Okay...so. Wordy post incoming. Apologies.
Part brain dump, part request for assistance.
Context, in case you don't recognise the thread title.
Naomi Novak is a really good author of fantasy fiction. I first came across her work via my wife, and the books Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which are basically interesting takes on classic fairy* tales.
They were good but at the same time didn't grab me as much as they might have done.
A couple of days ago, I came across a previous novel she wrote, called Temeraire (or possibly His Majesty's Dragon, if you're in the States), and I'm pretty much hooked, going through book 1 inside twenty-four hours. Firstly it's a series, secondly it's really well written and thirdly it combines some of my favourite things in one package.
The short version is that it's a Napoleonic War series, but...with Dragons, dogfighting above the rest of the war.
Not as in "ooh look, sparkly magic", but as natural, vaguely pterdaon-esque animals, which - though terrifying - are an ultimately mundane thing, and have been for much of recorded history (albeit selective breeding has produced ever larger and more dangerous beasts). They're rare, and expensive - because even a medium-weight dragon is a bloody 10-tonne macro-predator that probably eats the better part of a cow a day, and taming a dragon is a hard thing to do. Many of the breeds are just as smart as their handlers and the only reliable way to tame them is the fact that most breeds 'imprint' on whoever's at the dragonet’s hatching, much like chicks.
In the setting, there is a Royal Aviator's Corps, alongside the historical Royal Navy, British Army, and the Militia, although they're a bit of a breed apart from society proper, because they only have a limited ability to leave their bonded dragons behind, and it's not like a dragon can be left in the middle of Hyde Park or Portsmouth whilst the officers attend fashionable soirees. Plus - because some breeds will only accept a female handler - they're a mixed service, which isn't precisely 'secret' but isn't advertised either because, obviously, women on the front line was a pretty taboo concept in the early 1800s.
The world, aside from the presence of Dragons, is - by and large - as you expect given Napoleonic history; Nelson and Trafalgar still occurs, for example, albeit with 'top cover' from dragons at the battle itself, and with Villeneuve's escape from Toulon results from a French air attack pushing the British back rather than spotting Nelson's trap, and Nelson’s injuries coming from a strafing run on the Victory from a French Flamme-de-Gloire dragon rather than a marksman.
Dragons are scary but not invincible - major fortifications have 'shrapnel guns', often firing poisoned shot, which makes a suitable 1800's analogue to a flak battery, but the larger dragon's ability to fly above their range and drop black-powder grenades - or in some cases use their assorted flame or acid breath - is still terrifyingly lethal to a wooden warship, no matter how many marksmen with rifles it may cram in the mast-tops (though it’s obviously comparatively less threatening to a well-designed stone fortification).
They're a terrifying and devastating weapon, but not completely world-changing because there aren't that many of them (the RN's channel squadron prior to Trafalgar is covered by about a dozen or so, barely a quarter of which are heavyweights), and because they're still, ultimately, a living creature; you hit one with a heavy-calibre gun and they will die (one forced down by a wing injury into the elevation of a frigate’s broadside undergoes what can best be described as ‘spontaneous existence failure’), and replacements can take years to hatch. They're fast by any standard of 'normal' cavalry, but like any living thing, several hours is the limit of their serious endurance (aside from the smaller 'scout' breeds) and food is not something that can be sourced for them without a bit of planning (or really, really making the local farmers angry!); these are not jet fighters and covering a hundred miles or so in a day's flying is quite a realistic limit for a big breed.
Equally, to underlie the scale of these things, the really big dragons and their captains - the heavyweights - are not solitary fighters. Heavyweights like Temeraire himself run up to 50 tonnes when full-grown, and in addition to their captain on their harness (they wear a webbing harness around their shoulders and chest you can lock onto with carabineers, rather than the slightly unrealistic 'just hang on' depicted in many fantasy settings!) they have navy-style signal officers with flags, bombardiers, and a team of marksmen with carbines to watch their flanks.
Basically, a C.S Forester**/Jane Austen*** period setting, plus massive Dragons doing battle-of-britain-esque aerial combat over the top of the major Napoleonic battles.
