I own several of the other larger Dungeon World expansions/supplements/hacks (Grim World and Inverse World.) I recommend trying either of them, if their settings appeal to you. That said, Class Warfare is by far the biggest game-changer you can get. In my mind, this is a de facto core rulebook. If your group is going to play more than one Dungeon World campaign, you should own this.
Your players get to build their class from scratch. The system for doing so is great, and you can expect to get some really cool results. The Specialties are many and varied. They determine your starting moves, so the sheer number of them means that you can expect a good bit of variety, even among your first level characters! The system does a great job of handling Race and Alignment, giving the player a great deal of flexibility in this regard. I will note that spellcasting works (it's modeled after Dungeon World) but it feels a bit less polished than the rest of the text. I wish I could better put this into words, but it's been a minute since I've used this rule set.
You can buy numerous 3rd-party Dungeon World playbooks and spend at least as much as the cost of this book. These playbooks are great because they give you a fair amount of variety without any prep on your part. For impromptu games, I love being able to whip out a big stack of these so the players can jump right into the action. Class Warfare gives you something entirely different. It takes longer, but the payoff is a class well-tailored to the player's roleplaying interests, which should add to player investment. Hence this is perfect for longterm games, but not so great for demoing Dungeon World.
tl;dr: If you like the general mechanics of Dungeon World but wish it had character creation closer to that of, say, GURPs or Shadowrun, then this book is for you. There is a lot of material packed into this text, and you'll do a lot of flipping back and forth. Hence, I highly recommend getting a physical copy to plop down in front of your experienced players before your next campaign.
|