Last time I’ve talked about the New Player Briefing, which was basically an introductory pamphlet. Today I’m starting on the first of the three core books of DragonRaid: Light Raider Handbook, which appears to be a setting manual, though it also contains some mechanics stuff.

Without farther ado, let’s begin.

The book starts with the same explanation of what a PDF is and how to use it. I’m going to skip it, just know that every file has it.

Next is a list of tables contained within the book with links to them. That’s actually a nice touch, going through a book to find a specific table can be pretty frustrating. Though I think collecting them in a separate file would be a better solution.

Our first real section is the introduction chapter starting with a letter from the Light Raiders Academy President. There isn’t really much to say about the letter itself. It just encourages the graduated Light Raiders to do good work and reminds them to study the book dutifully.

It’s a nice immersive touch, though: from the beginning we know that this book is supposed to be an in-universe artifact, something your character possesses and can rely upon in their adventures.

Aside from increasing the entertaining value of the book (much like DF RPG did with running commentary in the margins and other touches like that), it also serves an important function of establishing what information, specifically, is known to the characters as opposed to players. Those of you with experience in TRPG would know the issue of meta-knowledge, when some facts are known to the players but not to the characters, like specific enemy weaknesses, location of cool loot, etc. In many games, separating characters’ and players’ knowledge can be tricky. For example, WoD has, like, all of the conspiracies, and what your character knows about them depends heavily on the character’s background. It has to be a conscious decision on your part to give the character that knowledge, approved by the GM, and then you have to watch out to stick to it. And it’s easy to slip and, say, take into account common game knowledge (Cain does indeed exist and lurks around) in your reasoning even though your character wouldn’t necessary belief or know it.

By making all characters Light Raiders from the same Academy and giving them an in-game manual about the setting, this problem is simplified. The book establishes common ground for characters’ knowledge, thus helping the players to immerse themselves in the game and not break its boundaries.

Of course, it comes at a cost of limitations. All PCs are rookie Light Raiders. You can’t play a recently converted dragon slave (or just dragon slave, for that matter), you can’t play as a random civilian lured into the Dragon Lands, you can’t play as a wandering adventurer unrelated to the Light Raiders, etc.

Of course, such limitations are not a bad thing. Many games use similar boundaries. The Mountain Witch, for example, is a game about a bunch of ronins going to confront the eponymous Mountain Witch. Don’t Rest Your Head is about people awakened to the reality of the Mad City, usually recently awakened ones (simply because “an old Awakened” is an oxymoron). My Life With Master is about minions (an experiment of a mad scientist, a vampire thrall, etc.). And so on.

Establishing who the assumed characters are is a part of defining what your game is all about, what its focus would be. The important thing here is to make sure that the limitations are not purely artificial, that there is a solid reason, both thematic and mechanical, for established boundaries. For example, DRYH PCs are all Awaken because otherwise half of the game mechanics wouldn’t even apply to them, and instead of a tale of insane superheroes fighting various horrors and surviving in a surreal environment, you’d get a pretty standard horror game about monsters invading our reality. Beyond that, however, DRYH doesn’t impose any limits: your characters can come from any walks of life as long as they have a reason to lose their sleep.

So, does DragonRaid has a reason for limited players’ choices? Actually, yes. Beyond the obvious thematic consideration (it’s a game about spreading the Good News and fighting for Jesus in the land of darkness and Satanism), it actually has specific mechanics tying into the setting’s metaphysics that justify the choice of PCs. I’ll get to them later, but for now it’s sufficient to say that playing as random adventurers would result in a loss of some neat aspects of the game.

As such, I do approve of the choice made here. In general, I prefer the games focusing on a specific concept and exploring it in interesting ways rather than games trying to allow you to do anything you want but having no inherent style of their own.

So, despite my misgivings about the previous file, I’m cautiously optimistic now. Let’s see how long it would last.

We’re still in the introduction section. Next is “The Great Rescue on Eden Again,” which you may recall from the previous review. It’s repeated word for word. Eh, I guess with the previous file being basically a pamphlet, it does make sense to collect all relevant information about the setting in one place, but I’m really not a fan of pointless repetition. The story could have been expanded at least. Maybe some tales about the early days of rebellion against the dragons so the PCs would know where to go after cool loot or something.

Anyway, I’ve talked about it already, so let’s move on.

Next section is titled “The Dark Enemy,” which looks promising. It starts with a description of the Great Red Dragon. Despite being called Abaddon, he’s actually Lucifer.

The King of Evil is the Great Red Dragon. He was not born, yet neither was he always there. Created full-grown along with many others, the Great Red Dragon was ordained for beauty. The High One who made him did not design him as a dragon, but meant him to be great among spiritual beings who serve the Everlasting Spirit.
The Great Red Dragon was not, however, content to serve. He wanted to be served himself in a way equal to the High One. So he initiated a rebellion. Following him were many other spiritual beings, whom he dispersed throughout the universe. Those on EdenAgain took the form of dragons.

