Appendix N: Dragon Warriors, part three

Three more media offerings for that authentic Legend feel.

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland

Excellent tale of ordinary folk amongst the plague. No fixation upon the armed gentry here. Eerie and character driven. Negative points for clumsy use of anagrams though.

No knights in shining armour here

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell

Saxons and Danes for your Elleslandic games. The TV series as useful as the books if you can get over the shapes of the Saxon shields. The beliefs of the characters are what makes this important to me. Belief in a curse or the words of an oracle or sorcerer seems to change reality or the perception of it. The importance of the church is prominent here too. Plus there’s decent battles and drama and so forth.

Getting your shield wall on

Excalibur

John Boorman’s very atmospheric film about the eponymous blade. We get a spot on depiction of the costs of sorcery here. Merlin pays a heavy price for the magics he employs in the service of the family Pendragon.

Being a knight, not all it’s cracked up to be.

The King Under the Forest, part two

I mentioned previously that this was the first adventure I ever ran, back when I was eight years old and new to RPGs. I recently had occasion to do so again...

I was at Dragonmeet, London’s largest RPG convention, in December 2018 and ran some off the books gaming for a group of crusty old European Grognards. With virtually no prep, no change there, I ran King Under the Forest using Dragon Warriors Rules As Written. In my current DW game, which runs about once monthly via Hangouts, I have some slight modifications to the by the book method. However here I wanted to see the system in all its original glory. So characters were rolled, 3d6 down the line as Gygax intended and I declared I would be reading the boxed text aloud verbatim. The latter to provide the authentic 1980s adventure experience but also I thought it would be interesting, seen through the eyes of modern gamers.

No such thing as too many swords

I have no wish to enter the Great Read Aloud Text Debate however it did lead to, for me, an interesting exchange:

GM “You pause and hold your breath as you study the outline of the shadow...”
Player “No, I don’t. I breathe heavily.”

Here and in some of the other passages the adventure shows it’s gamebook heritage (“will you climb? Or turn back?”) but then the designers also wrote some very successful gamebooks and in designing an introductory RPG for sale in bookshops (I got five out six books in WH Smith) rather than Games Workshops I can only assume that this was a deliberate design choice.

Of course running an intro adventure for genre savvy grognards means that they’re probably going to eat it up without too much drama and that was certainly the case here. There is a nice encounter with some warriors who materialise out of a tapestry with “faces the colour of old cloth.”  This is mechanically quite tough as a straightforward fight but instantly I was told “I burn the tapestry.” The Tapestry Warriors burst into flames and disappear with a ghostly howl.

Similarly the other puzzles were solved without too much drama and this is a strength of the adventure that the difficulty is sufficient that they require some thought but are not ridiculously taxing.

Overall it was a good time and although there was some eye rolling at some of the read aloud bits, the players seemed to enjoy it too. There are some really nice touches in this adventure that hint at the greater myth of Vallander, the King Under the Forest, without beating you over the head with it. There are some parts that seem a little jarring, the gorgon encounter for instance (although this has received some treatment in the re-issue version in the Sleeping Gods book) and the obligatory giant spider...

I’d like to redo this adventure building on the original framework and taylor is it to my own vision of what Vallander’s tomb would be like in my version of Legend. Perhaps more on that later.

The King Under the Forest, part one

In which I shall ramble about Dragon Warriors....

I hold in my hand an ingot of purest old school RPG

I bought Dragon Warriors pretty much by accident. We had this mail order book thing at school and occasionally they did Choose Your Own Adventure or Fighting Fantasy books. I read the blurb for this and thought that it sounded like the best Fighting Fantasy book ever. Of course I was wrong. It was better than that.

I played it with my school friends and my sister and anyone who would sit still long enough to listen. I was eight and this was the best thing ever.

The first proper adventure I ran was the one at the back of the book, naturally. The King Under the Forest. Wherein the PCs meet a priest with an ancient map that shows the location of the Tomb of Vallander, a King Arthur figure. While there is no setting information in this book, the adventure sets the tone (along with the monsters chapter, tons of great flavour there.) This is early medieval England but the beliefs of folklore are real. The setting would be greatly expanded on in Book 6: The Lands of Legend.

Uh-oh, this looks bad....

For all that it has a cool dragon encounter (for 1st Rank novices!) it’s a fairly straightforward underworld crawl. For some reason, probably product identity, dungeons are called underworlds in Dragon Warriors. I like it. There are some puzzles and some fights. It’s pretty linear but it’s meant to introduce beginning players and GMs to the game so a lack of complexity is a design feature. However it’s grown up enough to have a slightly downbeat ending. This is a fairly common theme for games set in Legend, as the Dragon Warriors world is known.

So, this is a good introduction to the game in my opinion, at least in principal. In execution, well I ran it recently and it shows its age a little but it was still a good time. I think that tapping into the well established folklore of the Arthur myth is a smart move and if you were encountering Dragon Warriors for the first time then this is a good place to start.