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Grimwild is the spiritual successor to Dungeon World. Thematically, the game feels like D&D with all of the tropes of the classes packaged up nicely as backgrounds and paths. The rules are short and sweet and pack a lot of punch -- with a ton of novel ideas that take some real chewing on and digesting in order to see how they elevate gameplay.
Take diminishing pools for example, which turn the predictable clocks from Blades in the Dark into random speedy hourglasses that keep the players on edge the whole time. Consider the Vigilance rules around Hint/Reveal/Strike that negate the need for boring chore of deciding what to do when someone says "I failed my Perception check!" Even Vantage, Wises, Story, and Potency worm their way into your brain as workarounds so you DON'T need to roll dice for something you're good at -- you JUST DO IT.
Of course, the star of the game are things like spellcasting touchstones and crucibles that mash up a few thematic words and generate creatively designed spells on the fly, tweaking the power up and down mechanically. It hits the perfect blend of the narrative improv and mechanical crunch that I want from my D&D heartbreaker. This is game that we've picked up in between D&D weekly games for one-shot material. This is the game we've converted our level 10 D&D characters in a 2 year long campaign module into Grimwild PCs to run a faster, smoother theater of the mind game.
Grimwild will be a well loved book in the years to come, with an exploration deck alongside it -- for those nights I want to play a solo game with my old D&D PCs that were just sitting around in D&D Beyond, doing nothing.
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