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Top 10 Versions of Dungeons and Dragons

February 19, 2026 5 Minutes Leave a comment

One question that shows up in my inbox again and again is simple on the surface but surprisingly loaded underneath. What is your favorite edition of Dungeons and Dragons?

I have done broader best RPG lists before, but that is not really what people are asking. They are not looking for my thoughts on the entire hobby. They want to know which banner I fly when it comes to D&D. Which version sits closest to my heart? Which books I reach for when someone says, do you want to play.

So I decided to answer properly.

Instead of naming a single winner, I pulled together a top 10 list that includes not just official editions, but also variants, clones, and offshoots that belong to the larger D&D family. Some are obvious. Some are unexpected. All of them, in one way or another, carry the torch of dungeon-crawling fantasy adventure.

It turned out to be a fun exercise. And with so much debate swirling around modern Dungeons and Dragons right now, it feels like a good time to zoom out a little. There is a vast landscape beyond the latest edition war. Plenty of roads to travel. Plenty of dragons to slay.

10. Forbidden Lands

I will start with what might be the most controversial entry on this list. Controversial only because it is the least mechanically related to D&D of anything here. Its core system comes from a completely different lineage. It does not descend from TSR or the d20 tree.

And yet, thematically, Forbidden Lands often feels more like classic D&D than some official editions. If we are willing to call 5th edition D&D, then I say by right, Forbidden Lands deserves a seat at the table.

What makes it unique is that it is tightly bound to its setting and intended campaign style. This is not a generic fantasy engine. It is a game about survival in a harsh and broken land, well defined, illustrated, and presented in beautiful detail. The players are not chosen heroes destined for greatness. They are desperate adventurers trying to carve out a place in a world that does not care if they live or die.

The mechanics are not perfect. There are a few rough edges, oddly familiar if you play a lot of D&D-style games. But what it does extremely well is align rules with tone. The system reinforces scarcity, risk, and tension. It avoids the incoherent sprawl that some classic D&D editions suffered from while still capturing that old school edge.

It is brutal. Life is cheap. Characters can and will struggle to survive. That feeling is deeply reminiscent of early D&D, when survival was not assumed and advancement had to be earned the hard way. Maybe it is not quite as unforgiving as the earliest editions, but it carries that same weight. Every journey into the wild feels risky. Every campfire feels temporary.

The boxed set presentation helps enormously. Forbidden Lands is largely self-contained. Yes, there are expansions, but the core box gives you everything you need. System, setting, campaign framework. It is all there, cohesive and focused. There is something refreshing about that. No endless stream of mandatory supplements. No sprawling library required. Just a complete experience in one package.

I have not played as much Forbidden Lands as some of the other games on this list, but the campaign I did experience was enough to convince me. It had that unmistakable D&D flavor. Exploration. Danger. Treasure. Hard choices. The difference was simply that the tone leaned darker and the system carried its weight more cleanly.

For that reason alone, it earns its place here. It may not share D&D’s mechanical ancestry, but in spirit it absolutely belongs to the same school of adventure.

9. Pathfinder 2nd Edition

I am not entirely sure I am a natural fan of the tactical RPG genre. I appreciate it. I respect it. But it is not my default preference. That said, when it comes to D&D style tactical systems, Pathfinder 2nd edition is undeniably solid.

I spent a fair amount of time running and playing it, and for good reason. It answers a very specific question. What happens if you take 3rd edition, modernize it completely, and then dive even deeper into tactical precision and character customization?

The answer is a beast.

Pathfinder 2e is enormous. Over six hundred pages of tightly engineered rules. Layers of customization. Class feats, ancestry feats, skill feats, archetypes, options within options. It likely contains more meaningful character choices in a single core rulebook than most of the other games on this list combined.

And yet, for all that weight, it is remarkably well organized. If you love deep mechanical play, Pathfinder 2e executes it in the most streamlined and optimized way possible. It is complex, but it is disciplined complexity. The math works. The action economy is elegant. The system is balanced with almost obsessive care.

What I admire most is something it shares with Pathfinder 1e. It takes a core concept and refines it relentlessly. Then it builds outward with themed expansions, adventure paths, and supplemental books that feel purposeful rather than random. It supports its own vision thoroughly.

At the same time, it is simply too heavy for me to run these days. I do not have the time I once did. There is no winging Pathfinder 2e. You cannot improvise your way through it casually and expect the system to carry you. To run it well, you need to put in the hours. Real preparation. Real system mastery. Without that effort, the experience suffers.

In my current stage of life, that level of demand is hard to justify.

As a player, however, I am far more open. If someone else is willing to do the work behind the screen, I am happy to show up and engage with the system. From the player side, Pathfinder 2e is a rewarding tactical experience. Fights are dynamic. Choices matter. Encounters can be genuinely challenging. And when paired with one of its strong adventure paths, it can deliver some truly memorable campaigns.

The Kingmaker adaptation for Pathfinder 2e is a great example. A massive kingdom-building saga, packed with depth and scale. As a player, I would gladly dive into something like that.

As a Game Master, though, I have to be honest. It is a hard no. Not because it fails, but because it demands more than I am willing to give at this point. Pathfinder 2e absolutely earns its place on this list. It is a masterfully engineered system. It is just one that requires a level of commitment I have long since outgrown.

8. Castles and Crusades

There are games on this list that I have spent years playing, systems that shaped entire eras of my D&D life. Castles and Crusades is not one of them. And yet it still earns a place here, because it fills a very specific role in the broader world of Dungeons and Dragons.

It covers a niche that I do not often need, but once in a while, it is exactly the right tool for the job.

Castles and Crusades emerged at a time when 3rd and 3.5 edition Dungeons and Dragons had grown increasingly complex. Character builds became intricate, rules interactions multiplied, and system mastery was often rewarded over good old-fashioned adventuring fun. Castles and Crusades stepped in as a lighter alternative, a rebuttal to the question, what does modern D&D look like. It felt like a modern continuation of 2nd edition AD&D, but with a cleaner and more unified core mechanic. In another timeline where TSR had remained in control and refined AD&D using a more streamlined approach, this might have been the result.

It was clearly dedicated to preserving the feel of classic AD&D. The classes, the tone, and the emphasis on medieval fantasy adventure all remained intact. The goal was not to reinvent Dungeons and Dragons, but to refine it. To keep the spirit while trimming away the layers of complexity that 3rd edition became known for.

For me the difficulty has always been the audience. The people I play with tend to fall into one of two camps. They are either committed old school players who want early TSR editions or faithful retro clones, or they prefer whatever the latest official version happens to be. At one time, that was 3rd edition, then Pathfinder, then 4th edition, and so on.

Castles and Crusades sits squarely in the middle. It preserves early D&D while presenting it in a modern framework. In theory, that should make it a perfect compromise. In practice, D&D players are rarely looking for compromise. They usually know exactly what they want.

As a result, my copy has often stayed on the shelf. A bit of a dust collector.

That said, from a design perspective, I have a great deal of respect for it. The system is elegant, focused, and confident in what it is trying to do. It is unapologetically both old school and modern at the same time, and it manages to pull that off remarkably well.

I’m not sure I love the Siege Engine, which is the core resolution system for C&C’s answer to skill checks. I always found the dice odds and results of that particular rules mechanic off, but as I tend to avoid the use of skills in my games whenever possible, it’s not that big of a deal. I think the game would have been better off either using the D20 skill system or the AD&D non-weapon proficiencies, but the middle ground kind of didn’t work as well as either one of those did.

That caveat aside, if you have a group that enjoys modern Dungeons and Dragons but is willing to simplify things a bit, and you are a Dungeon Master who prefers the feel of classic adventures without all the classic mechanical baggage, Castles and Crusades can be an excellent choice. It may not be the game I reach for most often, but I am glad it exists; it earns its rightful place on this list.

7. 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

I know some of my old school D&D friends will raise an eyebrow at this one. Especially after the 2024 update and all the noise that surrounded it. But here is the simple truth. I am a gamer. I care about what happens at the table far more than what happens on social media. I am here to roll dice, tell stories, and have a good time. The rest is just background chatter.

For me, 5th edition is the most polished and efficient power fantasy version of Dungeons and Dragons ever made. It knows exactly what it is doing. You are not a struggling adventurer scraping by with four hit points and a rusty sword. You are a force of nature. A fantasy superhero with spells, abilities, and enough resilience to stare down a fantasy monster without breaking a sweat.

And that is fun.

5th edition is about bold moves and dramatic victories. It is about kicking in the door and believing you might actually survive what is on the other side. The system is flexible, easy to learn, and offers a huge range of character options without drowning players in mechanical detail. It gives you variety without demanding spreadsheets.

That matters.

It also matters that this style of play speaks to a lot of people, especially younger players. My kids love it. They want to charge into battle against multiple dragons and come out standing. They want big moments and spectacular powers. 5th edition delivers that in a way that feels smooth and accessible.

As a writer, I love working in the 5th edition design space. It is easy to create adventures when you can assume the characters are competent and durable. You can focus on cool scenarios, memorable villains, and cinematic set pieces without constantly worrying whether the mechanics will collapse under pressure. Yes, it is difficult to create truly punishing challenges, and the game gets truly wacky at high levels. But if you approach 5e expecting it to be a brutal survival simulator, you are probably aiming at the wrong target.

Above all else, 5th edition is simply fun to play. If you are old school like me, you do have to let go of certain expectations. Once you stop trying to make it something it is not and just lean into what it does well, it becomes clear why it has brought so many people into the hobby.

The starter sets are a perfect example. They are some of the best introductory products Dungeons and Dragons has ever produced. I own them all, and despite having shelves full of adventures, my kids are perfectly happy replaying The Dragon of Icespire Peek again and again. We defeat the dragon, celebrate, and then roll up new characters to do it all over. It is like rewatching a favorite movie for the tenth time and still enjoying every scene.

Wizards of the Coast clearly understands how to speak to the current generation of players. What might look unusual or unnecessary to older fans feels completely natural to younger ones. They do not carry the same expectations or nostalgia. They just see a game full of possibilities.

If someone comes to me today and says they have never played a roleplaying game but want to learn D&D, 5th edition with one of the starter kits is still my go-to recommendation. It is welcoming, flexible, and immediately rewarding. And sometimes that is exactly what the hobby needs.

6. Pathfinder 1st edition

For me, Pathfinder 1st edition represents the entire 3rd edition era. When I put Pathfinder on this list, I am also tipping my hat to 3rd and 3.5 edition Dungeons and Dragons. Pathfinder 1st edition feels like the definitive final form of that lineage. The system was refined, expanded, and pushed right to its natural limit.

I played an absurd amount of 3rd edition era D&D. From the original launch of 3rd edition to the sprawling Adventure Paths of Pathfinder, no other game on this list has generated more memories or consumed more hours of my life. We practically lived at the gaming table. Twelve to fourteen-hour sessions were normal. Several times a week was normal. We were young, obsessed, and fully committed.