Interestingly, absent is any mention of him being imprisoned in Hell or otherwise constrained. Lucifer appears to be free to roam the world as he pleases, corrupting its inhabitants and ruling them with an iron fist.

That, of course, brings us back to the problem of evil and passive God. Does the book have anything to say on the matter?

The OverLord of Many Names could bring the struggle to a conclusion at any moment if He chose to do so. But for reasons not totally understood, the time is not right and the war goes on as a battle for people’s allegiance. The Everlasting Spirit builds men, and the Great Red Dragon tries to tear them apart.

Yeah, not exactly encouraging. That’s the closest the book comes to the engaging the issue. Other than that, there are just some remarks about God using hardships to build you in His image, which seems to me like a dick move.

I mean, it’s even worse here than in RL. In RL you can say free will and fallen world, and many people would be content with it. As I recall, the general theological stance on demons is that they have only as much power as you give them: they may tempt, but they can’t affect you directly in any way unless you let them into your heart. Here, however, demons roam freely, and even when people rise up against them, they don’t necessary have the power to defeat the demons. The whole world was conquered by the devil in large part by force, which really seems like something God should have prevented.

It does work better for the game, but the game also, once again, works better if you assume Overlord doesn’t have omnipotence and does the best he can, which may or may not be enough in the end.

This way, the tension is preserved and the awkward questions are answered, but I doubt the devs would agree with me on this point.

The rest of the section on Lucifer is kinda boring. It basically lists all the way he’s a bad guy (he’s a destroyer and would threaten you with harm, he’s the deceiver and would try to ensnare you in his lies, etc.) and your defenses against him (mostly faith). No mechanics here.

Next we have dragons.

One danger posed by the dragons is their ability to kill a man’s physical body. But for members of the TwiceBorn, this only results in an immediate and glorious entrance into the Everlasting Kingdom.

So, kids, go and martyr yourselves! It’s fun!

You know, there were a few more passages like that, but I didn’t comment on them because they were, well, less jarring. They were merely reassurances that lives lost fighting the darkness are worth it and that the dead Light Raiders are in a better place now.

However, when taken together, especially with the quote above, it really looks less like a reassurance and more like a glorification of martyrdom, which I don’t think is healthy, especially since this game is intended for kids.

But enough about religion, we have dragons to kill.

They’re basically demons who took on reptilian forms. While all of them are pretty close to what you imagine a dragon to be, they’re also divided into nine families, each with their own unique traits. There are crystal dragons and slime dragons (not made of slime, just oozing it) and sea serpents and so on. All of them, however, posses similar weapons: fire, smoke and mental speech.

Fire is pretty self-explanatory. Smoke carries various negative status effects, like causing you to see everything as worse than it is or be distracted by daydreaming, lowering your magic armor. I should note here that a lot of smoke enchantments are listed as unknown for some reason. I sure hope they’re listed in the rulebook or AM manual, otherwise it would be a shitty cop-out, much like the second edition of Age of Aquarius included a technomancer character template but didn’t actually provide any rules to play as one, opting to say “use your imagination.”

Mind speech is basically a subtle mindfuck. Dragons have a power to insert a thought into your mind that you may or may not recognize as your own. When accepted as truth, it causes you to lose your way and give in to one kind of enchantment or another, depending on the type of the dragon. Slime dragons cause divisions and arguments in the group, firedrakes strike with terror, shadow dragons blind people to the truth (truth of Overlord, naturally) and make them follow false philosophies and to deceive others.

Dream dragons are the most fan, probably. They send false prophetic dreams pretending to be Overlord and sending the PCs on quests unrelated to their true goal.

They’re patrons of side-quests, in other words.

Overall, while some dragons are rather obviously religiously-charged, I like the core idea of powerful enemies primary attacking your mind with fears, doubts and insecurities. I generally like works focusing on psychology and inner struggle of characters rather than on physical battle, and making the enemies dragons is just cool. It is something that legitimately distinguish this game from others in a positive way, especially considering the time it was published.

However, here we come to the major flaw in the concept. Remember how I mentioned that the most famous feature of the game is quoting Bible verses to do magic? Yeah, among other things, that’s how you combat dragons’ mind speech. We don’t yet have an explanation for the magic system (which is a bad design, but I’ll get to it in the next section where it bothers me more), but basically there are Bible verses under each dragon type. Reciting them shields you from the mindfuck effects.

I mean, OK, maybe I just don’t know the full version of how it all works, and actually there is more of a struggle, but right now it looks really cheap. Here is a frightening enemy attacking you with dark desires and your own insecurities, and you just lolnope it with a verse? It’s not even about religion here, it’s about conflict, tension.

