"The Ultimate Roleplaying Game"
Well, I don't know about that bold claim, but it was wondrous way back in the summer of '85 through to the spring of '86 as we discovered roleplaying games for the first time.
So what was so great about it?
Good question. It was the mid-80's in the UK. Thatcherism was in
full swing. I don't know about anyone else, but my parents were unemployed, so
money was really tight. Dragon Warriors arrived and it was cheap (far cheaper
than D&D or AD&D). It might not sound like much now, but you could get the
Dragon Warriors paperback books for about £1.50 -£1.75 each. Compare that to D&D
which cost about a tenner per book and you'll see which won from a purely
economic view.
I loved the game mechanic. Roll your attack, subtract the opponent's defence. You hit? Good, now roll armour bypass for the weapon and then tot up the damage if you beat the armour. Nice and simple and somewhat believable.
It got even better once the other books were published which had new classes, adventures and in the final book "Lands of Legend", a complete campaign world. Of course, by then we'd been playing for about 18 months, so our GM had created his own campaign world, which was keeping us occupied.
That world seemed a fantastic escape from the bleak mid-80's humdrum. The game and our characters gave us a sense of empowerment. Teachers, school bullies, home life getting you down? Don't worry, Friday night's coming up soon, you can get away from it then. It'll be alright.
I'm still not sure if it was the game or, more probably, the escapism, but I'll always have a real soft-spot for Dragon Warriors. In fact, I've recently began running a group of friends through the published adventures in the books.
Not an attempt at serious roleplaying; oh no! My remit was to recapture the first experience of gaming, including the wandering off-topic conversations and piss-taking that went with it. I must say, the lads have succeeded beyond my wildest imaginings! Thanks guys for giving me more than a few chuckles - you'll never actually know just how similar to my old group you lot are!
In fact, I think I might expand this section with a few other
pages with selected quotes and character outlines from the new game.
GREAT NEWS!!
It was recently announced that Dragon Warriors is back in production! It has been put together by Magnum Opus Press' FLAMING COBRA imprint and is to be published by Mongoose. It's rumoured that the core rulebook has all the characters and game rules in it, with separate volumes containing the creatures and adventures. The artwork has been updated for the new millennium, the cover hearkens back to the first book, assuming the knight has fallen foul of the demons climbing out of the fiery pit and a new group of adventurers are tackling the challenge of that particular underworld. If you look carefully, you can see all that remains of him is his rather silly winged helmet, lying in the shadows. This new cover sums up (for me) the atmosphere of Dragon Warriors, that of the low-fantasy setting, where the players are not necessarily world-saving heroes, but fighting back the darkness one foe at a time...