That era was a golden age for me, and part of that is simply timing. I was in my late teens when 3rd edition arrived. No wife. No kids. No career clawing at my schedule. Just friends, dice, and time. So much time. We learned the system inside and out. We did not just play it. We mastered it.

It also felt like a second great age of settings. Much like the early TSR days, the 3rd edition era exploded with new worlds. Scarred Lands. Eberron. Golarion. Midnight. Iron Kingdoms. Each one with its own flavor, its own tone, its own promise of adventure. The writing was ambitious and plentiful. You could jump from gothic horror to pulp intrigue to mythic war without ever leaving the broader d20 umbrella.

And the adventures. Some of the best campaign material ever written for the game came out during this time. Kingmaker stands tall in my memory as a near perfect expression of what long form campaign design could look like. Big ideas. Player agency. Epic payoff.

Mechanically, this was the age of prestige classes and intricate character builds. We loved it. We loved planning out ten levels in advance. We loved squeezing every advantage out of feats, skills, and class combinations. Looking back now, it feels excessive, but at the time it was exactly what we wanted. Video games were deep and complex. Miniature games rewarded optimization. We wanted systems with moving parts, and 3rd edition delivered.

That said, this is probably the one game on the list I would not return to today. Not because it failed. Quite the opposite. It demands time, focus, and energy. It rewards dedication. Back then I had those resources in abundance. Today, with family and career taking their rightful place, the thought of diving back into that level of mechanical depth feels exhausting.

That is not a flaw in Pathfinder. It is simply a shift in who I am now.

I regret nothing about those years. They were loud, ambitious, rules-heavy, and absolutely glorious. Pathfinder 1st edition stands as the monument to that chapter of my gaming life, and it earned every hour I gave it.

5. Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics is another brilliant offshoot of D&D that might be just a little too niche for its own good.

If Castles and Crusades is a careful bridge between eras, Dungeon Crawl Classics is what happens when you hand the keys to a group of wildly creative designers and simply say go. Goodman Games has assembled one of the most imaginative teams in the hobby. Their adventures and supplements do not feel restrained or filtered. They feel unleashed.

The result is a game bursting with ideas. Strange ideas. Loud ideas. Ideas that do not ask for permission and no sane person would ever approve them, but Goodman Games is …special.

For many D&D fans, whether old school traditionalists or modern build-focused players, it can be too much. Dungeon Crawl Classics demands an open mind. It asks you to step outside your expectations of what D&D is supposed to look like. You have to let go…a lot. Let the dice take over. Let the chaos breathe.

I ran a single Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign during the pandemic, when we were all locked in our homes and playing digitally. It was the perfect time to experiment. My group was ultimately lukewarm on the whole thing, and I understood why. DCC is strange. Its magic system alone feels like a deliberate rebellion against predictability. Spells can spiral into glorious disasters or explode into legendary triumphs. Control is not guaranteed or even expected.

In fact, that loss of control is part of the point. Where most RPGs try to smooth out volatility, DCC leans into it. It takes the core tropes of Dungeons and Dragons and turns every dial as far as it will go. The tone becomes gonzo. The situations become outrageous. At times, it feels like a fever dream version of classic fantasy adventure.

To really enjoy it, you almost have to take off your traditional D&D hat. If you cling too tightly to balance, careful planning, or long-term character optimization, the game will fight you. But if you embrace the madness, it becomes something special.

I personally love it. I think Dungeon Crawl Classics is an absolute blast to run and play. The shenanigans that unfold at the table often feel like a wild fantasy cartoon brought to life by dice. almost a kind of comedic parody of D&D. It is not sloppy design. Beneath the chaos is a carefully constructed engine built to generate those moments on purpose.

Still, it takes a very specific kind of group to truly enjoy it. It pushes both old school brutality and modern spectacle to their extremes at the same time. That combination is not for everyone.

I admire it deeply. I have tremendous respect for its creativity. But I completely understand why it might not click for most players. Dungeon Crawl Classics is less about comfort and more about curiosity. It rewards those who love bold design and fearless imagination as much as they love playing D&D itself.

4. 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons

1st edition AD&D is a true old school classic for me. I played it in the mid-eighties, when I was still very young, but even today I feel a surge of energy when I pull those old books off the shelf. The covers alone still have power.

That said, of all the games on this list, this is probably the one that has aged the worst.

Let me start with why I loved it, and in many ways still do.

It had style. It had mystique. Being a Dungeon Master felt like stepping into a secret order; being a player felt like you were stepping into a mystery. These were not just roles at the table. They were positions of either authority and deep knowledge, or explorers of a great mystery. The game expected Dungeon Masters to study it, internalize it, and guard it. Players, on the other hand, were meant to discover it through play, not through reading the books. This unspoken understanding was a social contract, and there was a clear purpose behind it.

As a player, the game was a mystery. We did not read the Dungeon Masters Guide. We did not flip through the Monster Manual. Doing so was forbidden. You learned by playing. You learned by surviving. You learned by making mistakes.

Knowledge was power, and that knowledge was earned; it was a trial by fire.

The first time we encountered a gelatinous cube, it was not a stat block. It was a horrifying surprise, but the next time, the players knew how to deal with it. Experience was earned by players and characters alike. The first time we got lost in the woods, found a magical lock, picked up an unidentified scroll, or crossed an ocean, there was no safety net. No clear mechanical explanation was handed to us ahead of time, we didn’t know the odds or even fully grasp the dangers. We discovered how the game and the world worked by interacting with it, by suffering at its cruelty and learning as we went.

The result was a game where the world felt real in a way that is hard to describe. Your character lived in it, but you as a player were also navigating something unknown. Characters died. That happened often. But the player gained experience. We remembered where the dangerous forest was. We remembered that troll and the hard lesson about fire. We made our own maps because none were provided. We built keeps for safety, opened taverns with our ill-gotten gains for fame and glory, and followed storylines that unfolded over years out of personal attachment to the events. Events in which characters perished to the plots of evil villains that lingered despite our best efforts to stop them. There were personal agendas, oaths of vengeance, we cursed the DM for cruelty and unfairness, but secretly we applauded the experience because it was so vivid.

There was a veil over the whole game, and we didn’t peek. The rules themselves were part of the exploration; the DMG was a mysterious book, and we could only imagine what was inside.

In modern D&D, that veil is usually gone. Players know the system inside and out. They know what monsters do. They can look up spells, effects, and optimal builds between sessions. The mystery is replaced with transparency. That is not necessarily bad, but it is different.

The hard truth is that maintaining that veil was never sustainable back then, either. Eventually, we all wanted to try being Dungeon Masters. We read the books. We saw behind the curtain. Once you understand the machinery, it never quite feels the same again.

Today, when I look at 1st edition AD&D with experienced and unveiled eyes, I see flawed mechanics, inconsistent rules, and some genuinely questionable design decisions. The structure is messy. The balance is uneven. The clarity we now expect simply is not there.

And yet, I can still feel what it was meant to be. I can still sense the potential. The idea that the game itself is something you uncover over time. That the rules are not just tools, but secrets.

Modern players ask more questions. They want clarity. They want consistency. They want to know how things work before committing to an action. They are less willing to let the system itself be part of the mystery. Without that mystery, 1st edition AD&D can feel fragile and awkward.

But when it worked, when that veil was intact, and the world felt unknown, AD&D had a kind of magic that was indescribably wonderful. I can understand the OSR for wanting to keep this version of the game alive and immortal. I’m 100% convinced that no other RPG in existence can offer the experience AD&D can, and if you haven’t experienced it yourself, I pity you.

If this were a list of the best RPG experiences of all time, AD&D would be at the top of the list by a margin so wide that there would be no point in adding any other games to the list.

3. 1st edition BECMI (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal): AKA The Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia

Yes, that is a mouthful.

The unified BECMI line is an interesting creature. The original purpose of Basic and Expert was simple. It was meant to be an entry path into Dungeons and Dragons, a starting point before players graduated to 1st edition AD&D.

But TSR being TSR, things did not unfold quite so cleanly. Business decisions and internal dynamics led to Basic and Expert continuing to expand. Companion added domain play. Master pushed power levels higher. Immortal went cosmic. By the time you had the full BECMI spread, you were looking at a system that rivaled Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in scope and complexity.

In a sense, it became an alternate evolution of AD&D. Not the same tone, not the same mystique, but just as ambitious.

Where AD&D felt mysterious and almost arcane, BECMI felt structured and purposeful. To me, its true strength was scale. This was a game built to sustain an epic campaign. Characters could progress from level 1 all the way to 36. No other version of D&D committed so fully to that kind of long-term arc, nor did most systems support game elements beyond simple adventuring.

It is the only edition that truly embraced the idea that a campaign might run indefinitely without slamming into a hard ceiling. I have never met anyone who actually reached Immortal play at level 36, but the mere existence of that ladder is inspiring. It suggests a game designed for years of development, not just months.

I ran a Mystara campaign that lasted nearly six years. Same world. Same characters, we reached level 21 if memory serves, we could have easily gone on for another decade. We began with Keep on the Borderlands, rusty swords and no backstories. Over time, those same characters ruled kingdoms, negotiated wars, shaped politics, and watched the consequences of their choices ripple outward. It became generational storytelling. Legends built at the table.

You can tell stories like that in other systems, certainly. But BECMI supports it directly. It has mechanics for domain management, armies, mass combat, and high-level play baked into the structure. From dungeon delving to empire building, it provides a framework.

Of all the old TSR-era systems, this is one that I believe still holds up remarkably well. It is robust, deep, and surprisingly cohesive when taken as a whole. The Rules Cyclopedia in particular stands out as one of the most practical and usable single-volume rulebooks TSR ever produced.

That said, like all TSR games, it expects house ruling. No version from that era arrived perfectly tuned. But the underlying design space is strong enough to support that tinkering, it was quite flexible. Not only as a design space, but because it had such a close relationship with AD&D, you could pull elements from the supplements supporting that game as well.

It is also important not to confuse BECMI with the earlier B and X sets. They are the same game, or at least share DNA, but BECMI grows far beyond a simple introductory game. This is not a basic experience. It is a complex and demanding system for players who want a long and detailed journey. In terms of commitment, it sits comfortably beside AD&D and 3rd edition.

Which is why I do not really run it anymore. Like those other deep systems, it asks for time and focus that I simply do not have.

But if someone came to me and said can you run BECMI for us, I would struggle to say no. It remains one of the strongest designs TSR ever produced, and it absolutely still works at the table; it’s worth the stretch.

2. Dolmenwood & Old School Essentials & B/X

I group these three games because they are directly connected. Old School Essentials is a beautifully organized and clarified presentation of B/X. Dolmenwood builds on Old School Essentials and wraps it in a rich, self-contained setting. They have interchangeable structures so adventures for any of them will work with any of the systems without alteration; they are, in a word the same game.

