Drums of War
Drums of War is a tabletop RPG inspired by the Warcraft universe.
It was originally written in the summer of 2010 as a thesis project for a course in digital games culture. The idea was to explore the challenges involved in adapting a game across mediums, but also mostly because I was deeply dissatisfied with the official tabletop game, and also by the lack of really interactive in-game storytelling in the game itself.
I wrote the first draft in an insane week of crunch while under the influence of some powerful new SSRI, but shockingly, the result after some clean-up was a very playable game that does a pretty good job adapting the mechanics of it to more tabletop friendly numbers.
Ironically though, despite the goal having been to create a more "RP-centric" medium for the setting of Azeroth ... mechanically it offers no more assistance in that department than the original game it adapts, beyond moving it to the medium of tabletop to begin with.
For many years now, the game has lived on a disused wiki since taken over by Fandom, but it's now under threat of deletion for inactivity, so I decided it best to preserve it somewhere under more of my own control.
The attached archive contains the complete package of game, character sheet, the post-mortem paper about the design process, the GM notes for the playtest adventure, and even an unfinished start to a point-crawl campaign in Stranglethorn Vale.
All contents are licensed Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.
Two important errata regarding the treasure tables:
- Several references in Table 19: Treasure Type are wrong. "Table 8" should be Table 22, and "Table 7" should be Table 21.
- Treasure Bonus may need revision. The bonus is almost meaninglessly small at low levels.