Review: Dragon Warriors Book 4: Out of the Shadows

[Thaluikhain]

After the first trilogy of Dragon Warriors books were released (apparently at the same time), another three were published, one at a time. Again, two (including this one) by Dave Morris, with Oliver Johnson doing the other. Apparently they didn't publish as many copies, though, so the seem to have made less of an impact.

Because of this, while I had a copy, and my high school library, IIRC, had a copy, and my high school gaming group were playing either Dragon Warriors or a homebrew that crossed Dragon Warriors, Fighting Fantasy and Magic the Gathering with rules that changed every game, it wasn't until sometime later that I picked up book 6 and even knew there were another three books out there. Looking up Dragon Warriors online, one of the first people I found who'd written about it had much the same to say. Ok, maybe their gaming group didn't have anyone let someone else play for them while they were absent and come back to discover their character's penis was missing, that could have just been the people I knew during high school.

Anyway, the first trilogy works as a self-contained game. First two books of the first trilogy, rather, the third book is nice, but doesn't have anything you need, and no additional rules that you'd actually want to use. The second trilogy feels a bit tacked on as an afterthought. It does avoid trying to hammer shiny new square rules into a system that was designed as a round hole, though, expanding rather than invalidating.

Chapter One
The first thing to come out of the shadows is the new Profession of Assassin. There's a few problems with this one. It does say that Assassins are rare amongst adventurers, that they don't get on with Knights, that the GM can say you can't play one. It also says that Assassins can get up to all the same stuff other adventurers do, and don't have to go around assassinating people. Ok, fine, you do need that in order to play the game (which might be considered important), but why call them an Assassin then?

Given that they are about fancy martial arts, unarmed combat, throwing stars, smoke bombs and flash pellets, you might want to call them Ninjas. Now, sure, the word "Ninja" doesn't really fit into the Medieval England setting Dave Morris was going for, but then do you want something exactly the same as a Ninja but with a different name?

Now, of course, this is something that some players are going to want, some GMs will allow, and some Knights will have to put up with. So, if you play as an Assassin, what do you get to do?

You get to use 13 special abilities. When you punch something, you don't get the (d3,2) unarmed combat attack everyone else uses, you do (d6, 3), the same as a staff. Or rather, the same as when everyone else uses a staff, when you use a staff, sword, shortsword, dagger or throwing spike/star, you get +1 to your armour bypass. You can throw three throwing spikes as one action. Those aren't three abilities, those are all part your first one, "Combat Techniques".

You can fall 6m without any damage, and can jump anything less than 3m tall like you are world high-jump record holder Javier Sotomayor, if Javier Sotomayor jumped 3m for his record instead of 2.45m. Again, not two separate abilities, just two parts of the "Climbing" ability, and that's without mentioning the climbing.

If you sneak up on someone and attack them, you don't just surprise them like everyone else does, you can extra special surprise them if you outrank them.

OTOH, one of your abilities is "has really good Stealth and Perception scores" (and anyone who is an elf gets the same as you), but you still get a lot of fancy skills other classes don't. Now, in fairness, this book also includes some skills for other Professions. If you exclude "only Knight and Barbarians can ride Warhorses" as a skill, before this book Barbarians got all of one special ability. With the rules in this book, that number is now doubled. For Barbarians of 8th or higher Rank. Because they get a new variant of the rule they had before.

Now, it could certainly be argued that Assassins need lots of fancy tricks, they don't use the heavy armour of Knights or Barbarians (they can use Ring Mail without combat penalties, but they take Stealth penalties for anything more than the Hardened Leather they start with). They don't get the big spell list of the Sorcerers, or the smaller spell lists of the Mystic, though they do share some conceptual space with the later and get some similar magicky powers. Still look overpowered to me.

Another issue Assassins have is the use of poisons. Poisons were introduced as things some monsters used in the first book, and as something Sorcerers could make in the second. Only now with Assassins you could reasonably expect PCs to use poisons. They even get to start making them from Rank 1, though they've got the same odds per Rank of getting it right (a percentage of your Rank times 10) so you'd probably not bother just yet.

