Welcome to Serpent King Games, the home of Dragon Warriors RPG

Dragon Warriors and Me, Part I: 1985

So, what am I doing, getting together with Gar and Jon to set up a new publishing house to publish… Dragon Warriors? Of all things? Shouldn’t I be, you know, writing for WotC by now, or at least printing Pathfinder-compatible homebrew material? Why take on the licence for a game that was out of print for 20-odd years till very recently?

The answer is going to get a bit rambling and self-indulgent, I fear, but I’ll try to keep it entertaining.

Let me take you back to 1985. I was 15 years old, and had been playing D&D for 3 years (I actually started with Gamma World, and still love post-apocalyptic settings with mutants and Ancient Technology and craziness, but that is probably another story). Mostly I played at school, with my schoolmates. Pretty much every breaktime or lunchtime we gathered and carried on the game. Usually we’d just go through whichever TSR module I’d bought from Games of Liverpool (one of the then stalwarts of the British gaming scene as a retailer, importer, distributor, and even occasional publisher, now long forgotten and long-since eclipsed by their former rivals Games Workshop). To begin with, we played the red box Basic D&D, along with Expert D&D, but it soon became apparent that there were a lot more modules available for AD&D, and, well, there was just something of a cachet to being able to say one was an “Advanced” gamer, and having those big hardback books that looked like eldritch tomes rather than kids’ stuff. Still, though, I suspect the main driving force for the switch was the need for more adventure material. Sure, we were only playing for maybe 60-90 minutes a day, but that was five days a week.

The switch didn’t sit that well with us though. Those three thick hardback grimoires did look and feel amazing, but it was no fun carting them all to school every day. Plus, well, they were a mess, frankly. I know that’s a lot of the charm to some old-school fans — the fact that there’s no one overarching rule system to the things — but it was also no fun losing any of our precious minutes while I looked up some obscure rule. It felt, even then, that we had all this… bulk, this weight, this inertia to our games, that wasn’t actually adding a proportionate amount of fun. Then there was the setting. I had the World of Greyhawk, and I suppose we used it, roughly, but D&D was its own genre, and almost its own setting, even then, and despite the more mature look of the hardbacks, it was just as goofy as Basic D&D. I mean — Owlbears? “Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, ROAARRR!” Really? Even the orcs and goblins and hobgoblins and all the rest were a bit same-y; it already had the MMORPG vibe, where it seemed like the critters were mostly there so you could kill them and take their stuff, and the bigger, scarier critters were just that — bigger scarier versions of the littler ones, so when you’d levelled up you could fight them instead of the one-hit-die versions.

Of course, I’m writing this with the benefit of at least a little hindsight. I am not sure we were quite sophisticated enough to realise quite why AD&D was kinda goofy, even though we knew it was, and I am pretty sure we didn’t care that much; goofiness was part of its charm (and still is, I suppose). So was its focus on extrinsic rewards (XP, gold, levels, magic items) rather than intrinsic ones (interactivity, fun, peak experiences, gameplay, agency, the sense of triumph, etc.), but that’s for another PhD dissertation.

What we did know was that when Dragon Warriors came along, it was better: less goofy, more elegant, and (I’m sure this was a factor, too) way more portable. And, more than just “less goofy” — it absolutely dripped with British folklore. It made me think of A Company of Wolves, and old folktales, and King Arthur, and Robin Hood. Here was a game with a strong theme, a world and setting that was not only more familiar to us, more like our own than the hodgepodge of D&D, but also paradoxically more atmospheric, more otherworldly, too, because it was immersive and believable in a way that D&D rarely achieved.

Oh, for sure, it wasn’t perfect. You could play it with just Book 1, but if you wanted to play a magician, you needed Book 2, and though Sorcerers were fun, Mystics were more interesting — and yet Mystics had this annoying random quality, where they just weren’t useful enough once they’d become psychically fatigued… I guess I figured that if I ever got to write my own version, I’d try to fix that, at least.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was a breath of fresh air compared to D&D. I felt much the same way about RuneQuest, too, but most of my school-friends didn’t, so it was Dragon Warriors we stuck with, till we ran out of adventures, around the end of Book 3 (I don’t think I even found out about Books 4-6 till years later, but that’s for Part II).

