Dungeon World Gets New Owners, Second Edition Planned

Luke Crane has purchased Dungeon World from its original creators and has plans to make a new edition of the game. Earlier this month, Crane, who previously designed The Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard Roleplaying Games, announced on the Dungeon World+ discord that he had "bought the game from the original creators" (Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra) with a business partner and was preparing to work on a new edition. Crane did not specify whether either Koebel or LaTorra would be involved in the new edition.

Dungeon World's first edition won several awards when released in 2012, including the 2012 Golden Geek RPG of the Year and the Ennie Awards for Best Rules Gold Winner in 2013. The game was a Powered by the Apocalypse system in which players gained experience points when rolling a 6 or below on a check (which resulted in "trouble" occurring on the check and the opportunity for the DM to make a DM move. The game's co-creator Adam Koebel was a prominent creator and early TTRPG personality until accusations emerged of poor behavior by former partners.

Crane was previously the head of community at Kickstarter and attempted to run a campaign for The Perfect RPG zine back in 2021. He cancelled the campaign after it emerged that Koebel was involved with the project and later resigned from his job as a result of the backlash.

 

[kenada]

not sure either, definitely getting rid of HP for one

But Apocalypse World does use harm clocks, which is functionally a form of hp. PbtA as described by Baker in his “What is PbtA?” series of articles is actually not all that prescriptive of which techniques a game uses or even the conversation structure or how premise is approached. There are certainly popular ways to design one, but that doesn’t mean they are better or more correct.

I do think design of Dungeon World has issues. @zakael19 touches on a number of them. I think if one wanted to keep hp and damage dice, it could be done. Obviously, the designers of DW2 don’t think it fits with the design they want to do.

 

[SteveC]

Does anyone know about the playbooks? DW had playbooks for the classic D&D classes, which were part of the association with D&D. It sounds like it won't be using the ability scores from D&D, so I wonder about the classes. I've recently been told that a game with D&D classes in the PbtA sense is still D&D, so it does make me wonder. Anyone know?

 

[zakael19]

Does anyone know about the playbooks? DW had playbooks for the classic D&D classes, which were part of the association with D&D. It sounds like it won't be using the ability scores from D&D, so I wonder about the classes. I've recently been told that a game with D&D classes in the PbtA sense is still D&D, so it does make me wonder. Anyone know?

Maybe that’s next weeks dribble of pre-alpha stuff, haha.