Anyway. I really, really love the idea of this setting, and my first thought was 'is there an RPG version of this?'
Since the answer appears to be 'No', my next thought is 'how do I make an RPG version of this?'
Yes, fantasy stuff seems more like I should be looking at Legend, but Dogfighting and aerial combat feels like it should be more suited to Traveller rules.
....And that's where I start hitting problems I want to work my way through. Advice is welcomed, and basically the reason for this thread.
Main thoughts:
1. The PCs should probably be Captains. Having everyone be the various crew members of a single heavyweight is cool, but unlike, say, a small armed trading starship where you have the pilot, gunner, engineer, and so on, you’ve got the Dragon who flies, attacks and so on, the Captain who directs the dragon, and….some supporting extras. A volley of carbine fire is nice but hardly feels like a fair character role compared to being the one flying the 40-tonne fire-breathing dragon.
2. I don’t think having the dragon as a PC works. Yes, they’re just as smart as the humans, but having the dragon be a PC is even more imbalancing than having the captain and crew be PCs; not least because the dragon is by default completely excluded from any social scene 'indoors'.
3. Different dragon roles – lightweights, middleweights and heavyweights do different jobs – the lights are scouts and harrassers, the heavys are big bombers and melee combatants but don’t usually have the ability to breath poison/fire/whatever unlike the middleweights, who are jack of all trades with the rare-even-amongst-dragons offensive breath. So I don’t mind having different PCs have different weight dragons as long as they all feel like they’re necessary during a mission. Each PC being a pairing of Captain-and-their-dragon feels ‘right’.
4. Having any marksmen work in the same way as missile or squadron volleys – roll once with a DM for the number of attackers, roll damage once and multiply by effect – seems a sensible way to allow heavyweights to have their marksmen crew without vastly increasing the number of dice the PCs playing their captains have to roll per round. Since they won’t be getting a damage increase from effect, they should be very limited in what they can do to a dragon, but they should be able to inflict the odd point of damage, which means a dragon’s armour is limited to something which can be credibly, if not reliably, hurt by an antique rifle (3D-3). Basically, the non-captain crew are NPCs that don't need much attention paying to them; they have a name and (maybe) are namechecked as being 'good' or 'bad', potentially generating a DM to appropriate checks.
5. Careers/character creation is probably the easy bit to work through – obviously character creation would need fettling as you don’t want people to fail to qualify or to be thrown out by mishaps (injury’s fine!). Broadly people fall into one of a few categories that I can see having different skill tables:
a. Aviator Corps– people basically raised to be part of the dragon corps from barely-teenage, much like RN midshipmen. Obviously the big advantage here is that all the basic dragon-handling skills will be on their table, so having it as your first career instead of transferring into it later means you get Aviator Corps basic training and hence rank 0 in everything, especially knowledge about different breeds and their capabilities. (Most other European nations do much the same thing)
b. Transferred Officers – someone who’s served in the Navy, or Army, who happened to be present when a dragon hatched (Temeraire’s captain takes the ship transporting his egg as a prize) or when a dragon lost its previous captain and who’s had the dragon bond with them instead. Again, short on basic skills like dragon-handling as they’ll have had the ‘emergency crash course’ but bringing better at leadership and tactics (being older officers) and probably significantly better with pistol and blade for similar reasons.
c. Nobility – prior to the corps being a thing, some noble families (at ruinous expense) maintained dragons on behalf of the crown, and some still do via funding provided. As a quid pro quo, second and third sons are often palmed off with the expectation that a mount would be found for them. Higher SOC, better abilities as a diplomat and (in theory) leader, at a cost of some of the aviator’s skills you might be expected to learn as a junior ‘midwingman’ and that might get missed when you skip straight into the big saddle.
d. Émigré – Napoleonic Europe is full of stateless individuals; exiled Bourbon aristocrats, Prussians who fled Napoleon, Finns who fled Russia, and Republicans who fought for France against their original nations. Some of them are veterans with their own dragons. The reverse of Nobility - much lower SOC (after all, you’re a stateless foreigner whatever title you might have once had), but probably a veteran captain.