After that… dammit, could we write anything that good? I didn’t think we could. And we didn’t have time. We had to buy more adventures for AD&D instead. Till we realised we could generate an all-evil party, of Anti-Paladins and Drow, get them all up to Level 26 using the Random Dungeon Table, and treat Deities & Demigods as our adventure for a bit, going through each pantheon and killing gods. Maybe we weren’t *that* much more sophisticated than all the other D&D-playing teenagers after all.

8 responses to “Dragon Warriors and Me, Part I: 1985”

  1. Oh my gosh that brings back memories. Its so nice to find others who thought AD&D was goofy, lunchtimes playing D&D Basic, I remember it well. Crazy thing is I still have the original AD&D hardback books!

    You hit all the marks with DW, those adventures were so incredibly written full of atmosphere and otherworldliness. I remember I liked them so much I use to pillage the florid descriptions and recycle them for a multitude of scenarios for other fantasy themed games. My players never realised 🙂

    The new iteration of DW is fantastic and MO have done such a great job – I am doubly pleased that the torch seems to have been passed to another avid and passionate developer. Looking forward to great things …

  2. My experiences were similar even though I moved from the UK to NZ by the time DW came out. I remember DW feeling both simpler yet richer than D&D, a heady combination.

    I also think your memories point at the importance of quality prewritten adventures, something DW has been blessed with in its initial run and the subsequent efforts of MO.

    Any chance that Fury of the Deep will see print on demand? It deserves it.

  3. @Luke
    Luke, we’ve not made a firm decision yet on putting FotD out in some kind of print format, but it’s a cracking adventure and seems popular, so I’d love to see it happen, personally.

    And, yes, I think the game does need more adventures, in general. There’s enough in print to keep most groups (the ones not playing every day in school lunch-hours!) going for years, but for those of us who have loved the game for a couple of decades there’s clearly a high demand for new adventure material.

  4. Thanks for an inspiring blog entry!

    “Here was a game with a strong theme, a world and setting that was not only more familiar to us, more like our own than the hodgepodge of D&D, but also paradoxically more atmospheric, more otherworldly, too, because it was immersive and believable in a way that D&D rarely achieved.”

    I believe this is the aspect that sets DW apart from D&D and similar mainstream fantasy RPGs more than ever. Fantasy roleplayers first getting into the hobby will inevitably play themselves, except as a wizard or a knight. But there’s the wonder of experiencing another world through familiar eyes – one’s own.

    Some of the most representative fantasy fiction precisely features a protagonist from our world, drawn to another – e.g. Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions, or more recently, (dare I name it) Harry Potter. Because the protagnist, and we alongside him, start out on familiar premises, getting transported to the other world is all the more striking.

    There’s a set of design essays for 4th edition D&D which explicitly says that they wanted to abandon this (even more than before). They do not want ‘a medieval Europe with fantasy sparsely sprinkled on top’. As a result, the default world of current D&D is even more alien than it was before, and features exotic player races beyond those made familiar in Tolkien, from the start. Want to play a devil? Want to play a dragon? Hey, sure, why not, here you go, level 1.

    That removes the whole wonder of being sucked into another world. I once wrote a lengthy diatribe on how this caused D&D to lose so much of what it once held (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=272365&postcount=32) – as a reader summarized it, “D&D has lost the bit of soul it had.”

    I look forward to getting into Dragon Warriors (completely new terrain for me) as a way to re-immerse myself in a RPG that gets the balance and place of familiarity and otherworldiness right.

    Sorry this comment got so long, but I wanted to say that what you guys are doing with DW does, I feel, speak to a larger audience for reasons you are aware of, one of which I wanted to elaborate.

    Best,

    S.

  5. @Stefan Stefan, I do hope that you find Dragon Warriors gives you what you’re looking for. It certainly sounds like it will.

    I took a look at your other post, too. Interesting stuff. I haven’t actually picked up 4E, and in fact only bought 3E because I got some work doing d20 game design, so I may well not get 4E at all. 3E’s big advantage, for me at least, was its easy customisability, particularly with all the 3rd party d20 supplements. The core game still had those vague ties to goofy Greyhawk-ish D&D-land, but there were so many more atmospheric d20 products out there that it didn’t really matter. I don’t think I ever played a straight Greyhawky D&D game in 3rd edition, and I skipped 2nd entirely!

  6. Not to get into a D&D4e discussion, but I disagree. One improvement D&D4e made is by clearly saying to the DM “do what you want, as DM, you are not bound by the rules”. This was in stark contrast with D&D3e which bound everything to the same mechanical standard.

Leave a Reply