Daniel (@dungeondive) is smitten with Heroes of Cerulea, Lucas Faulk’s pixelated dungeon-crawl RPG from Black Fisk Publishing — the game to play if you’ve ever wanted The Legend of Zelda on your table, and one of his favorites of the year. It has a GM/multiplayer mode but excellent solo rules (the Hero of Cerulea supplement) that start your lone hero stronger: boosted stats, a large pouch, two special items. You roam an overland map hunting three Trinity (Triforce) fragments, each guarded by a dungeon boss, before unlocking the final dungeon and the Ganon-like Shadow King — a definitive ending he loves for solo play.
Everything runs on d4s (thematically, the Triforce shape) via a simple dice-pool outcome chart, and the whole game gleefully embraces “video game logic”: keys vanish after one use, pots hide bombs and money, NPCs fixate on a single topic, food heals hearts. The gorgeous cartridge-styled book is packed with generators — dungeons, rooms, 54 monsters, bosses with randomized weaknesses and movesets, loot tables — plus a clever “glitches” mechanic that lets you re-roll while authoring dungeons. His one wish: a village generator. Charming, complete, and warmly recommended.
Heroes of Cerulea leans all the way into “video game logic” — vanishing keys, pots full of bombs, single-minded NPCs. Do you find that anti-realism charming at the table, or do you want your games to explain themselves?