Pinnacle Warrior 2 – Ilona Andrews

“Pinnacle Warrior” is a superior dungeon-crawl book. ‘Dungeon crawl’ is a narrow focus: 85% of the book consists of “monster attacks you, you attack the monster, monster dies, twenty experience points gained”, or its equivalent. If that doesn’t float your boat, you’re not going to like this book.

PW manages that narrow focus well. The other 15% matters - allowing the characters to be interesting, placing those characters within a larger world, fleshing out that larger world. The 85% is well-handled, with the characters advancing quickly enough that they are constantly encountering new challenges, and acquiring new tools with which to do so.

PW has a quirk I found interesting regarding wounds. In most dungeon-crawling books - as in most of the role-playing games in their ancestry - wounds are abstract. A wound means that you lose a fraction of your “hit points”. Healing means you gain them back. PW meets that abstraction half way: A wound is a broken arm or a spear in your back - and since it happens in the middle of a fight, you either cope or you don’t. Healing still (usually) restores the victim to the status quo ante.