But, you'd expect that at some point an Assassin likely will use poison. I'm reminded of something Gary Gygax wrote (a bit of rummaging and I see it was in AD&D Player's Handbook, 1978 p107) about how if you give players poison for their weapons, they'll use it to easily kill the dragon instead of fighting it and it'd ruin the challenge. But, ok, this is Dave Morris's game, not Gary Gygax's, players can use poisons on their weapons. Well, not so much against dragons, unless they are also magical, as you need magic weapons to hurt dragons. Don't know if that applies to poisons as well. Do poisons work on magical creatures? Fungus Men? Giant Beetle? Doesn't say it doesn't work, so unless you're going to houserule it, I suppose it works on Skeletons.

Ok, fine, we're using poisons, and you can decide whether or not it works on Mummies, but probably should work on, say, Ogres. Just roll over their Strength on 3d6 (for Normal Poisons) and they die. Which would make it really useful if they gave Strength stats for either of those monsters. Or any monsters apart from, IIRC, Vampires and Zombies. Anytime you use poison against anyone or anything that isn't a fellow PC and/or a Vampire or a Zombie, it's roll 3d6 and comparable it against some number you won't have. Any creature not specified (which is more or less any creature minus, again, Vampires and Zombies) rolls 3d6 for their Reflexes stats (which is bad for other reasons), you could do the same for Strength and then whether or not your 3d6 is higher than their 3d6 isn't quite a coin toss, but close. Either this never came up for Dave Morris, or there was a rule he forgot to put in the rulebook.

[Username17]

You get to use 13 special abilities.

Sort of. It's important to remember that there are a lot of abilities that are kind of included in "uses basic equipment." It takes a lot of abilities to make a Monk be able to still not be as good as a Fighter with basic equipment.

And so the "ability" to use a staff and have that still not be as good as a knight swinging a sword is not terribly impressive.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Chapter Two
The next thing to come out of the shadows is the rules for staying hidden in shadows. Fairly straightforwards, subtract their Perception from your Stealth, roll equal or less on 2d10, same as the way you'd see if Direct Attack spells work. Every Profession (except Assassins) has the same stats for this, Mystics get +1 and elves get Assassin stats, only better, because elves have to be special even if you've never read Lord of the Rings.

There's a list of modifiers to the roll, and the note that you should use common sense, as for example, undead see well in darkness but not bright light (first time this has been mentioned in DW) and you should reverse the modifiers for bright or dim light for them. This is notable because a little bit later there's the Stealth and Perception stats for all the monsters, and several types of undead have "Darksight", with modifiers that are reversed to normal vision, so you can give your common sense a rest there and use the rules as written. There's also "Gloomsight" for monsters that see best in sorta dark but not very dark conditions (this includes some other undead, can't see why some undead are one and some the other), "Elfsight" and "Panoptic" (meaning doesn't get modifiers, which is not what "Panoptic" should mean. But I cringe at names like "Gloomsight").

Oddly, all the monsters get their Stealth and Perception stats here, not just the ones in the previous books, also the new ones introduced in two chapters time. If you want to know the Perception of a Cyclops, don't look in the Cyclops entry in the "Denizens of Nightmare" chapter. Maybe because the Perception modifiers are here?

Of course, no mention of all the many custom monsters in the scenarios in the previous books, good luck trying to figure out how to sneak past one of the Moon Dogs guarding the Temple of the Moon. The mechanics take up about 6 pages, could easily have been stuck into the first book, tacking it into the fourth is a bit awkward, but better late than never, I guess.

Chapter Three
Characters who are 8th Rank or above get some new abilities that have come out of the shadows in this chapter.

As mentioned, Barbarians get one ability, instead of going normal berserk they can go extra special berserk. Fair enough, but nothing exciting.

Mystics can go into the wilderness and gain enlightenment, and then come back from the wilderness and have 18 Psychic Talent and Reflexes and some other benefits. Which is nice and thematic, but that's the only new ability they get.

Sorcerer can create a magic wand, permanently sacrificing magic points and getting 150% of that amount to be used for specific types of spells. That's pretty cool, encourages specialisation. But then you also get a chance to miscast each and every other spell. Depending on the type of wand, your wand could be used for as few as two spells or as many as five. You have to be Rank 8 to make a wand, and you'll have 48 spells by them. That's a lot of spells than can wrong, and thus a hard nope on the whole idea from me. Again, only new ability Sorcerers gets.

