Naming The Faceless: Dragonbane
Naming The Faceless is a series of posts where I grab an RPG and roll up a character in it, blogging about the process. It’s intended to be a brief, non-exhaustive look at how players approach RPG texts, and also just a way for me to have a bit of fun blogging without feeling like I have to write An Article. You can find all of the posts in this series here.
I’ve been reading the Dragonbane core set, slowly working on a Long Read post about it, but I decided to take a break from that to actually roll up a character in the system. So here we are.
Dragonbane is a translation of Drakar och Demoner, Scandinavia’s first and biggest tabletop RPG, originally launched in 1982. Here’s what the marketing copy tells us about it:
Dragonbane is a classic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game full of magic, mystery, and adventure. It is designed from the ground up to facilitate fast and furious play, with very little prep time and adventures that are a breeze to run. Dragonbane is a game with room for laughs at the table, while still offering brutal challenges for the adventurers.
I went into it expecting it to be essentially another D&D. It turns out that it was originally a direct translation of Chaosium’s Magic World, which is itself part of Basic Role-Playing that came out of Runequest. I know of BRP and Runequest but don’t actually know anything about how they work despite having read a lot of RQ adventures. I’m expecting that creating a character for this system will be a much more involved process than for the OSR games I’ve been looking at recently – I expect something closer to a D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e level of complexity, but we’ll see what happens.
Helpfully the book breaks down the process of character creation into steps. There are 13 of them.
- Choose or roll your kin.
- Note your innate ability.
- Choose or roll your profession.
- Choose or roll your age.
- Choose or roll your name.
- Roll your attributes.
- Calculate your derived ratings.
- Choose your trained skills.
- Note your heroic ability.
- Choose or roll your weakness (optional).
- Choose or roll your gear.
- Choose or roll your memento (optional).
- Choose or roll your appearance.
The game comes with character sheets and it’s suggested that character creation should take place on one of these sheets. The sheets are available to download for free from the Free League website, and come with the digital version of the game (as well as physical copies in the actual box set). Annoyingly the digital version of the sheets isn’t form fillable, so the screenshots I’m going to show you during this process might look a little ugly as I’m editing the PDF directly.
Start time: 15:30
Step 1: Choose or Roll your Kin
There are six “kin” in Dragonbane: humans, halflings, dwarves, elves, mallards, and wolfkin. The game actually gives us the option to roll for a random kin, which I like. It’s a d12 table, with humans and halflings the most common result (1-4 and 5-7 respectively) followed by dwarves (8-9), then elves, mallards, and wolfkin being equally uncommon (10, 11, and 12). Normally I would roll, because I like random generation, but I have no idea what a “mallard” is so instead I’m just going to pick that. I sincerely hope it’s a duck person.
Jumping forward a couple of pages to the description of the Mallard, I’m delighted to find that it is, in fact, a duck person. Here’s the description:
The origin of the mallards is shrouded in mystery. Some scholars claim that they came from a mighty island realm that was swallowed by the sea thousands of years ago; others believe them to be the result of a failed magical experiment. Whatever the truth may be, these feathered humanoids are a common sight in the world. They have a knack for trade, and their agitated quacking is often an integral part of the soundscape around marketplaces and trade caravans. However, some mallards seek their fortunes as brigands, pirates, or mercenaries. Despite their diminutive size, they are fierce in battle and feared by many for their murderous rage.
Honestly I don’t know why you’d bother including boring, run-of-the-mill kin like halflings and elves when you’ve got duck- and wolf-people as options. Lean into the weirdness.
Step 2: Note your Innate Ability
Each kin has an innate ability that no other kin can learn. Mallards get two, apparently. These innate abilities usually cost Willpower Points to use.
The two Mallard abilities are “Ill-Tempered” (WP: 3) and “Webbed Feet” (WP: 0). “Ill-Tempered” lets me “activate this ability when making a skill roll and get a boon to the roll”. After doing so I also become Angry, if I’m not already. I don’t know what that means in game terms but let’s write it down.
“Webbed Feet” just gives us a “boon” to swimming rolls, and lets us move at full speed while in or under water.
The next section header under Kin is “Language”, which gives me pause for a second because the overview of character creation doesn’t mention anything about languages. We’re told that most characters can speak, read, and write a common language, and that non-human characters (presumably such as the Mallard) “often have their own languages that few humans understand”. It goes on to say that the Languages skill is used to understand other languages (that makes sense), but it doesn’t indicate where we need to look to find out what languages we might know. I’ll put a pin in that for now.
Step 5: Name
I’m skipping ahead here, purely because I’m flipping through the kin listings to get to the next step and I’ve noticed that the roll tables for character names are listed alongside the kin descriptions. It doesn’t make sense to flip back to this page later when there’s nothing else I need on it now, so I’m going to roll a name and move on.
My character’s name is Hackleswell.
(Initially my reaction to seeing d6 lists of names was that this isn’t enough, but actually it’s more than enough for most groups, isn’t it?)
