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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 6, 2022 9:03:26 GMT -6
Anyone play this? I wasn't sure where to put it, and RQ seemed like the closest choice. Free League Publishing has bought the rights to "Drakar och Demoner," which translates into "Dragons and Demons." DoD is the "original Swedish RPG" and was first published in 1982. As I understand it, DoD was essentially the BRP system from RuneQuest (with some Worlds of Wonder thrown in, I think). DoD has gone through around 9 editions already, with various changes to artwork and rules system. It started out as BRP and at some point around 1985 seems to have replaced the d100 with a d20. A later edition supposedly changed the rules entirely and moved away from the BRP model. The first eight editions were in Swedish only, which I sadly cannot read, but the 9E rules were done in English in 2019 under the name "Ruin Masters." Free League plans on launching a KS for an English edition of DoD at the end of the month, but the actual product might be some time down the road. They are advertising a return to the BRP model for this edition. I've been curious about what this might look like since I haven't played RQ or similar for a long time, and my current obsession is looking at 80's BRP style stuff to get a sense for the system. I have 1E RQ (or maybe 2E, I forget) and bought a copy of the BRP pamphlet on e-bay. I have other compatible products, such as CoC and Elric and Stormbringer and Hawkmoon, so I'm generally familiar with the system already. What intrigues me the most is that Johan Egerkrans will be illustrating this new version. He's the illustrator for Free League's Nordic horror game Vaesen and I find his artwork to be really cool. (He has also done art books -- on vaesen, undead, and dragons -- which aren't RPG products at all but are pretty darned fun to thumb through. Anyway, when I heard about Free League doing a DoD edition I was pondering buying one in Swedish, even though I can't read it, just for the artwork. (My wife thinks I'm nuts, by the way, and my son-in-law suggested I might need an intervention.) Luckily, Free League is going to do an English version so I'm off the hook.  Feel free to chat about DoD here. |
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Post by Vile Traveller on Aug 6, 2022 14:54:07 GMT -6
DoD has always intrigued me, I even contemplated getting it at one point but couldn't find an old edition. I'm sure I could "sort of" work out the Swedish.
I will probably join the KS for this. It looks like they're using a d20 instead of d100. Makes sense in the old edition of BRP where everything was in jumps of 5% anyway, though I don't know if criticals or impales or fumbles are a thing.
The old WoW set worked on the principle of layering Magic, Super, or Future on top of the BRP booklet, and I believe DoD was BRP plus Magic World.
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Post by ravenheart87 on Aug 9, 2022 5:05:30 GMT -6
The first eight editions were in Swedish only, which I sadly cannot read, but the 9E rules were done in English in 2019 under the name "Ruin Masters." I wouldn't call RuinMasters an edition of DoD. It's a badly designed and laid out rules light sidegame. |
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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 9, 2022 8:49:01 GMT -6
The first eight editions were in Swedish only, which I sadly cannot read, but the 9E rules were done in English in 2019 under the name "Ruin Masters." I wouldn't call RuinMasters an edition of DoD. It's a badly designed and laid out rules light sidegame. Apologies. Reading Wikipedia gave me the impression that RuinMasters was a new edition of DoD.  |
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Post by ravenheart87 on Aug 15, 2022 6:46:57 GMT -6
I wouldn't call RuinMasters an edition of DoD. It's a badly designed and laid out rules light sidegame. Apologies. Reading Wikipedia gave me the impression that RuinMasters was a new edition of DoD. A new edition will be kickstarted in English soon under the name Dragonbane though. |
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Post by Finarvyn on Aug 15, 2022 18:18:10 GMT -6
Apologies. Reading Wikipedia gave me the impression that RuinMasters was a new edition of DoD. A new edition will be kickstarted in English soon under the name Dragonbane though. Yeah, a little bummed that it's named Dragonbane. I think "Drakar och Demoner" is much cooler. |
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Post by ravenheart87 on Aug 17, 2022 12:41:46 GMT -6
A new edition will be kickstarted in English soon under the name Dragonbane though. Yeah, a little bummed that it's named Dragonbane. I think "Drakar och Demoner" is much cooler. In English that's Dragons and Demons, which sounds pretty lame and like a D&D ripoff, so I completely understand they went with that title. An old video game based on the game was called Dragonfire by the way. |
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terje
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Blasphemous accelerator
Posts: 204
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Post by terje on Aug 24, 2022 2:17:34 GMT -6
Drakar och Demoner used to have a position among swedish rpgs similar to D&D's in the US. Nowadays, several other games have become prominent and swedish newcomers to the hobby are more likely to pick up D&D rather than any of the swedish language games. But Drakar och Demoner still has a strong following among middle aged swedish roleplayers. What impact this new edition makes remains to be seen. Wikipedia has a decent outline of the games history: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakar_och_Demoner |
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terje
Level 5 Thaumaturgist
Blasphemous accelerator
Posts: 204
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Post by terje on Aug 30, 2022 7:50:26 GMT -6
The kickstarter is live (and funded), and you can download a quick start pdf:
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Post by stevemitchell on Aug 30, 2022 11:32:41 GMT -6
Funded in 4 minutes. I wonder what took so long.