What I love about this architecture, especially as a Dungeon Master, is its simplicity and its immediate focus on adventure. I would even argue that these are not role-playing games in the modern sense. They are adventure games.

The difference, at least in my mind, is subtle but important. In most modern role-playing games, the character as an identity becomes central. Backstory, personal arcs, emotional journeys. In B/X and its descendants, the character is more of an avatar. An extension of the player exploring dangerous places. The focus is on what you do, not who you are.

My expectation with these systems is simple. I can say hey, do you want to play D&D, and ten minutes later we are rolling dice and kicking in doors. There is very little friction between the idea of playing and actually playing, which I can with confidence is ALWAYS a problem in almost all RPG’s. Character creation is quick. The rules are clear. The goal is obvious and explicit in the metagame (1 gold = 1 XP). Go into the dungeon. Survive if you can. Bring back the treasure.

Dolmenwood adds tremendous flavor to that formula. It provides a fully realized setting, strange and whimsical and dark in equal measure, with locations and hooks ready to use. It feels open and alive, but it does not demand hours of preparation. You can point to a map, choose a direction, and the adventure is already waiting.

I have never had an easier time getting a game to the table than with B/X or Old School Essentials or Dolmenwood. That immediacy is part of what made B/X so powerful in the eighties, and it is why its descendants still work so well today.

I often prefer pulling one of these off the shelf over 5th edition. But it is important to understand the tone. These games have teeth. They are not about cinematic heroics. They are about risk and survival. When you play a 5e starter set, character death is possible but unlikely. When you play B/X or Old School Essentials or Dolmenwood, death is not just possible. It is expected. The real story is often how your character meets their end.

And somehow that makes the victories sweeter.

Because the rules are light and direct, it is easy to get everyone aligned around the core premise. We are here to explore dangerous places, fight monsters, and haul treasure back to town. There is very little barrier between intention and action.

If I had to choose a line of D&D that gets from do you want to play to actually playing faster than anything else, this would be it. The kicker its, a stupid amount of relaxed fun, pure joy at the table without any of the weight.

1. 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

We have a winner!

When I think about the most complete and most authentic expression of Dungeons and Dragons, the version that captures the tone, the aesthetic, and the core gameplay in its purest form, I land on 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.

That is a bold claim, I know. But when I picture what D&D is supposed to feel like, this is the game that comes to mind. The art. The writing. The atmosphere. The balance between danger and possibility. Just the right blend of low and high fantasy. It embodies the identity of Dungeons and Dragons in a way no other edition quite does for me.

There is nothing in it that I would remove at the level of essence. Nothing I feel compelled to replace with something from another system. It feels whole.

At the same time, it is a deeply flawed game in many ways. In fact, of all the systems I have run over the years, this is the one I modified the most. That may sound contradictory, but when I talk about modification, I mean adjustment and tuning, not rewriting its soul. I balanced numbers. I clarified mechanics. I nudged pieces into alignment. I did not change what the game was trying to be.

One of the recurring issues with 2nd edition is the gap between description and execution. Especially in the expanded supplements, I would read the flavor text of a spell, a race, a class, or a weapon and think this is perfect. This is exactly what it should be. Then I would look at the mechanical implementation and feel the disconnect. The rules did not always deliver what the text promised.

That tension drove me to tinker, and 2nd edition is wonderfully suited for tinkering. It has a flexible design space and an enormous body of supplements. You can adjust it without breaking it. You can shape it to your table without losing its identity.

It is also the most adaptable edition in this lineup. Hand me almost any fantasy setting and, with the right books and a few mechanical tweaks, I can make it sing in 2nd edition. It sits comfortably within the grooves of traditional fantasy. It feels like the natural engine for the kind of worlds D&D was built to explore.

I also consider it the fairest of the classic systems. Earlier editions could be brutally lethal, especially for certain classes. Magic users and thieves often felt like they were one unlucky roll away from oblivion. In 2nd edition, you still faced real danger, but you had tools. You had options. You had a fighting chance. It struck a rare balance between survival horror and modern power fantasy. It was tense without being hopeless. Dangerous without being absurd.

I love this system. It is the only edition for which I own a truly massive library. Even now, I still collect for it. The material produced during that era feels rich and valuable. There is depth there that I continue to appreciate. I will admit the adventure writing for AD&D was hit and miss, but the settings were chef’s kiss. 2nd edition AD&D era settings were the best we ever got for any edition by a considerable margin.

If someone walks up to me and says hey, do you want to play D&D, and they do not specify an edition, I assume they mean 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. In my mind, that is the default form of the game.

Gaming Articles, Role-Player Game Reviews, RPG Preview

Legend In The Mist: The Rustic Fantasy Role-Playing Game

February 2, 2026 5 Minutes

Truly inspired ideas in role-playing games are not rare at all, and that, perhaps, is what keeps the RPG hobby endlessly fascinating. Unlike board games, which often iterate and refine on what came before, tabletop RPGs still feel unafraid to wander and explore new territory. Each game I read I find has its own energy and unique take on the hobby. Every new book carries the promise of a different path, a different voice, a different way to tell stories together. It’s amazing that this sort of thing is common in the hobby.

Despite this almost routine ability for RPG designers and writers to surprise, when I got my first look at Legend in the Mist, I knew I was in for a treat. It had the look of something created with love and care, a personal touch, the expenditure of enormous amounts of creative energy. It may be weird to say, but I think anyone who reads a lot of RPG books as I do would probably agree that when you crack a new book open, you almost expect innovation and something original. That is rarely a problem. But whether you find something that speaks to you, that delights you, that is the real trick.

The real question is always, “Will this land with my group?”

Legend in the Mist is a new tabletop role-playing game, successfully Kickstarted in 2024 with the support of over 8,000 backers, and now standing on the threshold of its physical release. I’m a bit late to the party on this one, Legend in the Mist has been very provocatively successful and has seen some pretty heavy coverage by some of the most renowned RPG bloggers and YouTubers in the business. Ladies and Gentlemen, to whom I bow to with respect. It’s sitting pretty on the best seller list on RPG DriveThru and outselling my beloved Daggerheart, which of course begs the question. How? I mean, what is this game that is crushing it right now?

The Kick-Starter may be over, but getting your hands on it shouldn’t be too difficult. I suspect with the general fanfare with which this game has had, it will be available wherever you buy your RPG stuff before too long.

You have my attention!

I’ll be giving the game a full, detailed examination later this year, but after spending some time with it, it felt wrong to stay silent. Games like this deserve to be talked about, even if only in fragments at first. Consider this a glimpse through the trees before the forest opens up if you just happen to be late to the party, like I was.

Overview

At its heart, Legend in the Mist is driven by a modern, story-first design philosophy, but not the kind that discards structure in favor of pure improvisation. This isn’t a game that asks you to abandon mechanics and simply “feel your way forward”, like say Dungeon World or Index Card RPG, nor is it a heavier mechanic hidden behind contextualized flavor like say Dungeon Crawl Classics. Instead, it offers a carefully built framework designed to support narrative play, to guide it, and, at key moments, to challenge it.

There’s an important difference between removing mechanics and hiding them.

Legend in the Mist is very much a system. There is an engine here, one that governs risk, consequence, and change, but it hums quietly beneath the surface, woven into the fabric of the story itself. The rules don’t interrupt the narrative; they shape it. They ask hard questions at dramatic moments and demand answers that matter, not just to the plot, but to who the characters are becoming. And this is the center stage of the game, it’s not as much a game about narrative as it is about character perspective on the narrative and their response to it and that internal dialogue that asks, what would my character do? A question that is somehow more profound in Legend in the Mist because of how the system is designed (more on that in a minute).

There is no question that “art” was foremost on this publisher’s mind when making Legend In The Mist. It’s provocative, original, and inspiring, with a level of love that is hard to ignore. People say A.I. will replace people one day. When you look at work like this, all I have to say in response is “good luck with that”. You need a soul to make something like this.

Explaining exactly how the game achieves this would require a deeper dive than I want to take right now. For the moment, it’s enough to say that Legend in the Mist is less concerned with heroic spectacle and more interested in the personal legend of ordinary people, from quiet places, who step into the unknown carrying little more than their resolve.

This is, in itself, kind of an old school philosophy or approach, but while Legend in the Mist has an old school premise from a story/narrative perspective, aka, ordinary people in extraordinary situations, mechanically the game itself is very modern with a lot of modern sensibilities about “how” the story lives in the game.

That’s mouthful and a long run-on sentence, I know, but I think it will make more sense once we dive in a little deeper.

To help paint that picture, there are three core aspects of the game that are worth highlighting.

The Writing & The Art

Role-playing games have a long history of treating their books like instruction manuals. Clean. Functional. Sometimes almost clinical. The writing does its job, the rules are clearly labeled, and inspiration, if it arrives at all, is left to seep in between the margins. I guess my point is that most RPG books these days tell you how to play, but rarely bother to tell you what the game is meant to feel like once the dice hit the table. Modern games like Daggerheart and now very clearly Legend in The Mist are trying to change that, and they are doing so very successfully in my opinion.

This book is not a reference manual for how to play the game, it’s art from front to back. Even when explaining game concepts and rules, it makes it a form of artistic expression.

That clinical approach of creating reference manuals works, don’t get me wrong. But it’s never been the only way; there was a time not so long ago when RPG makers were as much writers as they were game designers. Legend in the Mist I think is bringing us back to that style of RPG design and writing.

It’s time to go off on a tangent, it’s story time!

Back in the 1990s, a small publisher called White Wolf took a very different path to book writing from what most were doing at the time, when RPGs were still very much more G than RP. Through the World of Darkness, they treated RPG books not as sterile rule references, but as artistic expressions, guided tours through mood, theme, and identity. Those books didn’t just explain a setting; they immersed you in it. They whispered tone through poetry, bled atmosphere through layout and art, and made it unmistakably clear what kind of stories they wanted you to tell. For many players, they weren’t just rulebooks; they were formative experiences, myself included. In fact, I was very lucky in my formative years to actually grow up with one of the original writers from the early era of White Wolf, so I like to think that, at the very least, I understand the desire and passion of that work, having heard about it growing up from the horse’s mouth.

Reading the opening pages of Legend in the Mist, I was immediately taken back to that era of RPG’s. To those many conversations about the books, about role-playing, and about what storytelling actually means in that context.

There is a deliberate artistic hand at work here. The writing flows with confidence and intention, guiding you gently but firmly into the world the game inhabits. It doesn’t rush to explain itself. Instead, it establishes presence first, inviting you to slow down, to listen, to feel the rhythm of the setting before asking you to engage with its mechanics. You come away with a clear understanding of what this game wants to be at your table, long before you’ve memorized a single rule.

