Dragonbane

Dragonbane

I got the chance to play Dragonbane by Free League. 

The wonderful Gerry (pictured holding the map) has the starter set and ran us thorough one of the adventures within this as a one-shot. 

The starter set itself is great, coming with a map, as well as pre-generated character sheets, a deck of treasure cards, a deck of initiative cards, and other stuff.

The initiative system is where I think Dragonbane wins. The initiative cards are shuffled and then dealt out around the table, including the monsters or NPCs the adventurers are combatting with. You only have one action, and that includes dodging attacks against you, so if you use your action to attack and then the creature attacks you later in the round, you can't attempt to dodge to lessen the effect. Some creatures have special attacks allowing them more than one action in a round, which makes figuring our who should go when in the party and what action to take means everyone is invested in the combat. The nice thing about the initiative system and why I like it, is that every round the initiative cards get recalled, shuffled and dealt out again. You might have gone first last round, but this round you are now way down the initiative order. There are a limited number of swaps you can take for initiative, but as things change each round, it keeps you as a player involved with what is going on.

We didn't complete the starter-set adventure that day as we ran out of time, but we were all enthusiastic to play more.

 We managed to persuade the GM to run another session (or two) and so after the holiday period when things had quietened down a bit, we got back together to play more Dragonbane. This time we had a couple of different players at the table so we decided to roll up characters from scratch as we hoped to play Dragonbane through a few adventures. 

I am really enjoying Dragonbane, and enjoyed it that much I picked up a copy of the rulebook for myself – but that is for another story!

J