Can anyone offer any advice or share any experience with running DW as a city-focused rather than dungeon/wilderness focused game? Skulduggery, heists, cons, dirty politics, mysteries and investigation, conflicted loyalties, etc.
I ask, because I was struck by the notion of converting Wrekkengutt, the dirty little setting I knocked together for the D&D5e playtest. The campaign is called The Slaughter Season (as Wrekkengutt is like fantasy Chicago during the absolute worst of the meatpacking days). There are monsters and sewers and occasional invasions, but the focus is mostly on dealing with (near)human enemies, and not always (or often) by spitting them onto spears. Things do go gloriously and grotesquely wrong quite regularly, of course. The current plot-line involves mind control delivered by sausages, and troll cancer.
A city is just a brightly lit dungeon. Write up every faction, the noble and the foul, as fronts. It is often that the desires of the noble will lead to as disastrous an end as those of the evil. Make sure that you have sympathetic people in among the foul that, when the noble move against them, the players might feel a bit of despair.
I’m kinda notorious for running DW sans dungeon. The best thing is to write tons of custom moves. Write ones about dealing with the stench or dealing with your neighborhoods’ problems so your players can roll the dice and feel it.
But way more important is write custom GM moves. That’s where the real (and I hesitate to use the word given your setting) flavor of the setting is conveyed. So “Change the Environment” might be less evocative in your setting than “Make them hungry” or something.
If you want to take a look, I wrote a dungeon starter called Precipice that’s about a boomtown. The first session runs on the assumption that you have to deal with the town before you can get to the dungeon. http://thetravatar.wordpress.com
As the others have said, Ben. Also, Jonathan Walton’s wonderful Dark Heart of the Dreamer is loaded with great stuff for this.
Bruce Baugh would you believe I have not yet read that! The lovely little book sits with its siblings, waiting.
Well, get it to it, man!
This has been pretty helpful to me as well. I’m also putting together an urban game. I’ve shameless stolen my inspiration from this post:
http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=3007.0
Hopefully henrythewhite doesn’t mind me keeping the Underwatch alive.
Lots of custom moves to reflect the city sounds like a good way to go.
That sounds great! Reminicent, a bit of Jason Corley’s proposed CSI: Waterdeep campaign idea.