Video Game / Dragon Tavern

Explore the wilds, beat up monsters, steal their lunch money...

DragonTavern is a browser-based, free-to-play Western RPG from Australian company Rowdy Baron Games and it launched on May 16th 2008. The game is set in a High Fantasy world, divided up into various locations such as The Ashpeak Mountains and The Bravaki Wastelands. Player characters can come from one of three separate factions; The Mountain Kingdoms, The Steel Empire and the Deadlands, and adventure through the locales of the game world via a browser menu. All player characters are based out of the titular Dragon Tavern, located central between each of the three factions territories. Player activity is curtailed by a set amount of Action Points, which are spent to travel to a location from either the tavern or the location the player is currently in, to adventure within a location and to travel back to the tavern. Each character receives 25 Action Points per day, and these may stockpiled up to 250.

Character creation is based on the selection of one of the three factions and then one of eight classes for each faction. Classes are either ranged or melee specialists or hybrids of the two. All [[Player Characters PCs]] and Monsters have abilities within the game's TOAD system; (Tactics, Organisation, Attack, Defence) and Skills which modify their tactics. Combat functions by comparing a character's TOAD abilities and with their opponent and modifying based on the character's skills, level compared to the opponent and the quality of a character's equipment. Each of the TOAD types; ranged, melee, magic, stealth, solo, armour, etc. has an opposing TOAD style that it's particularly weak against in defence and one for which it's strong in attack; e.g the Group Organisation style receives a bonus versus opponents using Solo, but suffers versus the Monstrosity Organisation style.

The Mountain Kingdoms are a traditional fantasy kingdom with Elves and Dwarves and the most standard RPG class set; Storm Lords (mages), Infiltrators (rogues), Moon Elf Rangers, Moon Elf Cultivators (druids) and Dwarven Berserkers. The three kingdoms (human, elf and dwarf) are bound by the Treaty of Three Lords to put aside their enmity in the face of external threats.

The Steel Empire have a significantly Steampunk flavour with their Sanctioned Alchemists and Steam Crafters with Steam-powered Golems, but also have faint overtones of Warhammer 40,000 with their God-Emperor, Inquisitors, Zealots and zero tolerance attitude to non-humans and mutants. The Empire is xenophobic, technologically advanced and views witchcraft and magic as blasphemous. Were it not for the threats of the various monsters of the lands, they would be aiming to subjugate the other realms.

The Deadlands are a society based around necromancy as a means of survival. The entire country was nearly wiped out by invasion and only mass-necromancy by the ruling Gate Council prevented the Deadlands population being exterminated. Necromancy in various forms has become and entrenched part of life and culture in the Deadlands. Deadlands classes include; Necromancers, Dark Puppeteers and the ever-popular Death Knight.

Dragon Tavern uses a Microtransactions system through which players may purchase varying amounts of in-world credits which can be exchanged via the Shady Dealer in the Tavern for various items, some providing permanent advantages such as trap avoidance and increased loot drops or for single use infusions of extra Action Points.

Updates ceased in 2016, but the game remained online until early 2022, when the site's domain expired. Luckily, it seems to have come back online later in 2022, though for how much longer is anyone's guess.

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Contains examples of:

