Lion & Dragon Campaign, Plus Some Really Creative Use of High-tech

So, last night, we played Lion & Dragon. It was a great session. It had a lot of action, a lot of adventure in the D&D style and yet was deeply Medieval-Authentic.

For example, the PCs attended the court of an Earl and later a King. They got mixed up with a powerful and manipulative Magister. One of the PCs, a knight, got himself a squire who was the grandson of the PCs' deceased mentor.

But then they also went into an enchanted forest, and there fought against a Clay Giant (the stats of which you can find in the Lion & Dragon rulebook), and against a water-spirit knight (which will be stated out in a future RPGPundit Presents supplement - it's technically an elemental but looks NOTHING like a D&D elemental; this is what medieval-authentic 'elementals' were like).

The Scots Man ended up decapitating the Water Knight, but wasn't allowed to keep the knight's magic sword (instead, another PC who was the Scotsman's employer took it, since the scotsman was not of a class to be allowed to carry such a sword). This was an awesome example of the medieval social class system at work; fortunately the Scotsman PC was well aware that this was a reality of the setting, and was quite happy with his reward of one whole Pound, which was more money than he'd ever seen in his life.

Also the player of one of our magisters was surprised to realize that Occultism Lore is all you really need in order to "Identify" magic items in this game.


So that's it for MY L&D game, but over at Swords & Stitchery, things get a lot weirder! Eric, who writes that blog, has often thought of some really creative and unusual ways to blend various OSR products and subjects, and Dark Albion and Lion & Dragon are two of his favorites, luckily for me!

So recently, he's had a couple of posts where he combines Lion & Dragon with the 30 years war and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, to make a UFO-themed adventure. Along the way he links up to Dark Albion, my bestselling Cults of Chaos book, and even RPGPundit Presents #3: High Tech Weapons.

 As if to double down, in his next post he combines Barrier Peaks, the war in Bohemia, L&D, and crazy robots from RPGPundit Presents #19: Frantabulous Robot Generator!

Putting on my reviewer-hat for a second, I would have to note that this is not the kind of behavior I get up to in my Lion & Dragon campaign.  For me, I have a strict line: there's my Medieval-Authentic game, and there's my Gonzo games. The two do not cross.  I want my medieval-authentic game to feel super medieval, and that means it's unlikely to ever see robots. Golems, yes! But not robots.

However, don't get me wrong! I LOVE that Eric likes to mash things up like this and he enjoys it. That's just great with me. I don't want everyone who buys L&D to feel like their game has to be super duper medieval-authentic. I want them to have the tools to do that IF that's what they want to do. But if they want to borrow some of it and mostly play a game that's more vanilla fantasy, or if they want to mix it up with other products (especially if they're MY products, of course!) and play it as Medieval-Gonzo, then more power to them! Go nuts! It's your game. I'm not part of the Cult of the Game Designer; at the table it's the GM who is king.


So check out Swords & Stitchery's crazy-awesome blog. And if you haven't yet, be sure to check out Lion & Dragon as well as all my other Medieval-authentic AND Gonzo stuff!


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