Credit where it's due

Originally published in 1985, Dragon Warriors returned in 2008 in a deluxe hardback edition. Here is my foreword to that volume:

As Dragon Warriors is coming up to its quarter century, it’s now almost as venerable as those classic original role-playing games—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, Traveller—in whose company it was once a cheeky whippersnapper.

Those who enjoy Dragon Warriors respond to something unique about it. Which sets us to wondering: what is the essence of Dragon Warriors? Most certainly that essence doesn’t lie in armour bypass rolls or other game mechanics. Indeed, the best Legend campaigns we’ve played in have used the GURPS system. And the rules mean nothing to those who live in the Dragon Warriors world, for whom ‘mystic’ and ‘warlock’ and ‘sorcerer’ are all interchangeable shorthand for a guy you really should steer well clear of.

So, is DW then defined by the world of Legend? We think not. Some of the great role-playing games are completely identified with an entire fantasy sub-creation. Tekumel and Glorantha spring to mind. The world of Legend, on the other hand, was always intended to be this world—only skewed.

Some parts are closer to the 10th century, others to the 14th, but the point was always to create a backdrop that would be recognizably and convincingly medieval. It was never about creating a place that was alien and strange. The familiarity of Legend is what gives players freedom to create their own stories there.

Not rules nor setting details, then. From a personal perspective, the important thing for us has always been the flavour. That, for us, is the essence of Dragon Warriors. Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme-park taverns, comedy dwarves and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made Legend as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with a European folktale sensibility. The flavour of what fantasy ought to be.

In Legend, faerie creatures are as amoral as cats and as heartless as children. A goblin in the rafters can spoil a whole night’s sleep, while a troll under the bridge ahead is reason to change your travel plans. And these creatures are rare. Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.

This is a world in which human emotion is just as strong as magic. The scenario ‘A Box of Old Bones’, which originally appeared in White Dwarf magazine in 1985 and which is bound to re-emerge before long, makes it clear that the miracles associated with holy relics are sufficiently rare and vaguely manifested that a fake relic can go unnoticed for years, getting by on the strength of its placebo effect and the willingness of clergy and believers to collude in seeing evidence where they want to see it. Our rule was never to evoke magic if a non-supernatural plot point would do.

Fantasy games like D&D—or, these days, World of Warcraft—belong to the George Lucas or Chris Columbus branch of role-playing. Dragon Warriors would be a movie by Guillermo del Toro or Tim Burton. In literary terms, if D&D is Eragon, then DW is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Now that the righteous passion of youth is mellowed somewhat, we see that neither approach is right or wrong. Fantasy has room for all flavours. Take your pick.

Turning now to thanks, regrets, and reminiscences… Dragon Warriors owes its existence to Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, whose brainwave was to see that role-playing could be smuggled into bookshops. We were never that interested in solo gamebooks, but as soon as we saw the first Fighting Fantasy book we started planning the pitch for Dragon Warriors.

The game system too owes a debt to Livingstone and Jackson, interestingly enough. We had self-published a little RPG called Mortal Combat in the late 1970s. This came to the attention of Games Workshop, with whom we discussed a UK rival to D&D. Workshop’s working title for this was ‘Adventure’. The deal never happened, but it gave us an excuse to focus our role-playing sessions towards creating a set of rules and a world (in fact, several worlds) that ultimately evolved into Dragon Warriors.

With hindsight, there are things we would do differently. Oliver always argued strenuously against polyhedral dice, but Dave resisted a pure d6-based system—wrongly, as he now admits. As the whole point of Dragon Warriors was to be accessible to everybody, the low price-point of the books was pretty much invalidated when you had to go searching for twelve-sided dice. Democratization of the dice supply would also have helped to break the authority of the GamesMaster—a term we abhor, preferring ‘umpire’ or ‘referee’ as more indicative of the group story-creation that we feel good roleplaying should be.

Philippa Dickinson, our editor at Transworld, recognized that role-playing broke the normal publishing rules about age groups. That’s why the original DW books showed no sign of being targeted at 11-15 year olds, even though those were almost certainly our main market. We played it ourselves, after all, and our friends—and we were twentysomethings, as I hope were many of those who bought the books first time round.

Completists may wonder what other DW books are out there. We used Legend as the setting for our Blood Sword series of gamebooks (Knight Books, 1987-88), where we elaborated the end-of-time storyline that hangs over the world as the year 1000 approaches. Later, some of the story threads in Blood Sword were used for three novellas called The Chronicles of the Magi (Hodder, 1997). We’re still not sure if we consider Blood Sword to be canonical— or whether the year 1000 would really pass in Legend with much hysteria, and not a little magical mischief, but maybe sans the direct intervention of God Almighty. The flavour of DW can be grim and horrific as well as whimsical, but such grimness is usually on a personal level. A character’s soul can be in peril, lives can be threatened by treachery, individuals can be torn by loyalties and inner conflicts. And yet, in a Legend campaign, it is not usually the fate of the world that hangs in the balance. Not merely the fate of the world, at any rate.

