Drakar och Demoner has its origins in the Swedish
recreational wargaming scene. Target Games, the company that went on to publish
Drakar och Demoner, was founded in 1980 to import and sell wargames. One of the founders of Target Games, Fredrik Malmberg, moved to the United States in order to import wargames to Sweden, while also working for various game publishers. There he came in contact with the burgeoning role-playing game scene in the United States. Seeing that role-playing games were much more popular in the US than wargames, Malmberg got the idea that Target Games should publish a
Swedish language role-playing game; English language role-playing games like
Dungeons & Dragons had made some inroads in Sweden at the time, but the
language barrier prevented them from reaching a larger audience. Malmberg (who rented a room from
Steve Perrin during his stay in California) was one of the game testers of the
Call of Cthulhu and
Stormbringer role-playing games and had access to the unpublished manuscript of the upcoming
Worlds of Wonder multi-genre set of three role-playing games. The fourth edition in 1991 was a major revision of the rules, superseding
Drakar och Demoner Expert by incorporating it into the basic rules and then expanding them. In 1994, Target Games released a fifth edition, called
Drakar och Demoner Chronopia. This edition came with an integrated
campaign setting. Changes to the rules were minor, mostly reflecting the new setting. In the late 1990s, Target Games found itself in financial difficulties and discontinued their line of role-playing games. The rights to
Drakar och Demoner were transferred to
Paradox Entertainment, who in turn licensed them to
RiotMinds. RiotMinds published a new version of the game in 2000. This sixth edition was a complete overhaul of the game rules, supporting a much less generic game world. The idea of "Expert" rules was reused, and many rules expansions followed. When RiotMinds released their
Drakar och Demoner ruleset, it featured a concept very close to
levels ("yrkesnivåer"). It didn't take long before an official addendum appeared on their website, with optional rules on how to play without this feature. In the subsequent reprints (as well as later editions) little or no traces of "yrkesnivåer" remain. In 2006, RiotMinds published the seventh edition, which has many rule changes to better support its campaign world. Among those were the removal of the basic character stats (
grundegenskaper) which were replaced with 'exceptional abilities' (
exceptionella karaktärsdrag), and the introduction of specializations of skills. This boxed edition is called
Drakar och Demoner Trudvang. In 2015 RiotMinds announced a re-release of the 1987 edition of the game featuring new art and minor fixes, but otherwise identical. A line of products including several new campaigns was planned after its August 2016 release. On May 16, 2016, RiotMinds announced that
Drakar och Demoner Trudvang would be released in an English version, under the name
Trudvang Chronicles. In 2019, RiotMinds successfully
crowdfunded Ruin Masters, an updated and re-designed English version of the classic game, including new art and design. It has cover art by
Adrian Smith, and interior art from artists including, Jesper Ejsing,
Johan Egerkrans and Alvaro Tapia.
The Ruin Masters Bestiary was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2021. In August 2021, RiotMinds announced that it had sold the IP for
Drakar och Demoner to
Fria Ligan (Free League Publishing). RiotMinds stated they would continue to support their
Ruin Masters game and its Caldarox setting with no connection to
Drakar och Demoner (eventually the rights for
Ruin Masters and
Trudvang Chronicles games were acquired by
CMON in 2022). Consequently, Free League successfully crowdfunded a new edition of the game in August 2022, called Dragonbane in English. The new edition has English, Swedish, German, Danish, Polish, and Norwegian language versions. In early 2026, Free League announced that they will be publishing
Dragonbane: Trudvang (known as
Drakar och Demoner: Trudvang in Swedish), a stand-alone game set in Trudvang, which will fully be compatible with their 2023 edition of Dragonbane. == Campaign settings ==