Knights, by contrast pick one out of 7 when they hit Rank 8 and each Rank afterwards. They aren't bad, but having to get to Rank 8 to get your first one is a long wait. For example, one ability is getting +1 Armour Bypass for one specific type of weapon, the same as what Assassins get for five weapons (including two you'd care about) from the outset. Or you can have a 1 in 5 instead of a 1 in 6 chance of your shield stopping an attack. Could have started handing those out at Rank 4 or something.

All in all, pretty underwhelming. Could do with a lot more everything, and more than just 8 pages.

You get to use 13 special abilities.

Sort of. It's important to remember that there are a lot of abilities that are kind of included in "uses basic equipment." It takes a lot of abilities to make a Monk be able to still not be as good as a Fighter with basic equipment.

And so the "ability" to use a staff and have that still not be as good as a knight swinging a sword is not terribly impressive.

-Username17

That's true, Assassins even start off with a sword as well as a staff, not even stuck using a staff until they kill their first enemy and nick their weapon.

[Thaluikhain]

Chapter Four
The next things to come out of the shadows are 50 new monsters. Well, first, a revision of the relic powers from Book 2 to deal with the new monsters, and then the environments for where they tend to live (about of a third of them have "any" for this), the rules for how many of these monsters appear, and how much treasure they carry (almost half have "none" for this). Don't see why the last two weren't with the rest of the monster's stats, but putting where they live in a table at the front makes it easy to pick out monsters that live in hills.

"...fantastic creatures in Legend are the embodiment of passions and places. An elf is a spirit of the wildwood, not a geezer in green tights with a +1 bow."

Dave Morris had to (or at least believed he had to) stick elves and halflings and other generic fantasy things in the first DW book despite really not wanting to, in order to get the series published. If you've got rules for playing as elves and they are much the same as human, you've turned them from the strange inhuman menace he wanted into almost just another nationality. You can, if you like, use the DW rules and run elves as pointy-eared New Zealanders and base your campaign off Lord of the Rings (or perhaps Lorde of the Rings, which is creepier and has less royals). But that is rather missing the point of DW. That the earlier books when he was sticking more boring generic fantasy stuff in sold much better than the later books where he was being more original and inventive is depressing if I think about it too much.

"We have to have the rules in role-playing, but they’re a necessary evil"

Morris was (and is) a big believer of magical creatures being strange and mysterious and something humans can't classify or explain terribly well. Instead of giving monsters a kingdom and a history and a genealogy (genie-ology?), they should be unknown weird spooky things that come out after dark, and not resemble the other unknown weird and spooky things that come out after dark too closely. So when the book says these monsters are "rare", that's probably because they are often monsters that'd work as one-offs, possibly the subject of an adventure in of themselves. Because of that, he often put hints and suggestions as well as (or sometimes instead of) rules.

With the Nightmare, this didn't really work. The characters ending up in a magic dreamworld they may or may not recognise isn't a bad idea. But he's given the whole monster just over 2 pages. More than enough to get the basic concept across, but needs a lot more everything to be workable.

Alternatively, you've got stuff like the Boggart which has a handful of sentences about spooky magic powers that it may or may not possess and use in four pages of description and stats. Fair enough, some ideas if you want to use them, but plenty of normal stuff to skip to if you don't. Give it half a dozen goblin mooks and chuck it at the PCs.

There's still some fairly standard monsters like Harpies, Cyclops and Gryphons, and some very standard monsters like Giant Beetles and Dracomen (same old lizardmen you don't care about). A number are from mythologies from areas quite some distance away from the usual European setting, such as the Oni or Shen Lun, which might limit their usefulness if you are setting things in not-England.

The Blue Men have some nice text which talks about how they feature in lots of sailor's stories, how they are really scary, and how they will approach ships and challenge them to a contest of rhyming couplets. Which is either cool, stupid, or actually is really scary, but in the same way being forced to do karaoke is scary.

I'd also mention the Chonchon, a disembodied head monster from South American mythology. This is notable , partly because South America is half a world away from the rest of the setting (and when he later did the Americas, they were something else entirely), but mostly because Dragon Warriors already has 2 disembodied head monsters in the first book (the Death's Head, which he apparently never actually used, and the Obsidiak, which looks like it's made of granite, not obsidian, and is out of alphabetical order). There's another, the Skullghast, also in this book. He later introduced a fifth in an unpublished DW adventure, and used the Chonchon and at least 3 other disembodied head monsters in other games. I think his least favourite teacher at school was a disembodied head.

