The Gaming Den

Drakar och Demoner, Fifth Edition
or, It's not like Swedes couldn't play D&D – they just have something else in mind



Way back in 1981, a Swedish fellow called Fredrik Malmberg and a few friends of his bought a little shop called Target Games in the Old Town of Stockholm, and acquired the rights to translate the Basic Role-Playing system. The BRP originated from Runequest and was Chaosium's hallmark system for stuff like Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer and goddamn duck people. What history fails to explain is what the need for a translation was, since the Swedish youth was and is fluent in English. Whatever the original intent was, it soon spiraled out of control and took on a life of its own, later on spawning developments such as Target becoming Paradox, Paradox buying White Wolf and Malmberg's Cabinet Holdings buying Paradox, though he apparently never sold it in the first place and the whole thing is a fucking farce and we'll not be getting into it any deeper, because everything is in Swedish and it's my fourth language and I'm struggling enough with the rulebooks as it is. The fact that this is the same company that made Mutant Chronicles, the game in which you could die mid-character creation, speaks volumes.

The game has a whole bunch of editions, but the exact number is not known, because in 1987 someone started writing about the wrong edition, and the third edition was also renamed later on as Ed. 2.1, some of the new editions were identical to the earlier versions, there were two types of versions (Basic and Ground Rules) and so on. Historians suspect that the version currently (since 2006) running is edition number seven, but it's a matter of interpretation, apparently. It's a huge mess. I love this company. That said, what it says on the tin is “Fifth Edition” (not really, nobody tells you which version you're playing because nobody actually knows). From what I'm reading, it's a huge revision to the rules, but apparently it's actually a rewrite of the 1991 rules made to accommodate the new campaign setting, Chronopia. I don't know. I'm just excited that I'm confused before even opening the book.

Before I start soldiering through the dense 227-page (plus sample adventure) tome, I must say that the creators really seemed to appreciate legibility and fine art. In fact, the whole book is very pretty, professional and has some of the most gorgeous graphics I've seen. Chronopia was always visually terrific, but the new addition to the creative team, Bill King, was working on Warhammer Fantasy before joining Target, so I'm going to go ahead and guess that the content of the setting is a huge trainwreck.

I also want to note that I'm not going to be updating awfully often, because I already have one job and this is still all in Swedish.


Gimme that sweet, sweet madness.

The art has me interested.

That dragon...worm...thing looks disturbingly happy

In the 90s, Target tried to fight Games Workshop in the miniatures wargaming arena. They had a Mutant Chronicles minis game to fight 40k and a Chronopia minis game to fight Warhammer Fantasy. It used d20s and was built for smaller engagements than Warhammer Fantasy.


Orcs and Goblins were black blooded mammals and had an Ottoman Empire theme.


Dwarves had an animal totem clans deal going on and dresses like pigs.

The models looked good enough and the rules were more playable than Warhammer Fantasy (not that this was hard in the days of Herohammer). Also, the minis were cheaper than what you had to pay for GW models of the period. On paper, you'd have thought it would have been a slam dunk and GW could get fucked.

However, they never finished the model line for the units promised in the first book. Then they came out with an expansion that added new armies that also weren't finished. So it could never take off because it could never really be played except in the sense of trivial demonstrations. So some people bought some of the models in the vain hope that eventually there would be enough material to field a full army, and those hopes were slowly dashed as the company did less and less with the line and quietly withdrew it.

-Username17

The models looked good enough and the rules were more playable than Warhammer Fantasy (not that this was hard in the days of Herohammer). Also, the minis were cheaper than what you had to pay for GW models of the period. On paper, you'd have thought it would have been a slam dunk and GW could get fucked.

However, they never finished the model line for the units promised in the first book. Then they came out with an expansion that added new armies that also weren't finished.

And thus we are reminded that many better ideas than what makes the mainstream fail because of face-palming incompetence.

The Chronopia models were so sweet I regularly bought them just to assemble, paint and admire. In a similar sense, I just bought and downloaded Chronopia stuff without ever sporting the idea of playing it - I just wanted to look at the pictures. Paul Bonner (who, for example, did that Sadist Serpent (not actual name)) also did art for Mutant Chronicles, and he's like the best goddamn fantasy illustrator in the business. Or any business.

