As sure as night follows day, the time will come again when dragons and demons fight for power over humanity, nature, and the eternal mysteries.
The fantasy RPG Dragonbane is Free League’s biggest release this year, with a major presence at Gen Con, and now it’s finally coming to Roll20! This is a game with room for laughs at the table, while still offering brutal challenges for the adventurers. We call this playstyle “mirth & mayhem roleplaying” – great for long campaigns, but also perfect for a one-shot.
Dragonbane is a translation of Drakar och Demoner, Scandinavia’s first and biggest tabletop RPG, originally launched in 1982. This new and reimagined edition has one foot firmly planted in the heritage of decades of Swedish gaming and the other in the modern and innovative game design for which Free League Publishing is known worldwide.
Dragonbane is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game full of magic, mystery, and adventure, and comes with all of the fantastical creatures that you’d expect plus a few more – not least the duck-like mallards! What makes this game stand out though, is how it approaches the fantasy RPG legacy.
The game uses a skill-based D20 system that is very easy for new players to learn. Each skill is rated from 1 to 18, and the player needs to roll equal to or lower than the skill level to succeed. That’s right, in this game you want to roll low. Rolling a natural 1 is called rolling a dragon, and triggers powerful special effects.
The core Dragonbane game has ten professions, including the classic Fighter, Mage, Hunter and Thief, but also the more unorthodox Artisan, Merchant, Mariner and Scholar. The profession will impact a player character’s starting skills and give it a starting heroic ability, but after the game starts the player is free to further develop their character in any way they choose, unbound by any class restrictions.
Character advancement is also skill based, increasing the character’s skill levels and giving them new heroic abilities. That’s right – there are no levels in Dragonbane. The more gradual advancement gives the player more control over their character’s development, but also means that even an experienced character is never completely safe from harm – not even from the lowliest goblin.
Any self-respecting fantasy RPG needs a robust combat system, and Dragonbane is no different. Combat is fast, tactical, and deadly. At every turn, the player will need to make the crucial choice of whether to attack or defend, and any mistake can have dire consequences. The deadliness of the combat system ensures that fights never drag out, but even knocked-out combatants can get back on their feet quickly and join the action again.
Beyond combat, the Dragonbane core game has solid rules for travel, magic, and monsters – and an Adventures book with no less than eleven adventures tied together in the epic campaign Secret of the Dragon Emperor. The base game is fully available at the Roll20 marketplace and includes everything a group needs for hundreds of hours of mirth & mayhem.