The Hellion comes in lots of varieties, so it's built with a bunch of random tables for all its stats (reminiscent of a AD&D appendix for creating demons and devils "Random generation of creatures from the lower planes"). Combat stats could be anything from 1-2 Rank Barbarian, to 10-15 Rank Knight. AF could be from 1 to 9, HP could be 1d6 to 8d10. You're not going to get Rank appropriate monsters that way any time soon. I imagine you'd end up rolling 4 or 5 combinations you didn't like before either giving up or assigning stats yourself. Also because it's random there's no easy way to decide how many experience points it's worth. Hard nope from me.

I particularly like the Hag, who fly around on broomsticks or in cauldrons, are burned by cold iron and have varying amounts of power depending on the phase of the moon. Bit of effort to keep things weird and creepy and true to fairytales rather than just rip off Tolkien. By contrast, the Malgash is the Balrog. It even advises people to read the Moria bit from Lord of the Rings because it's the Balrog. Odd in that Dave Morris hasn't himself read LotR. No mention of whether or not it has wings.

There's bits that could have done with editing. In the description of one new type of undead, there's a mention of other types, which includes some that are otherwise never mentioned. Not sure if these are monsters they forgot to stick in, or it's a Giant Rat of Sumatra sorta thing. Another type of undead is the Barudath, which looks nice, only it's called an "Eaves Phantom" most of the time in its description and in a mention in Book 6 (albeit in passing). If you just remember a monster called an Eaves Phantom, you're not likely to think to look it up under the Barudath entry. Apparently also in Book 6 a random encounter table includes Jumbees in both the English and French version. Which is fine, only the French version of this book (where the stats are) uses the name "Triades" instead of Jumbee. No way of telling that they mean the same thing.

IMHO, what the list of new monsters really needed was more mooks. The first book introduced Skeletons and Zombies, which make for great low level opponents, something you can use more or less anywhere (the scenarios in the previous books all contained one or both types). Above them you've got undead that are either end boss or leader types (Wights, for example), or that have to be used more selectively (you don't have Mummies on shipwrecks, you don't have Ghouls in sealed tombs). A third type of generic undead, well, that'd be a whole 50% more you could stick anywhere you got dead people, which is anywhere you've got people.

There's 50 new monsters here and a bit less in the first book. So if you want to find a monster appropriate for 4-6 characters of Rank X in Area Found Y, there's probably not many options. You either need a lot more monsters, a bunch of monsters you can re-use and that work in different areas, or create your own one-offs half the time. There's some nice shiny toys in here, but I think it'd be better with more meat and potatoes and less dessert.

[Thaluikhain]

Chapter Five
Three scenarios come out of the shadows next, in the book's biggest chapter (110 pages, almost half the book). They are intended to follow shortly after the scenarios of book two, possibly with some GM created ones or the book three stuff in between. If people went all the way through book three successfully, they probably are a Rank or two higher with some nice magic gear, I'd have thought that might be important.

Anyway, the first scenario The One Eyed God starts with you at Baron Aldred's castle, where someone has tried and failed to kill him and then run off. He sends you to get the Assassin, preferably alive (don't know how you'd bring him in alive, though). There's mention in the fluff of a bunch of Knights preparing to ride out, but the only person he sends with you is a tracker if you can't track people yourself.

So, because of the plot against the baron, the PCs follow after a man the local peasants tell them has gone to a nearby barrow and has surely been killed by the monster living there. They've never actually been harmed by the monster, or even seen it, as it spends all of it's time at home, though sometimes creates illusions outside. If that sounds familiar, it might be because I just copied and pasted that from what I wrote about A Shadow on the Mist two books ago. There's quite a few differences between A Shadow on the Mist and The One Eyed God, though, such as A Shadow on the Mist being a lot better. In fairness A Shadow on the Mist is very good, and a large part of that is the backstory which the PCs may well never hear about anyway. The One Eyed God also has the nature of the barrow and inhabitants being forgotten, the locals call in the "Valour Hall" in which dwells "The Wooden Man", because they've gotten Valhalla and Woden confused and were wrong about all that to begin with. You only hear about any of that if you going round waking up random peasants instead of chasing directly after the guy you're supposed to chase after, though.

