The Sage and the Enchanter: Dragon Warriors rules for Blood Sword characters

Next year is the 40th anniversary of Dragon Warriors, and two years after that the 40th anniversary of the first Blood Sword book. I don't know if that accounts for the upsurge in interest in how to combine the two, which began when Tambù used the Blood Sword gamebooks as the basis for a 5e campaign. Some players grumbled that the 5e ethic wasn't a good fit for Legend, but I have always thought that the Legend of the Blood Sword books is tonally different from Dragon Warriors. One is epic fantasy, the other regular low(ish) fantasy -- and the Legend of the Jewelspider RPG will be low fantasy nudging towards realism. And in any case, there's no reason why Blood Sword 5e should be the same style as Dragon Warriors, any more than the TV version of Fargo has to exactly follow the plot of the Coen Brothers' movie.

(I realize at this point that somebody will ask me when Blood Sword 5e will be published in English. Sorry, I don't know. I'm told it's on the way, and the Italian edition is a luxurious masterpiece worthy of Gucci so I'm hoping to hold the English version eventually.)

All this preamble is to say that today we have a special contribution by regular correspondent Stanley Barnes, who has converted the Sage and Enchanter from Blood Sword into DW character professions. Thus, with thanks to Stanley and without further ado, here are those conversions. If you do have a go at putting these characters into your Legend game, come back and tell us about it.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 5

The Walls of Spyte is the last installment in Oliver Whawell's series of rules conversions from Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors rules. The stat blocks are available in PDF form here.

I had a lot less to do with the writing of the fifth book than the rest of the series. Oliver Johnson was supposed to write it, but ran out of time. Luckily Jamie Thomson was on hand to step in, but necessarily it was a rush job so he didn't have time to read the earlier Blood Sword books. I came in right at the end to tie up the last 40 sections or so.

Patreon backers can see how I'd have liked the series finale to pan out. Tambù's Blood Sword 5e campaign and rulebook drew on those notes, and I have a feeling so will Prime Games' forthcoming CRPG.

Various player-characters guest starred in the Blood Sword books, in a manner of speaking. This time it was the turn of Zaraqeb (Zara in the book) and Karunaz, who were played in my and Steve Foster's Empire of the Petal Throne campaign by Gail Baker and Paul Mason. The original PCs weren't a lot like their gamebook incarnations, incidentally. The real Zaraqeb wasn't a sorceress and wasn't that nasty; the real Karunaz was neither posh nor noble, though he was a much more interesting kind of hero because of that.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 4

We've got another set of stat blocks from the Blood Sword gamebooks, as converted to Dragon Warriors rules by Oliver Whawell. This time it's the turn of Doomwalk (the one where they go to the land of the dead) and you can get the PDF here.

The original 1980s covers were always an oddity, as they were completely different in tone from the books themselves. Blood Sword was verging on grimdark (well, the nearest you could get in a book sold to 10-12 year-olds) before the term was even invented. The covers on the other hand were cute and funny. I'm not sure what the art director at a publishing house actually did in those days. Took long lunches, I suppose.

Thanks to Wombo I've been having a ball rejigging the cover art to suit the interiors. Use of AI art infuriates some people to the point of hysteria, but you can see that (a) it's not going to replace human artists just yet and (b) these aren't for commercial use, so it's not taking away a job that I'd have otherwise hired anyone to do. However, let me just assure General Ludd's followers that I'm doing my bit as the forlorn hope against the forces of AI art by engaging real-life illustrator Inigo Hartas for the Jewelspider project.

In the video below, Grim expresses pretty much how I feel regarding the use of AI art. But I'm open to debate on this, so let me know what you think.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 3

The third of Oliver Whawell's meticulous conversions of stats from the Blood Sword gamebooks to the Dragon Warriors RPG covers The Demon's Claw. You can get a PDF of the stat blocks here.

This is the book where the series starts to kick up into really epic gear, seeing you face off against one of the series' best guest villains, have a return match with your arch-foe Icon (that is, Aiken, Lord of the Mountain of Songs), experience a close shave with Psyche (Saiki, his sister), and get a close encounter with the gods (allegedly) themselves.

If none of that makes any sense, and if you're interested in turning the Blood Sword gamebook saga into a roleplaying campaign - now's your chance. I'll just caution that the Legend of the gamebooks is considerably higher fantasy than the Legend of Dragon Warriors, never mind the "real" Legend of Jewelspider. But that's just my view anyway. All versions are equally valid.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 2

We're on to the second installment of Oliver's Whawell's conversion of Blood Sword encounters to Dragon Warriors rules. You can download the stat blocks for The Kingdom of Wyrd here.

This one is interesting because I already had a crack at converting the Meteor Stalker, a weird creature brilliantly visualized by Russ Nicholson. Patreon backers can read all about that, but in a nutshell (or a meteoritic geode) it's as follows. The characters see a piece break off Blue Moon, one of five celestial bodies in the night sky over Krarth. The object plummets to earth:

"Concealed in the undergrowth around the clearing, you watch the blue flare crash through the trees at the edge of the clearing and explode in a shower of blue sparks at its centre. The high-pitched whistling noise has stopped, but now you hear a hissing sound from where steam rises from the place where it struck. In the centre of the steam you can see a black stone which even as you watch cracks apart like an egg. An area of darkness spreads like a pool of shadow. Then a hunched shape rises up from the shadow as though taking shape out of the very ground. It is a skeleton dressed in black tattered robes. Its eyes are glowing blue crystals. It seems to sniff the air as it looks around."

And the stats I gave for it are:

Oliver's calculations give a very similar result, possibly proving that great minds think alike? Obviously I couldn't possibly comment.

Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 1

Last time I mentioned Oliver Whawell's conversion of Blood Sword stat blocks to Dragon Warriors rules, which Oliver has kindly agreed to share with readers of this blog. There's a lot of great work there, so I'll be running it in installments. To get the ball rolling, here's The Battlepits of Krarth.

The original books might be useful if you're thinking of running Blood Sword as a DW roleplaying campaign. You can get those here:

In the US

DRAGON WARRIORS

Core Rulebook

Bestiary

Players Guide

Cold Fury

Friends or Foes

Sleeping Gods

The Elven Crystals

Prince of Darkness

BLOOD SWORD

The Battlepits of Krarth on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

The Kingdom of Wyrd on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

The Demon's Claw on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

Doomwalk on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

The Walls of Spyte on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble

Blood Sword Battle Boards on Amazon

In the UK

DRAGON WARRIORS

Core Rulebook

Bestiary

Players Guide

Cold Fury

Friends or Foes

Sleeping Gods

The Elven Crystals

Prince of Darkness

BLOOD SWORD

The Battlepits of Krarth on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

The Kingdom of Wyrd on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

The Demon's Claw on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

Doomwalk on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

The Walls of Spyte on Blackwell's, Waterstones and Amazon

Blood Sword Battle Boards on Amazon

Italian gamers won't need to use Dragon Warriors as all the work has been done for you by Valentino Sergi and Daniele Fusetto in their magnificent Blood Sword 5e book, published by Tambù. It turns the whole gamebook saga into a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and it truly is a thing of beauty.

And if you aren't familiar with the Blood Sword series and you're looking for a taster, Raphael Perry did a playthrough of book 1 on YouTube along with this very interesting strategy analysis: