This is an immediately infectious and exciting idea. Little dragons let you do cavalry fighting only in mid-air, and big dragons let you re-enact Master and Commander - only IN MID AIR. As someone who loves Napoleonic warfare in the same way that fire loves liquid oxygen, this is very good news. The only thing that could go wrong is if it was attached to a lack-lustre, confused and frustratingly unpolished game, which took a wonderful concept and made it almost unplayable. That would be terrible, and that, oh so unfortunately, is what has happened here.

It was not a case of high expectations. The last time I read Bowley's work, on Sweet Chariot, I discarded it after two pages because I couldn't understand a word of it. So I was actually pleased to note that Bowley had progressed leaps and bounds since that work, and the game actually has the decency to begin by telling you what it's about and how it can be played. It is a tightly-focussed RPG, where the PCs are assumed to be lieutenants or wingmen in a dragon crew, or indeed the dragons themselves. The game suggests troupe play with players playing each other's dragons, or taking on the role of lesser wingmen, when one or two of the lieutenants are centre stage. No actual rules are provided to help this along (unlike the Grog rules in Ars Magica) but it makes a lot of sense for war games.

We then dive into the setting, which is good to have up front, but soon reveals Bowley's schizophrenic approach to communication. We haven't gone one page before he's telling us how eggs are hatched. A page later, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, we learn that you can't just kill people and take their stuff because of strict military laws regarding property of conquest. This gets less pronounced as the book goes on, but never quite goes away, so that reading this RPG is like watching TV while somebody constantly switches channels. It also produces a book where nothing is where it should be. The index at the end is useful but without logic to the layout and structure, it can only go so far.

The sole compensating factor is that when it comes to actual prose, Bowley is refreshingly clear and quick to get to the point. He never wastes words, makes frequent assumption that his audience is both intelligent and familiar with RPGs and doesn't get bogged down in atmosphere. This means the setting description is only a few pages long, but it answers the key questions: how have dragons changed things, what are dragons like, and how things are now. In effect, it was only very recently that dragons were trained sufficiently for warfare so your Napoleonic history remains unchanged – or so we must assume. You better know a fair bit about that history, too, if you want to run this game because none is supplied, except through implication of the system and chargen.

This shouldn't give you the idea that this RPG is slapdash, because nothing could be further than the truth. Bowley has clearly done a great deal of research into his topic, and provides plenty of exhaustive detail about military rank, historically accurate equipment, social realities and tactical procedure - not to mention dragons themselves. After reading this work, I know the ranks and honours of the French Navy, the agreed-upon divisions of prize amongst the ceew after capturing an enemy ship, both before and after 1806, and the wingspan of the common American Turquoise Thunderbird. What I don't know is why England is fighting France, which side America is on and who is running any of these armies, nor where they might choose to fight their battles. Some of this you can blame on the writer simply assuming a lot of background is known (which is somewhat justifiable in a historical setting) but other times such basic but non-historic information (like what dragons really think about war) is excluded in favour of explaining that an Excellent Cello is better than a Good Cello. So not only is someone constantly changing channels on you as you read, but the power keeps cutting the TV out every few minutes and then everything goes into slow-motion action replay. It was a bit like the Blair Witch Project: I'm sure there was a good RPG under there somewhere, if only they would stop jerking the camera around for five seconds and let it through.

And let me absolutely clear: there are flashes of a good – of a great - RPG under here, and at times it breaks through in breathtaking fashion. Bowley knows his setting backwards and loves it dearly, and communicates it very well. The detail is essential in many cases, and where it does go above and beyond the call of duty, this often just makes the setting more real and more vivid. And the rules back it up: chargen is done by moving your character through various stages of his military career, with different skills available at each level of promotion, much like the careers in WFRP. In a stroke of genius, while you can always learn more in your career over time, advancing through the ranks (to better skill choices) depends solely on earning enough Notice as quickly as possible. Notice is exactly what it sounds like: being noticed by top brass and important superiors. Naturally, the upper classes start with some notice but even the dirtiest Whitechapel boy can rise to Admiral if he takes down enough enemy dragons. Notice is determined individually, and those who fail to become lieutenants are, according to the rules, discarded when the game moves onto the next level. Very harsh, but it fits with troupe play and the genre, and encourages PCs to always be outdoing each other in terms of bravery and achievement. There are even rules for Toadying up to superiors to increase Notice. Toadying however will reduce your Honour (and increase your Practicality), another rule which provides a small but powerful nod to genre.

