these things have since been clarified in errata. The rulebook also has a lot of optional rules; I like modularity, but as someone new to the system, it meant I wasn’t quite sure which ones to include. I would have also liked more advice for encounter balance and monster creation, and since we only played one session, it’s difficult to know how the game would run over the mid to long term.
Overall verdict? This game blew me away. It’s fantastic. It ticks so many boxes for me, and I would love to give it another go sometime. The writing in the base campaign is full of flavour, and I could see it lasting several weeks of sessions. There’s also a new campaign coming soon, Path of Glory, which sounds pretty substantial. If you’re tired of 5e and really want something fun and fresh, then I cannot recommend this game enough.
Rating: ★★★★★
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