I’ve made a character sheet for Dragon Warriors. You can get a copy here (though you’ll need a Google account to access it). It’s not my finest work, but it will get the job done.
I’ve decided to use the Dragon Warriors RPG by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson as system of choice for my upcoming “British Old-School” campaign. After reading it through again, it really is about as close to B/X D&D as any British RPG published in the 1970s or ’80s ever came. Hopefully I can put together some Basic D&D / Dragon Warriors conversion notes at some point so that OSR content can be ported in relatively easily.
People seem to love the Dragon Warriors art and setting (as do I) but sometimes seem a bit sniffy about the system (I read somewhere or other that even Dave Morris preferred to run his home campaign in GURPS). However, I’m personally quite fond of the system. It’s streamlined, with about the same number of dice rolls as B/X (albeit with a slightly larger number of fiddly modifiers), while at the same time adding a bit more granularity to the results of said rolls. I’ll get into the specifics of why I like Dragon Warriors – the system – in a future post.
You can download a Pay What You Want PDF of the latest edition of Dragon Warriors here, and probably find copies of the first edition on eBay relatively easily (the core books go for cheap, though books 4, 5, and 6 are harder to find).
The original edition of Dragon Warriors (published between 1985 and 1986) was comprised of six regular paperback-sized books. I’ll be using only the core two books, plus the Assassin book (“Out of the Shadows”). That gives my players five classes:
- Knight
- Barbarian
- Sorcerer
- Mystic
- Assassin
The Knight and Barbarian take the place of D&D’s Fighter (with the Knight a slightly better all-rounder, while the Barbarian specialises in more aggressive, offensive fighting at the cost of lower defence). The Sorcerer does what it says on the tin (with some Clerical healing and curative magic thrown into the mix), while the Mystic is essentially a D&D Monk / Jedi Knight (or a Kai Master, if you prefer). Finally, the Assassin is basically a ninja (complete with throwing stars, smoke bombs, martial arts, and backflips), but also takes the role of the rogue / thief class (with climbing, stealth, backstab, lockpick, pick pockets, find traps, etc.).
Plus three races:
- Human
- Dwarf
- Elf
Classes and races (with the exception of human knights and barbarians) have minimum and maximum stat scores needed to qualify for them. There is a rule that players can reroll their stats if they are completely “hopeless”.
Humans are humans. Dwarves have gloomsight (meaning they see best in low-light and receive penalties in bright light or darkness – though they see better than humans in the latter) and can forge magical items at higher levels (something Mystics can also do). Elves are quite difficult to qualify for in terms of stats, but get a fat stack of bonuses and abilities: Elves have the same “sixth sense” abilities as Mystics, can see in the dark, have enhanced stealth and perception scores, can hide automatically in woodland, get a bonus to archery, and live for 300 years (but cannot be resurrected by magic because, wonderfully, they have no souls).
The setting will probably be Allansia, from the old Fighting Fantasy books (with a splash of Discworld mixed in for good measure).
Luther Gutekunst says
Do you plan to post play reports from the campaign? I’m interested in seeing what makes B-OSR different from the standard OSR at the table.
Andy Bartlett says
Why Dragon Warriors and not Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2e?
Or, perhaps, why Allansia/Titan and not Ellesland/Legend?
Genuine curiosity, not a demand you have fun the right way!
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Luther
Absolutely! In an ideal world, I’d publish play reports after each session… but in reality I think that’s probably too ambitious. At the very least, I do hope to get a couple of play reports out to highlight some of the differences.
Having said that, I’ve really made things difficult for myself because the system I’ve chosen (Dragon Warriors) is so similar to old-school D&D, and the setting I’ll be using (Allansia / Titan) is, in some ways, actually quite a traditional OSR swords & sorcery setting.
If I had wanted to really highlight the differences, I probably should have gone with something like WFRP, or straight Dragon Warriors (in the Lands of Legend) or even Heroes, Maelstrom, or Fantasy Wargaming. But I feel like WFRP is already well-covered online, and the others would take a lot more work to run. Besides that, I want to use the game / setting I personally knew from my own childhood. Finally, I’m lazy, so want to drop OSR content straight into my campaign with minimum fuss, which means keeping things quite similar.
In some sense, the distinction between the A-OSR and B-OSR is only a historical one. I think WFRP was the flagship of the British Old-School, and it clearly had an influence on the OSR. So, the “B-OSR” style has already largely been incorporated into the overall OSR playstyle.
Plus, many of the differences between the A-OSR and B-OSR are purely cosmetic (different points of reference, different styles of humour, different funny accents when NPCs are speaking, etc.).
However, I also think there are some more fundamental differences that it’s worth exploring a bit more (particularly in terms of things like social class, urban vs frontier settings, historicism, etc.). So, my approach is to run a campaign that, on the surface, is quite vanilla S&S / Tolkienesque fantasy, but then also borrow / steal a lot from older British Old-School games such as WFRP, Heroes, Maelstrom, Fantasy Wargaming, etc.
Hopefully that’s not a fool’s errand, and hopefully any differences (such as they are) will actually come across in play reports!
Uncaring Cosmos says
@Andy
Hah, good question! Honestly? Because, when I was a kid, I only owned the first book of the Dragon Warriors set, whereas I owned pretty much all the Fighting Fantasy books (including Titan, Out of the Pit, Dungeoneer, Blacksand!, Allansia, etc.). So, partly it’s familiarity, partly nostalgia. I already have a mental image of what Allansia looks like (I’ve adventured in it already!) whereas I still haven’t read book 6 of the Dragon Warriors set, detailing the Lands of Legend.
So, why not run Advanced Fighting Fantasy? Well, I only ever owned the first book in the Dragon Warriors set, but it had a huge impact on me. It feels like more of a “full” RPG than AFF (I only have experience with AFF 1e, so can’t speak of the second edition).
Also, my recent experience running a tabletop RPG campaign was LotFP, which is based on Frank Mentzer’s BECMI D&D. As I said in the post, Dragon Warriors feels, in many ways, quite similar to Basic D&D. So, because of my experience with LotFP, I feel Dragon Warriors will be a little easier for me to run than AFF.
Finally, I want to use OSR content with minimum fuss. It feels like converting to Dragon Warriors would be easier than converting to Advanced Fighting Fantasy (and I might be wrong about that).
Andy Bartlett says
@Uncaring Cosmos – yes, I can see how moving from one class/level game to another would make things easier. I think of DW starting PCs to be around the equivalent of level 2 or 3 Basic D&D PCs, but that there is a less steep ‘power curve’ as the DW PCs advance in Rank.
Re: AFF2e – it is much better than Dungeoneer.