Mark:

Welcome to RPG Blokes. Today’s episode is something special for us, because we’re talking about one of the games that shaped our early years, and that we still continue to play today, Dragon Warriors. You may have heard us mention it once or twice. We started playing it when it first came out about 40 years ago, and it’s largely the same now as back then. Now, that’s good value for money. And also, Stephen and myself, we introduced our children to the game, the hobby using Dragon Warriors, helped by John here, who DM’d for a good three or four years, wasn’t it, John?

Jon:

I think.

Mark:

Five.

Jon:

Yep.

Mark:

Yep. We’re in a debt, mate.

Jon:

I had hair, and it wasn’t all gray, but when I started.

Mark:

And Barry, our newest member, has a good go at this system, haven’t you, Barry? You’ve played two campaigns over the years?

Barry:

Yeah, one not particularly long campaign. One was really short and one medium campaign, but yes, and I can remember every detail flawlessly.

Mark:

Okay. And Stephen, we grew up together with the game and we bought it together as kids in that bookshop.

Stephen:

Yeah, it was great playing those games.

Mark:

Right, for today’s episode, we’re particularly excited. And we’re joined by the man that made all that possible, Dave Morris, co-creator of Dragon Warriors and one of the most influential British games designers of the 1980s and beyond. Hi, Dave. Great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Dave:

Hi. Great to be on. Thanks for having me.

Mark:

It’s an honour. Yeah, you’ve got three fanboys here and one murder hobo.

Dave:

Well, you don’t want anything like Trump’s cabinet where they’re all yes men.

Barry:

Yeah, exactly that. There’s a man after my own heart like it.

Mark:

So, Dave, could you ever imagine that 40 years on, you’d still be talking about Dragon Warriors like this?

Dave:

You know, at that age, you don’t even think about 40 years on, do you? No, I mean, I’m amazed, really. Until sort of when was it? About 2005, you know, I thought Dragon Warriors had been a thing. People would often mention it. And a lot of my gaming friends had started with it. But it was only when James Wallace came along and said, do you want to bring it back? But it sort of struck me that there were still even any fans out there. So, yeah, pretty amazing.

Mark:

We were there. yeah we were still playing through for all of the years my.

Jon:

Books are almost falling apart held together mostly with tape and prayers.

Mark:

So today just to give you an idea of what we’re going to be talking about it’d be great to talk about the history of dragon warriors so that’s the real heart and soul of it and then talk about where it is now and how you can get involved it’s still a live system still plenty of things being developed for it so um point you in the right direction for that and then look at the future of dragon warriors there are plans for a new system based in the same world that you’re in the process of writing. The idea for a fully-fledged RPG being sold in the average bookshop, WH Smiths, how did you get away with it? Sounds like a crazy thing to have achieved even now.

Dave:

Really, the trailblazing had been done by Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson by getting game books into Smiths. I’d actually been talking to, because I used to do a lot of articles in White Dwarf under my own name and various pseudonyms, and I’d been thinking of putting a role-playing game, serializing a role-playing game in White Dwarf because of the success. I’d done a series called Dealing with Demons. People liked it. I said, maybe we should do a role-playing game. Then I realized I don’t have to put it in the magazine. I could actually get it into bookshops because publishers were suddenly willing to talk about these nerdy things that they’d never been interested in before, but they all thought they’d be missing out if they didn’t do it. And I kind of, I knew it wasn’t, a game book, which is what they were all looking for. But I realized they also didn’t know what game books really were, so I could kind of smuggle it past them.

Mark:

That’s what it felt like at the time. So people didn’t really know what they were getting. Your publishers didn’t know what they were getting, a fully-fledged RPG.

Dave:

Yeah, exactly. And also because all the role-playing games at the time, I mean, RuneQuest or Dungeons and Dragons, they’re pretty expensive. You bought them in a box and And you had to go to a hobby shop to get them. And I wanted something we could serialize so people could buy it with their pocket money, was the idea. Going to Smith’s and two months later, there’d be a new one. And we’d build the game. Obviously, there are some problems with having to release it in books like that, because I’d have to think, well, we can’t do stealth and assassins until I get to book four or whatever. So we’d had to tease it out in that way. On the other hand it meant it wasn’t an impossible price even when you got all six books they weren’t you know compared to dnd it was a lot cheaper so that was the thinking behind it.

Stephen:

Yeah we went into a local bookshop to look for the fighting fantasies but then we saw the dragon warriors, on the shelf we thought what was this it looks a little bit of a crossover between the play by numbers and a role-playing game so we picked it up yeah really enjoyed what we saw yeah.

Mark:

And it became a gateway system to go onto dungeons and dragons although it wasn’t for us because we’d already made that leap and were playing D&D at the time when we saw it. Did you find that happened, Dave, with a lot of people?