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Post by stevemitchell on Aug 30, 2022 11:43:19 GMT -6
Arghh! Bit for two! I went over to pledge for Dragonbane and then saw the promo for Black God's Kiss for OSE/5E.
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Post by ravenheart87 on Aug 30, 2022 12:17:38 GMT -6
Checked the quickstart and it's pretty sweet. It uses a d20 roll under system instead of d100 like Pendragon or later editions of Drakar och Demoner. There are 6 attributes and 16 skills, besides magic skills. It feels like a classic lightweight percentile rpg with its attack vs parry tests, impaling criticals, MP system, weapon breakage (just with a d20 and much simpler), while it has a bunch of modernities and typical Free League mechanics - cards used for initiative, pushing rolls, the brilliant conditions system, etc. It feels lighter than OpenQuest 3e at first glance.
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Post by ravenheart87 on Sept 5, 2022 7:26:25 GMT -6
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Post by Finarvyn on Sept 5, 2022 8:15:28 GMT -6
Nice blog entry, ravenheart87. You summed up a lot of the things I had pondered about Drakar och Demoner (I refuse to call it Dragonbane), too. The biggest thing that had me worried was the initiative system, because it really seemed like going last was best because you can parry. However, it was explained to me that certain heavy-hitter classes want to go first so that they can try to take the monster out before the monster can beat up on the squishy classes, so there is more strategy than I had anticipated in initiative order. Players can hold actions and thus trade initiative cards and in that sense have some control over who goes when. Apparently the system plays a lot better than it reads. |
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Post by hamurai on Sept 12, 2022 0:21:35 GMT -6
Looks very much like a 5E D&D with some house rules (e.g. Spell Points instead of Slots) to me. Anything in the mechanics which sets it apart?
The setting can easily be used in any system, but what's the big selling point of DoD?
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Post by Vile Traveller on Sept 12, 2022 4:32:39 GMT -6
Someone on another forum was saying how non-BRP players view the DoD rules through the D&D lens.  It's actually running on a BRP chassis, with d20 substituted for d100, and some of the more popular 5E rules & house rules added in. It does look like quite a nice basic fantasy game, but I don't see much unique or innovative to make it stand out. I already have numerous iterations of BRP games on my shelf, plus my AEON:underground game, so personally I'm not tempted. But it would be a great game for drawing in new gamers I reckon. |
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Post by Finarvyn on Sept 12, 2022 9:23:23 GMT -6
I'm not an "expert" on this stuff by any means, but I lived through some of those genesis days and played some of the early games so I can take a stab at it. Apologies if I tell you stuff you already know. My take on this is that OD&D came out and some folks wanted their own homebrew and/or didn't quite understand how OD&D worked, so a few variant RPGs were born. T&T and Runequest were the major players that I can recall from back in the day. T&T has nothing to do with this particular narrative, but Runequest was an attempt to add in a few features like hit location (I know that Blackmoor did this, but RQ wanted it to be simpler) and rework spellcasting and some other things like that. Runequest was the foundation of the Chaosium game company, I believe, and they produced a generic version of RQ called Basic Role Playing. BRP formed the nucleus for Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer/Elric, Pendragon, and others. One of the "others" was a boxed set called Worlds of Wonder and contained rules for scifi, rules for magic, and rules for superhero play. In the early 1980's a Swedish group took the essence of BRP and of Magic World and translated it into Swedish, and thus Drakar och Demoner was born. DoD apparently went through many editions where folks tried to tinker with the system. One of the innovations was to reduce the d100 roll into a d20, since folks realized that pretty much every percent in the game was divisible by five. Depending upon how you count editions, I think that Free League's version of DoD is the 9th or 10th edition (or something like that) and represents various attempts to simplify or make complex or adjust mechanics or whatever. One of the versions of RQ added in ducks as PCs, by the way, and DoD did this as well. Not sure if that's a bug or a feature. Anyway, in one form or another DoD has been around for 40 years. So what is it about the new Drakar och Demoner that is particularly interesting? *1* First of all, the artist is the same one who did Vaesen and I really love his style. *2* The "roll under" approach is the same mathematics as "roll over" and feels counterintuitive to me in many ways, but it's easier in other ways. If the DM decides there is a 20% chance of an event, simply divide by 5 and the target number is 4 or under. In a 5E game you need to count backwards (at least, I do) from 20 and get 20,19,18,17 to determine that the target number is 17 or higher. Not anything super-amazing, but in some ways easier to work with once you get used to it. *3* Willpower instead of wisdom. Wisdom has always been sort of vague and I pigeon-hole stuff like perception into it, but willpower has a stronger sense of purpose in an RPG. *4* Initiate system. When you roll dice there can be ties, but when you draw cards there aren't. Initiative in DoD becomes more of a temporary resource, and you can tactically perform actions that put you in the right place in initiative order to attempt what you want to accomplish. *5* They make crit success and crit failure sound kind of cool. Neat to say that you "rolled a dragon" (success) or "rolled a demon" (failure) even though you could say this for any RPG. And if you roll somewhere in between and fail you can "push" the roll and temporarily burn stats to try to succeed anyway. (I know DCC has done this for years, but it's neat and it's in DoD.) Then they suggest adjectives that you can use in role play to describe how your character acts when a stat is burned, and it's different for each stat. Honestly, I played some RQ back in the 1980's and it was a favorite system of one of my best friends, but we didn't play it a lot so in many ways this stuff feels "new" to me even though I know it's old. DoD feels like a game which moves fast and has a fun vibe to it. Not sure if it will replace 5E on my table or OD&D in my heart, but it seems like a pretty cool system. Bottom line is that I doubt that there is anything that can't be ported into another system, so you might just download the freebie quickstart rules and see what you think. I backed the KS on day #1 because I want to own a copy of this thing in English rather than Swedish, and I can't wait to get the full PDF when the KS ends. Maybe that helps? |
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Post by ffilz on Sept 15, 2022 15:21:35 GMT -6
One quick thing... Ducks have been in RQ since 1st edition...
