Christmas in July is running for one more week!
It’s been lovely watching Dragonbane get the attention it deserves. Mike Shea of Sly Flourish has now run a full campaign and rates the starter set as one of the best he’s ever seen. I completely echo that. When I moaned a while back about everything I dislike about 5e and made a wishlist for the game I actually wanted to run, it wasn’t lost on me that Dragonbane ticked a heck of a lot of the boxes. It’s one of my favourite D&D alternatives. In fact, I probably prefer it to D&D. I just wish I had more time to play it. So, when Free League sent me review copies of their two new books—the Book of Magic and Arkand: City of Waves and Flames, both out next month—I was glad of the excuse.
(Full disclosure: the books were sent to me unsolicited, and this is not a paid review. Funnily enough, I’d been eyeing the Kickstarter last year and chose not to back it—I knew a baby was on the way and I wasn’t going to be playing anything for a while. For what it’s worth, I get sent plenty of products I didn’t ask for and don’t like, and generally speaking, I just don’t have the time to review them. Where criticism is due, I will criticize, as you will hopefully see.)
I was originally going to cover the two books together, but I think today I’m just going to look at the Book of Magic and save Arkand for another post. Short version: I really like this book, with one big caveat that I’ll come to straight away.
What is the Book of Magic?
The Book of Magic is a 138-page hardcover supplement written by Mattias Johnsson Haake and Mattias Lilja—the Symbaroum team—with Tomas Härenstam co-writing and editing. It adds nine new schools of magic to Dragonbane, plus new spells for the existing schools, for a total of over 300 new spells. It requires nothing beyond the core rules, and the whole product is entirely optional.
It’s currently up for pre-order on the Free League site at 438 kr—about £35, or $40—with a PDF included. I’m already seeing it online for nearer £25, though, presumably from retailers who backed the Kickstarter.
More options, more problems?
This book introduces lots and lots of new options. This is what makes the book great, but it is also my biggest concern with it.
The original Dragonbane box is admirably restrained. One spellcasting class, three schools (animism, elementalism, mentalism), and a few general spells. That’s it. The restraint was one of the things I admired about it. It felt balanced.
Here’s the thing (and I’m not claiming the first person to write about this): most roleplaying games, certainly games like D&D and its competitors, are asymmetrical. What I mean by this is that giving a GM more options is rarely a problem. A new monster, for example, is probably only going to appear once or twice, and the GM can pick and choose: they know the power level of the game they want to run. But giving players loads of new options is a completely beast. If something is on the table and it’s broken or overpowered, there’s a good chance players are going to use it and exploit it. Players like to break the game. And yes, there’s fun to be had with that—but you don’t want to be in the position of granting an option and then having to take it away. That’s neither fun nor fair. And if you’re anything like me, you really don’t want the arms race, where the players keep breaking the game and you keep building bigger challenges until the power level is nothing like what you had in mind. I have been there so many times with 5e, and I really don’t find it fun at all. Option bloat can ruin the social contract.
At this point, though, I should really underscore that I don’t see anything problematic in the Book of Magic—at least, not on a cursory read with no playtesting. Moreover—and this is a nice balancing mechanism—Dragonbane keeps the most powerful spells behind a bit of a barrier. In Dragonbane, learning a spell is a downtime activity that involves finding a teacher, and the higher the rank, the harder that teacher is to find. Rank 1 and 2 spells only cost a handful of gold, but rarer spells cost ten times that, and Rank 5 spells—basically the highest-level spells in the game—require seeking out named grandmasters, and these are great: unique to each school and full of flavour. Harmonism, for example, gives you Visyris, ‘a wine-loving and extremely self-absorbed satyr,’ while witchcraft offers Damagus Asgus, ‘an ancient recluse whose small hut flies on vast vulture wings’. It’s a neat bit of design: it lets the GM gatekeep the top-end spells through the fiction rather than through an awkward conversation, and it turns a limit into an adventure hook.
What the book doesn’t give you is any guidance on curation. There’s no section advising the GM on which schools to allow or what they might bring to the table, or how to phase them in, and I’m not sure I love this. It rather gives the impression that everything is greenlit by default. I would not be at all surprised if a few spells in here turn out to be more powerful or complicated than a GM might have wanted, and unfortunately we won’t know until groups have run with it for a while.
