Starting At The Beginning

     Welcome to "Chronicles of the Grey Company" a zone/hexcrawl-style campaign for the Dragonbane RPG! This is the home site and blog for my online homebrew Dragonbane campaign, as well as any other ideas I come up with for the game. The campaign revolves around a band of heroic mercenaries and adventurers. The player-heroes are novice adventurers looking to join the adventuring company. They will have to prove their mettle to the existing members, something which is easier said than done.

 

     The setting for this campaign is a world of my own creation, Terrenor. A high fantasy setting with allegorical elements, the campaign is also meant as homage to J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Alexander Lloyd, and the old Rankin-Bass animated films (The Hobbit, Return of the King, Flight of Dragons, The Last Unicorn) of the 1970s and 80s. Additional inspiration for this campaign comes from a RuneQuest campaign idea created by my friend, Peter Maranci.

     I've made a point to try and make the campaign meaningful by drawing upon Tracy Hickman's "Ethics of Fantasy" essay series. Unlike a lot of campaigns designed for today's gamers, character death is a possibility, all actions (and even inaction) will have consequences, and the campaign may touch upon some mature subjects. Despite such possibilities, the player-characters are the heroes of the story, and are meant to act the part. 

What is Dragonbane?

     Dragonbane, published by Free League Publishing, is the current edition of the Swedish fantasy RPG Drakar och Demoner (Dragons and Demons), which was originally based upon Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing (BRP) system. Dragonbane shows some of its BRP roots, but for the most part is its own system. Like BRP, Dragonbane is skill-based, meaning you don't have to deal with the class-and-level setup of Dungeons & Dragons (another old favorite of this grognard).

 

     Characters have professions and can expand beyond the skill set of their starting profession as the player sees fit. The spectrum of professions in Dragonbane runs almost as wide as that of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (yet another favorite of mine), including artisans, warriors, mages, thieves, and knights. The one notable absence or exception to the core rules is the lack of a cleric profession, but that is easily handled and will be touched on in a later entry on this blog. 

 

What Exactly is a Zone/Hexcrawl?

           © 2025 Dyson Logos, used under license.          

     Hexcrawl refers to the hexes on the campaign maps which player-heroes travel through. The scale of these hexes range from six miles to 24 miles per hex, depending the map. "Zonecrawl" refers to the fact that instead of using a large world map, the campaign will be using several hex maps created by cartographer Dyson Logos. These may or may not come into play depending on what path(s) the heroes take over the course of the game.

 

     Here's an example by way of my campaign: a blank map of the starting region for the campaign (you can find it here on Dyson's site). As I noted, the scale on this map is six miles to one hex. While it's not very big in terms of an entire world, it's big enough to pack in more than enough adventure (and trouble) for novice heroes. The actual starting map for the players will have some locations labeled. Others will get labels as the campaign proceeds, based on where they go.

 

Rule Zero

     Every ability, spell, profession, variant rule, etc. is subject to change or removal at the discretion of the GM. Even if a game element is initially permitted, if it is later deemed incompatible with the campaign, it will be modified or removed. Any characters (PC or NPC) that use that element will be required to adjust to the change (in other words, no grandfathering). The [GM] will attempt to keep this sort of thing to a minimum (if at all), but sometimes this may happen in the process of keeping the rules appropriate to the campaign setting.

    Some things that may seem like a good idea at one time may turn out to be a bad idea in use. No grandfathering also maintains a consistency with the game setting and prevents people from abusing the letter of the rules if they choose not to respect the spirit of said rules.

 

What Lies Ahead...

     Over the next few days and weeks, I'm going to be posting material regarding house rules for the campaign, elements of the setting (which will evolve as the campaign progresses, making this a living blog/document of sorts). I'll also be posting some write-ups of the characters' (mis)adventures as well as other things regarding Dragonbane. I look forward to adding to this blog and possibly hearing from anybody who happens to read it.