Just because the game book is an artistic expression, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t do a good job of teaching you what the game is, how the engine works. Quite to the contrary, the opening chapters hold your hand through the core game with great examples, all tied into a story format that you effectively follow along as you learn. It’s a fantastic approach.

The effect is quietly captivating. There’s a sense of nostalgia for a game you’ve never played before, a familiarity that doesn’t come from imitation, but from shared philosophy. It builds on the feeling we inspire to have at the table in our imagined games. It was only after sitting with that feeling for a while that the connection clicked for me: this is storytelling-first design in the old, confident sense. Not apologetic. Not minimalist. Purposeful. The game itself is a story.

What Legend in the Mist does particularly well is blend teaching with tone. As the book introduces you to its setting and themes, it also begins to reveal the engine beneath the hood, the way its mechanics serve the story rather than compete with it. You’re learning how the game works almost by accident, absorbed through example and narrative momentum rather than rigid instruction. It’s a technique that feels rare today, which is odd because it’s remarkably effective.

That approach is perfectly matched by the game’s artwork. The illustrations don’t scream for attention; they invite it. They reinforce the rustic fantasy mood, grounding the game in misty hills, quiet villages, and half-forgotten paths with an almost comic book, dare I say, Saturday morning cartoon feel to it. Together, the writing and art don’t just support the rules, they carry them, ensuring that from the very first page, Legend in the Mist knows exactly who it is and what kind of stories it wants you to tell.

This game doesn’t need a sales pitch; just hand someone the book and let them read the first 5 pages. If it doesn’t grab them by then, you might want to check your pulse; you might already be dead.

Themes and Tags

At the core of any role-playing game, Legend in the Mist very much included, is the character. Not just what they can do, but who they are: how they behave, what they believe, and why they act the way they do. These are the fundamentals of a good backstory. Yet in many RPGs, those elements live mostly outside the mechanics, serving as loose guidance rather than something the game actively engages with. In fact, most RPG’s traditionally define “who your character is”, outside of the game entirely, and the game itself is responsible for explaining “what you can do”.

For example, a class of a character to some extent says something about who your character is in an abstract way, A Cleric, a Fighter etc.. but mostly the point of the class is to tell you what powers you have. Yet, oddly enough, that class as a concept ends up infiltrating on a bit of your creative power over your character’s backstory creation because now you have to incorporate that class somehow into the “who you are” part of your character.

Legend in the Mist takes a very different approach. No classes, no pigeon holding, just pure freedom.

Instead of stats and classes, character creation begins with four themes. Each theme represents a defining aspect of your hero, such as their personality, training, background, or devotion. Within each theme are several “Power” tags, short descriptive phrases that give that aspect texture and meaning. These tags might be broad and human, like “a good listener,” or deeply specific, such as a family heirloom weapon passed down from a sibling. Every theme also includes a weakness tag: a flaw, doubt, or vulnerability that can complicate your hero’s journey.

Together, these themes and tags form a living portrait of the character. They tell you who this person is, how they tend to act, and what matters to them, not in abstract terms, but in language that naturally invites story. Personality, training, and motivation aren’t just written down for flavor; they’re embedded directly into how the game is played.

The layout of a character sheet in Legend in the Mist is very different from what you might be used to in a typical RPG. You don’t have stats or a class. Everything is built around the abstract, narrative concept of themes and tags.

And that’s only the foundation.

Beyond your core themes, characters in Legend in the Mist constantly pick up story tags, temporary descriptors born from events, choices, and consequences in play. These can be positive or negative, representing things like injuries, emotional states, allies, favors owed, fleeting advantages, or dangerous complications. Alongside these are statuses, which measure the intensity of conditions affecting your character. Together, they reflect how the story is actively changing you.

What’s striking is that nearly everything in the game flows through this same language of tags. They are the connective tissue between narrative and mechanics: small pieces of story that can be leveraged for advantage, turned against you as complications, or evolve over time. The game doesn’t ask you to step outside the fiction to resolve actions; the fiction is the system.

We’ll get into the mechanical details of how tags are invoked, spent, and transformed in the full review. For now, it’s enough to say this: if a game wants to be truly story-first, and Legend in the Mist absolutely is, while still remaining a game with structure and consequence, it needs a bridge between those two goals. Themes and tags are that bridge.

They are the fuel that drives play forward. The cues players use to justify bold actions, accept meaningful consequences, and understand why the story unfolds the way it does. In Legend in the Mist, story isn’t something that happens around the rules, it’s what the rules are built from.

It’s this aspect of Legend in the Mist that defines the experience and, in a sense, is “how” the game is about the story defined in very clear and uncertain terms.

The Construction of Story

Legend in the Mist spends a surprising amount of time explaining how stories work as a principle. On the surface, that might feel unnecessary; after all, this is a role-playing game. Why pause to teach storytelling? I would argue personally that any role-playing game should assume its reader has never played a role-playing game before, but generally, I think the act of storytelling is typically built into the “how to play this game” of the book. As a story is such a fundamental part of Legend in the Mist mechanic, knowing how to play the game and how to write a good story is practically the same thing.

The answer lies in how deeply this game commits to the idea of story-first play.

In many traditional RPGs, the story is emergent. Take Dungeons & Dragons as a familiar example. You don’t need much narrative structure to begin: “We’re adventurers seeking treasure and glory, there’s a dungeon over there, let’s go”. What the story becomes is largely the result of mechanical interaction, combat rolls, spell effects, saving throws, and unexpected outcomes stacking on top of one another. The narrative grows organically from what happens at the table.

Legend in the Mist works in the opposite direction.

Here, the mechanics don’t generate story on their own. Instead, they respond to it. Without a tale taking shape, without tension, stakes, and meaningful choices, the system has very little to push against. The rules are designed to bloom only when fed drama. In that sense, story isn’t a byproduct of play; it’s the soil everything grows from.

Because of that, explaining how to construct a story isn’t optional; it’s essential. There is no hidden narrative engine quietly assembling plot from dice rolls. If you want the mechanics to engage, you must give them something to engage with. That means structure. It means buildup. It means understanding how scenes, conflict, and consequence fit together.

Good storywriting doesn’t have to be complex; in fact, Legend in the Mist kind of pushes you to write simple, more straightforward stories as a guiding principle, as the game is not so much about plot as it is about character story development. Tremendous effort is taken in the book to explain the processes of creating and narrating a story in the game.

This isn’t a flaw. It’s a deliberate design choice.

To support it, Legend in the Mist breaks storytelling down in a clear, almost academic way, more reminiscent of a high school theatre or creative writing class than a traditional RPG manual. The book walks you through narrative fundamentals: narrator exposition, quests, conflicts, scenes, and how these elements connect into a rhythm of play. Each “round” of the story introduces challenges, discoveries, twists, consequences, and resolution, all framed to ensure that player choices genuinely matter.

The goal isn’t complexity, it’s clarity, but that clarity requires a clean process, and it’s exactly what you get from the book.

By formalizing story structure, the game ensures that adventures remain dynamic and responsive. Choices aren’t just flavor; they alter the direction of the tale, reshape characters, and leave marks that don’t easily fade (in the form of story tags). The result is an evolving narrative built around player decisions, rather than a prewritten plot the players merely pass through with real consequences to the character sheet and future resolutions, motivations, and so on.

In effect, Legend in the Mist functions as a strong tutorial in how to tell stories within an RPG framework. While the techniques are presented through the lens of this specific system, many of the lessons are broadly applicable to any game that thrives on narrative play.

Veteran players may find parts of this approach almost rudimentary, and that’s very much the point. Legend in the Mist isn’t interested in sprawling epics that require flowcharts, encyclopedic NPC lists, or intricate political webs. It aims instead for clear, direct tales: journeys with emotional weight, hard choices, and consequences that can later be retold as legend.

Simple system. Simple stories.

That simplicity isn’t a limitation; it’s the design goal. Legend in the Mist is built to tell stories that are easy to grasp, easy to play, and easy to remember. Stories shaped at the table, carried away afterward, and shared like folklore. And if the game does what it sets out to do, those stories won’t just be adventures; you’ll remember them as legends.

Conclusion

Is there more to Legend in the Mist than what I’ve covered here? Oh yes, far more. This is a substantial book, clocking in at nearly 500 pages, and at first glance that might seem at odds with the relatively simple, almost understated way the game presents itself. How can something so focused and restrained take up that much space?

The answer circles back to where this article began.

While Legend in the Mist is unquestionably a story-first system, designed from the ground up to support narrative play, it is still very much an engine. A robust one. This is not a loose pass/fail framework that gestures vaguely at story and leaves everything else to player improvisation. It is a fully realized role-playing game with a carefully constructed mechanical core, one that actively facilitates storytelling through structure, consequence, and momentum. That kind of design requires rules. A lot of them. Just not the kind most players and GM’s expect out of your typical RPG.

In many RPGs, the bulk of the rules are dedicated to tactical combat, exhaustive equipment lists, spell catalogs, and scenario-driven problem-solving. By contrast, Legend in the Mist devotes much of its page count to teaching you how to plan, design, and execute stories, and then providing a system that supports that process end to end. Large portions of the book are effectively a guide for players and Narrators alike, explaining how this style of play works, why it works, and how to make it sing at the table. To truly unpack everything the game offers would require a far deeper dive than this preview allows.

Suffice it to say, the system is not “simple” in the way light RPG’s are that mean to be story-focused by getting the rules out of your way, quite to the contrary in a way, Legend in the Mist is a heavy rule system that is focused on supporting storytelling. That said, it doesn’t mean the game is hard to learn or requires a lot of memorization; that is not the case either, but you will have to study the game’s purpose and learn its intention to get the most out of it.

What I’ve outlined here barely scratches the surface, but I hope it serves its purpose: either sparking your interest, or making it very clear that this isn’t the game you’re looking for.

Which raises an important question: who is Legend in the Mist for? It’s tempting to say “everyone,” and I’m sure the creators would welcome that answer. But I think the truth is a bit more specific.

If you’re an RPG aficionado, someone who enjoys exploring the breadth of what this hobby can be, Legend in the Mist feels like a must-try entry. It taps into a lineage of narrative-focused design that’s confident, intentional, and refreshingly unapologetic. In that sense, yes, it’s for everyone who loves RPGs as a medium, not just as a game, and wants to explore something new and fresh.

More practically, though, if I were to sum it up, this is a game for the theatre kids.

If your enjoyment of role-playing games comes primarily from tactical combat, mechanical optimization, and strategic mastery, if the “game” part of RPGs is where you find your fun, this likely isn’t your system. The goal of Legend in the Mist is not to present challenging tactical puzzles, but to leave the table having told a meaningful story.

If you love games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or Draw Steel, games where tactical depth and mechanical systems are a core part of the appeal, you may feel like entire subsystems are simply missing here. That’s not a value judgment. It’s a recognition that Legend in the Mist commits to the story in such an all-encompassing way that it leaves little room for switching between “game mode” and “story mode.”