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Post by Finarvyn on Sept 15, 2022 16:11:59 GMT -6
One quick thing... Ducks have been in RQ since 1st edition... Have they? I remember them as early as the Avalon Hill boxes set, which is 3E (I think) but I would have to go check my 1E or 2E to confirm. Not saying you are wrong, but I didn't remember ducks before 3E.  |
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Post by ffilz on Sept 15, 2022 17:29:13 GMT -6
One quick thing... Ducks have been in RQ since 1st edition... Have they? I remember them as early as the Avalon Hill boxes set, which is 3E (I think) but I would have to go check my 1E or 2E to confirm. Not saying you are wrong, but I didn't remember ducks before 3E. Yes Avalon Hill version is 3e. I've only ever ran 1e (though I got 3e in the 90s, and 2e in 2005, and have used bits from those versions), and I've had ducks in my campaigns all along. Trust the 1e expert... :-) |
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Post by jeffb on Sept 15, 2022 18:33:23 GMT -6
Yep. Ducks have been there since the beginning. I believe they pre-date RQ, in Glorantha.
Apple Lane, the (second published) adventure for RQ features a duck NPC (Quackjohn in the scenario "Gringle's Pawnshop"). Apple Lane was later included in all the 2E boxed sets.
And they are in the 1st (and 2nd) edition rulebook of course- though stats are in the "monster" section- as are Aldryami ("elves") , Mostali ("dwarves") , and other playable races (iow- an option only if the Referee is OK with them).
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Post by ffilz on Sept 16, 2022 14:46:35 GMT -6
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Post by thorswulf on Oct 7, 2022 8:09:45 GMT -6
I backed this kickstarter because it looked like a fun game, and with all the nifty stretch goals how could I resist? One of the things I really like is the cosmology of the game, it seems a bit more believable in the way it was constructed.
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Post by Vile Traveller on Oct 9, 2022 11:24:22 GMT -6
I played the quickstart at a convention today, basically a barrow-looting expedition. It was fast and fun, people had different interesting abilities. Not sure whether it has the "legs" for long-term play, we'll see when the full rules come out.
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Post by ravenheart87 on Nov 30, 2022 6:54:19 GMT -6
Free League started sending out the beta pdfs for Dragonbane / Drakar och Demoner. 115 pages so far plus two pdfs for cards.
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Post by Vile Traveller on Nov 30, 2022 8:07:52 GMT -6
I've got mine!  |
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Post by Vile Traveller on Dec 1, 2022 4:48:40 GMT -6
Mind you, the final book better not have a duck on the cover or it'll be brown paper and sticky-back plastic time!
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Post by ravenheart87 on Dec 7, 2022 5:09:14 GMT -6
Mind you, the final book better not have a duck on the cover or it'll be brown paper and sticky-back plastic time! I'm not sure about the book, but the box will have the Elric-wannabe facing a dragon art shown on the Kickstarter page. |
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Post by Vile Traveller on Dec 8, 2022 4:11:24 GMT -6
The 'Creating Adventures' section is a bit disappointing. It assumes there's always a boss fight at the end, and the random quest tables just create variations of 'someone's paying you to get a thing'.
I get this is supposed to be a basic game but basic games are exactly where it's important to give good referee (and player) advice. Light on rules, strong on guidance.
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Post by ravenheart87 on Dec 29, 2022 11:03:16 GMT -6
Wrote a summary about the current beta version on the Vorpal Mace blog for those curious about where the game is going. |
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