The inhabitants of this barrow are a boggart and some goblins, and some undead deep inside where the goblins don't go and would rather like nobody else to go. And now one Assassin (trying to reach an Astral Gate in a blocked off room). So, a 3 or maybe even 4 way fight. It talks about there being lots of cover and opportunities for the Assassin to attack and disappear, but not sure how well that'd work. The layout is rather linear, a corridor with dead-end rooms branching off to the sides (at least in the parts you are likely to fight the Assassin), so unless you really aren't paying attention you can be pretty sure of which way the Assassin is likely to attack from. If he gets behind the party, he'd probably be better off sneaking out and walking home then mucking about in the barrow anyway.

There's a few random dungeony things that don't really work. To get into the inner part of the barrow there's a pit of snakes that instakills you if you fall in, with a narrow stone bridge across. Why is this there? There's something hovering above the snakes you'd want to get. The book says the only way to do this is for someone to be lowered using a rope from each end of the pit, and trying anything else ends up with everyone falling in and dying. And that the Boggar and Assassin should attack when you are trying to cross, so someone's getting instakilled. There's another pit you can jump across, only gravity is extra strong immediately above it, which you won't know about unless you throw something across to test the gravity. If you don't, you've a chance of falling in and going all the way to Hell. If you go all the way into the final burial chamber, you can pick up some nice stuff including a +3 Two-Handed Sword. If you do this, the angry spirit of the person buried there attacks you, and it can only be hurt by magic weapons. Use your new sword against it (like you would) and it shatters. When you get out, it again says that you should give all your treasure to the baron and he'll give you back some stuff depending on how well you did, and you shouldn't have to be told this, you should know this somehow.

All in all, not a bad looking scenario, and there are some good bits and some flavour to it, but not great, especially compared to A Shadow on the Mist. I do like that you don't need to investigate the barrow, all you're after is the Assassin, the boggart is in the way, and the undead and treasure are a distraction. Don't have to dungeon-crawl through if you don't want to, but people are likely to choose this since they are there anyway.

[Thaluikhain]

The next scenario Sins of the Fathers is a dungeon crawl, in the sense it's a collections of rooms with stuff in them with often little connection to each other. Morris isn't really a fan of these, believing that they are lazy and don't provide a satisfying experience. On the other hand, they are easy to create and easy to run, and a good way to get GMs used to running things. The scenario in the first DW book The King under the Forest was explicitly stated to be there to introduce people to the game, not unlike the tutorial level of a modern videogame.

A few games later, and I don't see the need for more dungeon crawl. In all honesty, I was going to say something like "It's a dungeon crawl, with a twist, because Morris thinks dungeon crawls aren't very good and tries to liven them up something", then mention the twist and leave it at that. One more scenario in this book and on to book five, I've got a lot to say about Elementalists.

Re-reading it again and...it's still a dungeon crawl, but he has livened it up a bit. Room for improvement, room for not just being a dungeon crawl (especially as it is now assumed that you've played some of the other scenarios which weren't) but still, some good bits.

The baron's son has gone hunting with one of his old retainers, and some mysterious figures abduct the retainer and steal the magic spear the baron's son got from his grandfather, and you all go to an old ruin to go see what's going on. There you find the magic spear floating in midair, and it flies off north. You either follow it directly, or wander the dungeon until you get to the northernmost room, where the spear impales itself on a body that's chained up there. Which turns out to be the baron's son, and the twist is that he was a ghost all the time.

Years ago, the baron's father once hunted and killed a stag that turned out to be a forest spirit (and took the spear), so the spirit's brother killed the son in revenge. Fair enough, you've got some monster of the wildwoods that's been driven away from civilisation by the coming of humanity and/or the True Faith. He's got his beastmen followers that hunt and eat humans the way that humans hunt and eat animals of the forest. You don't even have to fight him, he's satisfied with his vengeance. If you do kill him, woodland animals hate you forever, which seem strange as you could take a ship to the Crusades or something (the location of which are yet to be specified, but presumably it's far away) and I'd have thought that'd be beyond this dead guy's power. Nothing brilliant there, but that's all quite decent.

