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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Canada_K" data-source="post: 2009184" data-attributes="member: 3735">The Bottom Line: Oh dear!The Nitty Gritty Review:The Premise: To put the concept crudely, Dungeon World is Ravenloft underground.  It is an insulated dimension of endless rock, administered by the mysterious and all-powerful "Caretakers".  The Caretakers take people from their own worlds at the moment of their death, to use them to fulfill their own incomprehensible purposes.  The who, what and why of the Caretakers is left to the DM.  Countless caverns and chambers are carved into the stone of this place, making it essentially an endless dungeon.The concept is very cool, but that's about it.The Game: The largest chunk of the book is spent detailing (I use that term loosely) 25 levels of the Dungeon World.  Each has its own theme, for example: - a level of duergar - the lair of an ancient red dragon - the lair fo an ancient blue dragon - part of the lost city of Atlantis - an extension of the plane of elemental fire - a level infested with warring formians and spiders - an aquatic level inhabited by warring tritons and lizard menYou get the idea.The Look: There is good use of space throughout.  There are a lot of words packed into this baby, and not a lot of wasted paper.  The drawings are pretty feeble, and in some cases unrecognizeable.  All in all I would say the art was terrible!  The maps are also universally poor.  They were probably meant to be printed in color, but in black and white they were far too dark, drab, and just plain ugly.  A lot of them didn't have a compas or a scale.What Works: As I said above the concept is a neat one.  And level 25 was something truly unique, and I throughly enjoyed it.What Doesn't Work: The whole thing is disjointed, inconsistent, and severely lacking in detail.  I agree with another reviewer in saying it had a very distinct 1st edition feel... but not in a good way.  Each room contained a monster, a treasure, and a description, and precious little else.  Little to no time is spent explaining NPC motivations, or even giving them personalities.  Another thing that troubled me was that these dozens of races on the different levels apparently don't interract.  Obviously they have to, but there should be some detail in the book.  Just because two levels aren't directly connected doesn't mean the inhabitants don't have frequent contact.  There are two evil ancient dragons in close proximity, they should be fighting, spying, and undermining each other constantly.  A paladin has set up an underground town of goodness in the same neighborhood as a well-established community of devils and an outpost of demons.  Huh?  There just isn't enough back-story here to make the encounters credible.I suspect that each of these 25 levels was designed to be a stand-alone little dungeon, and that someone decided to shoe-horn them together under a very thin plot device.  It doesn't work very well.  The Ruins of Undermountain is an example of a sprawling dungeon that works, so I know it can be done. The book is also burdened with poor grammar, spelling errors, outright rule violations, stat block inconsistencies, and things in the book that aren't on the map (or vice-versa or both).  I'd say Dungeon World was poorly edited.This book cost me $50 Canadian.  For that money I was expecting a little more.  This was my first experience with a Fast Forward Entertainment product, and I'll say now it will be very hard to convince me to try another one.  Read the other reviews and draw your own conclusions, but I'm afraid I just can't recommend this one.</blockquote>

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