Every January, my 1990s Philadelphia gaming group holds a reunion in Las Vegas. We hang out, give ourselves meat-sweats at Fogo de Chao, and run RPG one-shots. This year I decided to a session of Free League Publishing's Dragonbane core set that I bought back in August from Milwaukee's wonderful Old Guard Games. I loved the look of Dragonbane (the stunning art of Johan Egerkrans), and the rules promised precisely the sort of experience I like in a fantasy RPG: characters who aren't zero-to-hero pushovers at the start but who nonetheless have to struggle to survive as they make their picaresque way across settings like the core set's Misty Vale sandbox.
Although the game comes with a nice slate of pre-gen characters, I had my friends create characters so that we could see how character creation played out. The party consisted of a halfling thief, a human wizard, a wolfkin hunter, and a mallard knight named Sir Waddleton of Pondsborough. I ran this motley bunch through the core set's introductory scenario (which let us test-drive the combat rules), and then I skipped ahead to "Trollspire," the dungeon that many in the Dragonbane community recommend as a starting point. I don't want to spoil the details of the adventure, but I can say that the party succeeded in making away with the treasure.
The highlight of the session was watching Sir Waddleton valiantly try to maintain his dignity as he was insulted by a variety of humiliating traps. Mallards have a kin ability that gives them advantage on key rolls (in Dragonbane terms, they get a boon) at the cost of going berserk à la Donald Duck (they gain the Angry condition, which gives them disadvantage or a bane on Intelligence-related rolls). With each new metaphorical slap in the beak, Sir Waddleton grew redder and redder in the face ... until he finally snapped:
It was truly glorious to behold.
The lowlight of the evening was the extreme failure of the wolfkin hunter's twenty-sider. This die, which I was told routinely rolled low in the player's 5E Dungeons & Dragons, turned out to suck just as badly at Dragonbane: faced with a roll-under rules environment, the die proceeded to generate results of 17+. It wasn't much fun for my friend to roll so poorly so often, but there was a certain sadistic glee in the die's cursed consistency.
The tagline for Dragonbane is "mirth & mayhem roleplaying," and this one-shot lived up to that bill-ing. (It's hard to resist the duck puns.) I'll definitely be finding an opportunity to run Dragonbane here at home, hopefully for my son and his friends. He has promised me that their party will be all-fowl, and I can't wait.