So far, so good. Then we hit the mechanical bits, and I come unstuck at the single most important bit: how the heck do I model someone riding an intelligent mount in an aerial fight in Traveller?
6. The riding rules….. are basically non-existent as they stand. “Make an Animals (Handling) check to control the mount for a number of minutes equal to the effect” – what if you fail? What if it’s wounded? It’s a very simplistic rule for a reason – Traveller campaigns as a general rule are not big on ‘cavalry charge’ scenes – but it’s obviously an issue here.
7. Dogfighting rules, with everything working by relative arcs of fire, are fine enough, once you know what’s replacing pilot checks. Vehicle combat doesn’t include reactions, though, and feels like it should. With most of the fighting that matters being melee rather than shooting, the interplay of stuff analogous to dodge and parry is important to keep things interesting. In fact controlling reactions feels like it should be very important because a big part of mounted combat is persuading the mount NOT to react when its instinct is to break off and evade rather than press home an attack.
8. Treating the Dragon as an Animal means merely having a hits score removes the possibility of an END or DEX wound (as if they were a PC) or a critical hit to the Wing (as if they were a biotech vehicle), and not having stats other than skills feels like it removes a lot of room for ‘personalisation’ of a specific breed.
9. Having them have a conventional END or DEX feels like they would have to have stats at ridiculous levels to tolerate the amount of damage they should logically be able to sustain, or else give them a ridiculously high armour (which creates a situation where they’re “fine….fine….fine….dead”, as is often the case with a PC in battle dress, rather than suffering increasing minor wounds – once you manage enough damage to bypass the armour, the actual extra damage require to cripple a human is trivial), whilst a wounded dragon should have a fighting chance of extricating itself and its rider(s) from a fight – indeed intercepting and recovering a wounded dragon back home is the first action Temeraire sees in the series.
10. Vehicles….feel like there’s too much stuff in the default rules you’d be ignoring, pretty much starting from the default speed/range limits and going on from there. Yes, you could start by considering them a biotech ornithopter, but you’d want to rework the critical table (yes, the system already rerolls irrelevant criticals but you’d be rerolling a lot), and the range values are very high, and…ultimately, it doesn’t feel much like a living thing. Plus, melee isn’t really a thing vehicle rules are designed to support. Yes, there’s the biotech Scything Claw, but it’s Devastating, which means you ignore effect, making it a completely finesse-free weapon, and ultimately, with vehicles only taking criticals on an effect 6+ hit, rather than every 10% damage like a starship, they feel like you’d go most of a fight just attacking a ‘generic’ pool of hit points (similar to my problem with the Animal model). On the other hand, it’s the model where you most obviously have a mechanism for a crew member being hit and killed, and you can borrow the ‘boarding action’ rules for bigger dragons dropping armed crew onto an enemy (with the aforementioned bond, if you can put a gun to the captain’s head, the dragon will generally surrender)
11. Plus, since as noted they may be at least as smart as the PCs, they should have skills (or skill modifiers) for their riders – the skill of the PC riding a dragon should matter, but at the same time it’s an issue of handling and leadership, they’re not the one sat behind a gunsight, and the melee skill and STR which should vary from one dragon to another (and certainly from one breed to another) should also matter, arguably more.
Sorry. Bit of a brain dump.
Essentially, It's an amazing story and setting, and I can see the edges of a campaign I really, really want to run, but I'd like to figure out how to use mechanical detail to support it (even if I need to write some of it myself).
* A warning to anyone planning to read these to your children. I mean fairy tales as in 'Titania, Orion and the Wild Hunt'. Traditional British ‘Fair Folk’ are not twee little Tinkerbelle wanabees and are definitely not 'nice'.
** Laurence, Temeraire’s captain, is a Royal Navy officer when you first meet him (hence the name he gives the dragon) and there’s a very ‘Hornblower’ feel to much of the series.
*** It’s not all dogfighting. There’s a fair amount of just period-appropriate social interaction. There’s even a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pastiche short story ‘Dragons and Decorum’.