This game is almost entirely story mode.

For me, that commitment is what makes Legend in the Mist such an exciting discovery. I’m genuinely curious to see how it lands with my own group, who already gravitate toward narrative-heavy play and strong story-driven rulesets. I have a feeling this is a game that will thrive at our table, and one we’ll be talking about long after the dice stop rolling.

And really, that feels like the highest compliment a game built on legend can receive.

Hidden Gems, Kick-Starer, On The Table, Role-Player Game Reviews

Preview: Demidirge: Fanged Funnel – Shadowdark Adventure

January 25, 2026 5 Minutes

A small but vicious little kit landed in my bucket this week: a Shadowdark RPG adventure headed for Kickstarter in the near future called Demidirge: Fanged Funnel.

At first, I hesitated to do a preview. Normally, if I’m going to write about an adventure, I want to run it first, spill some blood, break a few characters, listen to players argue about marching order. But then I remembered: I’ve been a DM for so long that I can smell a good dungeon from a cold read. Also, this is a preview, not a review, so nobody needs to clutch their pearls. I think I’m on solid ground here.

What really hooked me wasn’t the premise, the stats, or even the promise of grisly player death (though those are all respectable selling points). It was the art.

Classic black and white ink art has an uncanny charm and ability to inspire, love it.

Now, I’m no art connoisseur, but I read a lot of adventures and RPG material, mostly scavenging for ideas to steal for my own tables. And these days? A lot of RPG art blurs together. It’s competent. It’s polished. It also often looks suspiciously like it was generated by a machine that’s never rolled a saving throw in its life.

Demidirge, however, is something else entirely.

This is unmistakably original, hand-drawn ink art in that grimy, old-school style, raw, evocative, and absolutely smashing. It’s the kind of art that doesn’t just decorate the page; it dares you to run the adventure. And honestly, this is one of the things the OSR does right. There’s a genuine love of illustration here, a reverence for the weird, the nightmarish, and the slightly unhinged, something that’s increasingly rare in the broader modern RPG space (and yes, I say that as someone perfectly comfortable using AI art myself).

The art in Demidirge is the sort of stuff that crawls into your brain and starts whispering encounter ideas. It’s moody. It’s grotesque. It’s inspiring. Old-school gamers are going to eat this up.

And here’s the thing: great art makes you want to read the adventure. That’s exactly how this module got its hooks into me. You’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but when you see this cover, you’re absolutely going to crack it open and see what horrors are waiting inside.

The Adventure

There are three things you need to know about this adventure, but fair warning, as always: if you’re a player, stop reading now. Seriously. This is a funnel. Knowledge is a liability. Spoilers ahead.

First, this adventure is written for Shadowdark, the current darling of the OSR scene. That said, like most good old-school modules, the bones are system-agnostic. You could run this with just about any OSR ruleset without breaking a sweat. That said, Demidirge is very deliberately tuned for Shadowdark and even includes a bespoke zero-level character creation framework designed specifically for this nightmare. You’re not playing “peasants who happen to be here”, you’re playing tunnelers, and that distinction matters mechanically and thematically.

Shadowdarks success as an RPG is uncanny; it’s spoken about in circles that stretch well beyond the OSR, at this point its practically mainstream. One day soon, I predict the OSR is going to give Wizards of the Coast a run for their money. It’s growing by leaps and bounds.

Which leads neatly into the second thing: this is a funnel, and it wears that badge proudly.

If you’re not familiar with funnels, here’s the short version: instead of lovingly crafting a single hero, each player controls a small crowd of level 0 nobodies. These unfortunate souls are fed into a lethal gauntlet with the full expectation that most of them will die screaming, dissolving, or being recycled into something worse. The lucky few who survive crawl out the other side as first-level adventurers, scarred, changed, and usually carrying some deeply troubling memories.

I’ve always loved funnels (Dungeon Crawl Classics remains my personal poison of choice), because they’re one of the best onboarding tools tabletop RPGs have ever produced. Minimal rules. Immediate stakes. Constant laughs punctuated by sudden, shocking death. They’re perfect for non-gamers, party games, or just reminding veteran players that life is cheap and heroism is earned. Demidirge understands this completely and leans into it hard.

Now for the third element, the one that really elevates this adventure from “cool funnel” to “oh hell yes, I need to run this.”

The entire funnel takes place inside a shared nightmare.

One of the sort of quirks of classic funnels is that you have very little to work with; you are not going to find the answer on your character sheet. Survival requires clever players. Still, the players are given some tools in this adventure that may very well prove useful.

The characters believe they are workers in a vast subterranean mining complex known as the Malic Mindshaft, a living, bureaucratic hellscape of quotas, rival labor crews, holy management cults, and acid-filled tunnels. In reality, they are prisoners trapped inside the mind of an inhuman entity called The Hermit Queen. Their physical bodies hang elsewhere in the real world, sealed inside organic coffins, while their consciousnesses are forced to dig ever deeper toward something called the Sunless Horizon. The queen’s nest of sorts from which she is attempting to escape, and the players are inadvertently helping her to do so by digging her out.

Their real objective, though they won’t realize it at first, is to notice that something is wrong. To pick up on anomalies. To question the reality of the tunnels. To recognize that the rules of the world don’t behave quite right. Only by collectively triggering enough psychic “cracks” in the illusion can they awaken… at which point the nightmare ends in spectacular fashion and the survivors emerge into the real world as first-level characters.

This setup is brilliant for two reasons.

First, it gives the GM enormous freedom. This is a dream. A hostile one. Reality can glitch, contradict itself, loop, or outright lie. NPCs can behave inconsistently. Dead crews can reappear. Shadows can move wrong. You are encouraged to mess with player expectations, and the module provides a long list of concrete tools, events, rival crews, nightmare phenomena, and outright body horror, to do exactly that.

Second, and this is the real GM gold, Demidirge is setting-agnostic by design. Because the adventure ends with the characters waking up somewhere in the real world, it can slot cleanly into any campaign setting. You don’t need lore buy-in. You don’t need a starting town. You don’t even need to explain where the characters are from. They wake up, alive, confused, and hunted, and now your campaign begins.

For me personally, that makes this an ideal opening adventure. I’ve been planning to kick off a Dolmenwood campaign and have been wrestling with how to start it in a way that feels strange, unsettling, and memorable. Demidirge: Fanged Funnel solves that problem completely. Drop the players into the nightmare, let them claw their way out, and then unleash them into the woods with no safety net and a head full of questions.

That’s a hell of a session one.

Conclusion

I’ve been intentionally vague about the finer details of this adventure, and that’s very much by design. The two questions people usually want answered are “What is this adventure about?” and “How do I actually use this in my game?” I hope I’ve given enough context to answer both, without robbing anyone of the joy (or horror) of reading it for themselves. And yes, that includes DMs. This is very much an adventure best experienced fresh.

What Demidirge: Fanged Funnel offers is that classic OSR, “trust the referee” style of adventure design. You’re given strong impressions, clear themes, and a well-organized structure, tables, factions, events, and evocative bite-sized descriptions, rather than pages of boxed text and rigid scripting. The module assumes you know how to run a game, and more importantly, that you want to. It’s fast to read, easy to internalize, and leaves the real magic where it belongs: at the table.

That’s one of the OSR’s greatest strengths. Instead of overwhelming you with lore dumps and hyper-specific contingencies that immediately fall apart once the first sword is drawn, this adventure gives you the tools and trusts your instincts. Once play begins, the dungeon breathes, reacts, and mutates based on player choices rather than a prewritten flowchart.

There are key elements that matter, of course. The slow discovery that the characters are trapped inside a nightmare is central to the experience, as are the unsettling monsters and factions that inhabit it. The adventure is carefully seeded with obstacles that double as clues: rival tunnel crews, bureaucratic cruelty, ritualized labor, and nightmarish events that don’t quite add up. Everything subtly pushes the players to dig deeper, literally and figuratively, while quietly hinting that something is very, very wrong.

Mystery is notoriously difficult to pull off in tabletop RPGs. Players are clever, suspicious, and prone to setting things on fire just to see what happens. But here, I think the author genuinely succeeds. The truth is neither obvious nor handed to the players, and I fully expect many groups won’t survive long enough to unravel it at all. This is a funnel, after all. Death is cheap. Insight is not.

Players will need to bring their A-game, and probably a few spare character sheets, if they want to make it to the other side.

In short: this is a great story, thoughtfully constructed, beautifully illustrated, and deeply engaging. It’s weird, cruel, and imaginative in all the right old-school ways. If you’re looking for a funnel that does more than just kill characters, one that leaves survivors changed, this is absolutely worth picking up.

Highly recommended.

On The Table, Role-Player Game Reviews

The Pioneer RPG: Kickstarter Preview

November 20, 2025 5 Minutes

For All Mankind, the Apple TV series, is without question one of my favorite shows of the last decade. It’s an alternative-history epic about what might have happened if the space race never ended, if humanity kept pushing, competing, and occasionally tripping its way across the solar system.

It has everything I love in a good story: speculative history, grounded sci-fi, drama, and just enough “this could almost happen” futurism to make you glance suspiciously at NASA’s latest press releases. But what I enjoy most is that it feels less like science fiction and more like future history, a glimpse into a world that could have been ours with just a few different turns of the wrench, without infusing it with the magic of made-up future tech that most science fiction relies on.

I love a good historically based what-if story, and For All Mankind hits those beats with perfection in my humble opinion. No question, one of the best shows in years.

So when the marketing team at Mongoose Publishing reached out and asked me to take a look at their upcoming RPG, The Pioneer, the very first thing that came to mind was, naturally, For All Mankind. One paragraph into the description, and I was already hearing the opening theme in my head.

Today, we’re going to take a peek into Mongoose Games’ latest Kickstarter: a rather unusual, yet deeply intriguing, near-future Earth RPG about humankind’s next great adventure, exploring our own solar system. If you’ve ever wanted a game that sits somewhere between hard sci-fi realism and “what if we just kept going?”, this might be exactly your trajectory.

Overview

The Pioneer is built on the classic Traveller system, which, for long-time sci-fi RPG fans, should trigger an immediate nod of recognition. Traveller is the granddaddy of science-fiction tabletop gaming, the venerable elder around the campfire telling stories about starships before most of us were even rolling dice.

But that pedigree isn’t the real selling point here.

I haven’t tried the modern Traveller, though I do have nostalgic memories of playing this one back in the Jolt Cola days. I regret nothing!

What makes The Pioneer interesting is the opening it offers for a story-first RPG focused on near-future exploration beyond just the “adventure gaming” elements. You’ll be heading out into the solar system, and yes, there’s some delightful technobabble sprinkled throughout (it is a sci-fi RPG, after all), but this isn’t just a game about rockets, trajectories, or micromanaging oxygen levels. It’s got this presence defined into the game, like a grand stage on which modern space exploration stories can unfold and it’s this part of the game that has me intrigued.

