Thursday, April 23, 2009

Dragon Warriors in a Nutshell

I received Dragon Warriors and the Bestiary for my birthday and I've been happily devouring it for the past couple days. My own personal plans are to use the rules as a basis to finally run a Magnamund campaign, but I'd highly recommend the game to anyone who is interested in fantasy more firmly rooted in Medieval history and folklore.

I lifted a bit of the introduction in a comment to Scott over at the World of Thool blog, and I thought I might as well re-post that passage here. I think it sums things up nicely; I know when I read it I started grinning like a kid.

"Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme-park taverns, comedy dwarves and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made [the game setting] as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with European folktale sensibility.... Fantasy games like D&D--or, these days, World of Warcraft--belong to the George Lucas or Chris Columbus branch of role-playing. Dragon Warriors would be a movie by Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton. In literary terms, if D&D is Eragon, then DW is Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell."


For those not willing to pony up the dough for a hardcopy, the game recently became available in PDF too.

3 comments:

  1. I'm glad you're liking the book.

    Fantasy Disneyland is fun a lot of the time, but it's not the mode I want to play in 24/7.

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  2. D&D : Marvel Comics :: Dragon Warriors : 2000AD

    Dark, weird, cynical: British gaming to a tee. ;)

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  3. I have the old six book set of DW and, although I have never run a game, the books are full of interesting ideas, spooky adventures, some genuinely chilling creatures. The whole thing is suffused with Medieval ambience that is really quite unique in traditional, fantasy RPGs. Oh damn, now I want to run home, drag the books off the shelves and dive in. I'm not sure my Traveller players would appreciate that level of distraction in their GM.
    Glad to see someone spreading the love for DW and I'd love to read any accounts of actual play.

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