At the risk of evoking comparison with Robert E Howard’s estate, whose discovery of new stories seems almost to have dwarfed Howard’s output while alive, there was also an entire world of DW rules and adventures, much more extensive than in the original six books. This is the Invaders & Ancients book, which was to have been incorporated into Chaosium’s Questworld project. When that deal failed to come about, we reworked the material into a massive sourcebook, called Ophis, that would have comprised some of DW books 7-12.

If you’re interested, a little glimpse of that continent of Ophis features in Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig (Insight, 2008). But that is all there is, alas, as in those days we did our work in nonelectronic form. The manuscript may have taken the train to Dumfries or been used to lay the cornerstone of a church or used to light a fire on an especially cold winter’s night—all those fates that the one and only copies of things are wont to suffer. But, like life, the loss is what makes the rest of it so precious.

For the resurrection of Dragon Warriors we particularly want to thank James Wallis, who needs no introduction as one of the great luminaries of gaming. We are honoured that Dragon Warriors is appearing as one of the first publications of Magnum Opus Press, and grateful to James for lavishing such attention to make it a truly mouth-watering edition. We also must thank Ian Sturrock for editing, revising and improving our original material into a new edition for a new era of gaming.

And we are most grateful to have such excellent companions in our ongoing exploration of Legend— in particular Steve Foster and Tim Harford. Steve has been with us from the very beginning, designed Mortal Combat and in fact originated several of the most colourful characters of the Dragon Warriors world including Tobias of the Knights Capellar and arch-wizard Cynewulf Magister. Tim has woven some of the eeriest, most exciting and most affecting campaigns of Ellesland and enhanced it immeasurably with his ideas. Along with them, we are privileged to have adventured with Aaron Fortune, Paul Gilham, Frazer Payne and Tim Savin—heroes of Legend, dear friends, stalwarts all.

Returning to it another seventeen years on, what would I add? First I'd have to reiterate my thanks to James Wallis. He had the idea of bringing Dragon Warriors back, assembled the very best team of writers, artists and editors for the job, and produced a stunningly beautiful series of books. Without him, DW would probably still be languishing in semi-oblivion.

I'm grateful to Lee Barklam for keeping the flame alight with his Cobwebbed Forest site, where you can find maps, scenarios, source material and links to other DW resources. Likewise profound and profuse thanks to Shaun Hately not only for The Library of Hiabuor but also for his contributions to DW lore as a writer. Along those lines, Red Ruin Publishing have continued James Wallis's work as a labour of love, producing Casket of Fays (not fey, please note; one is a noun, the other an adjective) and a number of fine scenarios and solo books (of which The Horned Ram by Paul Partington is the latest).

And I mustn't miss out the folks at Alkonost, who are not only bringing Dragon Warriors back in a French edition (Les Terres de Légende, that is) but are also publishing two all-new volumes. With more focus on the social and political aspects of the game than on old-style dungeon bashes, we can really say Alkonost are ushering DW into the 21st century.

Published game sessions, both audio and video, have helped spread awareness of Dragon Warriors, and I'm particularly indebted to Grim Jim Desborough and Roger Bell-West for making their games available online.

It would be remiss of me not to thank the artists who have brought Legend to life. I'm convinced that Jon Hodgson has visited Legend often; his illustrations seem to have come direct from my and Oliver's dreams. In the early days we benefited from the work of Bob Harvey, Leo Hartas, Russ Nicholson and Alan Craddock. And here is an especially beautiful map of Legend by Patrick Crusiau. There are many others, and we salute them all.

Remembering Russ

The latest issue of Casket of Fays is now out, and among the many reasons to pick up your free copy is the tribute I've written to Russ Nicholson.

Inside the Rookery did a special episode last week about Russ's artwork, featuring James Wallis, Marc Gascoigne, and Ian Livingstone. Among the revelations is the fact that he taught art to Sean Phillips, nowadays best known as Ed Brubaker's main collaborator. (Here's some of Mr Phillips's artwork. Is there any influence by Russ? You decide.)

The talk there is about Russ’s art but there's not much about the man himself. I like this recent interview because it not only fills in a lot of his biographical info but lets all of us who were privileged to know him hear again the voice of a much-loved friend and thoroughly decent human being.

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless

Jon Hodgson's artwork looks to me like Dragon Warriors was always waiting for it. I remember an evening back in the '80s. Oliver and I were working on the first DW book at his mother's place in Frensham. It was at the top of a meadow with the landscape of southern England spread out below us. A haze of rain was blowing in across the downs, trees swaying, grass rippling in the wind. Anything could have been out there in the twilight. Goblin magic was in the air. It was the kind of view we could imagine our characters having as they travelled the byways of Ellesland.