At this stage I should add another big caveat to this review. I am not, for obvious reasons, going to catalogue all 300 spells. I’m between groups at the moment and very time-poor with Wyrmling II, so playtesting them is out of the question. Frankly, I’m also not as knowledgeable about Dragonbane as I am about 5e. So please take all that follows with a pinch of salt.
What I can say is that the spells are full of flavour and feel fun. You can crack open a chapter at random, scan the chart of spells by rank (roughly Dragonban’’s equivalent of spell level), and the spells are so well named that you have a good sense of what they do before you read the description. In general, they are all the sort of spells you’d expect to be able to cast in a fantasy RPG, and in some cases, you’ll be wondering why they weren’t in the game in the first place.
The schools
There isn’t scope to go through every school in detail, but a few things stand out.
First, the original three schools are still here. Animism, elementalism, and mentalism all get fun new spells. More intriguingly, a number of spells from the original box set have been revised, and the introduction is clear that these revised versions are now the official ones going forward. I haven’t looked closely subtle differences, but it’s interesting to me that the designers are doing this kind of tweaking at all. Might a new edition be in the works at some point?
Some of the new schools bring a whole new way of doing magic. Alchemy is about creating potions, and it introduces a mini-game where you harvest parts from magical creatures. Whether that’s something you want in your game is up to you; personally, I prefer this thing in video games where I don’t have to worry too much about it. Enchanting isn’t much like the enchantment spells of D&D (charm person and so on); it’s closer to the artificer, improving magic items like armour and shields.
Harmonism is a new exception to Dragonbane’s convention that only mages cast spell. It’s a new option that bards can take in place of their normal heroic ability. I’m not sure how I feel about this. It’s not that I don’t like music magic as an archetype—I do, and the bard is obviously the best fit for it—but I also like the design consequences of there being just the one magic-user. Anyway, harmonism has the spells you’d expect—inspire, dance, hypnotize monster—but also some more surprising ones, like break, paralyze, and ‘abyssal resonance’, which is pretty cool.
Symbolism works quite differently from the other schools, in that it generally relies on symbols being seen—a bit like the symbol spell in 5e, I suppose. There’s a similar spell school in Forbidden Lands, if I recall correctly, and it feels perfect for dwarves. Symbols can provide buffs like fortify and shield rune, animate golems, or even imprison a target or raise a fortress. They can also be made permanent.
Witchcraft is one I really like. Pathfinder has had a witch archetype for a while, but D&D never quite cracked it, in my opinion (I don’t think the warlock is exactly it). The book ponders the difference between witchcraft and animism: animism is about the spirit or soul of the world, whereas witches are interested in tangible forms, patterns, movements. So witches get a bit of divination—augury, soothsaying—alongside curses, hexes, polymorph, and shapeshifting. A lot of fun to be had there.
Dracomancy is unique: it’s not available to starting characters, and every spell in the school is rank six, where none of the other schools go above five. It’s essentially epic magic: projecting yourself onto the astral plane, commanding dragons, stopping time. Very fun, very high fantasy, and perhaps quite different from the rest of the game.
Necromancy and illusionism are broadly what you’d expect from other games. But there’s the odd surprise if you’re coming from D&D in terms of which school a spell falls under and how powerful it is. Invisibility sits under mentalism, for example, where I wonder whether it might fit better as an illusion—and it’s a rank-five spell, one of the most powerful in the game, where D&D makes it second level. Meanwhile illusionism contains spells like mass confusion, which doesn’t feel like an illusion to me, and cheat fate, which feels like a divination ability. Things will surprise you.
Mentalism, incidentally, is the school I think 5e players will find hardest to get their heads around. It’s got a bit of everything: teleportation, flight, stone skin, dominate monster… A genuinely eclectic school.
Demonology is interesting because demons are quite a big part of Dragonbane’s story. There are spells I wouldn’t have expected here, like dimensional travel, alongside the properly evil and grim stuff: carbuncle, beetle swarm, gutworm, and, of course, summoning demons. The book notes that both necromancy and demonology carry a social cost, though it’s only lightly touched on in the introduction and never given any mechanical teeth as far as I can tell. I doubt that’s going to matter much in practice. Edge lords are gonna edge lord.