Dave:

I certainly thought when game books became a fad, I mean, they were a big craze in Britain, but Europe as well at the time. And I was thinking, I imagined most of those people would move to role-playing. And actually, that’s not true. I think 90% of game bookers never role-played. Either they didn’t have any friends who wanted to do it or they just weren’t interested in role-playing but to me it was all game books were a gateway to role-playing some people would come to me years later and say we still play in legend but we use our own preferred system whether it’s gurps or rune quest or whatever and i thought that’s fine it’s it got them into role-playing that’s the key thing and even better if they still use the world when.

Track 7:

I was reffing for the sprog i dived over a lot into the the blood sword books so ended up doing a mishmash of.

Dave:

Battles and.

Track 7:

Expanded on that all the little snippets of world building that you padded it up it’s lovely.

Barry:

Obviously i know um less about this system than any of these guys and you know my ignorance is going to shine through which.

Track 7:

I suppose more of a comment than a question.

Barry:

I mean i remember buying the player’s handbook and when i bought it i was surprised to find that it was like a pay what you can afford scheme and with you saying that you know that it was important that it came out in when you first released it in it increments so it was affordable.

Dave:

Well i mean i more fondly remember the little paperbacks, I mean, it looks gorgeous in its big, glossy, hardback version, but that’s for fans, as it were. But the original was just, I wanted any kid who just went in there and, like you say, looking for fighting fantasy, would find a paperback and think, I can just take this home and start playing. So I think that it lives in a different niche now from where it was originally.

Mark:

So when you were trying to tempt people into it from the beginning, people giving it a go, it does have a lot of similarities with Dungeons & Dragons, and particularly the dice set. That’s what you had in D&D, and that appealed to us at the time. Although I heard you say once that that wasn’t exactly what you would have done in hindsight. That wasn’t the best idea, considering most people didn’t have those dice, particularly those that were shopping in the kind of bookshops and buying the sort of games that you were trying to appeal to.

Dave:

So that’s one big regret that I used all the polyhedral dice because Oliver Johnson, my co-author, he said, can you just not make it D6? Because everybody will have those. And I said, oh, I can’t really do the, I lazily said, I can’t really do the statistical distribution as easily with just D6. And he was dead right. The whole point was to make it very accessible. You know, considering that I’d said, you don’t have to go into a hobby store to buy it. It’s a bit crazy to then send them to a hobby store to get the dice. So I do regret not just, you know, trying a bit harder to come up with a more streamlined system.

Track 7:

And we’re here to tell you that I do not regret that any longer because…

Barry:

Well, yeah, there are more than a couple of die-scorblins here, aren’t there?

Track 7:

Do you know what I mean? So the setting, yeah, going really just so we can describe the system well to people that might want to come and give it a go.

Jon:

Well, the setting is more fairy-based, like King Arthur and the lands of Fae. And sort of bleeding over into the real gritty world, I think, rather than the high fantasy of D&D or the totally grim and perilous of Warhammer.

Dave:

Well, kind of early 70s or mid-70s, you’d got D&D and then chivalry and sorcery came along. And chivalry and sorcery was very heavily medieval, in a very detailed, almost like a history textbook, and also a very slow game to play. But I appreciated they were trying to do something a bit more authentic feeling, where D&D really felt to me like it was more like the Wild West. I mean, they were supposed to be based on things like Tolkien, but it didn’t feel that way. And I’d always been interested in the darker side, you know, the kind of folk horror. And I suppose naturally coming from Britain or Europe. Flavor of a kind of grittier and less superheroic kind of fantasy was just a natural direction to take. I’ve heard, I haven’t played it, that the Schwarzer Auge, the German game, has a very similar aesthetic. So I think it’s just the difference between a European approach and an American approach. Having said that, plenty of Americans have told me they’ve enjoyed playing Dragon Warriors, so it’s not exclusively a European taste.

Track 7:

A little bit about the system itself as well. You made the choice just to have human PCs, although I think, John, you know a bit more about the races. I think you could play a race up to a certain level, couldn’t you initially? Well, yeah, half things were limited to… I think third. They did have elves. Elves and dwarves were the ones listed as possible. I remember having an elf, actually, and not being resurrected. Is that true, or did Mark just stitch me up? Yeah, because it’s spirits, not souls. Okay. They are fae.

Dave:

Because I wanted things like elves and dwarves and goblins to be strange and exotic and mysterious. And as soon as you say, like the D&D approach, they’re really just another race that you can play. You have to create something else to be the mysterious, weird thing. So my preference would be to not have any non-human player characters at all. But again, Oliver was saying, well, you’ve got to at least allow the possibility because some people will come to it having read Lord of the Rings, for example, and they’ll want to be able to play the Fellowship. So I sort of reluctantly included the rules for that while I think making it pretty clear I didn’t support them myself.

Track 7:

No, it fits. It’s the elves were this distant, far away, fae race at their own realm and stuff like that. So never really thought of it like that? It’s one of, I’ve never thought about it until I heard it. And now I’m hearing, I’m comparing my experiences in other games. And it’s a really valid choice because it’s like sometimes when you’re in a D&D adventure and your DM is describing this weird and wonderful person in front of you, like I’m traveling with a Dragonborn, mate. I’ve seen much weirder shit today.

