Review: Dragon Heresy Introductory Set
The Dragon Heresy Introductory Set is a book written by Douglas Cole and published by his company, Gaming Ballistic LLC. Mr. Cole has long been a freelancer for Steve Jackson Games, and he has to his name books such as GURPS Martial Arts, GURPS Technical Grappling and several others. I’ve been following his blog, also called Gaming Ballistic, for quite a while now.
The Introductory Set is the company’s latest offering, and it’s Kickstarter campaign is just wrapping up. As far as KS campaigns go, it was quite successful: it got the money it needed, hit some cool stretch goals, and is set to deliver on time. I expect the finished product will be availabe on the store before the end of this month.
Having read my preliminary backer copy, I will endeavor to give you my impressions of it.
TL; DR
Dragon Heresy might be the first iteration of D&D Fifth Edition that doesn’t put me to sleep. From now on, I will always be a bit sad when I play vanilla 5th edition because I could be playing Dragon Heresy instead.
On the Book Itself
The mostly-final PDF of The Dragon Heresy Introductory Set I have in front of me is around 285 pages long - the final book will have 288, so this is just missing the covers and perhaps a page or two of editorial information. People who backed it at a higher level than I did will also get a luxurious hardcover version (an offset print run was one of the stretch goals they achieved).
The book contains everything you need to play the game from levels 1 to 5, from basic die-rolling concepts to character creation, rules for lots of common situations and large catalogues of spells and monsters. You can see that all of this was taken from the as-yet-unpublished full game, since there are hints about higher-level stuff left here and there, but the text is self-contained. The hints act mostly as teasers of what the future might bring.
Layout-wise, the text is reminiscent of the official D&D books at a first look, but all the graphical elements on the page are specific to Dragon Heresy. The body font is a workable serif face, and the titles manage to be both fancy-looking and readable. The art that is already there is quite good overall. Several artists worked on this book, and their styles are usually dissimilar enough to be noticeable, but not enough to make the book look inconsistent.
The writing is generally clear, and occasionally sprinkled with the same delightful bits of humor you can find in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy supplements, which for me is always a plus.
Last, but not least, this thing has an table of contents and index comparable to those of a GURPS book. This is high praise: no one, and I mean no one publishes books that are as well-indexed as those of GURPS. The PDF also contains links in its text, which further helps referencing related concepts.
On Player Characters
Core mechanics and character creation options take up roughly the first 50 pages of the book. The basic mechanics are what you’d expect from any SRD 5.1 game: ability checks, advantage/disadvantage, and so on.
Character creation uses a set of three different number arrays. The player chooses one and assigns the numbers to the character’s abilities. As the author says, people who really want to roll 4d6-drop-lowest or even 3d6-in-order already know how to do it by heart.
The available races are Humans, Dwarves, Dragonborn, Half-Elves and Tieflings. None of them are what you’d expect from reading the names alone, and all of them get a detailed overview of their culture. Humans are basically ethnically diverse vikings. Dwarves look like they’re made of stone and have a stronger bond to their craft guild than to their biological family. Dragonborn can look like anything from humans with a bit of a skin condition to barely humanoid lizard-people, and have a history as former slaves of the Elder Dragons. Half-Elves and tieflings, in an interesting reversal of the cliche, are generally well-liked by others wherever they go, having innate bonuses to Charisma as they do.
You can’t play a full-blooded elf, because this is a Norse-inpired setting and full-blooded Norse elves are scary.
Class-wise, you have the Berserker (a renamed Barbarian), the Skald (a renamed Bard) plus Fighters, Clerics and Wizards. The basic rules for each are pretty much the same as in standard D&D, but their class options contain some interesting novelty. Berserkers who don’t just want to rage harder at 3rd level can choose to either channel rune magic or become monsters at grappling. Fighters can get what I think might be the best Warlord-like abilities I’ve ever seen in 5th edition material, and can start at first level with a fighting style that makes them Valkyrie-good at spear-fighting. Skalds, Clerics and Wizards also get their own flavorful options.
No rogues in this book, which is kind of appropriate as both the historical Norse and the people of Torengar consider theft to be dishonorable. The honorable thing to do is to first kill them, then take their stuff.
You also get a small selection of setting appropriate backgrounds, which segue into an interesting set of rules for social standing. The more lavish your lifestyle and the more expensive your bling, the more pull you have in Torengur society.
On the Setting
Dragon Heresy has its own setting: the Norse-inspired kingdom of Torengar, located in the world of Etera. The text takes pains to emphasize the inspired bit, and that you shouldn’t expect the setting to rigorously match real historical Norse facts, but you can still see that quite a bit of research went into it.