Part brain dump, part request for assistance.
Context, in case you don't recognise the thread title.
Naomi Novak is a really good author of fantasy fiction. I first came across her work via my wife, and the books Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which are basically interesting takes on classic fairy* tales.
They were good but at the same time didn't grab me as much as they might have done.
A couple of days ago, I came across a previous novel she wrote, called Temeraire (or possibly His Majesty's Dragon, if you're in the States), and I'm pretty much hooked, going through book 1 inside twenty-four hours. Firstly it's a series, secondly it's really well written and thirdly it combines some of my favourite things in one package.
The short version is that it's a Napoleonic War series, but...with Dragons, dogfighting above the rest of the war.
Not as in "ooh look, sparkly magic", but as natural, vaguely pterdaon-esque animals, which - though terrifying - are an ultimately mundane thing, and have been for much of recorded history (albeit selective breeding has produced ever larger and more dangerous beasts). They're rare, and expensive - because even a medium-weight dragon is a bloody 10-tonne macro-predator that probably eats the better part of a cow a day, and taming a dragon is a hard thing to do. Many of the breeds are just as smart as their handlers and the only reliable way to tame them is the fact that most breeds 'imprint' on whoever's at the dragonet’s hatching, much like chicks.
In the setting, there is a Royal Aviator's Corps, alongside the historical Royal Navy, British Army, and the Militia, although they're a bit of a breed apart from society proper, because they only have a limited ability to leave their bonded dragons behind, and it's not like a dragon can be left in the middle of Hyde Park or Portsmouth whilst the officers attend fashionable soirees. Plus - because some breeds will only accept a female handler - they're a mixed service, which isn't precisely 'secret' but isn't advertised either because, obviously, women on the front line was a pretty taboo concept in the early 1800s.
The world, aside from the presence of Dragons, is - by and large - as you expect given Napoleonic history; Nelson and Trafalgar still occurs, for example, albeit with 'top cover' from dragons at the battle itself, and with Villeneuve's escape from Toulon results from a French air attack pushing the British back rather than spotting Nelson's trap, and Nelson’s injuries coming from a strafing run on the Victory from a French Flamme-de-Gloire dragon rather than a marksman.
Dragons are scary but not invincible - major fortifications have 'shrapnel guns', often firing poisoned shot, which makes a suitable 1800's analogue to a flak battery, but the larger dragon's ability to fly above their range and drop black-powder grenades - or in some cases use their assorted flame or acid breath - is still terrifyingly lethal to a wooden warship, no matter how many marksmen with rifles it may cram in the mast-tops (though it’s obviously comparatively less threatening to a well-designed stone fortification).
They're a terrifying and devastating weapon, but not completely world-changing because there aren't that many of them (the RN's channel squadron prior to Trafalgar is covered by about a dozen or so, barely a quarter of which are heavyweights), and because they're still, ultimately, a living creature; you hit one with a heavy-calibre gun and they will die (one forced down by a wing injury into the elevation of a frigate’s broadside undergoes what can best be described as ‘spontaneous existence failure’), and replacements can take years to hatch. They're fast by any standard of 'normal' cavalry, but like any living thing, several hours is the limit of their serious endurance (aside from the smaller 'scout' breeds) and food is not something that can be sourced for them without a bit of planning (or really, really making the local farmers angry!); these are not jet fighters and covering a hundred miles or so in a day's flying is quite a realistic limit for a big breed.
Equally, to underlie the scale of these things, the really big dragons and their captains - the heavyweights - are not solitary fighters. Heavyweights like Temeraire himself run up to 50 tonnes when full-grown, and in addition to their captain on their harness (they wear a webbing harness around their shoulders and chest you can lock onto with carabineers, rather than the slightly unrealistic 'just hang on' depicted in many fantasy settings!) they have navy-style signal officers with flags, bombardiers, and a team of marksmen with carbines to watch their flanks.
Basically, a C.S Forester**/Jane Austen*** period setting, plus massive Dragons doing battle-of-britain-esque aerial combat over the top of the major Napoleonic battles.