Dave:

Yeah.

Track 7:

Yeah. So like the real world, the differences would be cultural.

Dave:

Remember one of my players had joined, this must have been sometime in the 90s and after we’d played for about a year. He said, it’s only just occurred to me that all the really nasty opponents are humans. They’ve encountered Faze, but there are so many ways for human beings to be absolute evil bastards that I don’t think you need to necessarily delve into goblins and the like for the real big bads of the campaign.

Track 7:

Dave is definitely talking my kind of language. I mean, that’s just the statement of fact, isn’t it? People are dicks.

Dave:

You don’t.

Track 7:

Need all these Gemihumans getting in the way.

Dave:

Feels more personal I mean I’ve had players Who have Talked about murder hobos Who’ve become Really homicidally Dedicated to taking out The NPC adversaries But Those are Rivals at court You know Other Human NPCs When they’re opposed by, elves or whatever it’s kind of like it can be frightening to them but it’s not personal because they know that’s just how the fays tend to behave it’s when another human being does it that you really bear a grudge so it just feels more kind of dramatic i think to go that way and.

Track 7:

Alignment was something that you didn’t include i don’t think people are so.

Dave:

Used to.

Track 7:

Having alignment in modern games so it’s quite a modern system in that respect steven it was quite integral to of D&D early days, wasn’t it?

Dave:

It was, yeah. I assumed that Gygax was thinking of Moorcock, you know, Elric and Coram, and they had a lot of stuff with lore and chaos there. But even in those universes, the average person wasn’t aware of that. I mean, Elric was aware, because he was a sorcerer, warrior, you know, that he would align himself with the Arioch and the Lords of Chaos. But it just felt to me like you’ve already got a lot to tell players you know here’s this world and this is the setup and this is the local lord and this is what’s going on and it seemed to me that trying to explain to them something like there’s also good and evil law and chaos just seemed like who thinks that way you know i don’t i don’t go down the street thinking i’m lawful good i mean my friends probably wouldn’t call me lawful good anyway but you know it’s it’s not how people think so i i could never see the point of including that.

Track 7:

Yeah it makes for better stories i think you can’t have someone just spamming the detect evil button and uh and if you’ve got someone who play like an mpc who plays upright righteous and up front but behind closed doors they’re an absolute bastard that makes it much more tricky to confront them yeah.

Dave:

Yeah also people are people are complicated you could have somebody who looks like they’re really nice and then you suddenly discover that they’re really horrible in one particular way, And it’s a bit of a shock, but, you know, I don’t want to be told by the GM, oh, you’re not role-playing, because you think, yeah, but that’s just, that’s who the character is. Nice in many ways, but maybe they’re a sadist or something, but it’s, they can be kind to cats, you know. Even Hitler must have had his good side. I mean, he could just hit it well.

Track 7:

I was just wanting to say, actually, I agree, and this is something that’s come up in the podcast when I talk about alignment, because I hate the idea of, like, I’ve made a decision at the beginning of the campaign. And really, I don’t know where that character’s going and what their experience is going to be. And alignment, like you say, in the real world, isn’t a fixed point. It was when Dave created this, alignment was the thing. It was the thing. Yeah. I don’t remember missing it when I played it. I don’t, it was probably more liberating to me thinking about, you know, I can just play this character how I want to play it and not worry about, you know, not to be too projectable. So I don’t. Yeah. There’s a strong sense of good and evil, but it was. Yeah. I guess good and evil was still involved in the whole storytelling, isn’t it? But, you know, you had returning crusaders and some of those were right, evil bastards. But they took the, it wasn’t a cross, was it? The Gatineides symbol.

Dave:

No, that’s an interesting one because he was impaled, not crucified. But as Barry was saying, also, you want to develop your character as you play. You want to see where the character is going to go. And sometimes that will mean they reform if they were a bit nasty to start with. Or somebody sets off on the Crusades thinking, I’m a great idealist and fast forward three years and they’re hanging somebody upside down over a fire and they’ve gone completely berserk fanatic.

Track 7:

I do love the villain arc or redemption arc. So the other thing I wanted to touch on here, talking about the system itself, D&D, I don’t know, Dave, if you’ve played the latest edition of it much, but it’s for softies, it just really has no danger to it.

Dave:

If a character gets killed, you’re going to feel that’s kind of a fail. Well, it’s certainly a fail if the whole party does. At the same time, you always want that sense of danger. I mean, this is something every role-playing game has to deal with in some way. I certainly feel that with Dragon Warrior’s adventures or any adventure set in legend, there’s nothing wrong with a downbeat ending. Even if the players survive, they’ll often be cheated or disappointed in some way. They can have a conflicted victory rather than a superheroic victory. But I have noticed that, I mean, friends of mine, there’s a friend of mine who’s running the Bloodsword books as a campaign for his son and his son’s friends. And he said, but they’re used to D&D 5E, which is basically unlosable. So the idea that there could be threat where they might lose their character and have to start again, it’s kind of new for them, but I think they’re coping with it. I mean, they just except that sometimes you might get killed and you’ve got to start a new guy or it’s very different i think but i don’t know if if younger players find that approach in dnd a bit patronizing i certainly would have done at their age i would have i would have had nothing to do with anything that was letting me off too lightly i want to feel like it’s a real hard struggle and then you get a hard one victory and you feel you deserve it.

