Dragon's Grave: Driven by Bids
A downloadable game
Dragon’s Grave is dark fantasy on an epic scale: two iconic dragons fought until they perished, and from their bones and viscera, living dungeons have formed. These terrifying catacombs can swallow entire cities, and spawn monsters that constantly mutate, threatening everyone!
The gods walk the land as juggernauts formed by the dragons’ death, and the many folk of the world are also descended from them in a similar way. The player characters will be epically powerful. They are driven by two tropes that combine ancestry, class, background, magical power, and other wide-ranging traits. There abilities are the purview of high-level characters in standard fantasy roleplaying games: they are immensely powerful, facing off against the minions of gods, or the gods themselves! Or worse yet, dangers spawned from the corpses of dragons.
Features two PDFs in a widescreen landscape layout and a 6x9-style one-column layout, allowing you to optimize for your screen of choice. Both PDFs are fully bookmarked and linked.
Developer & Author: Matthew Bannock
Editing, Layout, and Additional Writing: Tim Bannock
Cover Art: Jack Holliday
Interior Art: Bruno Balixa, Dean Spencer, Jack Holliday, Rick Hershey/Fat Goblin Games, Jeff Brown, Tan Ho Sim, Joyce Maureira, Jesus Blones, Juan Diego DIanderas, Gary Dupuis, Lars Nissen
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I just finished a session of “Escape from Hoth” using this system and it went great. My crew is familiar with Dungeon Word so it was easy for them to figure out how to choose outcomes and to choose Failures even when they had Skill/Fate points to spend. I made some modifications but that’s a longer/different post.
Now a question: working as a team, there were a few times when the Consequence should have been more general. Instead, I shoe-horned it into individual consequence(s). Any idea on how to handle choices by one PC that can affect the whole group?
Talk to the group about it, one person could absolutely produce consequences for everyone. This could be a great way to play and have people discuss ways to set up plans A & B when inevitably dice don't go your way.
Missed opportunity to call it "Dragons & Dragons".
Supplement 1: A Few Dragons More
In a typical dungeon crawl scenario, PCs will outfit themselves with specific equipment and likely find loot in their adventures. Do you have experiences with mundane and magical gear to share?
I’m thinking that gear is interesting for descriptive purposes but needs to be part of a trope to provide any kind of advantage. I can see how magical gear might provide a trope or perhaps allow for an additional Skill Point for a specific use.
Gear has been descriptive unless it was part of a trope itself: I think we've had one character with a Elric-style "Soul-powered Swordmaster" or something very close to that. Many of their consequences were described as self-inflicted problems from the sword.
An additional Skill Point use is definitely not going to throw off balance, especially if every player gets access to such things from time to time.
Alternatively, you could have certain gear create new "permissions" for a character. For example, you might assume that there's no grappling a gigantic monster under normal circumstances, but if you have the Net of Entanglement, you can! Or it might be a one-use "clear a consequence" power, which could be simple (Amulet of Healing) or far more interesting (Reset Timewatch).
This is a really cool system. I like how the Bids mirror usual outcomes from Dungeon World - that lets me draw on a vast set of resources.
Are there any examples of play you can post? I’m especially interested in Gloom Mode and handling combat.
Thank you so much for your interest and support! I'm glad you noted the crossover with PbtA because that's definitely a handy pool of resources to pull from.
Unfortunately, we don't have any actual plays or examples handy at this time. That said, one of our playtests took A LOT from Final Fantasy, right down to each character having a turn sequence in which they could Attack, Defend, Magic, Item, or Flee, but it wasn't very "mechanical." For example, Defend might mean some epic action that defends a crowd of bystanders. Magic might mean summoning a kaiju that bodyslams an attacking monstrosity. It was all about escalating our actions and their descriptions as the players battled a kaiju-sized worm spewing forth Cthulhu-esque monsters onto a city. Those descriptions and situations would inform the few rules interactions we needed during the session.