Daniel (@dungeondive) unpacks a prototype of Dungeons of Doria, made on The Game Crafter by Victor, a member of the Dungeon Dive Facebook group, ahead of a crowdfunding campaign. He says up front that he already wants the game and will be sorry to send the prototype back.
The rulebook gets sincere praise — better laid out than plenty of professionally published ones — while he’s clear this is a crunchy, older-feeling design: action points spent per action, lots of small formulas, contested rolls, all on d10s. The initiative system is what excites him, comparing it to the initiative line in the JRPG Grandia.
The loot is the headline. Over 400 cards, which he ranks alongside Dungeon Crusade, Dungeon Universalis and Quest for the Lost Pixel as kings of loot-in-the-base-box. Each item carries a line of lore, armour has elemental weaknesses, and traps are shuffled into the loot deck so searching is a push-your-luck act. He enumerates them with visible delight and suspects no two are duplicated.
Nineteen monsters across four levels are multiplied by a deck of modifier cards — soul eater, sweeping blow, invisible, doppelganger — stacked onto whatever you draw. Also here: 17 standalone scenarios, four campaigns, tiles that keep drawing until open-edged rooms close off, and one complaint about Game Crafter’s sooty laser-cut chits.
Does 400 loot cards make a dungeon crawl richer, or just longer to shuffle?