Greg Gillespie got tired of adventure-money and wanted corebook-money. So he basically rewrote Advanced Labyrinth Lord and added in some half-ass houserules and published it. That is all this game is. The majority of the differences are in the spell list. There's an added race. The classes are all the expected ones from Advanced Labyrinth Lord. And he's charging $30 for the PDF and $80 for the PoD. For a game he frankly didn't design, didn't playtest, and mostly didn't write. This is highway robbery, and fully unnecessary considering how mid-low tier the design is for the game is and even the megadungeons are.
Let's compare Dragonslayer to Worlds Without Number - WWN: Top tier design, full color art throughout, top tier GM tools, and a third more page count in a smyth-sewn binding hardcover with a ribbon bookmark for $85. Dragonslayer is being sold on DTRPG PoD B&W trash binding for $80. If I decided to go with DTRPG trash binding for WWN, I'm paying $60 for still full color art and the same content. That content actually being designed and playtested (yes, I'm getting there).
I spent a few minutes scanning through Dragonslayer's PDF, and watched a few videos of people with buyer's remorse trying to justify their purchase to themselves. That's all the input I needed to come to the conclusion I did because one said person actually had the good nature to scan through the PDF while on the video, meaning I saw basically all the contents of the game. What are they? See first paragraph.
There is a lie implicit within this game. Possibly explicit considering the interviews I've seen where it's brought up. The lie is that this game was the game intended for use with Barrowmaze and Gillespie's other dungeons. This is flatly false. It's kind of obvious that the original Barrowmaze was written for B/X and licensed with Labyrinth Lord due to how the OSR was intended to work at the time. There was never mention of this game or it's rules prior to Greg getting the hair up his ass to sell a corebook.
There are elements of this game that have not been playtested. All I need is one to exist to damn the game, and I found one while somebody else was scating through the book at a page every 3 seconds.
Dexterity. Dexterity is fucked in this game. It benefits ranged To Hit, ranged Damage, and Defense. The ability score rolls are roll 7x3d6 and keep the best 6. Arrange to taste. If you aren't retarded, Dexterity will either be your highest stat or your second highest stat (given a different prime requisite or required ability score for you class). That's every single character. That's a fundamental flaw in design. At the ability score level. Which means the entire game is completely fucked. And I figured this out from fucking video discussions about the system.
Fast Packs. It's a good idea to build fast packs if you want to curtail the shopping trip at the end of chargen before play. This has been known since at least B4: The Lost City and likely earlier. Greg includes essentially the B4 fast packs in the game but that's not the problem. He also includes a three fast packs for every character class. This is generally a good idea.
There is a big mistake though. If we look at, for example, the Paladin and Assassin packs, the issue is the most egregious. That issue being that you have to roll exceptionally well to be able to afford your class's fast packs. For example, the assassin has to roll 11+ on his starting gold roll of 2d6 to afford 2/3 of the class fast packs, and will have to roll a 12 (boxcars) on that same roll to afford the other one. This means the fast packs have a barrier of entry which is untenable at best and frankly stupid and counter-productive at worst. Any time actually using the design at at table would have shown this problem's existence immediately.
Recommendations: If you must get a game to play Gillespie's megadungeons, simply buy Advanced Labyrinth Lord for half the price ($40 on DTRPG for hardcover) and get 90%+ of the content of this game. The rest of the content that's "missing" from the modules actually isn't because they were intended to be played with B/X/Labyrinth Lord. In fact what incompatibilities you run into would be the same for Dragonslayer as they are for Advanced Labyrinth Lord. Dragonslayer is 100% not worth the ridiculous price he's charging for it. Do not buy it. If you do, you are a sucker.
Further recommendation: Buy Blood & Treasure 2E (another... better... version of this game) with more information to play around with and at a cheaper price (Core, Monsters, and Monsters II hardcovers are ~$70 from Lulu - 686 pages in all). Overall a better deal and better written than this game and Advanced Labyrinth Lord. Plus the binding is probably just a tad less shoddy being from Lulu.
Old School Essentials is almost as big a scam as this product so I would never recommend buying that.
Greg needs to do better. He did a good job with the art and layout, but this game is unplaytested shite at a baseline. It has no business pretending to be a decent OSR game. It has no business pretending to be the game that Barrowmaze et al. were intended for. None of these statements are true or accurate. They are all bullshit.
