Man, I hadn’t even seen the regular cover of this til I was putting this together. That’s uhh… well I guess Luke Cage found some chain mail made by Stussy or Jnco? Also someone give Katana back the rest of her outfit, she looks like a member of 90’s X-Force. This is XCrawl. The game of professional modern-day dungeon crawling in a Rome-themed American dystopia. You read it right. The premise is actually pretty great! Plus they seem to be making this still on kickstarters and in upscale nerdstropubs, so good for them!
System Mastery 
This game sounds like a great setting for a Smash TV remake.
In your version of the game, where classes are all just part of the schtick, where would the magic come from? Or would that be fake too, and the “wizard” shouts Fireball while throwing an incendiary grenade?
They’d still be mages at the end of the day. It’s more like the training comes without the D&D morality and story archetypes. Like how Michael Phelps can theoretically gain XP when he’s not in the ocean.
That said there’s also room for a version of the game where the players are ordinary citizens that don suits that give them the abilities and literally take them off at the end of the day. Easy class swapping that way, I guess.
I think in the Kickstarter version, which is based on Pathfinder, all the classes are redefined and all wizards become popstar bards.
It also seems like a great setting for Strike! One of the bits I remember that you didn’t mention is that you can have optional incremental healing/equipment stations that lower your score if you choose to use them, which I thought was a nice invention of the 13th Age style Campaign Loss concept.
Never got the back story though, nor how mellow the players are expected to be about the situation (apparently the DJ will often take winning teams out to dinner after the game and they’re fine with that. “Hey, I was just trying to murder you, but you survived, want a McDs?”)
The idea of Dungeon Crawl as a modern death sport is great. So much potential, you could do a Battle Royale thing with school kids dropped in a dungeon where they have to make their way out. Only one can get out of course but working together might be the best plan.
You could do wrestling matches types games with titles and rivalry, trades between teams. A system where you get points inside the dungeons for creating drama outside. You could even have rotating GMs where every player takes his turn directing the dungeon.
Horde Mode where monster enter an arena round after round without leaving time to rest so it becomes an exercice in managing resources.
man, you guys’ ideas for XCrawl sounds SO much better then the actual product.
Huh…. so James D’Amato’s Dungeon Dome is this but not immediately messed up…
Neat!