Thirty-some years later, I saw Jon's art for the new edition of Dragon Warriors, masterminded and produced by James Wallis, and I knew he'd seen into the same imaginary worlds as we had. Now Jon has a boxed set of DW art coming out in a limited edition of just fifty copies. You get eight signed prints, an art book, and some extras -- a real collector's edition and a window onto a magnificently evocative vision of fantastic places.

A Dragon Warriors character

When James Wallis brought Dragon Warriors back from the ivied catafalque on which it lay sleeping through the '90s and '00s, one of the all-new books he released was Friends or Foes, a collection of interesting NPCs who can be used as adversaries or allies for the player-characters.

Why not throw it open to the whole DW community? Players could upload their characters for others to use or be inspired by. Characters in significant positions -- Baron Aldred's ostler, say -- could be even made semi-official.

Ah, you spotted the flaw. Somebody would actually have to do all the work. And there are always the Dragon Warriors Wiki, The Great Library of Hiabuor, The Cobwebbed Forest, and others, all with several campaigns' worth of resources free to use.

But just in case you are looking for a quick NPC, I came across a character I played briefly in Tim Harford's Legend game when Tim first came to London. (That was just before we began the still-running Iron Men campaign mentioned from time to time on this blog.) Valentine of Braying Cross was the loyal servant Sir Eustace, a vassal of Lord Montombre, so he could make a useful and dangerous foe. Incidentally, he's a 100-point character under GURPS 3e rules, which is what we played back then. I wonder what he'd look like in D&D 5th edition?

Brother Valentine

Valentine was born 964 AS, the younger son of Constantine, esquire of the parish of Braying Cross. He was entered at the Monastery of St Apollonius at the age of seven. At twelve he was abducted by slavers from Outer Thuland, where he spent the next four years until he was helped to escape by a wandering friar of the Frestonian Order. Valentine by now had an abiding dislike of heathens and wished to join the Knights Capellars, but was excluded by reason of birth and therefore entered the Frestonian Order instead.

After four years as a wandering friar he began to come to the notice of Montombre's men. At first they dismissed the over-earnest youth but gradually they came to respect his determination and iron-hard faith. Friars had by now come into fashion as confessors because the harsh rules they lived by gave them a greater air of piety than any rich priest could muster. Valentine became Sir Eustace's confessor and clerk, and gradually took on other duties as well. He relishes the insulting names his enemies know him by. Regarding himself as Sir Eustace's "sin eater", he takes all the old man's unsavoury tasks onto his own shoulders -- interrogating spies with icy efficiency, alert to heresy among his master's entourage, sniffing out malcontents in the town gutters and doing what is needful.

Valentine's learned skills fall into three categories: the academic studies of his youth, the physical abilities gained in service to Lord Egil of Thuland, and the talents he has taught himself in order to better serve Sir Eustace, Earl Montombre and the Church.

He is tall and somewhat lanky with honey-coloured hair and blue-grey eyes. He might appear handsome but for his zealous scowl and unrelenting stare. His humour is liable to be bleak. He smiles most readily when in a position to do harm to an unrepentant foe.

His vows, in common with all the Orders of friar, constrain him to poverty, chastity and obedience. He can personally own only his clothing, religious accoutrements and (if need be) a humble place of abode. His arms and armour he holds from his lord and has no private title to them. He uses only such money as is entrusted to him for specific purposes, since as a friar he can always secure a simple meal and a place to sleep in return for a blessing. His chastity was once sorely tested by a succubus that visited him in the wildwood. He repulsed it after a dire struggle and thereafter sealed himself in his cell for forty days and nights, fasting until he gained renewed strength to resist such evil. This is the source of his resistance to magic. The vow of obedience means that he must do whatever is required of him by the lawfully appointed officials of the Faith and (more importantly, perhaps, to Valentine) by his temporal lord, Montombre.

Valentine has one redeeming quality. He is fond of animals (especially cats) perhaps because they, unlike man, are a part of God's design untouched by sin. He has a quotation from the Scriptures that he likes to recite when he's about to mete out justice:

"For thus saith the Lord God: Because thou hast clapped thine hands, and stamped with thy feet, and rejoiced with all thy despite against the land of believers; behold, therefore I will stretch out mine hand upon thee, and will deliver thee for a spoil to the heathen; and I will cut thee off from the people, and I will cause thee to perish out of the countries; I will destroy thee; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord."

And while we're talking about Legend, don't miss the latest fine offerings from Red Ruin Publishing, a couple of Dragon Warriors gamebooks: Green Water, Crimson Stag and Meryon Woods -- both free on DriveThruRPG. And if those whet your appetite for DW solo adventures, you'll want to grab Village of the Damned and The Village of Frogton too.

Notes from small islands

Happy New Year! Normally I tend to focus on gamebooks and roleplaying around here, but maybe I can squeeze in some news of projects of personal interest now that we're at the tail end of the intercalary days.