Anyway. I really, really love the idea of this setting, and my first thought was 'is there an RPG version of this?'
Since the answer appears to be 'No', my next thought is 'how do I make an RPG version of this?'
Yes, fantasy stuff seems more like I should be looking at Legend, but Dogfighting and aerial combat feels like it should be more suited to Traveller rules.
....And that's where I start hitting problems I want to work my way through. Advice is welcomed, and basically the reason for this thread.
Main thoughts:
1. The PCs should probably be Captains. Having everyone be the various crew members of a single heavyweight is cool, but unlike, say, a small armed trading starship where you have the pilot, gunner, engineer, and so on, you’ve got the Dragon who flies, attacks and so on, the Captain who directs the dragon, and….some supporting extras. A volley of carbine fire is nice but hardly feels like a fair character role compared to being the one flying the 40-tonne fire-breathing dragon.
2. I don’t think having the dragon as a PC works. Yes, they’re just as smart as the humans, but having the dragon be a PC is even more imbalancing than having the captain and crew be PCs; not least because the dragon is by default completely excluded from any social scene 'indoors'.
3. Different dragon roles – lightweights, middleweights and heavyweights do different jobs – the lights are scouts and harrassers, the heavys are big bombers and melee combatants but don’t usually have the ability to breath poison/fire/whatever unlike the middleweights, who are jack of all trades with the rare-even-amongst-dragons offensive breath. So I don’t mind having different PCs have different weight dragons as long as they all feel like they’re necessary during a mission. Each PC being a pairing of Captain-and-their-dragon feels ‘right’.
4. Having any marksmen work in the same way as missile or squadron volleys – roll once with a DM for the number of attackers, roll damage once and multiply by effect – seems a sensible way to allow heavyweights to have their marksmen crew without vastly increasing the number of dice the PCs playing their captains have to roll per round. Since they won’t be getting a damage increase from effect, they should be very limited in what they can do to a dragon, but they should be able to inflict the odd point of damage, which means a dragon’s armour is limited to something which can be credibly, if not reliably, hurt by an antique rifle (3D-3). Basically, the non-captain crew are NPCs that don't need much attention paying to them; they have a name and (maybe) are namechecked as being 'good' or 'bad', potentially generating a DM to appropriate checks.
5. Careers/character creation is probably the easy bit to work through – obviously character creation would need fettling as you don’t want people to fail to qualify or to be thrown out by mishaps (injury’s fine!). Broadly people fall into one of a few categories that I can see having different skill tables:
a. Aviator Corps– people basically raised to be part of the dragon corps from barely-teenage, much like RN midshipmen. Obviously the big advantage here is that all the basic dragon-handling skills will be on their table, so having it as your first career instead of transferring into it later means you get Aviator Corps basic training and hence rank 0 in everything, especially knowledge about different breeds and their capabilities. (Most other European nations do much the same thing)
b. Transferred Officers – someone who’s served in the Navy, or Army, who happened to be present when a dragon hatched (Temeraire’s captain takes the ship transporting his egg as a prize) or when a dragon lost its previous captain and who’s had the dragon bond with them instead. Again, short on basic skills like dragon-handling as they’ll have had the ‘emergency crash course’ but bringing better at leadership and tactics (being older officers) and probably significantly better with pistol and blade for similar reasons.
c. Nobility – prior to the corps being a thing, some noble families (at ruinous expense) maintained dragons on behalf of the crown, and some still do via funding provided. As a quid pro quo, second and third sons are often palmed off with the expectation that a mount would be found for them. Higher SOC, better abilities as a diplomat and (in theory) leader, at a cost of some of the aviator’s skills you might be expected to learn as a junior ‘midwingman’ and that might get missed when you skip straight into the big saddle.
d. Émigré – Napoleonic Europe is full of stateless individuals; exiled Bourbon aristocrats, Prussians who fled Napoleon, Finns who fled Russia, and Republicans who fought for France against their original nations. Some of them are veterans with their own dragons. The reverse of Nobility - much lower SOC (after all, you’re a stateless foreigner whatever title you might have once had), but probably a veteran captain.
