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Ouroborus - "The dragon or snake eating its own tail, representing the cyclical nature of life"
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"Where am I?" "You're in a room..." |
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Reign is a fantasy roleplaying game written and produced by Greg Stolze. Dungeons & Dragons is pretty much the archetypal fantasy roleplaying game that started the whole thing in the first place. D & D has been through surprisingly few iterations, given that far younger games have had as many editions. Currently, it is on its 4th Edition (I will spare you my feelings). 3rd Edition saw the birth of the D20 system, the popularity of which saw countless new versions of old games using some version of D20. For the most part, many people liked 3rd Edition. However, Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the D & D license, within a relatively short space of time, released a new version of 3rd Edition monikered "3.5 Edition". They then proceeded to re-release all their 3rd Edition catalogue under the 3.5 Edition banner. Many fans were far from happy. Reign uses Greg Stolze's own game mechanic, the One Roll Engine, of which I am very fond. Reign is a fantasy game of lords and ladies set in its own humans-only game universe. That game is very, very good. And yet, sometimes, you just want to play a bit of "elf and dwarf" fantasy, you know? Reign doesn't do that. D & D is the fundamental "elf and dwarf" fantasy game with more game material than one person would ever want to read. So if you want to use the wonderful Reign mechanics with the archetypal "elf and dwarf" settings of D & D, someone has to create a weird Frankenstein's monster using "body parts" from both. Enter the Dragon Reign... I received Reign for Christmas '07 from a friend of mine. He'd done his homework and knew that it was like Greg Stolze had written a roleplaying game just for me, it was that good a match. I read it and decided it was the most awesome thing in the world. But I just couldn't bring myself to run it! You see, I'd recently started playing a LOT of 4th Edition Talisman and that was definitely colouring my judgement. At the time, if I was going to run fantasy, it needed to have elves and dwarves in it... Fortunately, It just so happened that 4th Edition D & D had just been released, which meant that all the 3.5 Edition stuff was now being sold off cheaply...and after 15 years of playing World of Darkness, the prospect of returning to my gaming roots was actually pretty exciting. Which is key to my inspiration for creating Dragon Reign. What you have here is a marriage of D & D's source material with Reign's mechanics. The Dragon Reign rules are complete enough that you should be able to convert any of your existing 3.5 ED D & D to Reign. So, grab your old Player's Handbook and one of those wonderful D & D campaign settings and go slay some orcs! DOWNLOAD |
