Pinball Crawl Classics Will Turn Pinball Machines into Tabletop Adventures

By Garrett Martin | October 31, 2025 | 10:22am

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Pinball Crawl Classics Will Turn Pinball Machines into Tabletop Adventures

Traditionally the relationship between pinball and tabletop RPGs has gone one way: from the table to the playfield. There have been two official Dungeons & Dragons pinball machines, including Stern’s Dungeons & Dragons: The Tyrant’s Eye, which came out earlier this year, and a whole slew of machines that are obviously riffing on D&D’s whole vibe without using the name. Goodman Games is set to flip all of that with its new line of tabletop adventures, though. Pinball Crawl Classics is a set of RPG modules based on five classic pinball games from the late ‘70s and ‘80s, and will be supported by a crowdfunding campaign that starts in January.

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Unsurprisingly the set will stick to the kind of fantasy and sci-fi themes that are common in both RPGs and pinball. The five adventures are based on Gorgar, Embyron, Centaur, Cosmic Gunfight, and Sword of Fury, with stories inspired by the art and theme of the machines. They’re designed for characters between Levels 1 and 5 in Goodman’s own Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mutant Crawl Classics games, but, according to Goodman’s site, “can easily be used with any tabletop fantasy RPG on the market.” And they’re all separate, stand-alone adventures, bundled together in a box and “tentatively” costing $69.99.

If you’re a pinball fan, you’re probably already thinking about how those five games could be adapted onto the tabletop. Sword of Fury is a gimme—it already looks and feels like an unsanctioned Dungeons & Dragons riff—and so is Gorgar, although the titular demon of the latter should make for one hell of a final battle. The other three are all sci-fi games that fall within fairly obvious subgenres. Cosmic Gunfight is space cowboys, Centaur is your Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic vehicle rampage, and Embryon... okay, Embryon‘s a little unique. Yeah, the deliciously creepy Giger-esque art tips you off that it’s groping for Alien turf, but its claustrophobic cosmic horror is rooted in pregnancy imagery, which makes me assume one of the designers at Bally was going through something really personal back in ’81. They’re all strikingly designed machines playing off immediately recognizable concepts from the pop culture of their day, and it’ll be interesting to see if Goodman can turn that evocative imagery into stories that don’t just feel like rehashes of the movies and books that inspired the games in the first place.

The crowdfunding campaign promises all kinds of perks, including “earlybird rewards,” so even though it doesn’t start for another two months you might want to put it on your radar. And if you want more information, here’s a video about the project.