The wider cosmology is based on Norse myth: you have Yggdrasil and its Nine Realms, but there are several differences that are caused both by the need to bring this a bit closer to a D&D-ish arrangement and by the setting’s specific history. The latter are the most interesting.
For example, Jotunheim is inhabited by dragons, not giants. Giants used to live here at the beginning of time, but the dragons kicked them out. Alfheim was similarly changed by ancient historical events. These details make me feel like this is a post-Ragnarok world even though the Aesir are still kicking around.
The Aesir themselves are slightly changed from what you’d expect from reading up on Norse myth. Of the “main cast”, Freya and Frigga have been mashed up into a single deity (Valfreya), and several of the others go by names that as far as I know are historical, but not as popular in the present-day real world. Woden, Donnar, and such. There are also a whole bunch of other Aesir who don’t normally get top billing in Marvel movies but which play an important part in the lives of the people of Torengar.
The ancient history of Etera is dominated by a long war between the Winter Fae and the Elder Dragons, which ended when a Fae faction performed a desperate magical ritual of apocalyptic proportions that pretty much shattered both empires and allowed their former slaves to spread out and form many smaller, squabbling kingdoms. A few centuries ago, the dwarves of the island of Barakthel began exerting their influence on the neighboring lands to make them a bit more stable, resulting in the current political map.
Most Introductory Set adventures take place in Torengar, the most viking-like kingdom of Etera, or in the neighboring land of Tanalor where most of the ancient Fae and Dragon ruins are. There are other kingdoms that take more after other real-world cultures and which the Torengur love to trade with and/or raid, but they aren’t given much emphasis here. I imagine the full three-book set would have more on them.
Overall the setting as presented in the Introductory Set is quite gameable, and comes with plenty of advice and general hooks for creating adventures. It’s certainly a lot more flavorful than the Forgotten Realms the official 5th edition books stick to.
On the New Mechanics
I’ve touched upon this a tiny bit when describing the character creation options, but Dragon Heresy has a lot of new and interesting mechanics that, in my eyes, turn D&D 5th edition from the flavorless substrate of generic fantasy roleplaying into something interesting in its own right.
The most obvious change is that it ditches Armor Class and Hit Points in favor of a new Vigor/Wounds system. No, this isn’t the first wounds system in roleplaying: Star Wars d20 tried something similar, and any Brazilian readers will know Tagmar did it a decade before Star Wars d20. This is, however, one of the best-executed wounds system I’ve ever seen.
Your hit dice give you Vigor points, which explicitly represent your ability to protect yourself from harm via weapon parries, shield blocks or plain dodging. You gain more Vigor when you level up, and recover lost Vigor by resting (much like HP in vanilla D&D). You don’t take Vigor damage - you spend vigor to avoid taking Wounds. Wounds are serious business. They take days or weeks to heal without magic, and taking Wounds can seriously impair your character long before they’re at death’s door.
Instead of a single Armor Class value, characters have a relatively low Threat DC and a higher Hit DC. If an enemy beats your Threat DC, it means they will hit you unless you actively defend yourself by spending Vigor. Beating your Hit DC means they bypassed all of your defenses. Avoiding injury from that takes a “frantic defense”, which among other things costs your reaction for the round.
Armor no longer makes you harder to hit - instead, it provides damage resistance that reduces the amount of Wounds (not Vigor) you take from an attack. Shields do make you harder to hit, and you need a shield to be able to defend yourself normally from arrow fire or certain similar spells.
On top of this there’s grappling. Dragon Heresy uses a version of the grappling system introduced in Dungeon Grappling, where attempts to grapple an enemy cause Control Damage and enemies are more impaired the more Control has been applied to them. You can also turn control directly into wounds, which isn’t as efficient as just stabbing your enemy but is better than trying to punch them barehanded.
I quite like these systems! You can kinda see the influence from GURPS here - spending Vigor is the equivalent of making active defense rolls, and Dungeon Grappling was of course inspired by Technical Grappling. These rules do a good job of putting the age-old “hit points versus meat points” debate to rest.
Aside from these combat mechanics, there are other interesting additions. The social standing system was already discussed earlier, and there is also a simple system for Flyting, which is a ritualized contest of insults that was practiced by Norse. Yes, apparently social combat was a thing in the real world.
Conclusion
If you have any interest at all in the mechanic changes I summarized above, then you should definitely get this book. This goes double if you like vikings! This is only an introductory set, but the new mechanics and the setting could easily be transplanted into a game based on the vanilla SRD. The only thing you’d be missing are the new character options beyond level 5.