On balance across the schools: I honestly don’t know. Dracomancy is obviously more powerful, but that’s the point—it’s basically tenth-level magic. What I can say is that the schools are mechanically distinct. They don’t feel like reskins, which is great.
In fact, something I came away thinking is that each spell school in Dragonbane almost feels like its own class. It’s not like D&D, where an illusionist and an evoker might specialize, but most of the time they’re casting quite similar spells. Here, an illusionist and a necromancer are practically different classes. Which is great—but it makes me wonder whether the next book Free League should produce is one for martial characters. Different flavours of fighter, say. If I were playing a non-spellcaster when this book hit the table, I might come away feeling a bit unloved at this point.
Design and production
I’m always impressed by Free League’s products, though I have occasionally found them to suffer a little from style over substance—very, very pretty, but you wonder where the crunch went. That is not the case here at all. This book is absolutely chock-full of usable options—probably more so than any Free League book I’ve seen.
The art is lovely. Johan Egerkrans and David Brasgalla share the interior pieces, and I don’t know how to describe them, but they have edges, a shape, something slightly comic-book about it, and it fits the genre of mirth and mayhem: fighting and combat and monsters, but fun, too. Typography is a nerdy preoccupation of mine, and I don’t want to wax lyrical about it, but I love the heading typeface, too: fantastical, a bit squat and square, yet modern, clean, and readable, a great fit for the game. Chapter overviews fit neatly onto double-page spreads, with verbiage kept to a minimum; the paper feels nice and matte, and there’s an abundance of art throughout. I’m not an expert, but it looks stitch-bound rather than glued to me. Sorry WotC, but Free League makes your stuff look cheap.
I was surprised to see that the book is only 138 pages including the index. It feels like more! On the shelf, it looks like one of the D&D core rulebooks. I genuinely don’t know how they’ve done that. And the Swedish-to-English translation is absolutely fine, not that I’m surprised. Reading it, you’d forget it wasn’t written in English.
The thing I most want to praise—and that I’d love 5e to steal—is the chapter structure. Every school gets its own chapter, opening with a couple of pages of overview: what this style of magic is, the different types of caster within the school, what familiars they might have, what skills they might take, and then the sorts of grandmasters who could teach the highest-rank spells. Then a really nice table shows all the spells by rank (see below), with connecting lines showing how spells upgrade as you climb, kind of like skill trees in games like Diablo. It made me realize how much is lost in 5e by alphabetizing 400+ spells into one undifferentiated list. Maybe there isn’t really a neat way of sorting them in 5e—by class? by school?—but here, it works beautifully.
Familiars deserve a mention of their own. They’re a new rank-2 spell in the general magic chapter, similar in form to 5e’s familiars—raven, rat, cat and so on—but with rather more customization available in terms of abilities. And since every school gets its own section on familiars, the designers clearly expect this to be something a lot of players take.
Beyond the spells, there isn’t much more—some magic items, the potion and harvesting rules that come with alchemy, and the magic item options that come with enchanting. No rules for inventing your own spells, no mishap tables, no spell duels, no ‘histories of magic’ or magical theory etc. But in a way I like that. The book is squarely focused on spells and doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
Towards the back, in the penultimate chapter on enchanting (though somewhat separate from it), there’s a set of legendary artifacts: a pair of battle axes with a connection to lightning, a musical quiver, a throwing staff, a nasty whip, that kind of thing. It’s nice to see magic items you haven’t seen before. These aren’t classic D&D items with the serial numbers filed off; they’re new and original.
Should you buy it?
Bottom line, it’s a great book, and a really solid expansion to an existing system. If Dragonbane is a game you know well and enjoy, I recommend it without hesitation. It’s well indexed, good for cross-referencing, as useful in prep as at the table, and as useful to players as to GMs.
But, if you’ve only dabbled so far—if you have not yet run or played a full Dragonbane campaign—I’d maybe hold off until you have. This is a bewildering number of new options, and it probably pays to know the game well before diving in. Part of what makes Dragonbane special is its restraint; this book is good enough that you can start to loosen that restraint. You just want to make sure that you have some control over its.
This is already quite a substantial review and I didn’t want to dilute it with a double bill, so I’ve left Arkand: City of Waves and Flames out entirely. I hope to feature it on the blog soon.
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