I've been trying to continue my Mirabilis comic for some time now, and finally came to the conclusion that if I can't get it to the stage where it's a commercial enterprise that pays for the pencils, inks and colours, I can at least still tell the story. Having a few pages of artwork left before Leo gave up on it, some of which he was able to ink, I began serializing issue #10 ("A Truth That Wounds") on my Patreon page.

Those already-completed pages are running out fast. We'll soon get on to Leo's rough pencils, and after that I'll have to fall back on my own sketches. No joke, that, as you can see from the sample here, but at least the die-hard followers of the story (all dozen of them!) will eventually get to read it.

My main obsession for most of the year has been my new gamebook Can You Brexit? in which you play the prime minister of Britain through two years of negotiations, calamities, and backstabbing starting in March 2017. The book is about 870 sections long, it's now finished bar a final polish, and I'm hoping to get a proper publisher if my agent can find one who isn't too craven to handle it. Enemies of the people and all that. Maybe next year I'll tackle You Are Trump.

My wife Roz has published a book of travel memoirs called Not Quite Lost for which she has been doing loads of BBC interviews throughout December. Banish those mental images of climbing the Kilimanjaro slopes or drinking snakeblood cocktails in New Guinea. These are lyrical, whimsical accounts of our visits to various old follies around Britain, peppered with eccentric encounters à la Bill Bryson. I liked it, though you may not regard me as entirely impartial.

And if you want to hear what Jamie is currently up to, come back on Friday.




Meanwhile, if you're here looking for a gaming fix I got a doozy for ya: James Wallis's long-awaited story-game Alas Vegas is finally on sale. Buy it from DriveThruRPG or Indie Press Revolution. (Unfortunately it's not on Amazon, so if you want a print copy from IPR and you live outside the US, you'll end up paying about $50 in postage.) I'm not usually a big fan of "narrative" RPGs, but any and all original work by Mr Wallis is touched with genius, so I plan to give this a go at our next weekend special.

Start by forgetting

We're starting a new roleplaying campaign tonight. It's being run by Oliver Johnson, co-creator of Dragon Warriors and Blood Sword, and he always brings a unique blend of innovative story background and palpable atmosphere to his games, so excitement among the players is high.

The player-characters will begin with no memory of who they are. That in itself isn't going to win any prizes for originality. I think I'll be playing in at least one other amnesia-driven game this year alone, and that's even if I can't get my hands on a copy of Alas Vegas, but when added to the GURPS character generation system, amnesia should make for a particularly interesting cocktail.

GURPS encourages you to flesh out the details of your character's backstory -- too much, in my view. I've seen much better (more interesting, more subtle, more convincing) characterization from players developing their characters from the inside, once the game begins. The design-at-start approach is a little too much of an authorial straitjacket. But how about if you begin knowing nothing about your past?

With Oliver's upcoming campaign, which is set in New Mexico in 1862, I originally had it in mind to play a gambler. But then I thought, well, how would I know I was a gambler? I'm dressed like a gambler, maybe. Perhaps I found a deck of cards in my pocket. But what does that prove? What if another player-character is wearing a tin star. He might be a sheriff, but there are other explanations.

Here's how Oliver himself put it:

"The more I sit here reading through the rules, the more I'm convinced that GURPS is the enemy of roleplaying, and only when handled in the lightest way can it aid rather than overwhelm the game. That was why I decided to start everyone as amnesiacs. I want people to interact and make up their stories on the spot and have some good roleplaying, rather than prescribe their characters through these arbitrary skills and advantages and disadvantages and overthought back stories -- which, instead of expanding the character, merely justify the aforesaid self-award of skills, advantages, etc."

If GURPS allowed for a little more uncertainty, there might be some of those discoveries Oliver is talking about. As it is, I still have to know a little bit too much about my character -- those pesky GURPS disadvantages force you to join the authorial dots and end up with the usual cartoonish characterization. But in a different rules system with a little more leeway the amnesia could become a wellspring of creative improvisation.

One option would be to give each player say 80 points to spend on basic attributes, advantages, and disadvantages. Arguably you would know those pretty much right away, memory loss or not. But you don't buy any skills at the start of the game. When called on to use a skill, you roll 3d to set a brevet value X for that one roll only. You then roll in the usual way using X as your skill level for that one roll only. If you succeed, that sets a minimum value for your (still unknown) level in that skill. If you fail, that sets a maximum value.

For example, you attempt a Stealth roll. First you roll 3d to get your brevet value. Let's say you get a 12. So now you attempt the skill roll as if you had a Stealth of 12. Say you roll 9 - okay, that means you know your actual Stealth value cannot be lower than 9. Or say you roll a 14 - that's a failure, which means your Stealth cannot be higher than 13. Over time you'll nest in on values for all the skills you use.

This brevet system for discovering your unknown skill levels is not greatly different from the way James Wallis's Fugue system generates characters' skills in the course of play, as astute readers will have spotted, but I'm looking for something that's compatible with GURPS -- and, because we want to keep playing an open-ended campaign that could last years, we'll need a bit more detail than just having a skill or not having it. Also I confess a slight allergy to RPG systems that co-opt the tarot, simply because so many of them these days do that.

