Preview: Dungeonslayers 4th Edition

Today Christian Kennig and the German Uhrwerk Verlag (which is the German licensee for Space 1889, Deadlands and L5R) announced that the latest edition of Dungeonslayers will be released in print later this year at the SPIEL 2010 in Essen. If you enjoyed the so-called “old-fashioned” roleplaying game so far, you’ll be in for a treat.

While the 4th edition of Dungeonslayers will be over 160 pages long, the core rules aren’t that much longer than in its predecessor, but it’s still 99% compatible to the older editions. Nevertheless DS4 has been improved in all aspects.

The book is now fully illustrated, contains a table of contents and a detailed index, new and optimized rules, an improved game mastering section, new equipment, three fully-fleshed out adventures and a setting! The games appendices contain treasure tables, rules for miniature gaming, a toolbox for creating your own player races and a condensed version of my firearms rules.

One of the new features of DS4 will be the hero classes like paladin, druid, archmage or assassin. These classes will grant access to new talents and abilities and allow to individualize your characters even further.

Christian also managed to make combats in DS4 more tactical and fun without making the rules more complex by adding Slayerpoints. You earn those points by hurting your enemies and they can be used to activate special moves, ignore some minor damage, or temporarily increase your stats.

In my opinion DS4 makes a good game even better and I can’t wait to get my hands on a print copy with will be available in October.

Here are some pictures from the upcoming old-fashioned roleplaying game:

These teasers have to suffice for now. I’ll post some more info on DS4 over the next few weeks. So stay tuned!

As far as I know, the Dungeonslayers translation team is already eager to start working on a English translation, but given the size of the latest edition, this may take a while. In the meantime I will try to keep you updated. If there are any questions about DS4 and the print release, please feel free to ask. Any questions, I can’t answer myself, I will relay to the game’s designer Christian Kennig.