Daniel (@dungeondive) is under the weather and recording something low-effort, which in practice means a table’s worth of recent purchases and an accidental preview of a year’s programming.
The headline is Machina Arcana with the new Eternity expansion, written by friend of the channel Andy Lennon — a top-ten game for Daniel and earmarked for a multi-video deep dive. Robinson Crusoe’s Mystery Tales expansion is next, part of a plan to finally learn two intimidating solo games this year alongside Nemo’s War. A Kickstarter delivery of a Slavic folklore adventure game from Kalamba arrives with a caution: the translation and rules presentation look rough enough that even the publisher’s own instructional video drew corrections in its comments.
Then the stack of smaller things — Into the Odd and Cairn, earmarked for a rules-light comparison; the Lost Aeons box set; Dungeon Solitaire’s tarot deck; Alone Against Fear with a Blind Dead Templar adventure; The Broken Cask, an innkeeping game that is pointedly not an inn tycoon game; Ultraviolet Grasslands; DVG’s solo War of the Worlds; and History Maker Baseball.
The digression worth staying for is Mazes, where each class rolls exactly one die. It sends Daniel into an argument that Dungeon Crawl Classics badly misreads sword and sorcery, because Conan and Elric were never weak and never really progressed.
Daniel’s claim: sword and sorcery heroes start capable and stay there, so zero-to-hero progression gets the genre backwards. Does he have a point about DCC?