Track 7:

That’s what dragon warriors does present i think now to.

Dave:

The modern.

Track 7:

Player if they’re going to shift across and try something new then yeah i think the difficulty level isn’t extreme you don’t need to be too frightened about.

Dave:

Losing too.

Track 7:

Many characters there’s ways of coming back to life aren’t there too john there’s a couple the elixivitis the probably the most common one and then there was the anchor of osiris which was like the, cleanest i think well you lose stats so yeah it you know represented the danger of, Yeah, you didn’t want to die, let’s be honest. Well, you get your body looted within two minutes. Well, yeah. You haven’t hit the floor before you’re stripped down. We love the difficulty level of it in modern context, actually. I think it’s a really good balance. And we’ve done it to our children too. And they’ve grown up loving the hobby, haven’t they? Yeah, it’s been a great system for the younger player.

Dave:

It’s also good that people learn that there are a whole range of systems and they can pick their favorite because I don’t know if you’ve discussed this, but I’ve often heard people talk about if you come to D&D, there can be a sense there’s nothing else out there. And then people get fed up with D&D and they give up. But actually, there’s loads of other things. Even if you want to stay in that general danger level, you’ve got GURPS and RuneQuest, and then you could move it to the Powered by the Apocalypse games or Blades in the Dark, or you could go off do Call of Cthulhu. People should just get used to the idea, try everything, and then they’ll settle on what they really like. One of my players today, when I first met him, the first thing he said to me was, my group use GURPS, but we play in Legend. And I liked that because it was, you know, he was showing the willingness to mix and match, you know, homebrew it.

Track 7:

You were working at White Dwarf and writing for White Dwarf then before Dragon Warriors was released. Because one of the things that gave it a lot of credibility at the time, because we were already in an AD&D society and we were quite young. So when we brought along Dragon Warriors, the books, a lot of the old timers there wouldn’t take a look at it. They weren’t interested. But it then, it was in White Wolf. And that really gave it a lot of credibility at the time. I think one of the covers was the first cover of the first book, wasn’t it, Dave, I think?

Dave:

Yeah. Obviously, I’d gone off to write Dragon Warriors and some game books. So I wasn’t coming back to do articles. So I kind of had to really push, for old time’s sake, give me a cover and a scenario.

Track 7:

Okay.

Dave:

And the cover took a bit of arm twisting to get them to go, yeah, okay, well, we’ll stick that on the front.

Track 7:

So you brokered that deal yourself. The publisher didn’t get involved. That’s great work.

Dave:

I think I said to Ian Livingston, well, the advantage is you’ll get the cover for free because we paid Alan Craddock to do it. And also I did the scenario probably for free. So I think that was probably the main reason they were happy to do that. And I liked that was the box of old bones. And I liked doing that because I thought this is very much a flagship idea of how a Dragon and Warriors Adventure looks in contrast to D&D or other things. So it was a good way to show what we were trying to do.

Track 7:

Yeah brilliant showcase and as i say it gave a lot of credibility to the game and then suddenly you’d suggest it within our community and people were more than willing to give it a go, if i can gushy fangirl that was bloody brilliant it’s so expandable as well it’s one one of the go to setting pieces that i’ve used really good introduced like a counter group to the play So effectively another role play that you can play. You could be the bad guys doing the swipe. There’s so many different ways of approaching it. But also the Abbey was detailed enough. It’s a good place, like focal point for characters of certain types to go to. And yeah. That’s been reprinted, hasn’t it, Dave? I think that’s within the new PDFs they put it into.

Dave:

Yes. I don’t know where it’s appeared again, but it has. And it just occurred to me that people who like heist games could use one of those systems to run that heist, in fact, to get the relic.

Track 7:

Yeah, that’s it. Just to tidy up the history really here, when you look back at the 80s and the impact that it had, obviously it had a massive impact on us and, you know, life-changing in many respects for the hobby in general from our point of view. But how did it do, did you find at the time, were you pleased with the results? It was a mad thing, like I say, like we started, it’s crazy to have walked in and then alongside you buying informancy books to find a Capone of Fire Day real proper role-playing game. It must have taken a lot of people by surprise at the time. How did it do?

