Dungeon Universalis — The Third Leg of the Heavyweights Triangle
A seven-volume dossier arrived from the Iberian wing this morning, the cover sheet labelled simply Dunivers, the parcel weighing rather more than the catalogue desk usually expects.
The series chronicles Daniel (@dungeondive)'s reception of Oscar Bribián’s Dungeon Universalis, a Spanish-designed kitchen-sink dungeon crawl that began life as a fan-made expansion to Advanced HeroQuest and ended up — twelve hundred pieces of unique art, sixteen schools of magic, two complete bestiaries, an in-box solo-app, and a 120-page rulebook later — as one of the most ambitious genre love letters ever published. Five volumes drop in a single week of May 2020, a sixth follows that month, and a seventh waits two years for the upgrade pack. The arc moves from inventorial to admiring to argumentative.
The frame Daniel lands on is that this is an anachronistic design — a game that fell through a portal from a dingy 1988 game store and refuses any of the streamlining or component economy of the post-Descent-2.0 era. The Keeper, who has opinions about anachronism, finds this congenial. The genre’s third leg, alongside the original Warhammer Quest and HeroQuest — the heavyweights triangle the queue title named.
The Exhibit Catalogue:
- Dungeon Universalis — Take a Look Part One — the books: 120-page rulebook, two bestiaries, three campaigns, and a design that writes a rule for everything
- Dungeon Universalis — Take a Look Part Two — the cardboard, plus a clarification: the dark player isn’t adversarial, they scale with the heroes
- Dungeon Universalis — Take a Look Part Three — the cards, including the corruption school’s Entrails Blast (turn an ally into a living bomb)
- Dungeon Universalis — Boxing it All Up — two-minute bonus proving everything fits back in one box without third-party trays
- Dungeon Universalis — Creating Characters — Bartok the renegade dwarven Champion of the Gods of Evil, built in defiance of the suggested-pairings table
- Dungeon Universalis — The Review — “a good game that is almost a great game”; one more rulebook pass would close the gap
- Dungeon Universalis — A Look at the Upgrade Pack — two years on, Ludic Dragon delivered the rulebook revisions and bestiary cards Daniel asked for
Filed under D for Dungeon, beside the Crusade and Degenerates dossiers.
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– The Keeper
Notes that any game whose designers wrote a rule for swimming, climbing, falling, jumping, knocking enemies off staircases, and turning your own ally into a living bomb has, by any reasonable definition, finished.