Last weekend I ran the first session of my new Dungeon World campaign. We did some group world creation; I asked each player at the table for one thing they wanted to see in the game. The dwarves of the world have been savaged by some sort of deadly plague that only affects them when they’re under open sky; they’ve retreated into their mountain homes and nobody’s seen them in decades. Humans are the dominant race, but they’re incapable of performing much in the way of arcane magic. Human wizards of any real power are unheard of, though that wasn’t always the case. A long time ago there was a human wizard named Hazan-Khael, but he’s been dead a long time and nobody remembers much about him except that he was a Bad Dude. Coal power is the new thing these days; smiths use it, farmers use it, everybody who can uses it because it makes life easier (even if it also pollutes the hell out of the environment at the rates at which it’s being used).
I’ve got four PCs in the group. There’s Frey, the human druid of the swamps. He’s a bit of an eco-terrorist and hates that people use so much coal. He wants to convince people to go back to more natural forms of sustaining themselves but he’s a bit of a blunt instrument when it comes to convincing people of things. Ragothiir is an elven Marshal (a class I designed) with a loyal follower named Bromir who follows him because everybody thinks that he defeated a great warrior and bandit named Marc the Merciless. Problem is he didn’t; everyone just thinks he did. Emory is an elven ranger raised by humans with an owl named Snap. He’d like nothing more than to befriend a gryphon, and he’s heard that there’s an organization that raises and trains them somewhere in the world. He also grew up in the same neighborhood as the party’s human Thief, Telly, and has some incriminating information about him. Telly is a con man, a huckster who peddles phony cures and magic items. His favorite trick is getting everybody good and drunk with a keg of ale mixed with goldenroot, then selling them “druid insurance”.
Since that’s already a pretty long post I’ll leave it there for now, and talk about what actually happened later.