Codex Spotlight – Five Blood-Soaked Magic Items for Dungeon World

Codex Spotlight – Five Blood-Soaked Magic Items for Dungeon World

Codex – Blood was our test issue of the zine. Our ultimate goal was extremely ambitious: publish a new issue of the zine every month, on the first of every month, like clockwork. When you consider our core team had exactly zero publishing experience, you begin to realize the goal was not only ambitious, but audacious (and maybe a little stupid, haha). Before we could get close to that goal, we needed a test; we couldn’t do this project if we didn’t have some easily-repeatable structures for the features, and Codex – Blood was vital to developing those structures.

Each issue of Codex has some combination of 1) features by a single author, 2) features by a small, hand-selected group of authors, and 3) features that are entirely crowd-sourced. That blend enables us to source great material for the zine in an efficient, flexible manner. Five Blood-Soaked Magic Items for Dungeon World is an example of the second form.

The Gauntlet was built on Dungeon World. Dungeon World is in our DNA. Our early days in Houston were driven almost entirely by the fact people were joining to try out DW with us. Later, David and I started a popular DW podcast, and Gauntlet Hangouts continues to have a strong DW presence. It makes sense that Codex also features a lot of DW material. Five Blood-Soaked Magic Items is short but very, very sweet. Each item is entirely on-point in terms of both mechanical soundness and theme, and the feature has some great artwork by Allan Dotson (like the Bag of Blood-Speckled Shroomlings below). Some of the items, like the Codex of Atrocities and the Carnelian Chalice, have been the basis of whole adventures I have run in the past. It’s a rich collection of DW goodies, and as an early example of what was possible in Codex, I couldn’t be more proud of it.

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