• Anti Poop-Socking: 25 adventures per day, per character. Adventures can be stockpiled to a maximum of 250. Of course, you can create multiple characters under one account and you can buy additional action points.
• Bar Brawl:
  • Drinking too much can cause one of these to happen, though if your character wins they get a handful of XP.
  • One of the traps in Camp Ashlumber involves the player walking into a bar just as one of these breaks out.
• Bear Trap: One of the earliest mechanical traps players can come across is a simple Old Bear Trap that inflicts a wound if it isn't avoided.
  Who in their right mind would put a bear trap out here? Anyone could step on it... including you.
• Bird-Poop Gag: Used for an AP trap fittingly named "Bombed!" that can be encountered in the Bravaki Wastelands.
  Let's just say you looked up just in time to see a flock of Vultaur flying overhead who've decided to lighten their load slightly. Unless you can dive for cover quickly, you're going to be cleaning up this mess for a long time.
• Booze-Based Buff: The titular tavern sells a variety of drinks which can have positive effects such as increased loot value and additional resistances to various types of attack. The more you drink the greater your chance of ending up vomiting it all back up and losing positive effects.
• Booby Trap: Many and varied. From drifts of volcanic ash that penalize your action points to classic deadfalls and pits lined with spikes.
• Boss Battle: During exploration you will encounter random Boss Monsters which are possessed of multiple wounds and more powerful attacks. Concurrently, they also drop more and better loot. Sublocations generally have a higher chance of Boss encounters. Defeating Boss monsters also leads to receiving credits which can be spent on Advantages.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Various advantages can be purchased via the credits system, which costs real money to purchase in bulk but can also be acquired in-game via defeating boss monsters. These range from items granting XP bonuses to Rings of Regeneration.
• Critical Failure: It's possible to fumble and receive an "Unlucky Wound."
• Critical Hit: Characters over Level 50 can train additional skills which grant a chance of doing double damage.
• Deadly Gas: One of the magical wound traps found in the Silver Stagg Grove sublocation called Typhoon Haze. It sounds pretty nasty:
  A strange glowing mist envelops the area, causing burst blood vessels and heart attacks to all in it. It's probably some form of blowback from the Typhoon Cauldrons nearby, but it's quite deadly to all who are engulfed.
• Death Is Not Permanent: Death inflicts an XP penalty that has to be paid off via adventuring more; you will only receive 50% XP until it's paid off.
• Dem Bones: Plenty of skeletal enemies and Deadlands character class the Necromancer gets his own band of them to follow him around.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The slingy sling of slingslinging.
• Die Laughing: One of the exotic items a player can find is the Laughing to Death Joke Book.
• Distracted by the Sexy: There are at least two traps (Nymph Bathing Pool and Oh La La) that heavily imply that the character is busy being... "charmed" by sexy creatures and losing their AP because of it.
  • A sublocation in the Daggerspine Mountains has a similar trap in a den of half demons called Succubus Half Breed:
  Well, not all demons look like horned freaks... some look quite good... in fact... you may need to take a moment from adventuring...
• Dracolich: Shadowmaw, Eternal Dracolich. Fittingly, he is one of the hardest bosses in the game and has his own cult of underlings to defend his lair.
• Dragon Hoard:
  • An extremely rare Exotic item called "Immense Pile Of Dragon Horde Loot" can be found in the Shadowmaw Lair sublocation. This is one of more valuable rewards in the game and generally sells for 7000+ gold.
  • Another Exotic item called "Bag Full Of Dragon Hoard Loot" can also be found, though it is worth slightly less.
• The Empire: The Steel Empire gets this one: religious oppression, Inquisition, dislike for non-humans and mutation and would probably be invading everyone else if not for all the monsters.
• Experience Points: Earned by defeating monsters.
• Funbag Airbag: Losing one of the gambling minigames has the player crash into a tavern wench's cleavage after slipping on a cabbage. This earns them a slap across the face and a loss of however much gold they bet on the game.
• Fungus Humongous: One of the exotic items a player can find in the vast forests of Stangwood are the Huge Stangwood Mushrooms which are worth thousands of gold coins. The player can also come across creatures like the "Giant Mushroom Stalker" as well.
• Fun with Acronyms: The combat system; Tactics, Organisation, Attack, Defence.
• Giant Spider: Plenty. Mostly in the Krakesh Rainforest.
• Good-Guy Bar: The titular Dragon Tavern itself, which sits in the middle of the border of the three main realms and forbids any conflict inside its walls. Because of this heroes from all over the land meet up here to tell stories, gamble, get drunk and stock up for their next big adventure.
• Holiday Mode: At Easter you may encounter an assortment of Eastern Bunnies including the Crucified Zombie Rabbit, a Fur-suited Freak and a Giant Wooden Siege Rabbit. Due to 2012 being the Year of The Dragon in the Chinese calendar, there were two weeks of special dragon encounters.
• Hungry Jungle: Krakesh Rainforest; full of angry trolls, carnivorous plants and some things called "agony beetles."
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The Blight, The Shattered City, The Dreadmarsh, The Infernal Spire.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: The monsters don't drop them, but every so often you encounter abandoned ones, still full of loot and gold.
• Jackass Genie: The Efreet Wishmaster is a magical trap that drains AP if successful:
  Stringing you along with tales of wishes granted in exchange for his release, Efreet Wishmasters are usually only going to waste your time rather than make your dreams come true.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: The Planar Crossroads has a random encounter that mocks this trope called the Paranoid Shopkeeper:
  You were just nosing around, looking for undiscovered treasure, which just happened to be inside a shopkeeper's back room, when you manage to set off a craftily concealed series of blades, spikes and other nasty implements, meant to stop this kind of curiosity. If they didn't want you poking around in here, then why did they only put 3 locks on the door?
• Kleptomaniac Hero Found Underwear: Clothing items are fairly common and just like any other treasure in the game they come in different tiers. You have the cheap, common stuff like "Foppish Clothing" as well as more rare and valuable garments like "Hardwood Nymph Lingerie" and "Saucy Happywood Nymph Toga" which sell for large sums of gold.
• Money Spider: All monster drop gold and assorted loot items.
• Mordor: The Ashpeak Mountains
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Pus Factory.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: The Sky Kingdoms dwarves love to drink and fight; get better at the latter when they've done a lot of the former, have a reputation for bad tempers and a mystical connection with stone.
• Perpetual Motion Machine: The Buttered Toast Cat of Eternal Levitation. As cats always land on their feet and toast always lands buttered side up.
• Pirate Booty: Most of the items looted from Ravenwatch are heavily implied or even outright stated to be this.
• Pirate Parrot: One of the exotic items found in Ravenwatch is a "Scholarly Pirate Parrot" presumably taken off of one of the defeated buccaneers the player slew. Another (rare) item called "Trained Parrot of Dubious Loyalty" can also be found.
• Point Build System: Each time you level up you receive either 1 skill point or 1 additional wound capacity. Skill points can be assigned to either skills that improve your TOAD attributes or to skills that improve your loot finding, trap detection, loot value and so on.
• Punny Name:
  • Fohrumite Trolls.
  • The Calamarick Empire. Composed of the Aboleth (squid-like aliens), Ilithids (tentacle-faced monsters) and Octoprats (octopoid monsters).
• Random Encounters: Dragon Tavern's entire adventuring system is random encounters. You choose your desired location and click on 'Adventure' to encounter monsters. Or maybe nothing. Or find abandoned treasure chests. Or blunder into traps.
• Shop Fodder:
  • In essence, every item that the monsters drop. You don't maintain an inventory and whenever you return to the Tavern, you immediately sell all of your treasure.
  • The game even has different tiers for its loot with common items[C] being mostly the standard types of junk and garbage you'd find in an adventure game, rare items[R] being mostly gems, jewelry and other types of valuable treasure and exotic items[E] being extremely odd trinkets and curios that are worth tons of gold.
• Shout-Out: An item of Rare loot is named the Sorely Missed Whedon Firefly, and players can purchase an advantage called the Banner of Exploration, which increases the chance of discovering a sub-location while exploring. The item description:
  "Yes, this is a fertile land. We will rule over it... and we shall call it... This Land."
  • See Holiday Mode above.
  • A Boss Monster named Zuule, Banished Necromancer of the Unfoldo.
  • Dynadyne Stalkers. They're shiny, skeletal mecha.
  • Illithids and Displacer Beasts both appear as monster encounters.
  • The monster; Gorram Cliffracers. Bonus point for making it a double reference with the gorram.
  • Recently added Fortune Cookies gave us yet another Monty Python and the Holy Grail reference. One of the varying pieces of ancient wisdom found in the cookies randomly dropped by monsters advises you that "Fortune farts in your general direction today."
  • One of the most potent standard drinks a player can buy is called Planeswalkers Port.
  • About half of the ultra rares items are some form of this:
    • One of the exotic class items a player can find is a pair of Ruby Slippers.
    • At Camp Ashlumber (one of the highest level sublocations in the game) is a commonly found loot item called A Fistful Of Ashlumber Dollars. Sound familiar to anything?
    • The Hand-Felled Cube-Shaped Log item is a pretty clear reference to Minecraft.
    • One of the rarer exotic items players can find is the My Little Pony Cthuloid Edition.
    • Yet another exotic item is a Six Pack Of Primal Slurm.
    • One of the less subtle items is the Autographed Gordon Ramsey Poster found in high level boss lairs.
• Solid Gold Poop: One of the exotic items a player can find is a Blessed Cherub Turd worth thousands of gold coins. Literal holy crap.
• Swallowed Whole: Happens in the "Chubtoad Dinnertime" trap.
  A local chubtoad has leaped over cover and landed on top of you with its mouth open, swallowing you whole. Cutting yourself out won't be hard but you better do it quick before he starts digesting you.
• Swamps Are Evil: Undead, lizard men, giants, nasty bugs, mud... Dreadmarsh really lives up to its name and nasty reputation. On the plus side, its also filled with ruins and loot, making it an ideal target for adventurers and treasure hunters.
• Take That!: One of the rarer Exotic items a player can find is the "Torturous TV That Only Plays The View." Not exactly subtle.
• Trauma Inn: Yup, travelling back to the Dragon Tavern will heal all of your wounds.
• We Buy Anything: Since every item you collect from defeated monsters is immediately sold upon returning to the Dragon Tavern, the vendors really do buy anything. Some items particularly evoke this, though. Such as the Pyrojelly Crusty Bits and the Fake but Interesting Treasure Map. This can get pretty silly (and hilarious) with some of the Exotic class items. You never forget the first time you sell some "Hardwood Nymph Lingerie" to a merchant for over a thousand gold coins.
• Whatevermancy: Within the Gortunga Vault, a place ruled by misanthropic gnomish accountants, you can encounter Financomancers.

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