Your mission isn’t just “go do the space thing.” Instead, The Pioneer opens the door for character-driven drama you’d expect from a prestige TV series. Motivations will matter. Politics will matter. The planning, the pressure, the PR disasters waiting to happen, the game leaves room to weave these elements into the action parts of the narrative just as much as the EVA repair scenes. It’s a game where you will tell the whole story, including the behind-the-scenes footage usually reserved for the documentary crew. An exciting proposition for a guy like me who loves NASA stories that happen between the lines.

A 200-page hardcover means that this RPG doesn’t fall into the “Light” category as far as game systems go. Not surprisingly, as neither does Traveller, but it is a modern system, so I think we can probably expect a relatively approachable game system.

A great example in the preview is Rescue at Low Earth Orbit. On the surface, it’s a classic space-rescue scenario with plenty of “uh… Houston we we have a problem” moments. But underneath, there’s a deeper narrative thread open to explore, one with enough emotional and political gravity to anchor an entire campaign. I won’t spoil the potential twists, but let’s just say there’s more going on than simply “complete the mission.” It immediately grabbed my attention and, once again, made me think of For All Mankind in all the best ways.

The Kickstarter

The Pioneer is launching through Kickstarter, and I always feel obligated to sound the traditional warning horn when entering that particular sub-market. We’ve all heard more cautionary tales than success stories, Kickstarter can be a magical place, but it can also be where good intentions go to die.

That said, Mongoose Publishing is not some first-time, two-person garage operation trying to figure out where the print PDF button is. These folks are seasoned veterans with a long, reliable track record. If there’s a spectrum of Kickstarter risk, this one sits comfortably on the “you can relax” end of it. You can check out the Pioneer Kickstarter here!

The even better news, at least in my humble opinion, is that this Kickstarter has already blasted past its funding requirement, so The Pioneer is definitely happening. And not only that, the most exciting stretch goals have already been unlocked, giving the project a strong launch trajectory (pun fully intended).

Of course, one of the first things anyone wants to do in a near-future space RPG is stage a mission to Mars. Luckily, this Kickstarter has anticipated that very impulse. Ares Ascendant, a full-length campaign covering the entire mission from A to Z, is already included. So if you’ve ever wanted to make the Red Planet your problem, you’re in good hands.

I think this book is the key to the game. Most people, I think are willing to try alternative RPG experiences to the standard stuff like D&D, but creating a campaign for a game like this, I think, would be tough, so releasing it with a solid campaign like a mission to Mars was a very smart move, it’s exactly what this game needs.

Is this a good game?

One question people love to throw at me, as if I’m shuffling tarot cards behind the scenes, is: “Will this be a good game?” And as always, I have the same answer when it comes to RPGs.

RPGs are good games because they’re not really games. They’re experiences. An RPG is only ever as good as the group you sit down with. That is the secret truth of the hobby. So the real question with The Pioneer isn’t “Is it good?” but rather: Does its subject matter excite you and the people you play with? Because if it does, the rest tends to take care of itself.

My advice to all role-players, especially those who’ve spent their entire hobby life inside the comfortable walls of Dungeons & Dragons, is simple: explore. For gods’ sake, explore other RPGs. There’s an entire universe of creativity out there. Designers are pouring their imagination, innovation, and occasionally their sanity into projects like this. And I can say with near certainty: if the theme speaks to you, you will find something to love in the game, whatever it is.

So go out there, support your community, and give games like The Pioneer a chance. This is a wonderful project, and absolutely one worth investing in.

On The Table, Role-Player Game Reviews

Dolmenwood – Kickstarter Has Arrived!

September 9, 2025 5 Minutes 1 Comment

As a general rule, I don’t touch Kickstarters with a ten-foot wizard’s staff. Too often, they feel less like scrappy dream-fueled projects and more like corporate “fund me” jars rattling for coins, a kind of alchemy I find, frankly, a bit of hogwash. If you’ve got the treasure hoard to make a game, then by the gods of dice and destiny, make it, release it, and I’ll happily toss my gold pieces into your coffers for a completed product. Misuse of the platform is as common as goblins in a mushroom glade, it irritates me to no end.

But every so often, a true conjurer of words and worlds appears, someone who uses Kickstarter exactly as it was meant to be: as a lantern-lit path for dreamers without publishers, great houses, or corporate dragons backing them. These are the brave creators weaving wonders with nothing but ink, imagination, and maybe a touch of faerie dust.

Dolmenwood is one such marvel, sprung from the mind of Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome. For a few years now, Gavin has been quietly brewing some of the most curious, creative, and downright enchanting projects in the roleplaying sphere. These are the kinds of things that would never survive the soulless glare of a big publisher’s boardroom, too niche, too strange, too delightfully weird. Exactly the sort of creations adventurers like me crave.

From the spellbinding Old School Essentials (a meticulous, love-drenched re-edit of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons) to a treasure trove of smaller adventures, the cheeky and delightful Carcass Crawler zine, and now an entirely new game built around his own fairy-tale fever dream: Dolmenwood.

I have talked a lot on this blog about Old School Essentials. I ran a 3 year campaign using the system and it performed beautifully. It made me a fan of Gavin Norman. He makes a lot of good stuff.

I’ve been waiting for this one. Patiently, well, mostly, for nearly two years, ever since I pledged back in September 2023. And now, at long last, the package has arrived on my doorstep like a mysterious parcel left by a mossy-footed pooka. To say I’m buzzing would be an understatement. I tore into it with the giddy energy of a halfling spotting second breakfast.

One of the many charms of this whole journey is that Gavin has been an absolute wizard of communication, keeping us updated since day one with missives, sneak peeks, and development notes that felt like dispatches from the enchanted woods themselves. He gave us that personal touch, so even before my box of goodies arrived, I already felt like I’d been walking alongside the project every step of the way. I had been watching the trailer for two years, now I finally got to see the full production.

Today, we’re diving headlong into Dolmenwood. I’ll tell you what’s in the box, we’ll explore the game and its myth-soaked setting, and, most importantly, we’ll discuss who this game is for. So grab a cup of something hot and spiced, lean back in your favorite chair by the hearth, and settle in, because this is going to be a BIG article.

What is Dolmenwood About?

The very first question my friends asked, before I’d even cracked open the box, was: “Okay, but what exactly is Dolmenwood?” A fair place to start, I think, though a simple question this is not.

The best way to answer is to split Dolmenwood into two halves: first, how it works as a game system, and second, what it is as a fantasy world and story engine.

Dolmenwood as a Game

At its heart, Dolmenwood feels like a curious blend of two schools of design. On one side, it clearly draws heavily from Old School Essentials (OSE), Gavin Norman’s brilliant revival of 1980s Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons. On the other, it borrows the best lessons of modern narrative-first RPGs, which put storytelling, character invention, and immersion ahead of crunchy rules.

Now, that might sound like oil and water to some. After all, when many people hear “1st edition D&D,” they picture a rules labyrinth: THAC0 charts, descending AC, bizarre subsystems, and the heavy hand of the dice. Dolmenwood is not that. It doesn’t replicate old-school rules, it reimagines old-school concepts, polishing them into something that feels sleek and accessible to modern tables, but secretly, yes its old school rules. Confused?

To old dogs like me, this is just my adolescent stomping grounds, but I’m not blind to the fact that you have to really be glutton for punishment to still use systems that look like this today. There are better ways.

Ok so to be clear, there are no THAC0 charts, no wargame math, no headaches of deciphering unclear and unforgiving rules for which old school D&D is famous. For anyone coming from 5e, the rules will feel familiar and welcoming, even though for all intents and purposes, these are in fact old school rules. Imagine if a modern game designer, could travel back in time and advise Gygax on the fundamentals of rules writing and game design. Most of the decisions here are common sense for todays standards, but there is a clear focus on capturing the core concepts of these old school rules which (some of us old school guys) really do love. So its the good parts of these rules, without all the non-sense, which, when you get right down to it starts to look very much like a light, alternative, but modern version of D&D.

What Dolmenwood does carry forward from its old-school ancestry is the philosophy: this is not a game of superhero characters with endless feats and powers. It is low fantasy, low magic, high peril. A sword to the gut will probably kill you. You’re fragile mortals, not demigods, and that fragility is what makes your bravery meaningful. In Dolmenwood, you are heroes not because of your hit points, but because you willingly risk your tiny candle-flame lives in a world full of wolves, witches, and weirder things still.

Dolmenwood is not completely absolved of old school gaming shenanigan’s that deserve to stay dead and buried. For example, getting an XP bonus or penalty for having too low or too high prime ability score is just silly. There is some logic to it, but it dirties the waters in my opinion unnecessarily.

Of course as was the case in classic D&D, magic remains the great equalizer. Power often comes from what you find: a scroll, a wand, a ring, a talisman, the coveted equipment that often makes the difference between life with bags of holding full of treasure and horrifically tragic death at the end of a spear. Dolmenwood leans into that old-school rhythm where exploration and treasure-hunting matter to your prospects of survival and success. In fact, equipment is survival; resources are power, the story is about that glorious rise from a mere nobody to a powerful agent in the world.

Dolmenwood as a Story

Where Dolmenwood really unfurls its colors, though, is as a setting-first game. The rules exist, yes, but they feel more like a stagehand pulling ropes than the star of the show. Storytelling and atmosphere take center stage. In that sense, it leans closer to narrative-driven games like Vampire: The Masquerade or newer experiments like Daggerheart, where the drama lives in the back-and-forth between Game Master and players, rather then execution of rules.

This is why Dolmenwood’s books are so massive. The books are mainly tapestry of herbs, fungi, folklore, factions, fairies, pipeweed blends, oddball traditions, and richly described places. (Yes, there’s literally a two-page spread on different varieties of pipeleaf, and another on common fungi. You don’t need these details, but oh, how they make the world breathe.)

The game invites players not just to survive, but to inhabit. Characters don’t begin with a scripted epic or a railroad adventure paths. Instead, they’re handed a living sandbox, an open world alive with secrets, strange folk, and tangled politics.

At the start, you know almost nothing. You’re level 1 peasants with little more than a rusty sword, a pocketful of pipeweed and big dreams. The world is wide, mysterious, and dangerous, and you must carve your own path in it. The magic lies in how your choices, what goals you set, who you befriend, and which factions you side with slowly shape your story. The game doesn’t hand you a narrative; it hands you a place, filled with people with their own motivations and events brimming with fairy tales, and trusts you to grow a narrative out of it.

Dolmenwood is a stage ripe for theatre, something made clear from its evocative art and the writing style, even though theatre is not really traditionally an old school core ideology.

