Fantasy is the most popular genre of role-playing game. Even if you don’t count the sheer volume of Dungeons and Dragons players, there are more titles that slot into the fantasy genre than any other. When reading and playing games, one could be excused for beginning to think that many of these fantasy titles are little different from each other; thanks to the early days of Dungeons and Dragons, many of the genre’s tropes are filtered through RPGs in frankly wild ways and that does mean we see a lot of the same basic structures in our fantasy games. Doesn’t seem to bother anyone at Free League Publishing, though. Apparently to them, the ideal number of fantasy games a single company should put out is a half dozen.

Needless to say, Free League’s reasoning for each fantasy game they release is different, and they also reap the benefit of a more stratified European gaming audience where the appetite for different, specific experiences is greater. In many cases, it’s also not hard to see that the genre has a lot of room for variety. Mork Borg and Forbidden Lands have very little to do with each other. That does make it a little interesting, though, when Free League acquires the IP for the grand-daddy of Swedish RPGs. As of 2021 they did make such an acquisition, and the result is out now in the form of Dragonbane.

The History

Dragonbane is the newest edition of Drakar och Demoner (Dragons and Demons in English), a Swedish-language RPG which was first released in 1982. The history of Drakar och Demoner is fairly interesting; the first edition was literally just a Swedish translation of Magic World, the fantasy booklet from Chaosium’s Worlds of Wonder, released under license along with the BRP rules to make it playable. The next two revisions, in 1984 and 1985 respectively, made significant edits and revisions, including most notably a shift to d20 from the typical d100 BRP mechanics. From there the game continued to receive revisions until the late 1990s when publisher Target Games (earlier called Adventure Games, or Aventyrsspel in Swedish) discontinued their RPG efforts for financial reasons and sold the Drakar och Demoner IP, which resulted in its licensing to a company called RiotMinds.

While RiotMinds was the steward of Drakar och Demoner for over two decades, they’re also responsible for, interestingly enough, two different efforts to release the game in English. In 2016 they kickstarted Trudvang Chronicles, an English-language version of Drakar och Demoner seventh edition which, as you can tell from the name, centered RiotMinds’ own setting for the game, Trudvang. Then in 2019 they kickstarted a game called Ruin Masters, seemingly based on the RiotMinds 2016 rerelease of Drakar och Demoner from 1987. Showing just how successful RiotMinds was at making and distributing these games (they were not), the Drakar och Demoner IP was sold to Free League in 2021.

The existing English versions of the game are fair demonstrations of how much Drakar och Demoner varied over its lifespan. Trudvang Chronicles uses a d20 and has somewhat more detailed combat rules, while Ruin Masters still has the d100 but somewhat simpler rules. In theory this all rolls up back to Chaosium’s BRP, but even that only seems to mean that this is a classless, skill-driven game as opposed to class-and-level like D&D (RiotMinds actually tried to put levels in the game, but apparently it didn’t go well).

It’s with this history that we look to Free League and Dragonbane. Where Dragonbane fits into Free League’s content strategy is, at best, unclear to me. There are six fantasy games under the Free League banner; by fantasy I mean traditional RPG fantasy and am therefore excluding edge cases like Vaesen or Pirate Borg. I somewhat immediately put Mork Borg and Into the Odd aside; they’re more indie than the others and attract their own audiences. The One Ring is similar albeit for a different reason; being a licensed game it has its own audience. Symbaroum was already a going concern under a different publisher when it came under Free League’s wing, so the amount of resources that needed to be invested was a bit different. The One Ring and Symbaroum also both led to 5e versions of their games which make them more, er, lucrative. This leaves Forbidden Lands, Free League’s own whole-cloth Year Zero Engine fantasy RPG, and now Dragonbane.

The Game

When looking at Dragonbane, it’s hard not to keep mentioning Forbidden Lands. While Dragonbane is not particularly related to YZE in any way, the updates that Free League made kind of look like, well, Forbidden Lands, or at least mechanics from Forbidden Lands. Combat uses the same card-based initiative as Forbidden Lands (and other YZE games), and the bestiary features the same sort of attack tables as Forbidden Lands. Pushing the dice is included, albeit as an optional rule. There are definitely lots of indications of the Free League ‘style’ which show how Dragonbane was updated, and how it’s now a bit further along the path to being its own thing compared to earlier versions of Drakar och Demoner.

