I have seen Dragon Warriors mentioned, and it seemed to be one of those quirks of history, so I was surprised when I heard it would come back in print. I grabbed the freebie of DW and dived in.
The booklet contains rules for combat, generating characters for two classes, a short introduction to the world, a few monsters and s short adventure. Since it is a game from the past, you kind of expect it to be a old school system and it delivers. The characters have stats, and classes which give you starting values in certain basic skills. Having a value for Attack and one for Defend reminded me of the old Fighting Fantasy game books, also from the UK. Subtracting the targets Defence from your attack and roll a d20 to hit. Nice and simple. Different classes are inherently better at attacking or defending in combat. Also, you have some basic skills Stealth, Perception and Evasion. The classes then also have class based abilities, like Track or Berserk. It's classic old school weirdness that they haven't unified those two classes of Skills. All in all it looks easy enough to understand, and no more odd than some other classics. They have managed to include a roll to penetrate armor, but increase the amount of dice rolled, since damage is set by weapon. I kind of like that solution. I don't know if it works that way in the full game, but here I see an interesting opportunity to include weapon vs armor type effects in a fairly smooth way. Sadly we don't get any hints on how magic works, more than that there are a Magic Attack basic ability for some classes.
There is one thing which I found interesting in the system. Using the Evasion skill you can apparently dodge attacks, and other kind of calamities. There are no other system for saves, which for me is a big plus. They snap the suspenders of disbelief way to easy. Now, not only is this a understandable system for saves, but it uses 2d10 instead of d20. That could be considered a wart on the rest of the system, but note that this will give another kind of probability distribution than a flat d20 spread. I kind of like the implications of that.
The short intro to the world is intriguing. It looks a bit like a gritty, but fantastic, world somewhat inspired by our world. It is no Forgotten Realms kind of super magic to be sure. Maybe it feels a little bit too medieval for my taste. I can't stand Chivalry and Sorcery kind of medieval fantasy, for example.
Lastly, there's a short adventure. I have seen far worse, many times, so this little excursion to the land of Legend gave me warm and fuzzy feelings. It's nothing special, just a clear-out-a-location-from-monsters kind of adventure. But, it shows off the setting and system well.
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