If you don’t want to walk your PC through each year at sea (or rather, at wing) you can use the quick generation rules. This is where we encounter some of the annoying inconsistencies in the system, because you can’t actually make most of the quick generation characters using the full rules. Likewise, the NPC section provides lots of quick generation rules for all the possible characters you might meet, but then says that fully detailed should use the full rules – which of course provide no options for creating anyone outside the military. It’s almost as if nobody has actually read all the rules at once. And it’s doubly frustrating because a few pages earlier in that section is a stroke of genius, in the provision of random tables to generate who a PC is and what his mission is, allowing for random encounters that fit the genre and are full of story possibilities. Few RPGs think to put in such helpful things; In Harm’s Way thought to do so but then forgot to actually read the rest of the chapter. Which is not only frustrating, but rather odd.

The rest of chargen is the same. Characters are defined by Strength, Co-ordination, Endurance, Agility and Charisma – a good list for a game focussed on soldiers – and you have 40 points to spend. But there’s no min or max listed, and there’s no penalty for low stats, and you only get a bonus for every two points above 7, making even numbers pointless. You might take an even number if you ran out of points, but since you can drop a stat with no consequence, you’ll always have points. After this, you divide 165 points to buy IQ, Luck and Social Rank. This is another clever idea, ensuring that the poor types have luck to balance out but it is poorly executed: the purchasing tables are not very transparent, and it’s impossible to create intelligent noblemen, because the upper classes are so expensive. Alternatively, anyone ranked Middle Class or below is going to end up pretty smart: I made up Horatio Hornblower and Sharpe and they came out with the same IQ, which doesn’t seem quite right. Nor is there any real reason for an IQ stat anyway, since you immediately convert it to an Intelligence stat on the same scale as the others (once again hoping it is an odd number).

Skill resolution is rolling percentile dice and trying to get less than 45% plus 5% per two points above seven in the governing stat plus 5% per every level in the skill above two. Not particularly complex although why the skills aren’t written in this fashion (ala WFRP) is not clear. The skills list is long but right on the mark for genre, including such important skills as Discipline and Leadership, and then throwing the cleverness away by making them both do exactly the same thing. Special rules for a few martial art styles are provided (but not for fencing!); I didn’t check if they were balanced because the damage formulae gave me a headache. Damage in general is extremely random: a flat bonus for weapon type, plus d%. That fits the randomness of a musket ball, but it also means that a boxing punch can do 130 damage while a cavalry sabre to the stomach might only do 21. You can trade points from your initiative roll and margin of skill success to increase damage, but for some reason initiative is reversed, going up as it gets worse, so you add points to it instead of subtracting. You also better be good at adding two digit numbers together on the fly.

You can begin to see why this game is so frustrating: every flash of the powder of genius is followed by a stalling musket of ineptitude or clumsiness. I’ve read careless RPGs before, many times, where the rules have just been thrown together without much thought the whole way through. This isn’t one of them, though, because great care has been taken in several sections. Exhaustive care has been taken in very specific places; brilliant ideas included and thoughtful provisions made to make GMing all the more easier. And then two pages later the rules are blindingly flawed, or obviously absent, or completely disorganised or painfully obtuse.

The absolute worst example of this is the dragons section. Bowley understands what so few other game designers working on dragon RPGs have done: that the dragons require as much if not more character and rules devotion than the humans. In this universe, dragons can range in size from a small pony to the size of a blue whale, and there are stats for all kinds, from wing span to cruising speed to standard operating crew. Dragons can have special features like Night Vision or a powerful breath weapon, and a whole variety of different habitats, diets, personalities, defence features, skin coverings and – my favourite – colourings. There’s nothing quite like rolling Verdigris scales of a Ruffled Texture, featuring Café Au Lait Stippled Gradation.

