Dragon Heresy RPG 5E OGL

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Ulairi

Ulairi

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Anybody else back this? I'm a big fan of Doug Cole from his works on GURPS. For those of you who don't know, Doug is from Minnesota and really into Viking stuff including Viking martial arts (which I didn't know was a thing until recently). He's run a few Kickstarters and he's the exception to the rule that the games are always late.

He's most well known for his dungeon grappling rules for 5E and the OSR as well as GURPS grappling.

Anyway, Dragon Heresy is his 5E OGL game that uses the mechanics a lot of folks here love but in a Viking inspired campaign setting. The is a complete game for char and characters from level 1 to level 5.

The big change to raw 5E is a virgor and sounds system. And he made shields matter. It's still 5E but with better grappling, shields that matter, and a different damage system so combat isn't just a HP slog.

The world is a Viking world and it's cool but I dont know a lot about Viking stuff the way I do vanilla fantasy, Asian history, etc. I wish he included an appendix N for viking stuff to help us out.

Did anybody else get it?
 
Sounds interesting. Does it attempt a Scandanavian mythical equivalent of a dungeon premise?
 
Missed this kickstarter but I'm glad I came across this post as I checked it out and I'm interested.
May just pick up a hard copy of the book.
 
I'm a Doug Cole fan myself, though in a TFT/GURPS context.
This might be the D&D-a-like that I'd most consider being interested in, since it's Doug Cole and he says he's adding the things that I mostly find lacking in D&D - a tactical game & serious risk of injury without hitpoint slog.

On the other hand, I'm more likely to just use Doug's GURPS material.

"virgor and sounds system" - LOL
 
Skarg said:
On the other hand, I'm more likely to just use Doug's GURPS material.

"virgor and sounds system" - LOL
Click to expand...

Do you have links to his GURPS material you could share.
 
Hey, y'all! Happy to answer any questions if you've got 'em, and thanks for the kind words about Dragon Heresy.
For what it's worth:

  • Dragon Heresy is my OGL/5E-derived self-contained system. 288 pages; color, hardback US Letter.
  • Hall of Judgment is a conversion and expansion of the Lost Hall of Tyr convention adventure to the Dungeon Fantasy RPG. 128 pages, 8x10 format, color, softcover.
  • Lost Hall of Tyr: a publication of a convention adventure I ran at GenCon 50; written for Level 4-7 for 5e. 64 pages, color, softcover. Will be expanded and revised to 2nd edition for Level 1-5 Dragon Heresy as my next project
  • Dungeon Grappling. Revised grappling rules that don't suck for 5E, Pathfinder, and old-school DnD (specifically Swords & Wizardry). 52 pages, softcover, color.
 
Skarg said:
Yep:
http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-martial-arts-technical-grappling
https://gamingballistic.com/category/rpg-systems/gurps-rpg/
https://gamingballistic.com/category/features-on-gb/gurps-101/
https://gamingballistic.com/category/features-on-gb/gurpsday/
http://www.warehouse23.com/products?utf8=✓&keywords=Douglas+H.+Cole&x=0&y=0
http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/sample.html?id=2794
Click to expand...

This guy (Doug Cole) has some really great GURPS content and commentary.

I've always shied away from GURPS as I always felt if i got into it I'd be cheating on my first love "HERO". The two systems seem so similar (if I'm right GURPS was made as Steve Jackson was a fan of the early HERO engine). I even own the Dungeon Fantasy boxed set. I really need to "let it go" and get down to diving into GURPS.
 
IIRC SJ himself has written that he took inspiration from HERO when he wrote GURPS. However I went from TFT to GURPS and from that perspective GURPS just feels like "Expert TFT" to me (plus the generic stuff FWIW). I only accidentally looked at HERO when I picked up an RPG I'd never heard of called Danger International, which I later realized was a HERO RPG, and studied it for a bit thinking it did seem a lot like TFT & GURPS, but it did not seem nearly as clean and logical to me (but of course by that point, I had decades of TFT/GURPS experience so I'm used to thinking in those terms).
 
I'm more interested in the setting than the extra crunch. How much of that fluff is there in the book?
 
Voros said:
I'm more interested in the setting than the extra crunch. How much of that fluff is there in the book?
Click to expand...

There's quite a bit of setting material, though some of it is integrated.

There's a chapter on setting material that's 13-14 pages long, including a few maps. The Foes section has a lot of setting baked into the entirely rewritten fluff for each creature. That's 91 pages. Backgrounds and Social Standing/Influence is about seven pages, and of course has implied and explicit setting material. Each race and class has how they fit into the setting, etc.

I'll be blowing out the setting more and more using adventure material as well. The town of Isfjall, for example, got 20 pages in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG supplement "Hall of Judgment," which I've spent the last few days turning back into "Lost Hall of Tyr, 2nd Edition." So there's more fluff coming, and several forthcoming brand new setting/adventuring products in 2019 as well.

I'm not nearly done with Etera and the Norse-inspired lands of Torengar/Norðlond.
 
Ulairi said:
Anybody else back this? I'm a big fan of Doug Cole from his works on GURPS. For those of you who don't know, Doug is from Minnesota and really into Viking stuff including Viking martial arts (which I didn't know was a thing until recently). He's run a few Kickstarters and he's the exception to the rule that the games are always late.

He's most well known for his dungeon grappling rules for 5E and the OSR as well as GURPS grappling.

Anyway, Dragon Heresy is his 5E OGL game that uses the mechanics a lot of folks here love but in a Viking inspired campaign setting. The is a complete game for char and characters from level 1 to level 5.

The big change to raw 5E is a virgor and sounds system. And he made shields matter. It's still 5E but with better grappling, shields that matter, and a different damage system so combat isn't just a HP slog.

The world is a Viking world and it's cool but I dont know a lot about Viking stuff the way I do vanilla fantasy, Asian history, etc. I wish he included an appendix N for viking stuff to help us out.

Did anybody else get it?
Click to expand...
I've backed it on the berserk level, meaning I basically only got the combat system:smile:. Does that count?
I'm unlikely to ever run it, though the system is way better than "vanilla" 5e:wink:.

If you want an Appendix V, start by Icelandic sagas. They've got nice translations in English, I think, and should tell you a lot about the people that Vikings came from.
Also, get the Vikings book for Mythras, Mongoose's Legend/MRQ2, or Runequest 6, if you can find them. It's mostly the same book, and it should help a lot. We ran a historical Vikings game back in MRQ2 days, and it was nothing short of great:grin:!
 
Douglas Cole said:
There's quite a bit of setting material, though some of it is integrated.

There's a chapter on setting material that's 13-14 pages long, including a few maps. The Foes section has a lot of setting baked into the entirely rewritten fluff for each creature. That's 91 pages. Backgrounds and Social Standing/Influence is about seven pages, and of course has implied and explicit setting material. Each race and class has how they fit into the setting, etc.

I'll be blowing out the setting more and more using adventure material as well. The town of Isfjall, for example, got 20 pages in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG supplement "Hall of Judgment," which I've spent the last few days turning back into "Lost Hall of Tyr, 2nd Edition." So there's more fluff coming, and several forthcoming brand new setting/adventuring products in 2019 as well.

I'm not nearly done with Etera and the Norse-inspired lands of Torengar/Norðlond.
Click to expand...

Cool, thanks Doug. Looking forward to it.
 
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