I think I'd want to meet Fredrik Malmberg and listen to the whole story of Target/Aventyr/Paradox/Cabinet and all the spectacular failures it entails.

It's probably just me being a Swedaboo (is that a thing? It is now), but I am very interested to learn more of this game.

Foreword
or, before we get to the meat of it

The DoD (not D&D, because Swedish) team is impressively concise. The credits are in fact so short, that they had plentiful room to add a foreword and a “By the way” on the same page. The entire credited team has seven artists, translator (who did the translation in 1982, Åke Eldberg), Bill King of aforementioned Warhammer Fantasy “fame” doing the setting, ten-ish people doing Concept and “Assistance” and terrifyingly, Henrik Strandberg doing both Rules and Editing, all of it. That's over two hundred pages of rules and one man doing everything – which is practical, since he'd been a part of the team for nearly a decade and three-ish (you know what I mean by now) editions before this one. I'm looking at the earlier editions, but I'm struggling to find much writing credits to his name before the 1991 revision, which everyone keeps telling me, was a huge turning point to the game. The 1991 version had some of the original cast from 1982 still at it, (Lars-Åke Thor at the helm, with Åke Eldberg in “A Little Less Construction”) and Henrik Strandberg himself taking design credit as well as editing. So, the 1991 revision is quite a bit Strandberg's baby and the 1994 edition, which I'm reviewing, is a revision of that new edition, designed to compliment the dark fantasy setting of Chronopia. Was it typical for its time to make a “new edition” when you injected a new campaign setting? I doubt it. Perhaps they were looking at White Wolf and figuring that a new world needs new rules. They figured wrong. And with a single goddamn man revising the whole thing seems to me like a total hackjob from the get-go.


The King of Sweden rides alone

The Foreword is just the darndest thing – Strandberg does a hand-wavy brief history of the game, carefully omitting the actual edition number for the product in your hand. He mentions that the Blue Box DoD of 1982 only had 48 pages and that five years later it was 80, and 4 years after that, they'd hit 176 pages, and as is evident, 3 years after that, 225 pages + sample adventure.



Asides from the uncontrolled page bloat, he assures us that the game is developing and mentions, without any examples of course, that the whole RPG world is growing and changing fast, with plenty of fresh ideas and exciting new concepts. Why, then, Target Games insists on using a retarded, moldy late seventies percentile rules platform is not especially explained.

At this point, I want to direct your attention to Sweden, as a cultural background. See, when you imagine Sweden and the Swedish people, you might think blonde hair, equality, tolerance, utopian socialism, welfare, education and happiness, perhaps even unicorns and free money for everyone – and you'd be correct. The amount of giddiness and political correctness permeating Swedish culture is obnoxious. They're essentially the Friendship is Magic version of the already rather decent Nordic state concept. The fact that they're sharing all their happy gaming friends the previous versions of their game and a large percent of the splat books for free ( http://riotminds.se/vara-spel/drakar-oc ... -trudvang/ ) is symptomatic of all that love and kindness in the Swedish heart.


Heja Sverige, Heja vänner!

So, when the book, starting with the Foreword, includes “rolig” (“fun”) like four hundred times, we're not even scratching the surface – the “By the way” sidenote of the credits page goes out of its way to tell you that the author is not being sexist when he uses “han” (him) instead of “han eller hon” (him or her) when describing people, because he's just trying to reduce the word count and sorry about that. And this is 1994, twenty years before their neighboring countries, such as Finland, are slowly starting to remove words like “policeman.” It's as endearing as it is maddening.

Next we have a what appears to be a meticulous Table of Contents nicely fitted into one page. And after that, we're moving on to

Chapter One: Introduction
or, Be honest with me, are we going to have goddamn duck people?

The first chapter is 4 pages long, of which approximately two are pictures. It's smart, I'm already feeling good about this product. Look at those cool-ass customers on page 7! Though, the goddamn duck people make a cameo in the first setting image. Fucking duck people. Anyway!


Heja aventyrare!

