Donjon is an RPG that harkens back to the good old days of D&D dungeon crawls.

This is old school role playing, where the Dungeon Master is the enemy, and NPCs are just there to give you experience points. If you read the Knights of the Dinner Table comic, and are reminded of your first gaming group, then you started out with this sort of role playing.

Donjon tries to recreate the feel of those early days of role playing, but has some truly cool features that make it totally unlike D&D. The struggle between DM and player is made official, and the player is given weapons to use in the rules.

I'll start the review by mentioning one of the minor features of Donjon that, in my opinion, should have been in D&D from the start. We all remember the days of laboriously keeping track of what was in your character's backpack, because if the DM could screw you over when you didn't have a couple of iron spikes or ten foot pole, he would. (How did those ten foot poles fit into the packs, anyway?)

Donjon removes all the record keeping from inventory management. Characters have an inventory stat, and when they need something that their character could have been expected to pack, the player rolls against the inventory stat. A success means that the item was indeed packed and is available to use. A failure means that the character forgot that item.

This is cool, because it eliminates the need to spend precious game time buying things in town. You just assume that it happened, and figure out later what the character actually bought, as the items are needed.

The biggest difference between Donjon and other role playing games, though, is in the way that the results of actions are narrated.

Let's say that a character wants to check for an ambush. They roll against the appropriate score, and if they succeed, they tell the DM what they found! This is one area where the battle between DM and players is moved into the rules. The DM might want an ambush to happen, but if the player succeeds their check, they can rule that no ambush is in sight. Or if they want to get in a light workout, they can rule that the ambush is a handful of kobolds.

The DM, of course, is free to pervert the player's results in any way, without actually violating them. If the ambush isn't in sight, then maybe that's because it's a bunch of invisible stalkers. Or if the ambush is a handful of kobolds, maybe that's because the ogres got lost and turn up a couple of rounds into the fight.

Another area of conflict between DMs and players has always been in the players' desires for powerful loot, and the DM's desire to keep his campaign manageable. Donjon gives players the upper hand in this conflict. When players defeat a monster or recover some treasure, they get to roll to see how powerful or valuable of treasure they found. And then the player gets to decide what they found!

Need a nice vorpal sword? Get a good result on your treasure roll, and you've got it.

This is really the one aspect of Donjon where the balance between player and DM breaks down. The rules as stated give the player too much ability to rake in highly powerful treasure too early. A typical modification to the rules to rebalance this is to not allow the character's looting bonus to be used when determining the power of magic items found.

Donjon is a fun way to relive the essence of old school dungeon crawls, but without going to all the work that's needed to create a D&D campaign. The focus is on more of a free flowing game where everyone contributes to the narrative, with often hilarious results.

Donjon is available in PDF form for instant download through DriveThruRPG.com.