Dungeons & Delvers: Red Book Release

UPDATE: You can now purchase Dungeons & Delvers Core Rulebook from the Big Geek Emporium. This avoids any delays in receiving the PDF.

The "red book" edition Dungeons & Delvers is now publicly available, in a variety of formats (see below). You get them all by paying a single price: hopefully there's something there to satisfy everyone's tastes.

As with the "black book" edition, this is essentially Dungeons & Dragons how we would do it, greatly expanded upon and refined thanks to feedback and another couple years of additional playtesting.

Here are some key differences between this and other d20 derivatives:

• Flexible character creation and progression. Classes besides spellcasters get to make meaningful choices throughout the course of the game: you're never locked into an archetype or path. You can also to one degree or another control the complexity of your character, and care was taken to help ensure that the complex choices weren't the "best" ones.
• Different take on races, classes, and monsters. While many races and critters are inline with what you'd expect, many creatures have been tweaked or wholly reimagined both visually and/or mechanically. Elves are fairly similar, but instead of a high- or wood variant, you choose from light or dark. Instead of tieflings you have cambions, and there's one flavor for every sin. Kobolds are a collection of diminutive spirit-folk, a few of which possess overtly magical capabilities (such as conjuring flames). Ghouls are shapeshifting demons that can steal the visages of those they devour. Angels aren't all simply winged humanoids (and when they have wings tend to feature lots of eyes).
• Split hit points. Characters and most monsters have a pool of Wound and Vitality Points. Vitality Points better represent minor injuries and exhaustion, whilst Wound Points are more akin to "meat" points. VP recovers relatively quickly through increasingly longer periods of rest (starts at 10 minutes, and goes up from there), while WP replenishes far more gradually (x per day). Some attacks--such as a spider's venomous bite--and effects also only function, or function differently, depending on whether they inflict WP damage.
• Armor grants Damage Resistance. While armor makes you harder to "hit" (or rather, harm with weapon attacks), it can also absorb a bit of the damage. Some attacks can bypass armor, either partially or entirely (such as penetrating weapons and psychic attacks). Luckily armor can be made from various materials, making them more resilient and able to better resist different sorts of attacks.
• Less reliance on magic (and magical healing). While magic is assumed to exist by default, the game operates just fine without it. This is made easier thanks to Vitality Points and alchemical potions, but you can tweak VP (and WP) recovery and potions to make things even deadlier.
• Varying magic systems that actually make sense. No more pseudo-Vancian magic (which doesn't make any sense). In fact, there's no unified magic system that applies to everyone (though a few classes rely on similar mechanics because it made sense). Each system is built around the concept of flavor-first: figuring out how it would work or be explained "in game", and then reinforcing it mechanically.
• Simple, effective crafting. Learning a craft requires time and money, and the more you make the better you get. Some require a roll, but it's a straightforward process. Keep at it, and eventually you'll be able to craft items of a quality superior to what you could normally purchase.
• Waste not, want not. Not all treasure is gold and gems, and not every beast happens to have a hoard, but if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty many monsters have something someone wants (including you, if you're practicing a craft skill).

The pack comes with eight PDFs. If might take an hour or so to deliver the PDFs, depends on if we're at home or sleeping when you buy it, but if you don't get a response from us within a day, email us (david.m.guyll@protonmail.com) so we can get it to you sooner than later. You can even just email us right away to make sure we see it.

Four are black and white, and the other four are full color: there's one of each for a digest-sized Player's Handbook and Game Master's Guide, and both digest- and letter-sized PDFs that feature all of the content in one file.

Note that due to page dimensions, the letter-sized PDFs are laid out differently, and in some cases art is placed in different sections.

Here are a few pages from the letter-sized version of the book, so you have an idea of about what to expect in terms of layout and quality:

  $19.99