Dave:

It did pretty well. Originally, people at Transworld, the publishers, were very keen, and even the sales reps, who were typically not bothered about the content, became players because they’d get me to go in in the evening and all the sales reps would be playing it. So we were talking about doing 12 books, which I was definitely up for. That’s what I really wanted to do but we had a few distribution hiccups which are just those flukes for one thing the distributors thought they had the first three books and they thought it didn’t you wouldn’t need all three which really to play everything you know to magic and everything you need all three, so they sent all the copies of book one to the south all the copies of book two i think to the north and all the copies of book three to scotland and then they had people in scotland going it’s just scenarios, though, you know, and oh, yeah, okay, we messed up. So they did kind of redistribute a bit. And then, A lot of books at the time depended on foreign sales, and particularly in France, where the role-playing and game book craze was just as big as it was here. And Gallimard was the big French publisher, and they came and made us a really good offer for the French translation rights. But the publisher’s foreign rights person said, oh, I think I can get a better deal with this tiny new publisher. And six months later, that fell through. They had to go back to Gallimard. But by now, Gallimard’s offer had dropped, and they didn’t sell as many there. So it meant we’d done pretty well to start with. But by the time we got to book six, they weren’t going to go ahead and do seven to 12, which was a great shame.

Track 7:

That was a shame.

Dave:

Yeah.

Track 7:

That would have been great, wouldn’t it? Yeah. It was sad to see that. But those seven to 12, you must be asked this a few times. Book seven to 12, do they exist?

Dave:

Yes, some of the stuff. Robert Dale, who contributed a scenario in book two, had done a complete town, Brimstone, and a campaign that went with it. It would have been almost the complete book seven, probably. And that did appear… In a very abbreviated form. I don’t know, 10 years later, there was a magazine started up called Red Giant. Yeah. Actually, they asked me and Jamie Thompson to be the editors. And the first thing we said was, not if you’re going to call it Red Giant. They published a bit of Robert’s Brimstone campaign. It exists. And I think Robert’s recently revised it. And if there was much publishing momentum, I’m sure it would appear. Every so often, Serpent King Games, who now publish the new edition do talk about it, but it’s a bit like controlled fusion. It’s been talked about for decades, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

Track 7:

The Cadaver Draconis, the online resource that was before…

Dave:

Cobbry and Forest.

Track 7:

Yeah. They did a lot of expansions on professions. I was wondering if that was where a lot of your 7 to 12 had ended up.

Dave:

No, I hadn’t really. I think we’d thought a bit more about some of the religious orders. A lot of the stuff that I’d ended up developing background material in Bloodsword, and I guess some of that would have come in. Oliver and I had done what was called Quest World in the early 80s for Games Workshop, and that fell through. So we were thinking about repurposing that for what lies beyond the Western Ocean, because there’s a big tradition in Anglo-Saxon and Celtic myth of the sea voyage with a whole kind of odyssey series of adventures. And so we were going to maybe develop that a bit more. But because that’s a tradition in those old tales, we thought we’d take our old Questworld material and repurpose that as the area beyond the mysterious Western Ocean, which we’d explored in our own campaigns, but only to find the edge of the world. And I thought, We ought to put something there, but there’s not like a box is full of books 7 to 12 material waiting to happen. Or I’d have put them out myself by now, but I’m hoping Brimstone will come along.

Track 7:

We move on to now talking about the modern day Dragon Warriors. Well, I know this reprint happened in the early noughties. You were closely involved with that, Dave? Was that an intention or was it you hinted at that they involved you, but it was somebody else’s idea?

Dave:

It was one of those kind of semi-incestuous kind of publishing things in that James Wallace, who I was best man for, said, I could bring Dragon Warriors back and he kind of teamed up with Mongoose, but I think Mongoose only did the printing. James did all of the editing and typesetting and brought the team together to do it. That was Magnum Opus Press. I mean, it’s a very nice, lavish production, but that puts a lot of burden on the publisher because he’s got to sell a lot to sustain it. So after a while, he passed the license over to Serpent King Games, who basically are a little company that started out of some of his team, his creative team. So I was kind of peripherally involved. I think they asked if I had an idea for a session zero type of adventure. And I gave some notes to Fraser Payne, who wrote the scenario in the second edition book. But beyond that, yeah, I kind of let them get on with it because I was working at Elixir Studios at the time. And basically, it was 24-7 when you included commuting. So I didn’t have the time to get involved.

Track 7:

Well, you must be pleased with what they’ve done.

Dave:

Oh, yeah.

Track 7:

Yeah, we’d have been playing it anyway. But as far as being able to convince or to tell people, give this a go, it’s that addition that really puts it on the map.

Dave:

Yeah.

Track 7:

But the books one to six that we’ve discussed have gone into the core rulebook. And then, well, there must be at least a dozen additional supplements, the best three. And the whole thing is just now so complete.

Dave:

Yes. And it’s much better organized because I had to serialize it. And as I say, that meant you didn’t get stealth and perception rules until book four. And James completely re-edited it into a consistent single book. And then I really liked the way he took the scenarios and grouped them together. So you have kind of thematically grouped adventures, sleeping gods and things like that. Yeah. And also- really nice artwork that went with it. John Hodgson’s artwork seems to me to be perfect for Legend. Yeah, it’s a very nice production.

Track 7:

So yeah, that was very, very much my experience of it, even though I’ve only played a couple of campaigns. When I got the player’s handbook and sat down with the other players at the table, from a production values point of view, it was indistinguishable from any of the big name games that I’ve been playing. It looked the part and you’re right, the artwork is gorgeous.

