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.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah, Mouse Guard played perfectly fine. It was actually well structured, I thought.

I’ve only just started reading The Burning Wheel, and although it’s dense and perhaps could use some editing, I don’t know how anyone could call it unreadable. Seems a bit hyperbolic.

 

[Campbell]

Mouseguard was one of the easiest games to get into that I've ever played. Straight forward conflict rules, easy character creation, premise that is coherent and functional.

Burning Wheel is a bit more to swallow, but the writing in the text is pretty easy to grok. There's just a lot of layers to gameplay.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm one of those for whom Luke Crane's writing style works well. Burning Wheel, Burning Empires, Mouse Guard... all three work great with mature-acting players... provided one is willing to use the rules.

 

[pemerton]

Burning Wheel is unreadable.
Mouse guard is unplayable in its published form.

I've never read or played Mouse Guard, but have read Burning Wheel and played it a lot. I also found Burning Wheel books some of the best guides to GMing 4e D&D. I find the way it is written pretty compelling, to be honest.

 

[clearstream]

I like Stonetop's fix. Its significantly better than DW's base and actually handles a lot of of Torchbearer Camp phase questions in a PBtA way (around water/fire, around protection vs elements/exposure, around concealment, around locale, etc). It also does what I've been doing for a good while in my DW Make Camp games and that is to disclaim decision-making on whether something goes bump in the night and offload that to a 1d6 fortune roll akin to FitD tech (with options for Adv or DisAdv given conditions). This has been my solve for a long time. Probably my best solve for this is to answer these questions via gear and moves and then make a Custom What Goes Bump in the Night move with 1d6 fortune roll; 6 = Nothing and good rest, 4/5 = Combo Danger Opportunity but the PC on-watch is ready, 1-3 = Danger and the PC on-watch is surprised.

I really, really, really don't want that extraordinarily important question to be answered by high-latitude (even if constrained to varying degrees) GM decision-making. For these sorts of games, gamestates tend to pivot (and possibly careen wildly) on the faultline of in the wild resource recharge. My preference for this is such resource recharge questions to be wholly (or as much as feasible) answered by table-facing, stable, systemitized procedures where players are working off of well-developed information density and engaging with a stable and vital decision-space around these matters.

Best summary I've read of motives for systematizing this particular inflection point in the play stream.

On DW2, I have felt hesitant about continuing with DW1 so for me a re-edition under a new owner is welcome. If that comes with some QoL improvements guided by Crane as an accomplished designer, even better. At the same time, I can appreciate concern about his past missteps and know that folk came away divided over his apology.

I'm not sure where DW2 will land for me compared with Stonetop, i.e. will it be a game I want to play given I can instead play Stonetop? But every new edition/game faces that problem. (How to differentiate in ways that matter?)

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Burning Wheel is unreadable.

I wouldn't say unreadable.

It's well written and I like the tone. If you sit down and read it linearly it's perfectly fine.

However, the meandering of Crane's writing, the unnecessary complexity of some rules (or at least how they're presented) coupled with naming rules like "Let it Ride" mean it's a really hard book to use as reference. So many rules are written in natural language, lost somewhere in a paragraph with a headers that tells you very little about the text underneath. When I read it, it was fine. When I sat down to play, the book was hell to use. But once you get past the initial hurdle, the game is great.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

the creators drama

I pulled out just this as I think you are missing an apostrophe. Only one of the creators seems to have drama. The other one, Sage LaTorra, seems like a good person. So maybe update with "the creator's drama"?

OR! If you know of drama with Sage, I guess share?

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I have never, not once, have had a person tell me that they recognized the logo on my shirt. Even at a ttrpg convention. The logo itself is very niche, and not featured super prominently in the book; and the latin-ish text around the border is, well, latin-ish. I don't actually even know what it says. All of which to say, DW suffers from a brand problem in the wider gaming community. BUT! I believe if they kickstart it, it'll get high $200k numbers if not more.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You can look at a lot of threads about PtbA games, and the consensus is that Dungeon World is not a good PtbA implementation.

Having read that consensus, it's definitely there, but a lot of it is, er... pretty low-brow.

Like, not intelligent critiques which understands what Dungeon World is specifically trying to do, but relatively dim-witted critiques that are more about it failing to check boxes and failing to do everything exactly the accepted PtbA ways and/or more interested in repudiating what Dungeon World's explicit goals were, rather than critiquing it on its own terms.

There is some more intelligent criticism on the grounds of certain parts of the system not really working well in either PtbA terms or in terms of what it's doing (I think some have been mentioned already), but really, an awful lot of the critiques of that kind are very shallow.

So I'm not sure "the consensus" is to be respected here. Especially when the same "consensus" at one point, long before Koebel did anything wrong, attempted to essentially "cancel" Dungeon World for following D&D tropes, which they considered "harmful".

OR! If you know of drama with Sage, I guess share?

AFAIK there's no drama with him, but he specifically said that if he made DW2 he would have stripped out basically everything D&D-like from DW2, right down to things like "kill monsters and take their stuff", which he (correctly, to be fair) called "colonialist". I mean, it absolutely is on a certain level, but at the same, that's kind of part of the core of D&D and similar games. But not just that - his position was that, if he was forced to make DW2, essentially everything D&D-like must go. Essentially he agreed with the "PtbA community" of years-past (which was quite a narrow community, kinda got half wiped-out when Google Plus got ditched, because so much of it was based there), that being D&D-like was "harmful". Again, I sympathize, I get the perspective, but... it's like, so make a different game! It's like saying tactical-style shooters like Call of Duty are "harmful" (again, I get it, it's not an entirely unreasonable argument), so Call of Duty should become Team Fortress 2-like.

Anyway at that point, how would it be Dungeon World? Which was designed primarily to emulate D&D tonally and feel-wise (and did a remarkable job of it).

He also just didn't really want to do it, so I am happy for him to not be involved.

 

[UnplayedRanger]

You can look at a lot of threads about PtbA games, and the consensus is that Dungeon World is not a good PtbA implementation.

That seems to only be a problem if you have a strong idea of what a PBTA game is “supposed” to be.

The few times I’ve run DW, my players and I have had a blast. I’ve ran it for rpg newbies, and old timers.

And the excellent podcast Spout Lore doesn’t seem to have trouble having fun with it.

I’ve looked at some of the alternatives and they don’t seem to scratch that same itch. But maybe I’m weird for liking hp and damage dice.

Maybe a 2e game can let DW become more of its own thing, instead of just being judge based on pbta.