The problem with these tables however is that things aren’t very spread out. That is, on most of them, 80% of the results are mundane, with the really high rolls producing the best powers – sometimes staggeringly better than others. The results of just a few low rolls versus just a few high rolls (equally likely as these are flat percentile rolls, not a bell curve) will be dragons of vastly different combat abilities. Indeed, the example of dragon creation has the author declaring that this one is a “keeper”, implying that much of the time, what you roll will be either so uninteresting or so weak you will simply discard it. What the hell?

Afterwards, we swing back to Bowley’s loving and much appreciated attention to detail, with stats for twenty four dragons working for all three nations. They cover all shapes, sizes and power-levels and have an appropriate “field guide” feel to them. This is especially true in the names, with English varieties having names like the Glossy Russet and the Langwing, as opposed to American dragons like the Texan Volcanic or the French Petit Canon. This is followed by an immensely detailed – and again, appropriately and wonderfully so – system for air to air combat. It has a dog-fighting feel - I’m thinking a dragon the size of a whale carrying some fifty men and supplies for a cross-Atlantic flight isn’t going to be looping the loop that often – but they seem excellent for what they do cover. Dragons swap potential energy for power, so that the more exotic manoeuvres require dragons to climb higher beforehand. It feels real and it feels extraordinarily gameable. You could simulate Top Gun with these rules (and that would be an awesome idea for a sequel RPG, too).

But then there are no rules for dragons breathing on dragons, nor any for dragons attacking other dragons with fangs or claws, despite them having skills for the latter. Dragons can take damage from muskets and rifles, and the crew can be hit by dragon breath, but that’s it. And since everything works on tables in this game, it’s not like you can just make it up. You need the tables, and they’re just not there. They’re just not there.

The game closes with detailed rules for adjudicating things like bringing a dragon down, boarding one in mid-air, blowing open a sea fort wall, bombing an enemy airport, supporting infantry and escorting other dragons or vessels. These are full of useful guidelines on tactics and how much force is generally needed to win…but don’t lack any great explanation of why they might happen. Who might be in need of escort? Where might they be going? And what enemies would they meet on the way? There’s none of that. And it could have been so easily put in another one of Bowley’s immensely useful tables.

Page after page, the same song came back to me. On one page, a yelp of wonder to see a clever idea or an unusual inclusion or a flourish of genre; on the next, a burble of confusion at a foolishly broken rule, an infuriating or entirely inexplicable absence of content, or a failure to follow through with the necessary depth or clarity (while extensive text is wasted on utterly pointless sections placed in exactly the wrong places). The end result is this feels like half an RPG, as if it now needs to be handed to a competent designer and some good setting writers to be expanded, polished and fixed – and reorganised. Because as it stands it’s not just a poor RPG, it borders on unplayable. It would be a great resource on Napoleonic war itself, if it had included political or military information, and it’s a fantastic resource for ideas on dragons and draconic combat, one that anyone doing anything with dragons needs to look at. But it’s not a good RPG.

And that is an enormous tragedy, because I can’t imagine a cooler idea than doing Napoleonic warfare with dragons. My mind is alight with the possibilities. And much of the execution and description of this setting is so wonderful and so clever and done with such a love and devotion to the concept, so that it feels so deeply steeped in the truth of its own world, the real history of Napoleonic combat and the majesty of the 19th century. The book is rich with Bowley’s obvious love for and knowledge of the time, and his beautiful paintings of the world he can see in his head. I feel as if the man needs a McCartney to his Lennon, someone to marry his imagination to a solid bedrock of design and structure. But this hasn’t happened, and the game has suffered for it, and the ideas are wasted for it. And an idea this good is a terrible, terrible thing to waste.

Style 2 Substance 2

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