Dungeon Crusade — The Long Tail of Avalon
A second envelope arrived at the desk this morning, considerably thinner than yesterday’s bound dossier and stamped only with a date range — October 2021 through March 2024. The Keeper, who has come to expect that any series filed under D for Dungeon Crusade will produce a second installment whether one was scheduled or not, files it under the same shelf-mark and reads on.
Where yesterday’s six-volume opener chronicled Daniel (@dungeondive)'s first encounter with Roger Pearce’s fourteen-years-in-the-making passion project — the welcome to Avalon, the storage walkthrough, the two-part component archaeology, the death-trap setup at Kaladar, and a closing review — this five-volume return arc tracks the slower, quieter relationship that followed. There is no longer a thing to unbox. There is only a game on a table, getting played differently each time someone returns to it.
The arc is unusually shaped for the catalogue: a check-in nine months after the review where the long-promised Quick Reference Guide arrives and changes everything, a dining-table session braided together with two sword-and-sorcery novels that may or may not be entirely about Dungeon Crusade, a ninety-minute Hobbycast interview that opens up the designer behind the design, a custom-quest design tutorial Daniel writes mostly to argue that someone should be making more of these, and at the very end of the run, a four-minute appreciation from 2024 nominating the encounter deck as the single thing that separates great dungeon crawls from good ones. Eleven volumes across the two installments, and the series joins the completed shelf.
The Exhibit Catalogue:
- Dungeon Crusade — More Thoughts, KS Reprint, and Give Away — the Quick Reference Guide finally fixes the relearn problem
- Some (more) thoughts on Dungeon Crusade, The Maze of Peril, and Engor’s Sword Arm — a 1986 D&D-blue-box-author novel becomes the most dungeon-crawl book Daniel has ever held
- Episode 20 — A Casual Chat with Rodger Deering — fourteen years of design history, plus Roger’s GTA5 wave-mode survival maps
- Dungeon Crusade — Let’s Create a Quest — the only way to shorten this game is to cut subsystems wholesale, not compress them
- One thing I love about this solo Dungeon Crawl — a 2024 nomination of the encounter deck as the gold standard
Filed under D for Dungeon, beside its first installment. The Crusade dossier is now two volumes thick and complete.
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– The Keeper
Notes that of the eleven volumes filed, only one was an opening look and one was a verdict — the other nine are what happened in between, which is, of course, where dungeon crawls actually live.