I hear a v5 is coming, anyone who needs this many renditions to get a white box clone "right" is really the first red flag. There is only one opponent in the ring now, White Box FMAG. since S&W White Box proper decided to take it's place in a chair in corner while watching other games fuck its girlfriend, and other white box clones generally include Greyhawk additions and therefore take themselves out of contention.
But this isn't about that. This is about some 5E gamers touring the original game and rewriting it - same story as Barrows & Borderlands, but a bit more autism and the attention to detail autism brings. I know that because my last sentence in that previous paragraph isn't correct. Like FMAG and Iron Falcon, DD4 includes the thief and therefore puts itself in contention with games like these and Blueholme Journeymanne. While it sources that from Greyhawk, it doesn't source variable weapon damage, which means Iron Falcon leaves contention by actively winning the contest.
Looking through this book, I really see no reason for this game to exist. It's nearly identical to FMAG. Where it's different it's generally worse. The game uses the same lazy non-percentile thief skills on a d6 roll that FMAG uses, but doesn't have the decency to include incremental advancement, starting the thief at 4-in-6 (66%) at all thief skills (and secret doors checks) and never advancing from there. This is what I call white board design, making a class advancement boring by accident due to lack of table play and hashing out bad design considerations through play experience. I realize we're 4-5 iterations into this fucking game but I think this game may have seen less meaningful playtest sessions than it has editions. Such is the way
Let me be clear, like Hyperborea 1E this isn't 1975 so there's no fucking reason to limit the dice in your game to something more restrictive than the traditional 7-die set that everyone has. If you want percentiles and want to be some sort of nostalgic pussy and only use d20s and d6s in your lame white box clone, perhaps use the die that best used for flat percentages. The d20. You could then even have it increment over time to make the class less boring. It's stupid and you should just use d% or discard the thief but it seems everyone has the wrong idea on purpose and just wants to dice everything outside of combat with d6s because otherwise "that's not white box" or some stupid pseudo-nostalgic shit.
But the people that wrote this aren't being nostalgic. They're younger than me and started playing with 3E or later. You can tell right off if someone started with WotC editions or TSR editions. I can smell it in the text, this book was far less subtle than the last fake nostalgic game I read. This is performative nostalgia in a product looking for trappings of OD&D. And it's not a very good performance as the book reads like stereo instructions. The Handbook for the Recently Old-School.
The only piece of this entire game worth looking at is the procedural shit for creating a dungeon, underworld exploration, wilderness exploration, and campaigning. Even then it's mostly just gap design, looking for spots where there's a hole in for example Iron Falcon and filling it up or using it as an example to build something better in IF.