But it's at the end of a dungeon crawl (well, you can take a more direct route and miss most of it). You've got some nice bestial monsters that represent fear of the untamed forest or whatever, and you've got some seemingly random dungeon crawl padding stuff like an Obsidiak to represent...the writer's thing for disembodied head monsters? I do not see what a granite head with tentacles that floats around like a flying octopus has to do with atavistic humanlike creatures of the wilderness. Though, the stuff that does have the connection tends to be towards the end, so maybe the unconnected stuff is padding before the finale.

Rip out the random stuff, replace with more savage monster stuff, turn the dungeon into a ruined palace or cave dwelling (somewhere monsters live, not somewhere they wait to fight adventurers) and you could have had a much better scenario, IMHO. As it is, not bad, but obvious room for improvement.

[Thaluikhain]

After the events of the last scenario, you have to leave Baron Aldred's service because of the dead son thing, even if people can see it's not your fault and you killed the monster responsible. The third scenario, The Greatest Prize (which Morris apparently wrote while listening to Mask by Vangelis) starts with you going to an inn on a dark night and meet some Knights who are looking for someone to give an adventure to. Specifically, they want to kill an evil Sorcerer who lives in a castle, and they want you to go visit him so they'll have people on the inside he doesn't know when they attack. They promise you double the shares of any loot.

There's some backstory about how the Knights are just back from the Crusades, how the Sorcerer isn't really evil and how they just want the castle because it'd be useful for them in the upcoming war between Baron Aldred and his enemies. The players are unlikely to ever get to know much of that, though.

Anyway, you can help the Knights and kill the Sorcerer, in which case the surviving Knights either turn on you, or pay you off and you go away (presumably thinking that that was all there was to the scenario). Or you can help the Sorcerer and kill the Knights, in which case "The Greatest Prize" refers to having a high level Sorcerer friend with a castle you can stay at.

If everyone else is dead, "The Greatest Prize" refers to getting your own castle, and to a magic thingy that the Sorcerer had. But to get it to work, you need to go on a dungeon crawl. You get teleported to an Underworld that's supposed to have be themed after the elements, only in execution it's a bit weak, random monsters just happen to be fire based or invisible or something. There's also some annoying "puzzles", there's an ice key behind a wall of ice. To get the key you either have to let an Ifrit chase you into the room and melt it, or throw salt collected from the body of another monster at it. The ice key unlocks something on a room full of fire so it'd melt, so you have to get clay from the body of another monster and make an impression of the key and then fill it with molten lead from the fire room. Go down a level, and there's a room full of things that zap you with green lightning, and the only way to be safe is to be covered in green stuff, because they can't see that part of the spectrum. That shouldn't make you invisible, you should look black to them, but that doesn't matter because there's no hint that that is what you should be doing anyway, so you'll just get zapped and probably angry at the GM. There's a monster that's really an illusion, and the best way to fight it is with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears so you don't know when it's supposed to hurt, and there's no reason PCs should even consider this to be the case. Going from "dungeon crawl" puzzles to "old school point and click adventure" puzzles is not an improvement. Anyway, go through all that and you get a really nice magic thingy, which only works within half a mile of the castle. Meh. First part of the scenario looks alright, though there's not much to it at all, second part, yeah, no, dungeon crawl grind. Excepting some of the flavour text in the beginning, you could stick this scenario into almost any system, there's nothing really Dragon Warriors-y about it, which is a shame.

Morris seems to like putting backstories in his scenarios for the GMs benefit, most of which the players won't ever find out about. The monster and his brother from the second scenario are depicted on a ruined cauldron in the first, only the PCs will never know it's supposed to be them. The Knights' plans for the castle don't matter, as you'll only find out they are up to no good if they turn on you and you kill them. Equating each Profession to an element is something the players won't notice, which isn't such a bad thing because it's pretty weak.

Despite having 50 new monsters introduced in this book, the scenarios make use of all of one of them, the Boggart in the first one. If you're going to create Beastmen, Manslugs and Ifrit for your scenarios, why not expand on them a bit and stick them in your monster list so people can use them in their own scenarios?

Anyway, that's the book. Some good bits in there, lot of character and flavour, less in the way of solid substance. Next up, Oliver Johnson and the Elementalists, which sounds like a band from the 60s.