Over time, as you explore deeper, you begin to see the strings: the larger story of Dolmenwood itself. The factions, the plots, the creeping powers behind the veil. Small adventures tie into greater ones, and before you realize it, your once-humble would be adventurer is entangled in the grand weave of politics, prophecy, and faerie mischief.

And every inch of this playground is meticulously detailed. The campaign book runs a staggering 465 pages, stuffed with lore, locations, NPCs, and oddities. Every hollow, every hamlet, every mushroom ring feels like it has a story waiting to be uncovered, it feels that way because it is that way.

So yes, Dolmenwood is a game of rules. But more than that, it is a world, a moss-carpeted, fungus-studded, pipe-smoke-wreathed world, ripe for infinite exploration.

The Dolmenwood Setting

Let’s be clear: as a game system, Gavin Norman hasn’t reinvented the wheel. The “open world, make-your-own-adventure” style of play has been part of the D&D tradition for decades. But Dolmenwood tips its mossy cap to those old-school roots while polishing them for a modern audience, and I’m delighted to report that this approach is making a hearty comeback across the hobby.

Where Dolmenwood becomes something truly unique, where the real fairy-dust sparkles, is in its setting. This is no cookie-cutter fantasy world. In fact, I don’t think anything like it exists in today’s RPG landscape. It’s bold, strange, and deeply imaginative, so much so that it might even feel a little unsettling to players who are used to the safety blanket of Tolkien-inspired worlds.

Most fantasy settings lean heavily (sometimes lazily) on the Tolkien template: elves, dwarves, orcs, kingdoms, repeat. Dolmenwood gleefully shatters those expectations while still remaining recognizably “fantasy.” Its fairy-tale woods are bizarre, whimsical, and very dangerous. Nothing unfolds quite the way you expect, there are fewer recognizable fantasy troupes that players will connect with from other familiar settings. It’s geared towards real exploration, not the exploration of yet another alternative version The Forgotten Realms.

If I had to reach for an analogy, I’d say Dolmenwood is like a strange potion brewed from equal parts Harry Potter, Narnia, Legend and The Never Ending Story, with just enough Tolkien sprinkled in to keep it grounded. Fey folk, enchanted groves, and peculiar traditions abound, Gavin Norman delights in breaking expectations whenever possible.

The 1980’s classic Legend is a mostly forgotten film despite the fact that it was directed by Ridley Scott and stared a young Tom Cruise. It depicts a truly original fantasy world that departs from the Tolkien roots while still remaining oddly familiar as a fantasy world. It’s kind of the same effect Dolmenwood has when you read it.

Even at the character-creation stage, the game asks players to embrace the unusual. You can play a proud goat-headed Breggle, or a small, pipe-smoking Mossling, who feels like a halfling raised in a damp mushroom hollow. Sure, there are humans and elves, but they aren’t the focus. Dolmenwood itself is the wilderness, the edge of the map, the place where weirdness is the default.

The strangeness continues with classes. While you can still pick a Fighter or Cleric, you’ll also find uniquely Dolmenwood roles like the Enchanter, the wandering Friar, the cunning Hunter, and the noble Knight.

Magic, too, is peculiar and deeply rooted in folklore. While there are plenty of familiar things like the generic fireballs of high fantasy, spells draw on fairy glamour, rune-carved standing stones, ley lines, herbal concoctions, and fungi with names that sound like they were whispered by trickster spirits. It feels less like a spell list and more like a hedge witch’s grimoire.

But what elevates Dolmenwood above all else is the way the world itself is built. Nothing is random. Every ruined keep, every ancient shrine, every mossy mound is tied into the greater tapestry of Dolmenwood’s history. Stumble upon an abandoned tower in the woods, and you’ll eventually learn how it connects to the factions, politics, and hidden stories of the land. Nothing is throwaway. Nothing is meaningless. There is purpose and often you will not understand that purpose until later in your adventure, these locations become future lightbulbs for the players to connect in a larger story.

For players, this creates a delightful sense of discovery and self-importance, a logical puzzle where every new clue makes the world sharper and more comprehensible, known only to them. Knowledge that they can leverage in pursuit of their own success if they are clever.

For DMs, it’s a godsend: a pre-built web of places, people, and events that all interlock seamlessly. Players will feel clever as they connect the dots, while you’ll always have the tools to support their choices.

All of this is brought together in the Campaign Book, a masterpiece of editing and design. It combines event-driven encounters with location-based hex maps, giving you the freedom to run Dolmenwood as a true sandbox.

The one page layout approach of the campaign book is perfect for use at the table, you are a 2-3 minute read away from being able to run any area with plenty of flavor and direction, there is no need to read anything in advance even though you will not be able to help yourself.

What makes it brilliant is its clarity. You don’t need to read 100 pages ahead or memorize obscure lore. Every location is laid out in a simple, precise format: history, features, atmosphere, day/night differences, and the secrets that might be uncovered. No wasted words, no bloat, just clean, evocative notes that give the DM everything they need without scripting the events of an adventure.

Take The Craven Mounds, for example. In just a single page you’ll learn what the mounds look like, their unsettling history, the strange shrine hidden among them, the difference between visiting by day or by night, and which creatures prowl there. It’s enough to spark a full evening of play, while leaving room for you to weave it into the larger story. It’s connection to lay lines give it deeper meaning that might become important to the players later and then there is of course the real question, what are they for? The answer is not nothing and its this sort of intrigue that drives the Dolmenwood drama, a purpose in everything.

This structure repeats across the entire book: compact, flavorful descriptions that give you narrative cues and storytelling beats without ever tying your hands. The result is that your players can go anywhere, chase anything, and you’ll always be ready. It’s the kind of prep support most DMs dream about.

Dolmenwood is a sandbox done right: players get freedom, you get preparation, and the world itself does the heavy lifting.

What’s In The Box

While I don’t usually do kickstarters, if and when I decide to donate my hard-earned gold coins to a project, I don’t fuss about; I go all in for the full monty. I went for the limited edition loot box which includes pretty much everything except for a few of the “non-game” related items like T-shirts, buttons and stuff like that. It was a $200 dollar box and includes everything that is designed for the full Dolmenwood experience.

The Books

Let me say this right out of the gate: if you pick up these Dolmenwood books and are not utterly gobsmacked by their quality, then I’d like to meet the little green gremlins piloting your brain. The production values are jaw-dropping, perhaps the best I’ve ever seen in tabletop RPG publishing. The only comparable recent release is Daggerheart, and honestly, Dolmenwood still wins the duel, particularly when it comes to editing and layout.

These books are a dream to reference. The language is clean, concise, and direct, no wading through two paragraphs of purple prose just to extract one useful rule. Everything you need is right where you expect it to be.

Gavin Norman has always had a sharp editorial hand, OSE already proved that, but here, he’s outdone himself. This feels like divine work, a new gold standard for RPG book design. From this point forward, anything less will feel like sloppy wizardry. Work like this makes Wizard of the Coast publications look like incompetent goblins are running the company.

The Player’s Book

One of the trickiest challenges in RPG design is convincing players to actually read beyond the rules. When a game has a unique setting, as Dolmenwood certainly does, the danger is that players learn just enough mechanics to roll dice and stop there, never really tasting the flavor of the world.

I think Gavin understood this problem. The Player’s Book takes a deliberate approach: keep it short, sharp, and reference-friendly, while leaving the bulk of the lore and storytelling muscle to the Campaign Book. On one level, it works brilliantly. This is a book you don’t need to read cover-to-cover. Instead, it’s a handy companion that breaks the game into digestible chunks, how to make a character, how adventuring and combat work, how the physical universe ticks along. As a quick-start guide to “what is this game, mechanically?” it’s flawless. Often players books that are filled with lore between the pages, create an issue when you actually just want to look up some rules at the table, you won’t find problems like that in this players book.

But here’s the rub: Dolmenwood isn’t a system-first game. Yes, the rules matter, but the beating heart of the experience is the setting. It’s the moss, the pipeweed, the grimalkin, the fey bargains, the eerie ruins waiting in the mist. And I worry the Player’s Book doesn’t give enough of that to the people who arguably need it most, the players themselves. They need the inspiration for character creation and the grounding for their plans because this is after all, a open world game where players are expected to seek out the adventure on their own. How can they be expected to do that if they don’t know much about the place where that adventure is to take place?

Sure, there are delightful sprinkles of flavor scattered throughout. The races and classes ooze personality. The languages, gear, food, and drink entries all sneak in playful, flavorful cultural details. And there’s a particularly excellent chapter called “The Adventure” that does a stellar job explaining what role-playing actually looks like in Dolmenwood, complete with examples that make the difference between “rolling dice” and “telling a story” crystal clear.

Still, I can’t help but wish for just one more chapter, a lore dump, a short but rich introduction that gives players a real sense of what Dolmenwood feels like to live in. There is a kind of two page layout of major factions and settlements as a reference but its just not enough.

This is because while mechanics get us rolling, it’s the setting that inspires us to play. We don’t pick between Alien and Star Trek Adventures because of their initiative systems, we pick them because one is about horror in the void and the other is about utopian space diplomacy. It’s the story behind the game that drives the whole thing.

And Dolmenwood, for all its mossy brilliance, deserves that same up-front love and it should be in the first chapter of the players book. It’s absence I think in particular with players like mine, will be a bit of a problem.

As it stands, the Player’s Book is beautifully illustrated, brilliantly organized, and a joy to use, but I’d argue it’s just shy of being the perfect guide for players. A little more lore, and it would be flawless.

The Campaign Book

Ah, the Campaign Book. This towering tome isn’t just a rulebook, it’s a storybook atlas of wonder, equal parts practical GM guide and enchanting fireside read. From the very first page, I was grinning like a mischievous faun. Gavin’s writing is clever, breezy, and endlessly readable, just enough flourish to make it fun, but never so much that you lose track of the game-ready details. It’s splendid, cover to cover.

This is the meat and potatoes of Dolmenwood, written in a style that makes this entire book a page turner you will want to read cover to cover.

Now that I’ve got the finished version in my hands, with all its lavish illustrations, it feels like a treasure pulled straight out of a mossy chest. The art captures the words perfectly: whimsical, eerie, and evocative all at once. The character portraits especially are so vivid you can practically hear their voices, quirks, and mannerisms leaping off the page.

At first glance, one might assume Dolmenwood’s open-world, West Marches–style design means there’s no central story, just a big faerie sandbox. But that’s a trick of the briars. Hidden among the hexes and hamlets is an overarching narrative, an honest-to-goodness tale threading its way through people, places, and events. I won’t spoil it here (the delights of discovery belong to the reader!), but trust me: it’s there, and it’s wonderfully easy for a GM to weave into play.

The ink art is absolutely amazing, crafted to depict the bizarre world of Dolmenwood with a nod to classic D&D that is unmistakable.

