Dragonbane Bestiary Now Available
After months of teasing, Free League has finally released the Dragonbane Bestiary — an expansion book for the Dragonbane RPG that adds 63 additional, never before seen monsters to the roster.
After months of teasing, Free League has finally released the Dragonbane Bestiary — an expansion book for the Dragonbane RPG that adds 63 additional, never before seen monsters to the roster.
Dragonbane was released by Free League last year: a remake of a classic Swedish TTRPG that’s been made available globally for the first time. The game’s first expansion was announced a couple months later: Dragonbane Bestiary, an additional volume that will introduce 63 additional monsters to the roster.
If you have access to a 3D printer (lucky), you no doubt have thought it might be useful to create original elements of a tabletop RPG campaign. Free League thinks so too, and they’ve just announced a partnership with with MyMiniFactory and Titan Forge to create a subscription service for just that sort of product.
Last August Free League released Dragonbane, a remake of a classic Swedish TTRPG, now made available globally for the first time. They also came up with a Dragonbane game engine for free use that will allow anyone to make a game that is compatible with the rules in this one. But for those who feel the stock of monsters in the vanilla Dragonbane is a bit small, a new shipment is on the way.
Dragonbane from Free League Publishing, is set for release later this year. I have already reviewed the Core Set of the Dragonbane TTRPG and gave it a huge recommendation. In that review, I left out details of the Adventure Book that comes with that box. I did this on purpose; because I wanted to give the Dragonbane TTRPG Adventure Book its own review. As the Game Master in our plays of Dragonbane I have no idea what it is like to play Dragonbane as a player. So, I collected feedback from my friends, so you can get a player’s point of view of this adventure.
When asked to review the Dragonbane TTRPG, I’m ashamed to admit I was a little disappointed. Another generic fantasy Dungeons and Dragons clone? Oh, the joy. All that anguish disappeared in a flash, once I began to browse the PDF. The image of a Darkwing Duck character leaping through the air, brandishing two mean-looking knives, was the first thing I saw. With that one image, Dragonbane had suckered me in. With my disappointment forgotten, I wasted no time in devouring the rule book. For this review, I only received the PDF version of the Core Set. So while I cannot review the physical version of the Dragonbane TTRPG, I can offer that this is a Free League Publishing product, and they are historically high quality in nature.
In Sweden (where Free League Publishing is based) there’s a classic TTRPG called Dragonbane. Free League is working on bringing a new version of this game not just to the US, but to multiple other places…and to prove it, they’re working on SIX separate translations. The new Dragonbane, when it comes out, will be available in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, and Danish. Separate studios are working on each edition. Dragonbane was originally released in Scandinavia in 1982 under the title “Drakar och Demoner” and became the first TTRPG to reach hit status in that country. Its rebirth is a bigger deal there than it is here (it was voted one of the most anticipated RPGs of 2023 at EN World), but American players will finally get to find out what makes it appealing. The narrative behind Dragonbane is not an entirely serious one, and some adventures can get downright silly, but that doesn’t mean the game is easy — far from it. Dragonbane is reportedly quite challenging and the situations it conjures will have you on edge. The core set will include the complete Rules book, an Adventures book containing 11 adventures that can be played separately or as one long campaign, five pre-generated characters, 70 custom cards for treasure, adventures, initiative, and more, and a map of the game world by cartographer Francesca Baerald. As reported earlier, Free League is developing a Dragonbane game engine for free use that will allow anyone to make a game that is compatible with the rules in this one. Both Dragonbane and the engine will be released later this fall; preorders are open now.
Wizards of the Coast is still dealing with the fallout over their leaked plans to revoke the Open Game License, the legal agreement that has allowed third party companies to make 5E-compatible products for the last twenty or so years. Just about all those third parties refused to agree and started making plans to develop their own OGLs. Last week Wizards issued a half-apology that contained a few concessions but didn’t promise a full walkback. As of today they’re backpedaling even further, announcing they will preview any proposed changes with their audience before implementing it, and that the first of these previews will arrive within the week. It may be too late, however, to rebuild the bridge they flamethrowered. No third party has yet to announce a reversal of their plans to leave D&D. The most common comment I hear is that the only thing that would restore faith in D&D is to just leave the current OGL alone entirely. Wizards still doesn’t seem interested in that. Free League, whose products we’ve reported on quite a lot, won’t be affected much as they use their own game engine for Mutant: Year Zero, Coriolis, Tales From the Loop, Forbidden Lands, ALIEN, Vaesen, Blade Runner RPG, and others. What they run on is called The Year Zero Engine, which may be getting a revision of its own soon — but don’t panic. The new Year Zero Engine OGL is going to be the opposite of what Wizards tried to turn their own OGL into. FL says it is “designed to be easy to understand and use for creators. It will give creators an irrevocable, worldwide, and royalty-free right to use [the] Year Zero Engine Standard Reference Document (YZE SRD) and freely publish their own roleplaying material based on it.” In addition, Free League has also announced plans to release a third-party license for the upcoming Dragonbane RPG that they’re releasing later this year. “This license allows creators to freely publish RPG supplements explicitly compatible with Dragonbane, and to place the special A Module for Dragonbane logo on the front cover.” Dragonbane will be released in the fall.