The Green Dragon in its lair

Under pandemic restrictions, the Tinkerage is confined to home and taking the opportunity to play Green Dragon style scenarios with two novice, or beginner, players. Overall, this has gone very well. Green Dragon play is designed to get up and running fast, and adventures are full of encounters, battles, and dramatic turns.

Here are the current conventions, in a nutshell.

Characters are simple, and fit on a single index-card:

• Type: this is a short description of background and calling, such as Knight of Chalice, Elven Archer, Mysterious Witch-doctor.
• Attribute: a significant characteristic, such as Tough, Intelligent, or Agile.
• Skill: the character’s signature skill, such as sword and shield, archery, or knife-fighting.
• Special: a character”s outstanding feature, often inventive and unique, such as a talent for detecting lies, talking to animals, or magical tricks and curses.
• Each character begins with 3 Hits.

All aspects of the character, including equipment, are chosen by the player, and approved or modified by the GM.

The rules are a familiar version of roll and read with two regular dice. In this simple method, the player declares an action, the GM assesses the likely outcomes, and the dice roll. Any roll of 6+ is close enough to go as expected. Lower rolls are progressively worse than expected, higher rolls, from 9+, are better and better!

The only new rule is the addition of Luck points the younger players can spend to overcome unreasonably bad results that can lead to frustration rather than engagement. We will experiment with a small luck pool, starting with 1 point per session. (Sessions are usually short.)

Addendum; Easy battle pieces

Pitched battles run quickly in this system, but younger players appreciate a figure that they can focus on and to visualize the situation. Any handy chess pieces work well, but the Tinkerage has been experimenting with custom printable tokens folded into standing playing pieces.

1 - Locate some suitable icons, with clear, distinctive graphics. The icons site game-icons.net is a great place to start.

2 - In Google Draw, or a suitable app, set up your printable pieces, using an approximately 1” x 4” grid, with four 1” squares (in fact, slightly less than 1” sits neatly on a standard battle map). The two center blocks will represent the facing side and back of your playing piece. The icons are up to you and the players, but for the facing side I used a portrait style icon, and for the rear side icons representing the character’s battle gear.

3 - Print, cut out, and fold the pieces into a triangle. Use a small coin (a US penny is perfect) to weight the base, with a piece of clear tape wrapped over to hold the paper together. 

Now, choose any adventure or propose your own, and begin.