The obvious segments suchs “what is roleplaying?” and so on follow patterns typical prior to D&D 3.x, where they explicitly state that the SL (Game leader) is the most important person in the table and the only one who needs to know any rules. They try to soften that by saying that the most important part is to have exciting adventures together (obviously) and to have fun, but they can't mask the fact that the game is a product of a time when the SL was king and you fucking proles do what you're told. Maybe here it's backlash to all the democracy and friendship outside the game.

The following “Equipment” section explains character sheets, dice and miniatures. The very thorough and surprisingly well explained die section is a big plus, the miniatures part once again explains to us, that “most fun” way to play is to get some figurines. They even mention that you can get those figurines and dice from the same store you bought the books from, but I don't know why they're so confident about that.

Following that, there's Preparations, which mostly stresses the importance of the SL to have total control, and curiously, using the sample adventure which he must read at least twice.


But you can be a Fun tyrant!

My girlfriend suggested I not read it while learning Swedish, because every sentence I'll end up asking "Is this a Swedish word I don't know, or made up for the game?" and apparently the answer will almost always be the latter. That's common enough for roleplaying, mind you.

Red Archon wrote: And this is 1994, twenty years before their neighboring countries, such as Finland, are slowly starting to remove words like “policeman.” It's as endearing as it is maddening.

Also twenty years before a certain American company floated the idea of bringing back strength penalties for female characters. Though when I mentioned this to aforementioned Swede, she said they picked an unfortunate year to release it because there was a surge of "kind of crazy" feminism that wanted every document to read like a certain Monty Python sketch. "Two years before or after and it'd be fine".

Fucking duck people. Anyway!

Kalle Anka is a national hero who always polls really well at the elections. This is Kalle Anka:



I think it might just be a duck-centric country.

Koumei wrote: Kalle Anka is a national hero who always polls really well at the elections. This is Kalle Anka:



I think it might just be a duck-centric country.

I'd vote for him.

Unless Scrooge was running, too. Obviously, Scrooge is much more competent than Donald.

They might have taken on the RuneQuest ruleset explicitly because of the goddamn duck people.

Chapter Two: Characters
or, this is going to take a while

Chapter Two begins how these things really should always begin: with an explanation of what everything you're about to read means. There are of course races, which they kindly tell us we'll learn more about in the campaign setting section and which do not seem to entail any duck-related creatures, Professions, which we'll read about in the “How to create a character” section and Basic Attributes. What we're seeing is a D&D gold standard STR/CON/DEX/INT/KAR and PSY (Psyche), the last of which also suggests that Magiker (Magis) are dual-attribute dependent from the get-go, but we'll find out later how true that may be. In there, they've also shoved Storlek (STO), or, Size. Also, SMI (Smidighet, agility) seems to not only account for your initiative, speed, reflexes and such, but also your perception and your to-hit score, which leads us once again to guess that while now casters need two attributes, beatsticks need three, which doesn't really surprise anyone at this point. Note: though it's really quite obvious what words the abbreviations come from, it's not excplicitly stated. Minor gripe.

Then we go for Skills, of which there are two types, Primary Skills and Secondary Skills, the first of which is a number between 1 and 20 and apparently corresponds to roughly skills that everyone knows – everyone's granted a single point in things like Jump and Spot and those numbers are modified by your Basic Attributes and can never exceed them, and then you have your Secondary Skills, which you can somehow purchase (we'll soon find out how) and which you don't know from start and which CAN exceed your Basic Attribtute score. Eventually, we have Professional Skills, familiar to us later on as class skills, in which you are given a single poäng the moment you choose your Profession. Skills are rolled with 1T20(tärning, die), roll under your skill score to succeed.

It seems simple now that I'm writing it down, but here's something you may not have noticed: RPGs are a fucking thesaurus for the words “ability” and “trait.” Reading this shit in Swedish made me realise that there are like fifty fucking variants of the words in D&D alone, which we never really pay any attention to, since we've been playing these games either in our native languages or since we were the size of a fire extinguisher.


This man's got a serious grundegenskapsvärden in STY, and you shouldn't call him a thesaurus

Then we have magic, which, for now, seems fairly simple. You have three schools, Animism, which deals with druid shit, Elemental Magic, which abides to the four-element logic, and Mentalism, which from the start is said to include, for example, both flight and invisibility, so we already know that everyone's going to play a Mentalist. Now, you have skill points in your school, and after using INT to learn spells, the School Skill determines the difficulty of the spells you can cast – ranging from 1 to 20. So, jack up that PSY score, my friends.