Starting a GURPS game with no memory naturally rules out giving character design points for Allies, Enemies, Reputation, etc. Those are things you'll discover or acquire in play. But that's a much better way to handle them anyway, just as in stories it's better to show than to tell.

Not where it's at, but how it feels

Roger Bell-West: [A lot of rules recently are] “replicating the sort of story that you’ll find in another medium. A book or a film or whatever.”

Michael Cule: “I’m not convinced that we’re doing the same sort of storytelling. I’m not sure that story is actually the product we’re trying to produce in roleplaying games. It’s the experience. Not what we say happens afterwards, but what we feel at the time.”

I couldn't agree more. But you already know that if you’ve read earlier posts like this one and this. In that same podcast, Roger and Michael talk about a sniper character. You don’t just want the sniper to hit the target when it suits the story. The story is whatever happens.

That Hollywood baby formula of turning points and themes and act breaks – that’s the little learning that’s a dangerous thing in game designers' hands. It’s a join-the-dots narrative construction model designed to help Hollywood churn out the product they want to make. It bears as much relation to good (= interesting, unusual, surprising) stories as fast food does to a good meal. Like in life, it's how you react to the random events that's often the most memorable stuff.

Funnily enough, Roger and Michael talk about Save the Cat in that particular episode of Improvised Radio Theatre – With Dice. Download their fascinating salmagundis of roleplaying gaming and genre criticism here. And talking of Save the Cat...


The point here, though, is not that all that Blake Snyder BS will only render up repetitive story structures. Nor is it even that codifying rules for creating stories is less effective than just winging it. (Though that's true too; the only rule you need is to keep throwing surprises at the players and be ready to run with the ones they throw back.) Stories might be a by-product when the dust settles -- we're human beings, everything looks like a story after we've done it. But going in with the intention of shaping a story requires distance. The very opposite of emotional engagement.

Players will often recount their in-game stories; you've seen our write-ups. But what's really fun is that those are utterly unreliable accounts. Ask another player, you'll hear a very different tale. And, as with life, we impose the form of a story after the event. At the time it happens we're right in the thick of things, living an imaginary life not authoring a yarn, and if what you're aiming for is how it feels then stepping back for a bit of chin-stroking analysis is not only going to etoliate the experience, it's likely to bend what might have been a surprising and unique sequence of events into something more like a prosaic formula.

And after all it wouldn’t matter a jot if nobody ever did a game write-up or recounted the adventure later. The write-up is like photographing a sand mandala. The point of a mandala isn’t to end up with a work of art, it’s to be there for the creation of it. That goal of how it feels is a point expressed very well in this video (9:00 minutes in) so I'll wait while you have a look at that.

Why are games written nowadays to reproduce, as Mr Bell-West says, the stories that you'll find in other media? Partly it may be that for a published game to make money it has to have a gimmick, and there's quicker surface appeal in a system that promises you it has rules for ensuring a great story. Or is it that many games lack a deeper cultural underpinning, which means that abstract story forms are easier to impose? If players in a Tekumel campaign are at loggerheads, they have law courts and clan-councils and shamtla and the duelling code to fall back on -- and all of those have their own in-game rules that yield rich stories. In the absence of those social structures, meta-rules for fictionalization may seem more necessary to keep the game going.

And there's the rub. Keeping the game going. That's easy when you're in your twenties with no spouse or kids. Your game persona can take over and initiate events in your parallel life. But not every gaming group has that luxury. Some reviewers of Fabled Lands have complained that without a quest assigned to them they don't know what to do. Jamie joined in our Victorian Investigators game recently and noticed that the players don't tend to drive the story in-character; they discuss and analyze, but then they wait to be told what the story is, and react. Under those circumstances, I can appreciate why people would reach for rules that encourage you to step away from the persona and think instead as an author.

Finding a way to work in your character’s catchphrase, or analyzing the character’s story arc to decide what ought to happen to them next, are signs that the actual playing of the character, the participation in the moment, are no longer fun. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the dramatically ironic style of game for other reasons. I'm eager to play James Wallis's Alas Vegas (admittedly light-years ahead of the usual "storytelling" systems) even though I'd chafe at so self-consciously narrative-shaping a game on a weekly basis. So, you know, none of this is the One True Way. We're just talking.

Another look at Dragon Warriors

I recently cracked open the beautiful hardback edition of Dragon Warriors produced by James Wallis’s Magnum Opus Press. As a matter of fact there are some copies on sale on DriveThruRPG at the moment – not at all cheap compared to the fiver my Tirikelu rules will set you back, but definitely worth it.

