This is a short report on my Dragon Heresy session from HeinzCon 2019.
Since, I guess, most people never have heard of HeinzCon let me just say it is smaller local con in the North of Germany which is hosted by Clockwork Publishing (Space 1889 and Dark Conspiracy) [1].
Dragon Heresy is a setting for 5e that is based on a fictional version of the Norse mythology. So it is based in a Viking-like world. Douglas Cole did a great job with the Introductory Book which is a self-contained hardcover that allows to play characters from level 1 to 5. Self-contained means you only need that book and no other 5e material (no players handbook). I wrote the session for the con using only that book, so it works. [2]
I had 5 pregenerated characters: a human berserker, a human fighter, a human skald, a drwaven cleric and a half-elf wizard. Each was level one, so we could immediately start to play.
In order to show the features of the game, I had them start a teenagers around 17 or 18 years and they would start on the day of their right of passage. (The book says that age should be 16 in Thorengar, but I adjusted a bit). The first scene was the characters standing in front of their Jarl, who challenged them to prove their worth.
Some local farmers were losing cattle to some malicious wolf over the last week and the group should take care of the problem, but before they could: as a rite of passage they had to win an unarmed fight against two veteran bodyguards from the village.
In game terms we had then a Flything between the veterans and the players (imagine the Viking version of a rap battle), followed by a brawl which showcased the grappling rules. It was a tough brawl in which to everyone’s surprise the wizard and weakest character managed to wrestle one of the bodyguards down in an astounding case of repeating beginner’s luck. Eventually, the second one could be overcome as well.
The Jarl declared each character an adult now and a feast started in their honor. At the dawn of the next day a hung over, exhausted party started their quest to find the wolf. They arrived at a shepherd’s cottage, found that the fence had been smashed, talked a bit with the shepherd and slept off their hangover.
The next day they tracked down the wolf, which turned out to be of enormous proportions. I had used the Varulfur stats (werewolf) since that wolf turned out to be a human cursed by a Falleglygi. The party managed to fight her of as well and stop her from spreading that curse to other people. With that amount of success we finished the session after 3.5 hours.
I did collect some feedback on the game and its mechanic. The players felt that the game had successfully captured a Viking-like atmosphere, from the way the characters were build through the spotlight on things like Flything, grappling and the distinction between vigor and wounds.
As an off-hand remark: three of the players had never played any incarnation of D&D or Pathfinder and were only familiar with the general principle of that array of attributes and boni because they had played Dungeon World before. I never would have anticipated that this might be possible in the real world. So, I will be even more careful with my presumptions.
In closing, I think all of us had a massive amount of fun exploring the game and I really like to run it again soon.
[1] German speaking readers might known them as Uhrwerk Verlag.
[2] Actually two spells that a referenced in the book are missing in the spell section in the hardcover. I guess there will be an errata page as a download. (Floating Disk, Weapon Ward)