Here we have an empty character sheet, but strangely and atypically for this book, no suggestion on how to recreate it. I was assuming they'd say you can buy additional sheets from the same store you bought the book from or that the most rolig way is to draw it up with all your friends using crayons.

How to make a character


Bet you can't play as any of these guys

When given an example on chargen, in cursive, they tell of little Peter, who wants to make a powerful barbarian, a little like Conan the Barbarian. Copyright infrigement you say? Nope, Target is just demonstrating how they bought Bob Howard's literary IP. That's right, somebody paid money for that shit.

Now, the character creation has at least 11 steps, of which 9 include the possibility to pay Backround Points to get more than average qualities. BP is apparently kinda the starting level, and it's “nominally” 125. Race, extra power and stuff costs BP, and you can trade some of your perks for BP again, creating this strange starting power shop effect, which we actually recognise from D&D, down to the point where you can buy super power for your Mage with age and race.

Next,

Race

We begin with a continuation to Lilla Peter's story, where he's struggling to choose a race for his Barbarian. Yes fucking really. Who the fuck is editing this thi- oh.

There's a table with the basic atteribute pluses and minuses for the player races and attached are the BP costs. Around it are brief summaries of the races – the rest is explained in the campaign setting section.

What we immediately notice is a very 90's amount of fucking elves. Out of the 12 races presented, 4 are goddamn elves, and all of them are fucking better than you, they're the Dimalv (they mean Mist elves, but I like to call them dim elves), Halvalv (half-elves, or the sound Kaelik makes when he gets a rage stroke), Ljusalv (Bright elves, let's bet money they're a right bunch of assholes) and the Stadsalv (City elf, who exist only to make us wonder, are there no elves in the fucking forest?) The most costly of these is the “ancient” or “first elf,” the dimalv, who are the progenitor elf, who are 65 BP out of 125, which nets you a +5 to PSY and +3 to INT and plus 1 or 2 to everything else. It's hard to say how badass that is, but I know we were told Basic Attributes “normally” range from 1 to 20. PSY and INT are the easiest and the cheapest to increase throughout this process, as we'll soon learn.

Then there's the standard package of Dvärg, Goblin (who are described as “comical” from the start, so I probably hate all goblin players with the same seething vitriol as I have for the shit-eating nimrods who play kents), Människa, Troll, Orch and eventually, Högländare, who are now a different race, because they are from Sweden. Surprisingly, they're not any smarter than “humans.”


Even Lilla Peter wants to play a Highlander

The more exotic choices are Drakonit and Wongos. Drakonit are big, smart crocodile people, who are not at all barbarians, and from the summary, not at all interesting. We'll see later on. Wongoses are the Loser of the Day. They are ugly little people, a sort of a mix between halfling and parody Jew. We await anxiously on how terribly they'll be described later on, but for now, they also get the “comical” tag.


Little people are rolig as balls!

Age

Your age does what you'd expect, dropping physical basic attributes and increasing mental ones. It also affects your BP and Starting Capital (which will be determined later.) However, the attribute changes and the BP/Gold alterations are not in the same table – the former are in an age category table, the latter are measured in years. If you are over 5000 years old, you get +50 BP and multiply your starting capital by seven. I'll tell you right now, and this might come as a bit of a shock to some of you, only three elves qualify for the 5000+ bracket, and of those, only Dim elves don't have age categories, because they're immortal. Are we safe to assume that Dim elves always start as 5001-year-old not-at-all aged people who have outstanding attribute bonuses, 7 times the starting capital and in effect paid 15 BP for their race (same as human)? Yes, yes we are.


5000 years of hard work has mechanical benefits.

Profession

The section begins with the author complaining, in parentheses, about how the fans demanded controlled Professions for their characters instead of just picking out their own Professional Skills and that they now need expansion material to do so, so here you have some premade professions and now they're all shitty and your character is ruined so are you happy now? It's very strange.