Characters should not get an easy way out in a psychological battle. They should not have a sure way to defend themselves. They should struggle with their own convictions, they should reach within themselves in search for something, anything, that would hold them together. They should put their ideals on the line and risk them being shattered.

Hell, even fiction that uses Christian imagery understands it. It’s enough enough to recite the right words, you need to convince yourself of the truth you choose before you can convince the world.

Or, the way Unknown Armies put it:

And these are your people.
And you are one of them.
And every one of you knows a secret no one else understands.
That it’s not enough to merely believe in something.
That you have to become that belief.
That the world is you and when you change yourself the world changes too.

I suspect this mechanic will be this game’s undoing in my eyes, but let’s move on. It is possible at this point that I’m misunderstanding and the game would prove me wrong. I’m not very optimistic about it, however.

Next we have a section of dark creatures. Unlike dragons, they are not demons given flesh. Once upon a time they were good people corrupted by the dark powers. Oh, and they’re also aliens.

The planet of EdenAgain has become a place of exile for the vermin of other inhabitable planets. Some time ago, the dragons invited these nearby worlds to send the worst of their kind, promising that on EdenAgain, under the abominations of dragon rule, they would experience what they had desired when living on their home planet.

Yeah, I’m really not a fan of mixing science fiction and fantasy like that. An ecletic style can sometimes work when it’s a point of a story, but here we have a pretty standard fantasy world with swords and castles and dungeons and dragons, so spaceships (and yes, thee are spaceships, though mostly destroyed) feel off. Especially when they deliver trolls and goblins.

Anyway, the dragons took control over the exiles and made them their servants. In the process they… ah, I’m not sure, either gave them an ability to enchant people or enhanced their natural talents. Either way, dark creatures can spread so-called “sin enchantments,” basically a form of mindfuck slower than dragons’ own mind speech and typically conditional. You can get it from touching an item belonging to a cave troll, or from goblin’s bite, or from spiders’ words (because of course there are giant spiders. And they’re sapient), etc.

The enchantments change character’s behavior first in subtle, then increasingly obvious ways that made the population easier to control as a whole.

Again, nice idea, and it seems the mechanic is different from simply citing Bible verses, but we’ll have to wait until it’s revealed to us.

Oh, by the way, here is the first place where we get a consistent reference to mechanics. Specifically, the enchantments do damage to character strength like LOVE. However, we still know nothing about the mechanics or even the flavor definitions of character strength, making the passages needlessly confusing. There is a reason why most games start with an explanation of the core resolution mechanic, proceed to character creation, then talk about the setting. That way, the players reading it wouldn’t be confused and would actually learn relevant information instead of glossing over it because they don’t understand what it means.

What we have here is just bad game design.

Before we get to the descriptions of various dark creatures, there is this lovely tidbit from a section on their attacks:

So in your dealings with dark creatures, expect them to behave wickedly. Watch for their sin specialty and fight against it, using words first. Ballads are sung in the Liberated Land commending LightRaiders who held their ground in verbal combat with dark creatures. Only as a last resort should LightRaiders attempt to kill dark creatures{except for orcs and goblins, whom the OverLord wants you to attack on sight.

Because fuck those guys, right? Don’t mind that they, too supposedly were good once and probably could be redeemed. Don’t mind that the list of the dark creatures includes animated skeletons with an aura of despair surrounding them. Nope, Overlord hates orcs and goblins (probably because they turned against him after that debacle with the ring), so you should just kill them.

Here we see the game struggling with an old TRPG moral dilemma: players like to kill stuff, but killing is generally considered to be wrong. What do? Much like D&D before it, DragonRaid arrived at an obvious conclusion: always chaotic evil creatures. They’re evil, don’t think about it. They’re always evil, attack on sight. Even their babies are evil (well, OK, the game doesn’t say it), kill them in a crib. Genocide, go!

Honestly, it’s pretty jarring. One of the things I knew about this game before starting these reviews is that the PCs are forbidden from killing locals since they’re just victims of demonic schemes. I assumed that the enemies would mostly be dragons themselves, maybe some lesser demons and various non-sapient creatures: animals, zombies, Wither fans, etc. To find otherwise was quite a shock.

But alright, I probably shouldn’t hold this game to higher standards than D&D, even if the devs insist otherwise, so let’s move on.

Most dark creatures are fine and what you’d expect: goblins are small, sneaky and cruel. They like to torture their victims, and can infect people with sadism. Orcs are strong, ferocious and live to fight. They infect people with the desire for revenge just by fighting with them. Trolls are powerful, greedy and power-hungry.