So far, so good. Then we hit the mechanical bits, and I come unstuck at the single most important bit: how the heck do I model someone riding an intelligent mount in an aerial fight in Traveller?
6. The riding rules….. are basically non-existent as they stand. “Make an Animals (Handling) check to control the mount for a number of minutes equal to the effect” – what if you fail? What if it’s wounded? It’s a very simplistic rule for a reason – Traveller campaigns as a general rule are not big on ‘cavalry charge’ scenes – but it’s obviously an issue here.
7. Dogfighting rules, with everything working by relative arcs of fire, are fine enough, once you know what’s replacing pilot checks. Vehicle combat doesn’t include reactions, though, and feels like it should. With most of the fighting that matters being melee rather than shooting, the interplay of stuff analogous to dodge and parry is important to keep things interesting. In fact controlling reactions feels like it should be very important because a big part of mounted combat is persuading the mount NOT to react when its instinct is to break off and evade rather than press home an attack.
8. Treating the Dragon as an Animal means merely having a hits score removes the possibility of an END or DEX wound (as if they were a PC) or a critical hit to the Wing (as if they were a biotech vehicle), and not having stats other than skills feels like it removes a lot of room for ‘personalisation’ of a specific breed.
9. Having them have a conventional END or DEX feels like they would have to have stats at ridiculous levels to tolerate the amount of damage they should logically be able to sustain, or else give them a ridiculously high armour (which creates a situation where they’re “fine….fine….fine….dead”, as is often the case with a PC in battle dress, rather than suffering increasing minor wounds – once you manage enough damage to bypass the armour, the actual extra damage require to cripple a human is trivial), whilst a wounded dragon should have a fighting chance of extricating itself and its rider(s) from a fight – indeed intercepting and recovering a wounded dragon back home is the first action Temeraire sees in the series.
10. Vehicles….feel like there’s too much stuff in the default rules you’d be ignoring, pretty much starting from the default speed/range limits and going on from there. Yes, you could start by considering them a biotech ornithopter, but you’d want to rework the critical table (yes, the system already rerolls irrelevant criticals but you’d be rerolling a lot), and the range values are very high, and…ultimately, it doesn’t feel much like a living thing. Plus, melee isn’t really a thing vehicle rules are designed to support. Yes, there’s the biotech Scything Claw, but it’s Devastating, which means you ignore effect, making it a completely finesse-free weapon, and ultimately, with vehicles only taking criticals on an effect 6+ hit, rather than every 10% damage like a starship, they feel like you’d go most of a fight just attacking a ‘generic’ pool of hit points (similar to my problem with the Animal model). On the other hand, it’s the model where you most obviously have a mechanism for a crew member being hit and killed, and you can borrow the ‘boarding action’ rules for bigger dragons dropping armed crew onto an enemy (with the aforementioned bond, if you can put a gun to the captain’s head, the dragon will generally surrender)
11. Plus, since as noted they may be at least as smart as the PCs, they should have skills (or skill modifiers) for their riders – the skill of the PC riding a dragon should matter, but at the same time it’s an issue of handling and leadership, they’re not the one sat behind a gunsight, and the melee skill and STR which should vary from one dragon to another (and certainly from one breed to another) should also matter, arguably more.
Sorry. Bit of a brain dump.
Essentially, It's an amazing story and setting, and I can see the edges of a campaign I really, really want to run, but I'd like to figure out how to use mechanical detail to support it (even if I need to write some of it myself).
* A warning to anyone planning to read these to your children. I mean fairy tales as in 'Titania, Orion and the Wild Hunt'. Traditional British ‘Fair Folk’ are not twee little Tinkerbelle wanabees and are definitely not 'nice'.
** Laurence, Temeraire’s captain, is a Royal Navy officer when you first meet him (hence the name he gives the dragon) and there’s a very ‘Hornblower’ feel to much of the series.
*** It’s not all dogfighting. There’s a fair amount of just period-appropriate social interaction. There’s even a ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pastiche short story ‘Dragons and Decorum’.