Step 3: Profession
As with kin, we’re given a roll table (this time 1d10) of professions to pick from. From the description – “all the plater characters are adventurers, but you have learned a thing or two before the game begins” – I get the impression that these are closer to D&D 5e’s Backgrounds than traditional classes, but then as I continue reading I can see that they’re responsible for determining lots of your starting skills, the gear you start with, and which heroic ability you get. I don’t know yet whether there’s any advancement in them, and it strikes me as I’m writing this that maybe that’s one of the key differences between a “background” and a “class” – do you get better in it as you adventure, or does it just determine what you know when you start out? (This may be an obvious observation but it’s not a connection I’ve made before, mainly because I don’t think about backgrounds or classes very often).
Anyway. One dice roll later and we’ve determined that I’m going to be playing a bard. Which, given the choice, is what I’d normally go for anyway.
To avoid flipping back and forth in the PDF I’m going to note down some of the information the Bard entry gives me, namely that my Key Attribute is CHA (presumably Charisma), the Skills I can choose from are Acrobatics, Bluffing, Evade, Knives, Languages, Myths & Legends, Performance, and Persuasion, and that my Heroic Ability is Musician.
(Another side note here to complain about a common thing that really winds me up, which is the consistency in how skills are named. It bothers me disproportionately when skill lists use a combination of verbs and nouns, and I desperately want to fix this list to be at least a little more consistent. Even just changing “Evade” to “Evasion” or “Evading” and “Performance” to “Performing” would make me happier despite still being inconsistent).
Steps 11 and 5: Gear and Nickname
As with the Kin entry, we have a couple of tables here that I can see are going to be needed later on and I don’t want to have to scroll back up the PDF, so I’m going to roll them now. I start play with a horn, knife, torch, flint and tinder, 4 food rations, and 6 silver, and my nickname is Talespinner.
Step 4: Age
Age is actually meaningful here. It’s divided into three categories – young, adult, and old – and each one impacts our stats in some way. Older age means that we begin with lower attributes but higher skill ratings, which seems a fair trade-off (though I’m still waiting for a game to account for Old Man Strength when doing this sort of thing).
We’re free to choose or roll for it, and I’m going to roll. Looking at the distribution of results (1-3: Young, 4-5: Adult, 6: Old), “Young” is the default setting. I rolled a 4, which makes me an Adult and gives me 6+4 trained Skills. (I assume it’s written in this manner rather than just saying “10” because 6 of the skills have to be selected from our profession and the others can be picked freely from elsewhere.)
I do wish that there was some indication of what “Adult” means in diegetic terms. How old is an Adult Mallard in years? How does that compare to a human? What sort of life expectancy do I have? If we’re going to make age meaningful then we should make it meaningful, I think.
Step 5: Name
Oh hey, we’ve done this step.
Step 6: Attributes
Now we come to the numbers. Each character has six base attributes that indicate their basic mental and physical capabilities. Each is scored on a scale from 3 to 18, generated by rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest result. We don’t have to roll them in order, but we do have to assign them as we roll them rather than rolling all 6 and then making choices. Here’s the exact wording of this process:
Roll 4D6 and remove the worst die, which gives you a score between 3 and 18. Assign that score to an attribute of your choice. Repeat this process five more times until you have assigned a score to each attribute. You must assign each score as you roll them, but once done you may swap two scores.
I actually really like this as a mid-way point between “roll 3d6 down the line” and “put them wherever you want”. It allows for some randomisation and interesting outcomes while still meaning that you can make sure your highest score is in your key attribute, if that’s what you want to do.
The actual attributes themselves are unsurprising to anybody familiar with fantasy RPGs: Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, Willower, and Charisma. My key attribute is Charisma, so I’ll keep that in mind when I’m swapping scores. My rolls were as follows: 12, 13, 10, 12, 15, 10 and I initially assigned them like this:
STR 12 AGL 13 CON 10
WIL 12 CHA 15 INT 10
After my first three rolls were underwhelming I told myself that the first time I rolled a 13+ I’d put it into Charisma, and it turned out that my highest roll when there anyway. I’m largely happy with these scores, and I think the only change I want to make is swapping Strength with Intelligence. That makes my final attributes look like this:
STR 10 CON 10 AGL 13
INT 12 WIL 12 CHA 15
If I were either Young or Old these would change, but I’m not, so they don’t.
Step 7: Derived Ratings
Based on our attributes we have a number of derived ratings. Let’s go through them in order.
Movement
Does exactly what it says on the tin, telling us how many meters we can run in a round of combat. (As an English person who exists in a world that uses a weird mixture of Imperial and Metric measurements, meters for a person moving around feels very weird and doesn’t really mean anything to me. Mentally I’m probably going to convert this roughly to feet if I ever play the game). It starts with a base number determined by your Kin – in my case, 8 – and is then modified by Agility. With an AGL of 13 I get +2, so my Movement is 10.
Damage Bonus
Characters have two separate damage bonuses, one determined by Strength and one by Agility. For scores less then or equal to 12 there’s no adjustment, so I don’t get a Strength bonus, but with an AGL of 13 I get to add +D4 to AGL-based weapons.
