Tag Archives: design

Grumping about DungeonWorld, 9/17/26

Posted on by Henry

I have a problem. I grumble nearly every time I think about DungeonWorld. It’s gotten worse, and I’m at risk of full blown curmudgeon-itis.

I have to talk about D&D first. For better AND for worse, D&D remains most people’s touchstone for roleplaying games. DungeonWorld isn’t D&D, but obviously looks and sounds like it should be similar. Based on my recent conversations with newer explorers of the hobby, DungeonWorld is the not-D&D game that they are most likely to have tried. Those who aren’t exploring lots of different RPG systems will try out D&D, look at DungeonWorld… and then often go back to D&D. Whenever I hear that, I feel disappointed—not with them, but with how much better DW could have been.

Maybe my sample group is weird. That’s totally possible.

DungeonWorld (DW) is the Powered-by-the-Apocalypse (PbtA) game that I like the least. That has been true for a long while. This opinion pre-existed and is totally distinct from my thoughts about Adam Koebel (here’s some now-old news on that front). Maybe I’ll talk about that drama some other day, but probably not.

I’ve had fun playing DW. I’ve had fun running it. Heck, I ran it during its playtest and had a delight with my friends. Back then D&D’s 4th edition was still au courant, with its Daily, Encounter, and At-Will powers for every character class and its clearly MMO-inspired design. In retrospect I do like how D&D 4e worked as a tactical puzzle game, but DungeonWorld felt like a much-needed alternative. It was a game that felt D&D-ish and which didn’t assume everyone needed a tactical map to play their tabletop RPG.

I still really like the ways in which DungeonWorld encouraged the GM and players to all collaborate on the narrative and the setting. This wasn’t unique to DW: PbtA games regularly played around with more-collaborative systems. But DW had explicit mechanics by which players could contribute. That plus a great set of players led to The Underwatch, one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve run.

No, my problem with DungeonWorld is a personal gripe that I don’t expect others to share—and which I fervently want to convince you is correct:

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Illuminae, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

Posted on by Henry

IlluminaeCover

I’ve been reading a lot of Young Adult and Middle Grade sci fi over the past few months. A good deal of it has been a grind, predictable material that didn’t excite me but which I knew I had to finish for due diligence. Not so with Illuminae. This is a book I inhaled. It was fun, tense, well-paced, and knew how and when to stab me in the feels.

If you like sci fi, action/thriller stories, and dramatic feels I strongly recommend it. This is solid YA sci fi.

I also strongly recommend reading it in hard copy. I don’t know whether an ebook would deliver the experimental (and effective) layout and formatting, and I’m certain that an audiobook would lose a lot of the value. It’s like Code Name Verity in that way. There are layers of paratextual content that would disappear without the physical book in front of you, and the design itself is worth appreciating.

Though the book is thick, it isn’t dense. The designers’ formatting and layout choices make excellent use of space and spatial alignment to convey the book’s underlying pretext, as the whole piece is found-text: transcripts of chat logs, audio files, video records, and more. There are a few places where the layout and design get even weirder, and most of those spots worked extremely well for me. I won’t spoil them.

Speaking of spoilers, I have some appreciative thoughts which don’t ruin anything but which might be considered *spoiler-ish* by the sensitive. There was a moment a ways in when I realized that there was no guarantee that things would turn out “well” for the primary subjects of the story. I returned to the first pages, re-read the contextualizing introduction, and confirmed my fears. I read on, heart firmly in throat. I was very impressed. I deeply appreciate any book that manages to make such good use of its underlying context to pull the legs out from under the audience, and Illuminae managed that skillfully. *End spoiler-ish*

I don’t think I need to say any more, honestly. Check out the book. If you like the first page, sit back, read on, and enjoy.