James Nicoll Reviews

Stealing from Aaron de Orive, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Number five is SPI's foray into tabletop fantasy roleplaying, DragonQuest. It was a mix of random generation and design, offering players a range of occupations their character might have mastered. Mages got a much wider range of schools of magic than AD&D offered (and with all the free spells they got at character generation, effectively began the game a couple of thousand experience points up on mundanes), with the catch that newbie mage spells often did not work and spell failure could leave the mage a soot stain on the floor.

As one would expect from SPI, the rules had all the poetry of a legal document¹. First edition combat was incredibly glacial, for which I credit my later tolerance of Champions.

1: Although they slipped in the odd joke--one of the inherent abilities all halflings had was being able to dispose of jewelry in volcanoes without suffering social consequences.