There is a bit of a problem with the tone. On the one hand, you have orcs who collect great stacks of bone as status symbols of how much sorrow and suffering they have caused to others. On another, you have muks, small creatures made of muk who cause anyone who touches them to worry overly much about every little thing. One is your standard fantasy fair, another feels more like something out of a children cartoon.

Eh, it can be handled with the right tone and balance between silliness and seriousness.

Some dark creatures, however… well, let’s say they reflect the devs’ views on morality and faith a bit too strongly for me.

For example, there are selfoes. They’re described as Dragon Lands’ answer to Light Raiders: they’re humanoid creatures traveling around the land and doing various good deeds to help locals. Sounds good, right? So, why are they dark creatures? What’s their crime? Do they secretly spie for the dragons, perhaps? Or set things up in a way that would produce problems far greater than they solved? Well…

Selfoes were exiled from a small, peaceful planet named Ammech. Selfoes there serve the OverLord of Many Names and are very helpful creatures. They call him the Rescuer. Some time ago, a few degenerate selfoes began to do good things for people, but not for the glory of the OverLord. They ceased to be the OverLord’s servants and became only the servants of men.
Eventually, the citizenry became angry with the selfoe do-gooders, being jealous for the OverLord of Many Names. They knew His power and goodness cured the sin contamination that was preventing selfoes from having a pure heart. So angered did they become that they exiled the self-focused selfoes to EdenAgain.

[…]

Whenever a selfoe recognizes a LightRaider, he tries to work a False Guilt Enchantment to make him feel that he has been too judgmental and too certain that dragon slaves are not necessarily destined to reach the Everlasting Kingdom. Selfoes spread their Glory Hog Enchantment in various ways. Infected LightRaiders will do good things to acquire rewards rather than for the purposes of glorifying the Everlasting Spirit, pleasing the OverLord, or saying “Thank you” to the Rescuer of Many Names. It is quite important that you rescue stricken LightRaiders!

That’s right, kids. If you do good deeds in your own name instead of serving Jesus, you’re worthless scum. Did you think that helping fellow people in itself may be valuable? Ha! Only saving their souls matters, their bodies can rot.

To be fair, there is a mention that they do good deeds in the name of dragons, luring people into complacency, but the emphasis is pretty clearly on serving yourself rather than Jesus.

One good thing I can say about it is that at least the game seems anti-Objectivist, yet it helps only so much.

Then there are wood sprites. At first they seem pretty straightforward: they’re small forest creatures that live in a moment, not concerning themselves with the future and making people carefree to the point of recklessness. Pretty classic faerie here, to that I don’t object. However, for some reason they’re also known for creating philosophies, and one of them, well…

One of the most foolish, yet quite popular, wood sprite philosophies is that there never was a creation or Creator, but that all life evolved by chance mutation. It is amazing how blind darkness can be!

Ah yes, a jab at the evolutionary theory. I shouldn’t be surprised, yet I am.

The true question here is what the fuck does it have to do with carefree attitude?

And, you know, while I doubt a world where bears can mate with ostriches could evolve naturally, I wouldn’t call it intelligent design, either.

Speaking of, fluster beast.

The fluster beast is DragonRaid’s very own answer to owlbear: a bear with two ostrich heads. You may think it’s just a silly fantasy monster, but it’s origin story is… interesting.

Fluster beasts were exiled by the civilizations of the planet Kumoz when unholy mating occurred between bear-like animals and ostrich-like birds. Those that the twelve intelligent races of Kumoz could nd were shipped to EdenAgain at the invitation of the dragons. Every couple of years, new mutations arise from similar matings. Last year, there was one with an ostrich head and another head resembling a swan.

…You know, in any other book I would take it for whimsy, you know, like a basilisk hatching from a chicken egg when a toad sat on it. But DragonRaid advertises itself as an allegorical game. You’re supposed to learn spiritual lessons from it applicable in a real life.

Does anyone else see any other interpretation of this allegory other than an objection against interracial marriages? Because I’m really getting the Deep Ones vibes from it.

I don’t know, maybe I’m reaching, but it does make me uncomfortable. Let’s move on.

The next section is titled “The Victims of Eden Again“. As you may imagine, it’s about humans, in theory at least. In practice, it’s a very brief retelling of the original sin myth and consequences thereof: dragons have filled humans of Eden Again with impure desires, blinding them to God, blah blah, Twice Borns are saved while Once Borns are not, but could be, blah blah… The bottom line is that the PCs are forbidden from killing them and are expected to minister to them.

I would note that there is much emphasis on humans being sinful because they desire something God has not provided them and didn’t want them to desire. Not sure how I feel about it, but it strokes me as strangely Buddhist.

Alright, I think this post is long enough already, so that’s it for now. Tune in next time to finally find out how to righteously mingle with evil. Maybe there even would be rules for it.