Crowns 2nd Edition

8/29/2025 - What is Crowns 2e About?

68 days ago byWard Against Evil (@ReeseSurles)

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What is Crowns 2e About?

As strange as it sounds, it took me a really long time to figure out what this game was about, and I’m happy to say I figured it out before it was released to print. Originally, my plan to build a dungeon-crawler that had fun combat and base building. This was THE PLAN for most of the game’s development until I wrote a side game calledAketon.

In my opinion, Aketon is just a straight up better dungeon-crawler than Crowns 2e. It’s much simpler, it’s much harsher, and its much less focused on things that don’t matter to dungeon crawling. It’s more streamlined, as it were.

But where does that leave Crowns 2e? Is it just an inferior product? The game is still fun, so why is it fun if it’s inferior at its intended goal?

I’ve broken up Crowns 2e’s development into four major phases:

The Improvements Phase
The Overlord Phase
The West Marches Phase
The Old World Phase

The Improvements Phase

I first started work on Crowns 2e immediately following the release of Crowns 1e in 2022. In this stage, the game was going to be EXACTLY what the previous game was, but I had noticed some problem points with combat and/or a few of the systems that needed some grease.

This initial rewrite was just going to improve a few things, nothing special. It would be mostly compatible with the old game and would clarity in areas I thought were confusing.

The Overlord Phase

Eventually, I realized that the game was being built in such a way that it really encouraged epic battles and, thanks to the way that the faction and warbands systems worked at the time, warfare in a lot of ways. So, the idea of the game changed: The bad guys had won, the good guys had lost, and you were the few rebels brave enough to try and contest the overlord of your region.

There were a ton of rules for faction conflict, region generation, making overlords (BBEGs), all of that:

However, the problem was that the other half of the game was still a dungeon-crawler. The more I pulled away from dungeon crawling, the less the game made sense and would need a full re-write and redesign. I was generating more work for myself than I needed.

So, I cut out the overlord ideas and put them into another game I’m working on and returned to the basics.

The West Marches Phase

After dropping the Overlord ideas, I leaned much more heavily into West Marches play. This world didn’t have cities, it didn’t have overlords, it was an unexplored frontier infested with monsters. You played as treasure hunters (Seekers) who sought to get rich on the ruins you find out there. This was the pitch I gave on Backerkit. Here are the problems with this approach:

A lot of other games do this and they do it as well as or almost as well as Crowns 2e
It’s hard to sell people a game that does what their favorite game already does

Partway through this phase is when I wrote Aketon in order to get a bunch of ideas that weren’t fitting into Crowns. That really showed me what this game was lacking in that department and how it could be improved. After a long while, I finally got to fixing it with the final phase.

The Old World Phase

The world IS a frontier infested with monsters, the bad guys DID win and the good guys are screwed, and you ARE Seekers in search of treasure, but you have a purpose: to restablish human civilization out here. You were willing to fight back the horrors of the night, which greatly outnumber and overpower you, but you’re fighting smart and using what magic equipment you scavenge against them. You represent the last hope for a scattered humanity, and without you the monsters WILL win. Not in a few years, but in a fewmonths.

You will establish an outpost and attempt to pacify the land. New threats will be cropping up, some threats will just be too dangerous to fight at first, and the world is reacting to your actions.

This does not inherently mean you are the good guys! It just means you have a goal you can give your players: “Get gold, bring it back to town, spend it to improve yourselves and the town, and prepare for when things get worse (and they will get worse).”

There are no wizards here, there are no sages or archives to reference, this world isdying. If you want those things, you must become those things and/or find them in the wilderness.

Going Forward

Writing new content for Crowns 2e has been a bit of struggle lately because of the identity crisis it was having. Now that we’re out the other side, it’s much easier. Your job is to:

Collect the loot you need to win from the wilderness, which is the only place that could have it
Stop monster factions from taking over the region before its too late
Improve the region by providing order (for good or for ill)

And try not to die.

Thanks for Reading!

until next time…

Good Luck on your Adventures!

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