Dave:

Yeah.

Track 7:

Barry, you didn’t really know that you had the history. I didn’t know I had any of this history. I just, I mean, genuinely, and I mean this as a compliment, I just thought I was playing something else that was a bit like D&D. And it was… Like i say from production values and from quality it was it was on a par and what we think about the biggest strength the system we love it it’s lightweight don’t get me wrong we’re a big fan of the system but the adventures really are just just like yeah this is what you’ve got to do you’ve got to you’ve got to run those scenarios and and just play them all there’s not there’s not a bad one amongst them and the order is quite obvious because the levels are set quite clearly and you’ve got a year 18 months worth of weekly gameplay they’re just playing through everything that’s written within those books. And in five years, John will have you doing it. Just brilliant scenarios. When I started playing them, that’s what separated it from A Dozen Dragons for me. I felt like I was being placed in a story. That makes sense.

Dave:

I tried to make the adventures into a campaign. So you had this natural, almost season by season, not that I really typically like to talk about campaigns in those terms, but the idea that you’d be starting off and then you’d be working for Baron Aldred for a while. But there’s a point where you fall out with him to some extent, and then you’re into the next phase and you’re getting more independence. Because I was thinking by this stage, these were newbies a year ago, but they’re now experienced players and it’s time for them to be a bit more independent. So previously they’d had the Baron as their NPC guide. And I thought we can move them on a stage now. The idea, I guess I was thinking was people will play these adventures and then they’ll see how a campaign should work and they’ll take it from there.

Track 7:

We played through them all more than once. Yeah, I remember the first one in the very first book was quite like, I died so many times in that and then they sort of developed from there. Yeah. The first one is, yeah, it does feel as if it’s quite a basic thing. But then you’ve got this character Valendar at the end and if you play the campaign right or if you want him to have that effect, he has a presence right by the way through.

Dave:

Because of.

Track 7:

The deals you make with this person that’s right you get involved in that sort of story and the ongoing arc of it that’s what i felt.

Dave:

At the time yeah we also thought you know in those days there were a lot of dungeons and so i was hoping that i thought we’ve got to put the dungeons in but i was hoping that players would notice that there was more fun to be had in the bit that wasn’t the dungeon like you know in that adventure you meet the the crazy parson who wants to go off into the depths of the fairy wood and follow a spider web trail by moonlight or something. And I thought, hopefully, when they’ve played a few adventures, they’ll think we could dispense with the dungeon part and just have those kind of things happening.

Track 7:

Well, it certainly worked with me, because that’s pretty much what I was playing. I guess up to then, then that was the first experience I had of more of an open-world kind of scenario. So thanks. Yeah, Dragon Wars is true. Up until that point, B&D had been… Yeah, it was monsters waiting in a room with no ecology and a handful of silver, whatever each. That was it. Then you had the so-called bad guys like Gardner Jack in the second book. And you gave enough history and background there i’ve often had him as a good guy, and it changes the flavor of what happens after that there’s so much you can do because, if you take it as again the the fae background and the traditional stuff rather than the warhammer and dnd goblins the fact that these a goblin in dragon warriors is like a fae trickster sprite, changes how you view certain creatures. You can’t just go by name. I think some of your bad guys have sometimes looked a little bit overpowered to me. I tell you, there’s a few TPKs in the making there, but people have got the right choice. It’s never an organ conclusion that that is the combat that needs to happen, I think.

Dave:

Yes, sometimes it’s don’t have the fight in that case, yeah.

Track 7:

Have them too scared to. I had the Boggart in one of, I won’t mention which one in case it ends up as a spoiler for players, but… Just having not describing the abilities or the spells like what they are and just saying the effect i had a party actually surrender because they couldn’t see what was happening it was like constant little guerrilla warfare and it worked it was brilliant i mean if they’d just gone charging in they’d have absolutely rinsed them and it would have been another combat encounter instead of one where they constantly complain, I robbed them blind because they gave up. It’s brilliant. The good thing about the Dragon Warriors bad guys, it’s really good to get into the character of them. They’re not just throwaway stat blocks. There’s a story and you can really expand on everything. It’s so good. That’s what I want from villains. I want my villains to be as interesting as the people that are chasing them down. So we heartily recommend it, of course, to our listeners. And if you do come across and give the system a go, this will happen for you. You’ll get this as soon as you start playing it. It’s very, very accessible. The system being fairly lightweight too, but the way the adventures are structured, as we’ve just discussed, and they draw you through into the campaign from a very basic start, you do not need to be concerned really about sort of adapting to the system. I think it’s perfect or giving something completely different a go and trying something independent and. Talking about the current state of the system, you can buy these as PDFs, can’t you? And this is still print-on-demand, Barry. You bought the book, didn’t you? When did I buy it? So it was probably three or four years ago now. But yeah, I bought a physical copy. It was print to order. And it was pay what you can afford, which was really refreshing for me.

