This review was requested, and so because I know the system and had a copy, I'm stepping up. Now, I don't think this book is particularly interesting; the most noteworthy thing about it is that it was released after GURPS 4e was written but before it was released, and so most of the book is in GURPS 3e, but there's a tacked-on appendix where they do all the stats again for the new edition. As a result, I'll try to make this as brief and pithy as possible.
Chapter 1: The Name of the Beast
The book tries to cover a lot of mythological ground, and in addition to the western and eastern dragons, it tries to cover cockatrices and basilisks, nagas, the Lernaean Hydra, Apep, Tiamat, etc. For reasons that aren't made clear, they also talk about the Ordo Draconis and the etymological connection to fucking dragoons, despite neither of those going anywhere. Pop-culture dragons get a section that's too short to do them any justice, but still too long.
I appreciate the willingness to find thematic connections in many cultures, but the whole chapter feels padded, shallow, and unfocused. Especially since a whole lot of the stuff that gets mentioned here is never mentioned again.
Chapter 2: Playing With Fire
This chapter is a lot more practical, but also very random in its organization. It opens with ways to use dragons in a campaign: simple beasts vs intelligent beings, living natural disasters, macguffin guardians, teachers, rulers, mounts, pets, etc. Good, useful stuff. Then it talks about an all-Dragon-PCs campaign for a page before being distracted by a bumblebee and going back to talking about general campaign things: how powerful are dragons in your campaign? How common? How intelligent? How magical?
Then it talks about draconic tactics, which is seriously out-of-place because the abilities it references haven't been properly addressed yet. And then it's Life Cycles, Lairs & Hoards, Society, which are sort of appropriate; but then it's three pages of genre crossover notes, which is a bizarre tangent. GURPS books normally save this kind of hash for the last chapter, not the second one. I checked, and the book did seem to have an editor. None of the material is bad, a lot of it is quite good, I just expect better organization from a GURPS book.
However, despite the first chapter's crazy attention to all the even vaguely draconic things, the focus in this chapter is clearly on western fantasy-style dragons. Like, the section on dragons as rulers has no reference to the Chinese dragon kings of the oceans, and the section on tactics doesn't talk about how a poisonous dragon could bite and kite, letting the poison finish an enemy off.
Chapter 3: Hatching a Dragon
Here is the crunch. Templates for a number of different dragon types and body layouts, with 'lenses' to customize them a bit more. It does not attempt to cover anything like all the things listed in the opening chapter; even basilisks, cockatrices, and the Hydra are missing, before you get to the more exotic stuff. I would call it minimal, but adequate, and certainly there's plenty to work with if you were going to build your own – which, as a GURPS player, you probably were.
Chapter 4: Tooth and Claw and Fiery Maw
And here's the stuff for building your own. A discussion of appropriate DR to resist the weapons of the setting, various venoms and natural weapons, innate hypnotic gazes and fear effects, shapeshifting, how to model 'many heads.' The natural weapons section is quite padded, but overall the chapter is good, although it does assume you have the 3e Compendium I to cover all the strange fringe advantages it talks about.
Chapter 5: Dragons and Magic
Discussion of dragons as casters. How to use the Breathe Fire spell instead of an innate breath weapon, and similar. Casting packages for draconic characters. Hoards as divinatory tools and magic point stores is the most interesting material. Minimal, but adequate.
Chapter 6: Slayers and Servitors
The kinds of relationships humans tend to have with dragons, both for and against. Various kinds of dragonslayer and templates for them. Things to do with a slain dragon. Anti-dragon tactics. This chapter is a little heavy on the 'slayers' side, but it's mostly good material.
Chapters 7-9: The Dragons Return
These chapters are about a specific campaign setting, in which dragons start appearing all over the world in 1878. The setting is ~1900, when the dragons are more-or-less established, but both they and the humans are still adjusting to the situation. Chapter 9 is mostly notes about advancing the timeline ahead through history to the early 2000s, but it is a very half-assed effort. The first two chapters do a pretty good job with what they have, but they are fifteen pages together, and don't even try to talk about even the most significant ways in which the 190X's are distinct from contemporary times.
The book does the usual GURPS thing of mentioning other GURPS books to be mined for material and crossovers, but shockingly does not mention GURPS Technomancer; a book that not only includes modern-day dragons but also does a whole treatment of how magic might affect a modern society, which is especially relevant because the dragons of this book's setting know magic and can teach humans how to do it.
One thing that's kind of a missed opportunity is that the assumption is that a party is either all dragons or all humans, if for no other reason than the dragons cost so many points that even badass humans who are also half-dragon sorcerers are going to be pushing credulity before getting anywhere near them. There's no particular reason that has to be the case, especially since a lot of the draconic physical advantages look a lot less impressive in a world that has rifles, artillery, and maxim guns.
Chapter 10: Other Times, Other Dragons
This chapter is a pile of campaign seeds.
• Fear and Flame is a post-apocalypse where the dragons have burned down some D&D-esque fantasy world, and the ash-streaked survivors are trying to do the whole survival thing; against that backdrop, the PCs are taking back the world, one hard-earned dragon corpse at a time. I'd watch that show.
• The Wisdom of Pearls is draconic bureaucrats in fairytale Bronze Age China. On some level, it's just like being a human bureaucrat: you have to do your duty, look after your family, jockey for promotion... except you're an enormously powerful water dragon. I don't know if that difference is enough on its own, but Chinese history is long and has a lot of interesting things happening to bureaucrats, so mine some up, put a dragon-level twist on them, and get caught up in a succession crisis over the next Jade Emperor or something.
• Dracomancy contains no dragons, wtf? It's a secret magic campaign where all your spells are based on draconic abilities and slowly corrupt your behavior to be more stereotypically dragonish. Could be cool, I guess.
• Fire in the Sky is an SF setting, with a lost colony of humans on an alien world and also there are genegineered dragons for no reason. It's very lame.
• Hatchling Night is a horror scenario involving a swarm of dragon hatchlings. A little different, but not very interesting.
• Serpent in the Mirror is about dragons that don't really exist (but totally do) living behind mirrors doing poorly-explained things that advance a poorly-explained goal in a poorly-explained way.
• Armor: Not Shining, But Big Enough is mecha vs. dragons. The invading biotech aliens decided that dragons would be extra-scary to humans, genegeneered some up, and dropped them on us; we fight them with various sizes of mecha because rule-of-cool.
• Tiphon is a world where a human population lives under a draconic tyranny, and the PCs are younger dragons rebels, fighting to free the little squishies.
• Burning Space is a science fantasy space opera, where dragons are used as mounts that can fly in space and even do FTL hops between star systems, basically functioning like Star Wars fighters. Not a bad jumping-off point for a crazy over-the-top-awesome-style game.
Final Thoughts
Not a great book, not a terrible book, just thoroughly mediocre. Some interesting ideas, some decent mechanical work, but also a deal of padding and uninspired write-by-numbers hackery. If you plan to do a lot with Dragons in your GURPS games, go ahead; otherwise, skip it.
OSSR: GURPS Dragons
Moderator: Moderators