I really like a dice-based bonus for damage. Rolling dice is fun and it makes it A Moment when you roll maximum damage on both dice, or roll poorly on your initial damage die but make up for it with a good roll on the bonus die.
Hit Points
Nice and easy, this one. Our maximum HP is equal to our CON, so 10 for me, but can be increased by taking the Heroic Ability “Robust”.
Willpower Points
These are used for magic and, as we’ve already established, for innate abilities and heroic abilities. As with HP our initial number is equivalent to an attribute – in this case, WIL – but can be increased by taking a specific heroic ability (“Focused”). I have 12 WP.
Step 8: Trained Skills
Skills. The things that our characters can do that other people might not be able to do, or can’t do quite as well. They represent knowledge and abilities acquired during – or prior to – our life as an adventurer. There are 30 skills in the base game, each measured by skill level on a scale from 1 to 18. The higher the better, apparently, and each skill is connected to an attribute that determines our base chance in that skill. This is described as “a “free” skill level that you get automatically”.
This is very similar to things like the proficiency bonus in D&D 5e, where every character always adds their ability modifier to a roll when trying to use that skill but only characters with training in that skill get to add their proficiency bonus. Picking skills is, traditionally, my least favourite part of making RPG characters.
(A note here before we go on. The book makes mention of “Secondary Skill” beyond the core skills, which are things like schools of magic. The base game doesn’t give players a base chance in any secondary skills, but we’re told that “future expansions and supplements may modify this”. I’m always interested to see this sort of product line building going on in a core rulebook.)
As mentioned earlier, 6 of my trained skills have to come from the list determined by my profession, while another 4 can come from the main list. The level of trained skills is equal to twice the base chance, so it’s very simple to work out. It just requires a bit of time spent filling things in on the character sheet.
In the end I select the following trained skills: Bluffing, Evade, Knives, Languages, Myths & Legends, Performance, Sneaking, Spot Hidden, Sleight of Hand, Beast Lore.
I’m always interested to see the spread of attributes being linked to skills in games like this. Most of them are linked to Agility, Intelligence, and Charisma, with only one non-combat skill being linked to Strength (Crafting, which seems a strange decision). None of the skills are linked to WIL at all.
Step 9: Heroic Ability
Heroic Abilities are special abilities that give us advantages in the game, based on our profession. I’m not sure why this is a discrete step in this process, since we already picked our Profession early on and I know that my heroic ability is “Musician”. Weirdly, this page doesn’t give me any additional information about what this ability actually does, and doesn’t point me to another page in the book where I can learn about it.
A quick scan of the PDF bookmarks tells me that this information is at the end of the Skills chapter. The requirement to use Musician is “Performance 12”. That means that we need at least a 13 in our prime attribute (Charisma) and to have chosen Performance as one of our trained skills in order to be able to actually use our heroic ability. It’s probably a safe assumption that most Bards will pick Performance, but it would be nice to have some indication that actually it’s a key part of the class and you can’t really function as designed without it.
Step 10: Weakness
Basically just a roleplaying prompt, but let’s roll one. I rolled a 19, giving me “Cynic. I always think things will turn out for the worst”. A cynical duck sounds like fun to play.
Step 11: Gear
We already did this step earlier. Hurray for us.
Well, we sort of did this step. We’ve got the items from our profession, but in skipping ahead in the book I can see that there’s an encumbrance limit equal to half our Strength. My limit is 5, and I have 5 items here. That’s without including a musical instrument, which I don’t appear to have, or a weapon beyond the knife I’m starting play with (though reading a bit further tells me that I can have up to three weapons at hand which don’t count towards encumbrance limits).
Given that all musical instruments cost gold, and I don’t have any gold, I’m going to assume that I don’t actually begin play with an instrument. The same is also true for armour, which I can’t afford either. I am very squishy right now.
Step 12: Memento
A memento is an item of sentimental value that we carry with us, something small and unobtrusive without much value that’s basically just a roleplaying aid. Other games call them trinkets. I roll a 6 and get “a wooden figurine you got as a child”. I like the idea of my mallard having a little wooden duck painted yellow, so that’s what we’re going with.
Step 13: Appearance
And finally, a d20 appearance table. With a result of 13 I develop a limp.
And that’s my character done, as far as I can tell. Here’s the sheet.
I’m missing some information about my weapon, but otherwise this looks pretty complete. This whole process, including typing up the blog post while making my character, took about an hour and a quarter to complete. If I hadn’t been blogging I think it would have been much quicker.
Having done this, I’m very interested to see what this game looks like in play. It occupies this strange space where the books – and the character sheets – look like big crunchy trad games, but actually there’s not a huge amount going on here mechanically. I don’t have tons of feats and unique abilities. I have some equipment, a skill list, and not much else. I think this might feel much more like a rules-lite OSR game than I’d expect if I got it to the table, and I’m curious to see if that proves to be the case.