Review of Dungeonesque Player's Guide

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The Dungeonesque: Red Box RPG is a game described as "5e optimized for old-school play" by its creators. In a certain way, it's modelled after Basic Dungeons & Dragons, as the game's goal is to provide its players with a version of 5e Dungeons & Dragons that comes in small booklets rather than large hardcovers. It is still fully compatible with D&D 5e, though.

The Booklets
The game comes on two booklets: The Player's Guide and the Gamemaster's Guide, with the latter including a bestiary. It is available as a PDF as well as a in print via OneBookShelf's print-on-demand service. The creators also encourage players to print their own copies on Lulu or other services. The PDFs are relatively small, load fast, but don't come with a hyperlinked table of contents or index. PDF bookmarks are available, but the creators went a bit overboard with them. For example, every single paragraph of the Open Game License is a bookmark - with its full text. So is every single ability. This makes the booksmarks almost unusable. However, both booklets only have sixty pages, and are well-organised enough to be usable without bookmarks without too much of a hassle.

The editing is a bit sloppy in places. There is a spell description for Goodberry, a spell neither mentioned in the wizard's or cleric's spell list, nor a spell they can actually cast. The rules support characters from level 1 to level 15, though wizard spells are available all the way up to level 9. The layout of the Player's Guide uses three columns (like Basic D&D), the Gamemaster's Guide uses two. The fonts are slightly fancy but readable. However, the layout suffers from being too cramped. There's very little space between anything. Most pages are massive walls of texts.

In the monster section, some stats blocks are broken up across multiple columns or even pages. This was probably done to reduce the pages count (a goal of Dungeonesque according to the creators), and while it does make the booklets slimmer, it ultimately reduces their utility. Nevertheless, both PDFs are about 60 pages long, which is significantly longer than the initially announced 30 to 40 pages.

The Art
One of the selling points of Dungeonesque is its art, which is what sets it apart from the D&D 5e Basic Rules. There are about 30 pieces of art in both booklets combined, all of them in black and white. The exception is the colour illustration on the cover - which is the same for both the Player's Guide and the Gamemaster's Guide. There are a couple of nice illustrations, mostly one where player characters encounter monsters. However, most pieces are simply characters posing in front of a white background, weapons, or treasure. Overall, the illustrations are nice addition, but rather generic and not very memorable.

The Rules
The core of any RPG are its rules. In the case of Dungeonesque, said rules are compatible with D&D 5e, its parent game. The reason for this is simple: Dungeonesque is for the most part a copy of the D&D 5e Basic Rules, and based on the D&D 5e SRD. Like the Basic Rules, Dungeonesque has four classes - cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard - with a single archetype available for each of them. There are a five races (human, elf, dwarf, halfing, and half-elf) couple of backgrounds as well as everything else one would expect such as weapon lists, prices lists, or spell lists. Most of it is identical to the Basic Rules, and while some rules are described in less words, the difference remains insignificant.

There are a couple of places where Dungeonesque differs from D&D 5e. There are rules for 0-level characters, the Basic D&D reaction table and a handful other things, but almost nothing that a game master with a copy of Basic D&D couldn't do themselves with minimal effort. The monster section is notably shorter than the one in the Basic Rules, but this is mostly due to the aforementioned cramped layout and minimal monster descriptions. The game's Indiegogo campaign mentioned tactics for spellcasting monsters, but these are not to be found in Dungeonesque's release version. What is also absent is any form of discussing what makes this game old school, what old school means in the context of this game, or how Dungeonesque is intended to be played to deliver an old-school experience. There is a short chose-your-own-adventure section (once more in style of Basic D&D), which is nice but irrelevant for those familiar with older D&D editions, and not helpful enough for those who want to oldschoolifty D&D 5e.

Two more things are worth noting about Dungeonesque. The first thing is the Open Game License, which claims everything as Product Identity that is not directly lifted from the SRD. While that is not relevant for most players or game masters (and most of Dungeonesque is just SRD content anyway), the fact that the authors do not want to share their game with anyone but effectively re-sell someone else's work leaves a rather sour taste.

The second thing is Dungeonesque's price tag. For those who did not support its Indiegogo campaign, the game costs $25 - per booklet. Thus, the Player's Guide and the Gamemaster's Guide cost a combined $50. This price is quite frankly insane for a product like this. Interestingly, the PDF costs as much as the combined PDF and print version, so at least one gets a hardcopy on top of the digital version. Not that this justifies the $25 in any way.