Dave:

Yeah, I think they still do that. And also, anyone going to drive through, there’s also the casket, all the stuff that Red Ruin Publishing do. It’s just fantastic they keep coming up with all sorts of new magic items and new background stuff and stories adventures there’s a huge amount of material there that they’re just doing for the love of it really and uh it’s it’s top notch and.

Track 7:

It’s at a reasonable pace there’s not you’re.

Dave:

Not yeah glutting.

Track 7:

Uh the world with stuff that wasn’t there before it yeah yeah nice so red ruined yeah just to discuss them they’re a fan-based organization aren’t they led by simon barnes and we need to thank simon actually for brokering our interview with you today thanks simon for getting us in touch he’s um yeah he’s doing a great job there and yeah and the community as a whole have come together as a strong discord channel yeah the casket of phase which is like an old school kind of fanzine that’s out every so often i think there were an episode i think they’ve got a print option as well now on drive through they.

Dave:

Do yes yeah and car seat of phase was a an item from that scenario a box of old bones in fact so it’s it’s nice to see it the name being used in that context.

Track 7:

And there’s an open license now is there to this yeah.

Dave:

The guys who run serpent king games don’t really have the time and there are there’s so much talent out there i mean i have to say i think people who’ve learned their role playing from Dragon Warriors often end up being extremely imaginative. So there’s so much great work being done all around the world as well, Australia, as well as here in Britain and so on. So it’s giving them a forum to actually release that stuff and make a little bit of money to encourage them to do some more.

Track 7:

Yeah, it’s very much a live system. The community is there. It’s a very welcoming community. We’ve gone to the Day of Legends. I saw you there, Dave, actually. It’s a yearly convention run by Red Ruin. It’s been great. 40, 50 of us in a London pub playing one shots. There’s another one of those online, but I think by the time this podcast comes out, I think the Day of Legends online winter is going to be done within the notes. I’ll add the date for the next Day of Legends as well. Is that the first convention that Dragon Warriors has had?

Dave:

Yeah, I think the first kind of dedicated to Dragon Warriors. Went to the first one just to say hello, because some of my players had gone along, and I was meeting them afterwards anyway. And then the second time, Oliver Johnson came as well, and we actually joined in a game. That was a lot of fun.

Track 7:

That’s right. Remember, you almost signed up to my game, but Simon got you.

Dave:

Yeah, we were too slow.

Track 7:

So yeah, looking at where you would get involved with it now, Day of Legends, the Discord channel, the fan material, there’s just so much going on with the system but get the core rules it’s one book that’ll get you started that’s got everything you need yeah great also i’m thinking if you wanted to get into the dragon war as well there are there are many other books that you could also buy you’ve got the bloodsword book i see the news particularly fond of those those a lot back in the day yeah absolutely loved them yeah the game books weren’t they so so what was the process was that then dave was that something that was in the pipeline alongside Dragonborn?

Dave:

I was doing a lot of game books and I thought I’d rather stick with the world that I’ve created than have to come up with something else. So it was a different publisher, but I went along and when we came up with the idea of the selling point, I suppose, of, Bloodsword was that it was going to be multiplayer. So logically, it seemed to me this is another way to get people from game books to role-playing. So it made sense that I would use the Dragon Warriors world. Although I often say I kind of think of the Bloodsword books as the Saturday morning cartoon version, perhaps, and the Dragon Warriors books are just slightly more, there’d be the live action version. So just because most game book readers were just a little bit younger. So I thought of it slightly differently, but it’s a bit more high fantasy. Recently, it was turned into a 5e campaign. So there’s a book you can buy now that Tambu in Italy did, which is the whole Bloodsword campaign done as a 5e thing. I haven’t played it through. I played one session, but I’ve got some friends who are playing it. And they said, It’s not the same legend as they’re used to from the Bloodsword books or from Dragon Warriors, but it’s a kind of 5e variant, you know, a multiverse alternative.

Track 7:

Yeah, they got rid of Long West curing everything and there’s nice bits in it.

Dave:

Yes, they’ve made the characters not so super powered and it’s a bit less forgiving perhaps than 5e would normally be.

Track 7:

Am I the only person that dies in Dungeons and Dragons? What’s going on? And also, uh, Dave, the Golden Dragon games books, I noticed you’ve reprinted those and so they were about online too. They’re very much in the flavor of Dragonwood. I think, was it three of them that were based in legend?

Dave:

Well, you see, that’s an interesting one, because I don’t really think of them as based in Legend, but I can see why people would think this, because I used Wistron Wood in the first one, which is definitely, it’s the western part of Jewel Spider in Dragon Warriors. And then Akhtan is mentioned in, I think, the third one, and that’s mentioned also on the map of Legend. So, I don’t think they’re canonically part of Legend.

Track 7:

And uh so they’re all available now also red ruin as we’ve mentioned that do a hell of a lot of solo adventures so you’ve got a way of getting into the system learning about the world by yourself before you’ve got your own gaming group together to give it a go with somebody else i mean there’s plenty of opportunities to to dive into this i recommend you check check those out too john you had a question didn’t you about is there going to be a dragon warriors movie at all and or is there one or two that you would consider are really close to it like maybe big inspirations oh.