The settlements section alone deserves applause. Each one feels like its own mini-campaign in a bottle, bursting with unique cultures, strange laws, and peculiar inhabitants. There’s no generic “town” or “city” here, every settlement is a little gem of fairy-tale worldbuilding, more bizarre and enchanting than the last. Its like reading Harry Potters version of England, except you have a wide array of cities from all over the world to explore, each wildly different from the next. They’re richly described in the Campaign Book and beautifully backed up in the accompanying Maps Book.

And then there’s the heart of it: the hex-crawl. A full third of this 460+ page grimoire is devoted to detailed hex locations, and they are a masterclass in design. Each entry can be digested in a couple of minutes, giving you just enough to run the area with confidence, but always laced with hints and connections that pull you deeper. It’s impossible to flip through without “cheating” as a DM, sneaking ahead to peek at how people, places, and events intertwine. Those connections are exactly what players will discover in play, and they’re intoxicating. You’ll want to run Dolmenwood the moment you put the book down.

Of course, the Campaign Book also comes stocked with the GM essentials: magic items, curious equipment, random tables, charts, and all the toys you need to answer the question, “What if my players…?” Whether your party sets out to plunder dungeons, open a tavern hawking strange ales, or establish a kingdom in the mist, you’ll have what you need within a page flip. That’s the real magic of this book, it makes running Dolmenwood feel effortless.

In short: I absolutely love this book. Honestly, if Dolmenwood had shipped with only the Campaign Book, it still would have been worth the price of admission.

The Supporting Tools

Dolmenwood comes with its share of frivolous extras (see below), but the real treasures for a GM are the supporting tools, clever, practical, and brimming with utility.

The Monster Book

This volume is a delight. The illustrations are gorgeous, the entries lean hard into roleplay cues, and the mechanics always come with a twist or two. Many of these creatures aren’t meant to be generic foes but unique denizens of Dolmenwood, weird, singular beings with their own origins woven into the setting’s lore.

An fantasy RPG is incomplete without a monster book, but frankly I have so many of these you have to do something really special to make it worth are time. In my humble opinion, Gavin nailed it, you cannot run Dolmenwood without this book and maintain it’s unique character.

That’s the real trick here: every monster’s backstory matters. Their histories and methods of creation often double as clues for how clever players might deal with them.

One of my favorite touches is the chart of monster rumors, half true, half deliberately false. They’re perfect for seeding tavern gossip, confusing players, or foreshadowing a lurking horror in the woods. It’s playful and practical, like the rest of the books.

The thing about most monster books for me personally is that I find that they are usually generic replications of pretty standard fantasy monsters that I have seen scraped together based on everything that has come before in D&D. This book is unique to the setting and you could not run Dolmenwood without it. Its a must have to do this setting justice and t ensure its well executed.

The Maps Book

Think of this as a stack of enchanted lenses. Each map presents Dolmenwood filtered through a different lens: political boundaries, faction domains, herb and fungus distribution, shrine locations, ley lines, and more (no spoilers!).

This is without a doubt a luxury, not really something you need, but having a lot of material that is easy to reference allows you to answer wacky questions that might come up unexpectedly and that is a nice touch to making the world feel lived in for the players. I like it.

For a DM, it’s an absolute luxury. Need to know which lord rules the next region? Or which strange herb grows in that hex? Flip a page and it’s there. The book also includes full-page settlement illustrations, styled to reflect local culture. They’re mostly for flavor, but oh, what flavor. Pull one out mid-session, and your players instantly feel the character of the place.

It’s not a necessity by any stretch, but its cool and I can definitely see myself using it.

The GM Screen

I’ll be honest: I’m not usually a GM screen fan. It can feel like a wall between me and the table. But if ever there was a screen that earns its keep, this is it.

I don’t use DM screens generally, but so far as they go, this is a pretty useful one.

Printed on thick, sturdy board, it’s packed with genuinely useful reference material: combat reminders, weapon traits, faction names, settlement lists, and those regional pronunciations you’re bound to butcher under pressure.

Again, not a necessity, but sure, why not.

The Adventures

The box also comes with four stand-alone adventures tailored to Dolmenwood:

Winter’s Daughter
Emelda’s Song
The Fungus That Came to Blackswell
The Ruined Abbey of St. Clewyd

Each one can be prepped in about fifteen minutes and run on the fly, short, sharp, and clearly laid out so you’re never bogged down in text when you should be running the table.

They’re tied into Dolmenwood’s broader story web, but they also work independently as bite-sized campaigns. And while I haven’t run them yet, I backed Dolmenwood largely because of Gavin Norman’s adventures. His style is unpredictable, evocative, and brimming with creativity, exactly the kind of storytelling that surprises even veteran GMs.

Winter’s Daughter is probobly THE adventure that made me a fan of Gavin Normans creativity and led to me buying Dolmenwood.

More importantly it doesn’t overcook your prep. This isn’t a story laid out point by point, or just a bunch of location place descriptions, its more of an adventure guide that gives you the basics and you fill in the rest. Though it gives you enough so that you don’t have to plan or think about it in advance, you’ll be able to run these on the fly.

That’s the mark of a good adventure writer: giving you something you couldn’t have conjured up yourself. These adventures hit that mark. Brilliant work, full stop.

The Frivolous Fun Stuff

Beyond the core treasures of Dolmenwood, the box also comes sprinkled with a handful of whimsical oddities, frivolous, yes, but delightful all the same. Think of them as the shiny baubles and enchanted trinkets you might find tucked into a mossy hollow after a long woodland ramble.

First up: funny dice. Yes, Dolmenwood blesses you with a set of charming polyhedrals, your trusty click-clack friends, ready to be rolled in fury or folly. Then there’s a jaunty little Dolmenwood patch, perfect for sewing onto a bag, cloak, or perhaps the satchel you take into the woods when mushroom-picking. Add in access to a digital soundtrack (more on that in a moment), and, most surprisingly, a full set of miniatures.

I tend not to use miniatures in my RPG sessions, mainly because I want combat to be just an extension of role-playing rather than a “mini combat game” we play periodically when a fight breaks out. But I love collecting and painting miniatures so these are going to get some paint regardless, because they are pretty unique.

Now, as a longtime lover of pewter and plastic adventurers, I must say the minis were the most delightful surprise, mostly because I had completely forgotten they were included! These are single-mold game pieces already perched on bases, sturdy and practical. No, they’re not dripping with hyper-detailed resin flair, but they’re absolutely paintable, and more importantly, they embody Dolmenwood’s curious cast of races and classes. Goatfolk, moss dwarfs, grimalkin, and other odd denizens you won’t find in your average fantasy bestiary, they’re here in charming form, ready to stalk across your tabletop. For anyone who likes to use minis in play, these are a genuine boon.

The soundtracks, meanwhile, are a touch of magic I didn’t realize I needed. I adore setting the mood at the table with music, and Dolmenwood’s offerings are wonderfully distinctive. There’s a proper “music” soundtrack, full of strange rhythms that feel like a cross between old-school video game tunes and eerie X-Files-esque mystery. Then there are the atmospheric tracks, which I think are the real gems. These are subtle soundscapes, whispers of wind, the patter of rain, the creak of branches, the low murmur of something uncanny just beyond sight. Many are region-specific, perfectly tailored to accompany particular areas of the setting.

Together, they capture the peculiar, otherworldly vibe of Dolmenwood in a way that words alone can’t. You can practically smell the damp moss and hear the flap of a nightbird’s wings.

So yes, these extras may be the garnish rather than the feast, but they’re flavorful little morsels all the same. Cool stuff, and wholly in keeping with Dolmenwood’s knack for enchanting the senses.

Conclusion – Who Is Dolmenwood For?

I’d love to say Dolmenwood is for anyone who loves fantasy and role-playing games, but that would be too broad, and not entirely fair. This is a unique world and a very particular system, and not everyone will vibe with it.

If you grew up with old-school Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the stranger, more experimental settings of 1st and 2nd edition, Dolmenwood will feel like a nostalgic return to form. It has the same bold departure from Tolkien tropes that made worlds like Dark Sun and Planescape so compelling, while still carrying that classic sense of story-driven adventure that made D&D a phenomenon in the first place.

For modern audiences raised on 3rd, 4th, or especially 5th edition, the appeal is more complicated. The setting, whimsical, fairy-tale, tinged with Narnia, Harry Potter and Neverending Story, may hook you immediately. But mechanically, this is not a game of heroic power curves, feat chains, or endless character builds. Dolmenwood is not about gaming the system, it’s about dynamic narrative play. Growth is slower, victories are hard-won, and characters are fragile. If you try to play it like 5e, leaning on dice and mechanics to bail you out, you will die. Often. This is a game that rewards planning, cunning, and creativity over brute force.

And yet, this might be exactly what modern players are looking for. Many D&D players openly admit they find the modern rendition of the game too easy, too bloated with safety nets, too focused on “powers” rather than theatre. Dolmenwood offers a refreshing change of pace: a system that strips things back, trusts the players, and invites you to rediscover role-playing as a collaborative story first and foremost.

That’s why Dolmenwood matters. It’s not just a curiosity, it’s part of a broader movement in the hobby. Games like Blades in the Dark, Shadowdark, and Daggerheart, along with the OSR revival, are all pushing role-playing back toward dynamic player-driven experiences. Dolmenwood stands proudly in that lineage, and in many ways raises the bar for what a modern fantasy RPG can look like despite its nostalgic nod to classic D&D play.

Now I would personally argue if you really want to experience a modern RPG as a design, Daggerheart is just pure magic. But as a built in story, combined with clever writing and an amazing set for theatre, Dolmenwood is also a fantastic choice.

So yes, I recommend it. Wholeheartedly. Not because it will replace D&D at every table, but because it reminds us that fantasy role-playing can be stranger, braver, and more imaginative than the well-worn Tolkien mold. Dolmenwood is extraordinary, a design triumph, a storytelling feast, and a bold step in the right direction for the hobby.

10. Forbidden Lands

9. Pathfinder 2nd Edition

8. Castles and Crusades

7. 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons

6. Pathfinder 1st edition

5. Dungeon Crawl Classics

4. 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons

3. 1st edition BECMI (Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal): AKA The Dungeons and Dragons Rules Cyclopedia

2. Dolmenwood & Old School Essentials & B/X

1. 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

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Overview

The Writing & The Art

Themes and Tags

The Construction of Story

Conclusion

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The Adventure

Conclusion

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Overview

The Kickstarter

Is this a good game?

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What is Dolmenwood About?

Dolmenwood as a Game

Dolmenwood as a Story

The Dolmenwood Setting

What’s In The Box

The Books

The Player’s Book

The Campaign Book

The Supporting Tools

The Monster Book

The Maps Book

The GM Screen

The Adventures

The Frivolous Fun Stuff

Conclusion – Who Is Dolmenwood For?

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