Off the Shelf: Dragonslayer

This game does not get as much love as it should. Dragonslayer is front-to-back, page-to-page, pure awesome. Now that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is no more, people are taking another look at this game and realizing that sleeping on this book was a mistake. We are sort of in a two-way battle between this and the new revised Labyrinth Lord 2E, and this game compares favorably as a BX/1E mix that Labyrinth Lord Advanced once covered.

Page after page, the art in this game is fantastic. This game gives Goodman Games and DCC a run for their money, and the beautiful line art evokes the old-school style perfectly.

And this is a one-book game! One book is all you need for unlimited fantasy adventures.

Fighters in this game have a cleave ability, allowing one additional attack per two levels if the fighter kills a target. This is one extra attack at level one, two at level three, and so on. The fighters in this game are fun, and that cleave ability is greatly appreciated. In some old-school games, playing the fighter seems like punishment, and you get nothing to do except roll a d20 per turn and do damage. Here, they fold in the classic low-HD multiattack rules into the cleave ability (without the HD limitation), and it makes you want to be out there in the front ranks, hacking away at crowds of monsters.

The OSE fighter, in comparison, feels too basic. This is more of a "reference work" book, and once you add in some of the optional abilities from the Carcass Crawler zines, things improve for OSE, but you need to mod the game to customize how it plays. In the new OSE Advanced, I hope those optional rules are folded into the core book, and the game takes on its own identity.

The racial level limits in Dragonslayer are lower than OSE, but everything is more or less compatible between OSE and DS, or any old-school game for that matter. The hit-die scale is on 1E levels, with fighters being a d10, so the lower level limits are likely due to the bump in hit points. The game's power level is adjusted by focusing on fewer levels and more hit points.

Dragonslayer gives full hit points at level one. Nice. Please don't force me to play a level-one character who rolled a 1 for hit points. There is a fun to that, but most would throw that character away as an expendable rabble. If I want that, I will play DCC with my level-zero peasants.

A level 10 fighter in Dragonslayer with a +2 CON bonus will have 78 hit points on average. A level 10 fighter in OSE with a +2 CON bonus has an average of 61 hit points. In general, you are tougher in this game than OSE, and you do more damage.

If you don't want the complexity of OSRIC, but you want all the cool 1E "stuff" in a BX-like package, then Dragonslayer is a fantastic game. The base game feels like BX, and not like 1E's endless tables of modifiers and percentages to bend bars and lift gates, and it keeps things simple. The demons and devils are here, so this is not censored like 2E was.

Compared to Shadowdark? Dragonslayer is more heroic, no spell failure, no small-map play, no torch timer, more theater of the mind, and not as tightly focused. I love Shadowdark as a "small dungeon" game, almost as a board game, but if I want a more traditional game, Dragonslayer will fill that old-school need nicely.

Dragonslayer is a fantastic game, well worth your time.