Dave:

That’s interesting i mean i don’t know about inspirations i did when i saw the black death i thought now that’s pretty close to dragon warriors even the way they’ve got magic working in a very ambiguous and slightly unpleasant way is quite clever. So that’s probably the nearest, I think, to a movie that I’ve seen since doing the book. So I thought, yeah, that fits.

Track 7:

They were looking for a cure, and it was an isolated village in the marshes.

Dave:

Yes, that’s the last Sean Bean in it. Also, I guess pilgrimage, if you’ve seen that with Tom Holland, it’s a little bit in the same vein. They’re having to take a relic across Ireland to deliver to the Pope’s men. And the relic is the whole reason that the monastery really survives at all. So it’s basically destroying their future livelihood by having to deliver it. But they’re trying to, and then somebody else is trying to steal it. So that’s got a little bit of a Dragon Warriors vibe going on.

Track 7:

I think, the Jewel Spider. Oh, yes. So the last thing we would like to speak to you about is the Jewel Spider. So we know that that’s been in development for some time, and it’s going to be within the same world, the Land of Legends, but a different approach to how you play within that world. Is there anything you’d like to tell us about that?

Dave:

And it’s got bigger and bigger over the time I’ve been working. It is the problem. I don’t want it to be like 300 pages, but that’s what it’s looking like at the moment when I’m trying to do a bit of a layout. It’s legend again. I was saying before, if Bloodsword was the Saturday morning cartoon show and Dragon Warriors was the network show, this would be the streaming show with all the blood and gore and nastiness turned up to 11, perhaps. Not that I’m trying to make it shocking, But it’s just a kind of very authentically medieval world. I’ve got a system which is much more pared back than Dragon Warriors. It’s not really a replacement either. It’s because people have said, is this Dragon Warriors 2? And I said, well, no, if you want lots of tactical gaming, then Dragon Warriors is still the one I’d use. But this is for… People who don’t really want to do a lot of dice rolling and they mostly want it to be the talk and improv and closer to tabletop LARPing, that sort of approach. So it’s a system that’s designed to get out of the way of the role playing.

Track 7:

Will you be writing new scenarios for it or encouraging people to use this system to revisit some of the stuff?

Dave:

I have done a few scenarios on my Patreon that I probably won’t include in the book because, as I say, I’m trying to cut it back from 300 pages, not make it 350. But those give you a flavor for the different kind of scenario that it would be. It’s the nearest of all the Dragon Warriors scenarios to a Jewel Spider scenario would be a box of old bones, I think. If you downplayed the tactical battle side and upped the having to use your wits and guile and so forth, that would be the nearest. The system itself… The basic system is only about the first 20 pages, but then the magic system is currently huge and just keeps expanding because I’ve tried to build in all of the different rules of magic so that you can, once you know a particular magical phylum and mastery, you can pretty much improvise what you specifically want the spell to do. But then you drill down to how difficult is that result to actually get that’s taken up quite a big chunk because every time i describe a spell i also give loads of examples for how it would work and anyway i’ve got all the artwork which is done by inigo hartas who’s the son of leo hartas who did a lot of the original maps and some of the dragon warriors illustrations in the paperbacks, and Inigo has done these beautiful full-colour medieval-style annals, pages to start each chapter and then various fillers, which means that I’ll have to do it as a lovely full-colour hardback to do justice to the artwork.

Track 7:

Yeah, I think it’s fantastic. Yeah, we’re all looking forward to it.

Dave:

If anyone wants to kind of get a cheap sneak peek, if they come to the Patreon page for Jewel Spider, there’s quite a few scenarios and also some of the rough cuts of the rules although I’m changing the rules, a bit just currently to try and streamline them even more but the patreon backers have have had various versions in pdf so far of parts of the rules so they can get to see it there we’ll.

Track 7:

Put a link up to the.

Dave:

To your yeah yeah so.

Track 7:

That’s something to keep an eye on and again just proof that this this game has got so much more life left in it so that that’s always appealing i think especially you know to see a system that’s still live it’s still valid and still new things being creative for it a lot of us old school gamers settle back into old editions of games and, never see the light of day again and you know it’s.

Dave:

Great that you’ve.

Track 7:

Kept up with us dave with all of this and you’ve encouraged and allowed everything to progress as it.

Dave:

Well i think i always think the only risk is you know alan garner who did the weird stone of brisingerman and then something like 50 years later he did the third book in the trilogy and lots of people said oh i didn’t like the third book it was nothing like the first two and you think well you know 50 he’s 50 years older and i think well i’m 40 years older so it is going to be, different and that’s why i keep saying it’s it’s a different take on legend and hopefully people will feel it’s not intended to destroy or replace dragon warriors if that’s what they like that it won’t ruin that it will just give them some extra stuff to add brilliant.

Track 7:

But it’s been an absolute pleasure so thanks for taking the time to.

Dave:

Talk thank you thanks.

Track 7:

A lot for you.

Dave:

Thanks guys.