The Profession system is simple. You can learn the Professional skills described in your class Profession entry, the number in parentheses after a skill tell you how many skills of that type you get. For example, the entry Vapenfärdigheter (3) means you get to pick three weapon skills. In addition, you gain a Professional ability.

The professions seem impossible to match, even in fantasy fiction. We have, for example, a fucking Handworker and an Archmage. Why is a Paladin travelling with a thief and the village general store keeper? It doesn't seem very logical, but, then at least they don't have BAB or any some such – the Professional abilities are just +3 to Initiative or +10 to Craft rolls or like Know All Magic, so it's not like there are big differences.

Additionally, we have some very cute character pictures for each job, also revealing exactly what all the races look like. (Surprise surprise, the Trader is a wongos.) This Orch Munk is vicious.

And also a Christian, for some reason.

There's a section following, where you can choose a sex for your character, and it's emphasized how that doesn't affect their performance. Obviously. After that, we start buying base attributes and additional skills. Skills are cheap, but you have to be magically trained (we'll later learn how that happens) to buy magic skills. Base scores range from 3 (0bp, minimum for all stats) to 18 (40 BP) and additional points cost twice the bonus, maximum of 5. So, being a Troll who maximizes STR (STY), you would be an Adult Troll ('+6 STY for 30BP with 18 Base STY (40BP) and +5 store-bought points (10BP) giving you 29 STY for 80 BP. Being an Ancient (+50BP) City elf would in turn run you 25 BP for +1, +7 (free), 18 base (40BP) and +5 (10) giving you 31 PSY for 25 BP. This is costly in terms of physical attributes, but I'm sure the 7x wealth can help with that.

Or, you could just be an ancient dim elf, and have 18(base)+5(racial)+5(bought)=28 for 110 BP-50BP=60BP leaving you free to boost two more abilities with a +5 (and also have bonuses to everything else without penalties) for the same amount of points the Troll achieved his 28. And it doesn't state anywhere that you can't stack the +5's (I'm just assuming that's the rule as intended), so by the book, you could actually have 38 PSY with those 80 points and still have x7 wealth, the all around positive stat line and the dim elf bonuses.


You know what the fuck I'm talking about.

Selling points goes from -1 to an attribute for +1 BP to -5 to an attribute for +7 BP, which is practical only in the most serious of min/maxing exercises.

You are also given Hit points for each body part because this is 1994 and, extra hit points called wound points, which are not explained in any way, so since Big Fightan Men get a lot of these, I suppose they're bad for you. Both of these are based on STY and STO.

Your movement speed, which is explained as your squares (about 1,5m across) per round (about five seconds), is a function of your FYS, SMI and STO. It's not terrible reasoning, but it seems that for example a jack rabbit (moderate in one of three factors)would be hugely slower than a morbidly obese Troll chef (very good at two factors). Maybe there are stupid-ass random bonuses to movement speed scattered around. Who knows. There is no base movement rating listed anywhere.

Now we arrive at a strange table. If you have leftover backround points, you get to roll on a table of special powers for the cost of one. By spending extra BP, you can get higher results. So, there are 77 powers, and you roll 2t20 + your BP and get a random power. Higher score yields a better power. The maximum you can invest is 40 points, which leaves the final result of (81+) something of a mystery. The powers appear mostly to be the good old boring +5 to skills or some such, and skimming the entries, I'm not seeing much excitement. Animal companions, a couple of caster bonuses, a necromantic artefact (what those are, we'll find out later) and the roll of 81+ gives you +1 in three basic attributes or +2 in a single basic attribute. Bonus information: the dim elves' darkvision (the equivalent of low-light vision in D&D 3.x, the darkvision is called “Infravision” which again, we must've heard somewhere before...) is a roll of 60, so the game also gave those fuckers a 39-point ability for free.

To finish off this post, there's a table for your sword hand. It's a roll of 2t6+invested BP. 2-11 is right-handed, 2-14 is left-handed, 15-18 is double-handed (can wield a weapon in either hand, but not both) and 19+ is ambidexterous (can wield a weapon in both hands.) It tells us a bit about the combat, suggesting that you're going to be losing your fucking sword hand every so often.


Though hopefully, not as frequently as in some other franchises

The chargen is going to continue next time. I'm getting the feeling I'm being a little too thorough.