Dungeon World 2: Year One

The Journey So Far

Happy Holidays from the Dungeon World 2 team! It's been an amazing busy year working on the game, and today we wanted to look back on the highs and lows of 2025, and look forward to what's to come in 2026.

The Beginning

Exactly one year ago Luke Crane and John Dimatos—owners of the Dungeon World license—announced to the community, after months of interviews and meetings, that both Spencer Moore and I, Helena Real, would be the co-designers of a new version of the game, 13-14 years after the original was published.

Of course, we had been in meetings and working for a couple of months at that point, and we had already come to agree on a few basic tenets of our design moving forward which we shared at the time. Our intention to come up with “a new way to create compelling fantasy stories at your table”; we defined DW2 as “a game of conversational adventure fantasy”; and we mentioned that we wanted to include “exciting action, danger, and climactic moments, but [...] also focus on downtime, drama, and the shared moments between the characters.”

During this time we already had plenty of rules, moves, and playbooks in place, and we were privately playtesting