Sword & Sorcery: Immortal Souls

This is one of those Kickstarters I regret letting pass me by. Sword & Sorcery: Immortal Souls is comfortably the best dungeon crawler of its generation I have come across, and it is a shame that Gremlin Project did not support it in production as fully as it deserved, while Ares did not push it harder. With wider distribution it might cost more, but it would be sitting on a great many more tables.

The core system is solid: you enter the dungeon, face what it puts in front of you, and roll dice to settle matters in the proper dungeon-crawling manner. Standard difficulty is judged well; it does not pat you on the head, but neither does it punish you merely for turning up.

Officially, you are all in this together. In practice, once someone dies, the race begins to loot the body first. That is where the game remembers that cooperation tastes better with a little unnecessary greed, and the table laughter arrives without any help at all. Right then: who died?

I am not usually the person who gets excited by these hippy, everybody-hugs-together concepts, yet this gave me exactly what I wanted: honest fighting, honest dice, and a reason to care about every hero until they become the corpse their friends are searching. It is genuinely very good.