Daniel (@dungeondive) opens a freshly delivered Kickstarter — with the caveat that this is a second take, the genuine first-open having been lost to broken audio. Dawnshade casts you as a petharican, a small forest-dwelling race caught between two warring factions, and what drew him in was the promise on the back of the box: an endless path quest system plus a 200-plus page choose-your-own-adventure narrative where no two runs are alike even when revisiting a location. His stated hope is that it isn’t another read-the-storybook-from-A-to-Z game.
The component tour is admiring. Small trade-paperback-sized rulebook, chunky printed dice, hexagonal player boards with pop-out dials, a randomised hex overland map, and quest tiles whose numbers key into events in the logbook — the system he likes most on sight. Trays are moulded so everything drops back in without a Tetris puzzle, which he calls a genuine relief in the current Kickstarter climate.
Two reservations register early. The weighted poker chips push the box to sixteen pounds and he’d happily have paid the same for cardboard. The logbook’s magazine-thin covers on a metal spiral look set to tear, and he’s considering laminating them. He signs off cautiously optimistic, planning to read the rules that night and play over the weekend — a break, he notes, from Elden Ring.
Does “everything fits back in one box” now count as a feature worth paying for?