I’m also reading some Dungeon Crawl Classics books I got in PDF cheap recently. Both DCC and EP together are interesting as they’re getting me to think about the entire evolution of tabletop RPGs and some of the social issues intertwined with them.
Dungeon Crawl Classics is an RPG and line of cheap-ish adventures. It’s basically an offshoot of D&D 3rd edition, but stripped to the bone: Characters gain 10 levels (but good luck doing that… Keep reading) and there’s a lot of elements like “race as class” taken from 70s/80s Basic D&D editions. A core element is the “Character Funnel” in which you create a pile of 0 level characters (Roll 3d6 for stats, in strict order. Roll for a non-adventuring Profession, which gives you a starting weapon and a piece of equipment that might be useful. Roll for one other piece of equipment.)
You play this ‘squad’ until they level up. Most will die horribly.
Adventures are intentionally simplistic: They’re meant to hearken back to early D&D where an adventure was basically a funhouse dungeon that gave mere lip service to making any sense, accommodating the physical requirements of the creatures within, or telling a story (That’s the player’s and DM’s job).
Even the art is kind of old-school, with several artists with ties to early D&D. Styles are all B&W art beyond the covers, which tend to be a bit on the ‘lurid’ side. (I do wish they’d move to more of the 2e era oil paintings, but that’s a personal issue.) Think old pulp sci-fi/fantasy.
They also have a Mutant Crawl Classics that’s a compatible add-on for more post-apocalyptic adventures in the style of early Gamma World releases.
Rules are simplistic but look workable. Fighters get a vague ‘Stunting’ rule that encoruages them to do more than just hit things, but are not overly complicated as everything hooks into the common system. Casters can cast more than their AD&D/D&D counterparts, but with caveats: every spell cast is a big deal requiring at least one roll to resolve, usually multiple. A Cleric rolling poorly to cast earns the disfavor of their deity while wizards may suffer Corruption and take on tentacle-ish aspects. Wizards can contact a Patron to control and channel their magic, or go it alone. Thieves (and halflings) play with the Luck stat a lot, treating it as a renewable resource while everyone else uses Luck sparingly to get out of deep trouble.
It is, in many ways, an unashamedly thorough attempt to mimic older gaming styles.
That said, it’s also modern in many ways I find desirable: It didn’t keep AD&D 1e’s weird gender-related limits. The art has some cheesecake, but it splits among men and women. There’s a single-panel cartoon that makes fun of the ‘chainmail bikini’ issue, even. I feel like they’ve done an impressive job trying to merge the modern core with a decidedly old-fashioned aesthetic.