This book is a real mixed bag.

For players looking to get more of that D&D character creation style crunch, Class Warfare is a godsend. Dungeon World has beautifully simple PC archetypes, but from folks, they're too simple, and CW fills that gap perfectly.

For anyone else, the character creation process feels rather arcane and the book isn't well laid out (especially from a typography perspective).

Phenomenal ideas, relatively poor execution.

Ths is exactly what I'd been wanting for my Dungeon World games: a well thought-out system allowing players to create highly customized characters without destroying the game's simplicity. Even beyond the included options, it provides a framework on which to hang new material of my own.

Casual players will probably be overwhelmed by the volume of options, so it's best suited for use by GMs or players who enjoy character creation as a its own sort of mini-game, but if you're one of those, it will also assist you in building up a library of custom playbooks to hand off to players who just want to sit down at the table and start gaming.

Class Warfare is a mess!

Just picked this up for my Dungeon World game due to all the great reviews. Not all that impressed to say the least. Layout that makes everything seem smashed together. Unclear explanations of some of the core ideas. Opens with a brief explanation about building classes but then just becomes a huge list of poorly explained class abilities. Confusing. Ugly font. Awful art work. No art would be an improvement. I wouldn't recommend getting this for any reason.

$19.26 Canadian for this train wreck is absurd.

Lots of excellent free stuff available for Dungeon World made by the community. Well layed out documents that look the same as the official play sheets.

Just my 2 cents...

As a pure supplement to give you more mileage out of Dungeon World, this product is fun. As a resource to help you in examining, deconstructing, and researching Dungeon World class design, it's absolutely incredible. If you enjoy playing Dungeon World and are dipping your toes into the idea of making brand new playbooks, you can't go wrong owning this. It's a fantastic reference and touchstone for class design.

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.

THIS IS WORTH EVERY PENNY YOU PAY!!! It is a step-by-step deconstruction of Dungeon World character design, well laid out, and easy to follow.

Amazing toolkit for anyone designing classes. Also a great way to innovate if your players run out of classes.

Works well with "Funnel World".

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of the PDF, 'cause I helped the author in the Beta stage of his work, with feedback, humble advices, typos searching etc.

Now I have the final product in my hands, and I have to say that it's impressive. If you need to create custom playbooks for your Dungeon World campaign, search no more. Here you'll find tons of moves, options, even additional spells. You can just twist a class you already like, or you can build a brand-new one, combining "specialties" (sort of class chunks) like Pilgrim + Crusader + Shadowmancer: now I easily obtained a custom class like a wandering templar with shadow based powers! :D A thick book with 500+ pages, and more than 60 combinable specialties, the only "problem" is that you'll need LOT of time to read all those options. Final note: Inside you'll find almost no pictures, no nice illustrations. It's a huge wall of text. In this kind of books I don't care a lot about the graphic part, but if you search a beautifully illustrated manual, then remove a star from the final vote. Of course, a book like that with more than 60 inspirational pictures for every specialty should be some kind of wet dream for any D.W. fan, but I understand it's an unthinkable thing to finance... Well, I hope Johnstone will become rich enough to propose a eye-caching super illustrated version, in the future!