In September 2016 we presented the Dragon Warriors Bundle, featuring Dragon Warriors, the classic 1986 British FRPG of adventure in the Lands of Legend from Serpent King Games.
Dragon Warriors started its long life in the 1980s as a series of six paperbacks from British publisher Corgi Books. Because these books were only available in the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Dragon Warriors was and remains largely unknown in the United States. Yet for a whole generation of Her Majesty’s subjects, this game provided the gateway RPG experience.
Though published in paperback format to capitalize on the Fighting Fantasy gamebook phenomenon, the Dragon Warriors books together constituted a complete FRPG. With its easy rules and fast play, the game resembles D&D, but Dragon Warriors captured the hearts of a young audience with its mythic setting, the Lands of Legend. An analog of our own world in the early European Middle Ages, the Lands of Legend drip with folklore, faerie, myth, and legend. The place is immediately familiar and easy to understand to anyone who has watched Robin of Sherwood or read Ivanhoe. It has a clearly British feel — down-at-heel, grim, gritty, and in places horrific. The names are right: Cornumbria, Ellesland, Albion, Glissom. No one has nice teeth in Legend, and no one ever wears a chainmail bikini.
In Legend the beliefs and fears of the medieval European peasant are real. Elves are not tanned crafters who speak funny, but the unknowable inhabitants of the otherworld, as likely to kill you in passing as marry you and take you away under the hill for 100 years. Goblins aren’t funny green dudes you slice into XP chunks; they’re mean-spirited, twisted, murderous denizens of the forest, where you don’t go at night or you’ll be killed.
Player characters pursue a range of professions: knight, barbarian, mystic, sorcerer, warlock, assassin, or elementalist. They are defined further by a string of familiar statistics like Strength and Reflexes, and a number of health points. Characters gain ranks with experience, but a key point that gives Dragon Warriors its brutal reputation is that health points are gained very slowly. A knight of the 10th rank must still fear a gang of angry peasants armed with staves and a couple of knives.
Dragon Warriors fell out of print when the ’80s gamebook fad crashed. But devoted fans kept the game alive, and in 2008 Magnum Opus Press issued a new one-volume edition licensed from the original creators, Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson. In 2011 the license lapsed, and the creators formed a new company, Serpent King Games, to carry the game forward.
This comprehensive collection presented almost the entire current Dragon Warriors line from Serpent King. It’s everything you need for a complete heroic saga in the fantastic Lands of Legend. And if you lived outside the Commonwealth and never encountered the game in the 1980s, this was a great way to learn why so many fans have devoutly tended its long-burning flame.
There were four titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $44.50), including the complete Dragon Warriors core rulebook (retail price $20), the Players Guide (retail $20), and the two short adventures The Knight’s Tale (retail $2.50) and The Miller’s Tale (retail $2).
Those who paid more than the threshold (average) price rose in rank and also got our entire Bonus Collection with six more titles (retail value $60):
- Dragon Warriors Bestiary (retail $10): Scores of creatures from the Lands of Legend, many unlike anything seen in other RPGs.
- Friends or Foes (retail $10): Three dozen vivid nonplayer characters bring color to your campaign.
- Cold Fury (retail $10): The full-length Fury of the Deep adventure along with many scenarios from the supplement In From the Cold.
- Prince of Darkness (retail $10): A sourcebook and full-scale campaign set in the frozen and mountainous fief of Glissom.
- Sleeping Gods (retail $10): A complete seven-part campaign that can lead novice adventurers on a path to power in the Lands of Legend.
- The Elven Crystals (retail $10): Four linked adventures for beginning characters set in the troubled kingdom of Ereworn.
That’s a US$104.50 retail value — you’d pay that much for a Ring of Obedient Parts in the Ward of Long Market in downtown Ongus, yet this great collection is yours for the price of a waterskin and backpack. (Depending on the current conversion rate of dollars to Selentine florins.) Ten percent of eachpayment (after gateway fees) went to this offer’s designated charity, Reading is Fundamental.
Dragon Warriors resources
- Dragon Warriors wiki
- Dragon Warriors discussion forum
- Shaun Hately’s fan site, The Great Library of Hiabuor, includes scenarios, maps, articles, and an unofficial 93-page DW supplement, Cadaver Draconis, of material cut from the Dragon Warriors Players Guide
- Another good fan site, The Cobwebbed Forest, has material expanding the Sleeping Gods adventure in this collection
- DW co-designer Dave Morris’s blog, Years of Wonder
- “A Weak Pleasure” (.PDF download link) by Shaun Hately and Mark Turner, a free short scenario for 4-6 characters of ranks 3-4
- The “Dragon Warriors” tag on RPG.net
- Dragon Warriors on Facebook
PS. Check this RPG.net forum thread about this Dragon Warriors offer, something of a “Sell me” discussion — and wow, do the DW fans sell!