In the preface I talked a bit about my and Oliver Johnson’s thinking when designing the game:

“Our aim was to put something dark, spooky and magical back into fantasy role-playing. Loathing the medieval Disneyland of Dungeons & Dragons, with its theme park taverns, comedy dwarves, and cannon-fodder profusion of monsters, we made Legend as vividly dreamlike as the Middle Ages seem in stories, a place dripping with a European folktale sensibility. The flavor of what fantasy ought to be.

“In Legend, faerie creatures are as amoral as cats and as heartless as children. A goblin in the rafters can spoil a whole night’s sleep, while a troll under the bridge ahead is reason to change your travel plans. And these creatures are rare. Walking into a tavern in Legend and finding an elf at the bar would be like strolling into your real-life local and seeing a polar bear.

“In the world of Dragon Warriors, human emotion is just as strong as magic. The scenario ‘A Box of Old Bones’ makes it clear that the miracles associated with holy relics are sufficiently rare and vaguely manifested that a fake relic can go unnoticed for years, getting by on the strength of its placebo effect and the willingness of clergy and believers to collude in seeing evidence where they want to see it. Our rule was never to evoke magic if a non-supernatural plot point would do.”

It’s nice to see old work you did getting some love. Normally when that happens people are heaping praise on the land of Legend. The Dragon Warriors rules themselves get overlooked, even by me. (Especially by me, in fact, since I’m forever kicking myself for not listening to Oliver when he said we should dispense with the polyhedral dice.) But then I came across this in-depth review by Charles Akins in which it’s the DW system as much as the world that grabs him. If I ever get around to finishing Jewelspider for publication it’s going to have a new D6-driven system, but Mr Akins’ comments still give me a warm glow inside. As does this mini-review on Legacy Game Mastering:



And if you should feel like a return to the lands of Legend, Serpent King Games have made the core Dragon Warriors rulebook available free as a PDF until the end of this month. That's better than a dragon spitting in your eye. (Although I should add that in all my time in Legend, the nearest we've yet got to a dragon is hearing an ominous slithering in a ditch in the forest one time. Gotta love that low fantasy.)

The Serpent's Venom

White Dwarf was getting a circulation boost or something, so Jamie (who was the real editor of the mag, whatever the punters thought) asked me to knock off a beginners’ scenario for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Ah, dungeons – I’m sure you know by now how I feel about those. But I did my hack duty, and it went out under the pseudonym Liz Fletcher because I already had The Castle of Lost Souls and my RuneRites column appearing in the same issue – which was number 52, April 1984, if you’re interested.

It was later modified slightly by James Wallis to appear in the platinum-rare Dragon Warriors supplement In From The Cold. I’ve taken the stats from that, but reverted it to a more generic world background. Looking at it now, I’m not sure what the ‘awkward situation’ was that Galadria had ostensibly approached the player characters to help out with, and they may well ask so you’d better have her invent something plausible. As Galadria will have researched the characters' background before approaching them, she might be able to come up with a story that relates to their recent adventures, in which case it could be quite an effective sting.

The Serpent’s Venom

An adventure for 1st to 3rd-rank characters

Players’ introduction

Finding themselves somewhat impoverished, the player characters enter the town of Overdale one cold evening, and are forced to make do with only a meager supper of bread and cheese at the Black Rose inn. Naturally they are quick to accept when a tall, slender blonde woman in robes of green and grey approaches and invites them to dine with her.

‘I am Galadria the Gifted,’ she says. ‘I know what it is to be down on one’s luck, so I extend this charitable hand to a group of fellow adventurers.’  

The charitable hand in question glitters with a number of heavy gold rings. She sweeps gracefully between the benches where the common patrons of the inn sit drinking, leading the characters to one of the partitioned tables off to one side of the room. She orders stew and mulled wine for them, all before explaining that she is  looking for a party of suitable adventuring companions to help her deal with an awkward situation.

As the food is brought, there is a brief lull in the conversation, and the characters cannot help overhearing something of what is being said by the group at the next table. ‘Treasure’ is mentioned several times. Discreetly listening at the thin wooden partition, they hear snatches of discussion—the other group are also adventurers, planning to explore and loot an abandoned temple a day’s ride to the north. The temple appears to be located in an underground complex hidden beside a lake surrounded by weeping willows. Galadria whispers that she knows the lake, having recently passed that way—it is called Willow Lake.

Suddenly one of the men at the next table rises to leave. Galadria and the player characters immediately pretend to be chatting to one another. The man who has risen says goodbye to his friends. At the door, he turns and calls back, ‘I’ll get some horses and see you back here in two days, then,’ before walking into the night.

Galadria leans forward and speaks in hushed tones, glancing from time to time at the next table as if to reassure herself that the eavesdropping has not been detected. ‘Luck has delivered us an excellent opportunity. If that group aren’t planning to depart for another two days, we can steal a march on them. I hope that none of you consider this dishonorable—they do look rather disreputable types themselves, and honor must go by the board when one’s pocket is almost empty of gold.’

Referee’s Background

This has actually been a con, an elaborate charade enacted to dupe the player characters. Galadria is the accomplice of the men at the next table. She and they are worshippers of an evil god. (In From The Cold interpreted this as a cult sacrificing to the pagan deity Balor; see Prince of Darkness. The original scenario had the god down as Set, who in the can't-be-arsed but vaguely Old Testament mythology of Dungeons and Dragons is a snake god - which explains the scenario's title, at least.) The abandoned temple was their own, but it was attacked over a year ago by a knightly order. Galadria and the others were the only ones to escape. They would like to retrieve the idol of their god and the coffers from the temple, but have been unable to do so because several of the skeleton guards of the temple were not destroyed by the knights and now patrol parts of the complex following their original orders: to attack anyone not accompanied by a full priest of the god (of at least 5th level).

For some time, Galadria and the others have been luring adventuring parties to the temple in order to whittle down the number of undead guards without risking themselves. Then events were complicated by a group of orcs moving into the abandoned temple. Their leader, a human sorcerer, instructed the orcs to board the skeletons into one section of the complex. Although many died in the attempt, this was achieved, and the skeletons do not have the orders or the intellect to dismantle the barricade.

The remaining worshippers of the god know about the orcs. They have evolved new tactics. Galadria will take the player characters into the temple and make a drive straight for the main shrine in order to get the sacred idol. On the way out, Vargus and the others plan to mount an ambush—whereupon Galadria will reveal her true colors and (they intend) the player characters will be slain.

The Journey to the Temple

The ride north takes the characters through rolling green countryside, through vales and gentle hill, past small hamlets and farms where peasants till the fields. The terrain gradually becomes more craggy and less populous. At one point they espy a somber black chapel or monastery across the valley. Even at a distance it is easy to see that it is deserted and overgrown.

This chapel was the home of the knightly order that raided the temple. So many were slain in the endeavor that the wounded who returned decided to deconsecrate their chapel and move south. As a consequence it is deserted.

Finally their objective is in sight. As the characters ride towards the lake, however, they are suddenly attacked by a party of five orcs who are out foraging.

These orcs will not attempt to reach the temple (if they try to escape, it will be into the wilderness) because they know that the look-out there will have seen the characters approaching and will have given the alarm, so the way in will be barricaded (see below). Galadria will try not to use her spells unless absolutely necessary. She does need at least three of the player-characters to carry the idol out of the temple, however, so she will bear this in mind

The entrance to the temple is a cave mouth on the lake shore. This is concealed behind the trunk of a weeping willow but Galadria will soon ‘stumble across’ the entrance if the characters don’t spot it. Once inside the temple, her aim will be to lead them directly to the major shrine and the temple treasury. This will involve Galadria ‘noticing’ several secret doors and although she will try to pretend that she is just doing this by luck, her eagerness to complete the mission may make her find the secret doors suspiciously quickly.

The Temple Complex

1. Entrance Passage

Crudely hewn steps lead up about six feet behind the willow tree. The passage then levels out and carries on for another five feet or so—just more than the range of torchlight.

2. Entrance Hall

Barricades to the left and right block the exit passages from this room. Sturdy ropes lead across from behind the left barricade and are secured to the other. As the characters enter, they can see several orcs peering out from the left-hand barricade.

Suddenly the ropes go taut and the right-hand barricade is pulled down. There is a noxious tittering from the orcs as four skeletons advance through the collapsed barricade and attack the characters. There is a total of nine skeletons in the temple complex, previously trapped in the passage to rooms 12, 13 and 14. They will issue forth to attack the characters at the rate of 1-3 a round until all have been killed. They will also attack Galadria, even though she is a worshipper of their deity, because she is not accompanied by a priest of the god.

The barricades are made of logs and branches. The left-hand one must be broken down for the characters to reach the orcs. This will take 4-6 combat rounds, with the orcs sniping at the adventurers all the time. Galadria will prefer to take the party this way even if all the skeletons haven’t been destroyed, because she knows about the skullghast guarding the armory and regards it as the safer of the two routes.

The orcs and their leader occupy the section of the complex covering rooms 3, 4, 5 and 6. Their leader is Althalos, a sorcerer. He regards the temple complex predominantly as a convenient base from which to raid and perhaps eventually take over the local district. Though he reveres no specific deity, he does also think there’s a possibility he may be able to tap into whatever dark sources of magical power were once associated with this place. 

3. Storeroom

This was originally the temple storeroom. Some game hangs from hooks in the ceiling for a banquet the orcs were planning. The smaller chamber off to the end is where the food is prepared.

4. Refectory

There are plain wooden benches and a table.

5. Dormitory

This is where the lower-ranking worshippers slept (Galadria, Vargus and the others). It is now the orcs’ dormitory, of course. One orc lies in bed here. He has Swamp Fever (see Dragon Warriors, p. 126), and could not join his fellows in defending their lair. Anyone who touches him has a 5% chance of contracting the disease.

