Dave Morris

Thirty-five years ago, Oliver Johnson and I published a roleplaying game called Dragon Warriors. It may have been the first RPG to appear in a paperback edition (and hence as an affordable pocket-money purchase) in regular bookshops, at least in the UK. The game's setting was Legend, a low-fantasy world with a strong flavour of European folklore:


Eventually we switched to using GURPS for our own Legend campaigns. Oliver had always argued that the rules should only use six-sided dice, and what can I say? He was right. The polyhedral dice got packed away, never to return to our gaming tables. But, much as I admire the design of 4th edition GURPS, it does take up several hundred pages and a few dozen rules supplements. If you're foolish enough to trigger a large-scale combat, it feels like solving the three-body problem without even having recourse to a pencil and the back of an envelope.

Running Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders, I enjoyed the streamlined system that allowed me to focus on the events in the game rather than the maths needed to crunch them. A seed was planted. I got to thinking about a new set of rules for legend, D6-based, and with a core system simple enough to fit into a dozen pages or less. Of course, there's more detail if players want it - for magic especially, but also combat, social interaction, prayer, thievery and so on. But it's up to the players how much they want to zoom in.

This new game is Jewelspider. Oliver and I are running it now, tweaking the system, with a view to publishing it in 2020.

So is this Dragon Warriors 2e?
Not quite. At least, we're purposely not calling it that because a lot of people use DW for combat-heavy dungeon-style games, whereas the emphasis on Jewelspider is for adventures on a broader canvas. There will be rules for combat, of course, but the system isn't intended to drill down to the level of tactical battles you'd see in a tabletop skirmish game. When we want that sort of game we use GURPS. The focus in Jewelspider is on building a shared narrative with players attempting swordplay, yes, but also sneaking about and cajoling and eavesdropping and scouting and seducing and threatening and pickpocketing and singing and conjuring and praying and fast-talking -- in fact attempting any action they care to try.

The Jewelspider book will feature some new one-shot adventures and a mini-campaign by Oliver as long as we can raise enough to pay for the maps and artwork to go with those. The kind of adventure you can expect is typified by "The Dean's Folly" and "The Holly King" (both by Tim Harford), "The Thirteen Pages" by Alistair Jackson, and "The Hollow Men", "A Box of Old Bones" and "Silent Night" (all by me). 

What we need
If it was just the rules and the adventures there'd be no need for Patreon. We're mostly doing those for our own group anyway. Admittedly we don't write up adventures to be "publishable" (we prefer to run a looser game from notes) so that will involve a little extra work. But the big obstacle is art. I have commissioned a fabulous painting by Tancred Dyke-Wells and I'd like to get some pictures by Jon Hodgson too, as for me and many others he is the definitive Dragon Warriors artist. (That's one of his above.) And ideally the book will have maps and interior illustrations too. That's what costs money. Hence Patreon.

Once bitten
It's not my first, as they say, rodeo. Leo Hartas and I tried raising funds on Patreon for our comics epic Mirabilis: Year of Wonders. That was a pretty resounding failure. We had a few backers putting in $10 and more (and my eternal