Part two of the 3rd-edition tour, and Daniel (@dungeondive) spends the whole video on the two lore-and-art books — the Codex Arcanum (covering 1st and 2nd edition material) and the brand-new Codex Eternum by Andy Lennon (covering To Eternity). His framing for the segment is that both books are better made than the Kingdom Death Monster manual, and the prose lives up to the production.
What they contain: the full scenario chapter texts blown up with their corresponding paintings, a bestiary section with the same heavy black-and-white line drawings Daniel singles out for praise, and a card gallery so the game’s writing can be read outside of play. The Codex Eternum, in Daniel’s read, works as a standalone weird-fiction novella — Andy Lennon’s prose is rich enough that he could recommend the book to someone with no interest in board games at all.
The two unexpected highlights. First, a making-of section in the Codex Arcanum showing 2013 prototype sketches — item cards in a more traditional dungeon-crawl idiom, characters with abilities-to-upgrade that got cut during development. Daniel wants a whole book like this one section. Second, Uri Bilik has named every single map tile: the Courtyard, the Cross Pit, the Ritual of Chewed, Barrels of Fun, Blood Falls, Grizzly Grotto, the Incubator. Daniel emails Uri pitching a one-tile-per-scenario zine expansion.
Daniel’s pitch — a zine expansion of one-tile-one-scenario mini-quests — would only really work because Uri named every tile. How often do you notice when a designer treats their map as a set of places rather than just terrain?