6. Outer Shrine

There is a black bas-relief of a muscular red-eyed demon on the opposite wall. Originally the room was hung with tapestries and was a place for solo rituals devoted to the god. It is now Althalos’s private chamber, and he uses the tapestries for his bedding.

7. Robing Room

Several black robes with a stylized eye design in white over the abdomen hang on hooks around the room. A wooden cupboard contains six black iron crowns, with tines in the form of rough, icicle-like spikes. There are five moldering corpses in the room, two of which wear rusting armour. (Roll a d20; on a 1, the player-character with the highest perception will notice that Galadria is unusually disturbed by the sight of these corpses. The three unarmoured ones were priests of the temple; the other two were knights slain in the attacks.)

8. Major Shrine

This is a large chamber of black marble veined with quartz. On the altar stone there is a solid onyx idol to the god, with eyes of red gold and a leering forked tongue, this is the idol Galadria wants. (Note: as a worshipper of the god, Galadria should perform a genuflection as she crosses the threshold of this chamber. She won’t actually do this because it would be an obvious giveaway, but from that point she will be at –1 to ATTACK, DEFENCE, MAGICAL ATTACK, MAGICAL DEFENCE, STEALTH, PERCEPTION, and EVASION, until ritually absolved by a priest of the god.)

There are two traps on the idol that even Galadria doesn’t know about. Firstly, if touched anywhere except behind the head, it will shoot out its forked tongue (speed 19, damage 3, normal poison) to strike any character standing directly in front of the altar stone unless they have taken specific precautions against this. Armour will not help, unless the player has specified that the character is wearing a full-face helmet, or has his visor down, in which case the tongue will have no effect.

Secondly, a 5’ × 5’ trapdoor will open directly in front of the altar, dropping anyone standing there down a sloping chute to room 17 unless they can evade its Speed of 16. The idol is worth 450 florins and radiates a palpable aura of evil.

9. Priests’ Dormitory

There are five beds with decaying linen. There are two corpses here. It seems that an armored knight slew one of the sleeping priests but was then struck down from behind.

10. High Priests’ Room

Two decomposing bodies lie together on the floor. The armored knight thrust his sword through the High Priest, but the latter locked his hands around the knight’s throat and choked him even in death. The knight’s sword has not rusted, unlike his armour. A black pentangle amulet hangs on the far wall. The high priest was trying to reach his Amulet of Sovereignty over Violence when the master of the knightly order caught up with him. The knight’s sword is +1.

When the characters have been in this room for two combat rounds, a shadowy form will rise from the high priest’s corpse. It will attack anyone except a worshipper of the god. It is the high priest’s spirit, now a wraith. The strength of the god’s spirit in this place, and the high priest’s fanaticism, are such that the he was able to become a wraith in far less time than usual.

If this wraith is struck with the paladin’s sword it will be destroyed immediately because some of the paladin’s goodness has remained in this weapon which was the cause of the priest’s death.

11. Library

Shelves around the room are stocked with numerous books, all of which deal with the revolting and terrible rituals of the priesthood of this deity. Any character of the True Faith who reads one of these books through completely will be subject to a magical attack of 16, permanently losing a point of Intelligence if affected.

12. Barracks

A bare room. This is where the skeletons remained when ‘off duty’.

13. Tomb Chamber

Two sarcophagi contain the mortal remains of earlier high priests of this temple.

14. Cells

Manacles hang from the walls. There is a decayed corpse chained here. This is where victims were kept awaiting sacrifice to the deity.

15. Armoury

A skullghast (see Bestiary, p. 66) guards the special weapons of the temple. The skullghast will attack anyone except the High Priest, so Galadria knows better than to enter the room. The skullghast will not leave this room, even to pursue intruders, as its orders were to stay and guard.

The special weapons and armour are a +1 morningstar; a +1 mail hauberk; two +1 shields.

16. Treasury

The temple coffers contain 328 florins, guarded by two zombies.

17. A Dank Chamber

Contains the temple’s special guardian, which will attack any who fall down the chute into its lair. It is a nargut (see Bestiary, p. 42). It usually subsists on small creatures such as rats and moles which burrow into its lair (the priests used to feed it regularly). A human should provide quite a feast! 

Leaving the Temple

As the characters leave the complex, they are ambushed by Vargus and the other worshippers of the god. The player-characters will recognize them from the overheard conversation in the inn; this may allow them to work out what has happened, if not immediately then later on. Galadria will turn on the party now, if she hasn’t been killed in the temple.

Since the sacking of their temple by the knights, these remaining worshippers have devoted their efforts to recovering the idol and the temple coffers. Losogon, although but an acolyte, is their spiritual leader now but he is not a leader of men, so it is Vargus, as an officer of the temple guard, who gives the orders. Galadria, by virtue of her intelligence and personal power, wields much influence, but the others do not see her as leader because, in the religion to which they belong, women are seen as inferior.