That all said, the basic game hasn’t changed all that much. Based on BRP but shifted to d20, pretty much every roll is an attempt to roll under your ‘skill level’ in the appropriate skill. Skills all have a ‘base chance’ determined by their attribute, and you’d be excused for noticing that the base chances come pretty close to multiplying the attributes driving them by 5 (not exactly, but pretty close). I rather like the treatment of skills and skill advancement; at character creation you tag a certain number of skills (driven by your character’s age) to be trained skills, and start with double your base chance in these skills. Advancement is taken care of by tagging skills and then trying to roll over their skill level, just like in BRP (and I like it just as much here). There are also several questions asked every session that can award extra ‘advancement marks’, and these questions are very similar to the experience questions in (you guessed it) Forbidden Lands.

Saying that combat in Dragonbane shares some similarities to Forbidden Lands is where the usefulness of this exercise starts to break down. Free League is a company of Swedish RPG nerds, and they have a track record of shepherding Swedish games (i.e. Symbaroum and Mork Borg). When we’re talking about Drakar och Demoner, a game that obviously predates not only Forbidden Lands but also Free League as a going concern, there’s a chicken and egg problem for anything which isn’t clearly a newer mechanic. Experience questions, pushing dice rolls? Those are YZE things and, from what I’ve been able to read, didn’t come from BRP or any edition of Drakar och Demoner. Balancing your combat system to ensure that one-hit kills are possible? That’s a bit more academic. Yes, Dragonbane is that lethal, with hit points topping out at 18 (excepting a Heroic Ability that gives more) but mundane weapons going up to 2d10. And that says nothing about monster attacks, which can be huge and brutal. I do rather like that all Heroic Abilities (these read like Talents from Forbidden Lands) cost Willpower Points, which despite the common name do not work anything like their equivalent in Forbidden Lands (in Dragonbane you have Willpower Points equal to your Willpower attribute). While resting is fairly quick (good night’s sleep regains all lost HP and WP), combat is always going to be about making the best use of your limited resources in order to come out ahead. I like the defense rules here as well. There are two defenses, Dodge and Parry, but defending uses your action (and therefore if you’ve already taken an action you can’t defend). I know conventional logic is that losing a turn kind of sucks, but I like how this all comes together. Resource totals stay low, attacking is always a risk, and abstracted increasing hit point totals are replaced with character capabilities, actually modeled out.

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Mechanically, I rather like Dragonbane. If you handed me this book with none of the context, I’d say it looks and reads like Free League taking a swing at D&D. Add Heroic Abilities to the stat+skill template of BRP and you do sort of have a more freeform version of class abilities, though claiming there’s more than cursory alignment between the two doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Still, it’s pretty clear this is the same sort of fantasy game evolution that D&D went through, although where each game ended up in terms of power level is pretty different.

That is, though, one of the weaknesses of Dragonbane when looking at it across the field of roleplaying games. Although they stole the duck species from Runequest back in 1985, Dragonbane overall is very much ‘just a fantasy game’. While the setting of The Misty Vale in the Adventures book is workable, there’s clearly not a lot of truly unique worldbuilding going on. I mean, for a game whose first edition was literally just a translation of another game, what do you really expect?

At the same time, when we live in the world of Old-School Essentials (also a translation, though from Gygax to English instead of Swedish to English), there’s clearly recognized value in taking an old system, cleaning it up, and sending it back out. What’s more, if you like BRP, like the classless, skill-driven approach, and want an ‘old-school’ fantasy game, this may be your best bet. That’s not a knock on RuneQuest; there’s a reason it keeps getting revised and keeps getting played. But when RuneQuest is twice the length of Dragonbane and entirely wrapped up in its own setting and reason for being, Glorantha, it’s not going to be an OSR stand-in even if the base game is very old-school. Ducks aside, Dragonbane can absolutely do the ‘old-school gaming’ thing without added complexity.

If you go onto Free League’s Swedish storefront, you’ll see that Drakar och Demoner is still the title of the game. In that way, of course, Dragonbane makes sense. This is the original Swedish fantasy RPG, updated for a modern audience in the same way that D&D has been since 2000. And ultimately, Free League wants to be a core influence in the Swedish gaming scene; it’s one of the reasons they’re so heavily invested in other Swedish properties like Mork Borg and Symbaroum. At the same time, English translation helps keep the game alive; one of the only Free League games to go out of print, Svavelwinter, was either never available in English or only available in English in a very limited release. In that way, at least, asking these questions about where it fits in the American RPG landscape may be missing the point.

That said, it does fit. Dragonbane may be just another fantasy game in content, but the rules are tight and well-tuned towards old-school style gaming, despite not having too much in common with D&D. The Rules book is less than 120 pages, and unless you really want some premade content, that’s all you need. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on Drakar och Demoner, and exactly how the new edition improves over the old one (or not, as the case may be). I’m only ⅛ Swedish, after all. But, though I’m not the core audience for this game, I am a person who’s looking for more solid old-school fantasy games that aren’t D&D. Because of that, I’m glad we got this translation.

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