Your opinions are encouraged:

Your opinions are encouraged:

Your opinions are encouraged:

I’m considering making a Sword & Sorcery hack and setting for DW, something like a blend of Hyboria and Nehwon.  I know there are a couple Hyborian/Conan AW hacks, but I want it more DW-ish.

1. The only PC race is human.  How should I handle racial moves?  I’m inclined to let them pick any racial move that doesn’t involve non-human features.

2. Alignments are gone.  What should I use to replace them?

3.  How should I handle spell casters.  I’d prefer to do away with any sort of blatant spellcasting, however, I want to keep rituals.  I’m thinking to allow greater multi-classing options.  Maybe something like ‘pick 2 classes, you may freely choose moves from both.’

4. I’m sure I want the musician aspect of The Bard gone for this, so the class would really just have some moves available for multi-classing.  As for the Druid, I’m not sure if they could fit as is, or are too overtly magical.

9 thoughts on “Your opinions are encouraged:”

  1. I like the premise, but I’m not really sure what parts of DW you really want to keep. Anyway here are my thoughts.

    a. World of Dungeons is a pretty solid starting place since it eliminates a lot of what you are looking at doing. It simplifies everything to a very basic system and it would be easy to add any missing features from DW to it. There are no races and no racial moves. No alignment. On it’s own World of Dungeons is a 0e version that is pretty low powered. The magic system is pretty neat and might fit to more your cup of tea.

    b. I would eliminate Hit Points. Sword & Sorcery has always seemed more gritty to me. It wouldn’t be to hard to borrow the Harm Mechanics from Monster of the Week or another AW game. This would take a little more work, but maybe your okay with hit points.

  2. Sadly, as a post kickstarter fan, I’m in the post-kickstarter lot.  I very eagerly await the day World of Dungeons is made available to the masses.

    Thank you for your suggestions!

  3. Make a new suite of moves based on the locations of a culture to replace race. For instance, the seafaring people might have different fighters than the people who live in a desert.

    As for magic…don’t use spellcasters? Dungeon World doesn’t break like D&D does if you don’t use a class. If someone wants casting, have them take the Ritual move from the wizard book. That’s all magic the players have access to in the setting.

    Why eliminate hit-points? Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser get in trouble but survive all their stories. While gritty on paper, heroes never really die. In Nehwon, it’s even implied heroes may get special protections from fate. NPCs are totally disposable, though, but that’s per the rule-book.

    Alignment: Civilization vs Barbarism, so roughly law vs chaos, do show up in lots of pulp fantasy. Honestly, while alignment in a cosmic sense doesn’t play a huge part, alignment as rules still seem like they’d work for me in the context of the fiction. The Gray Mouser is definitely driven by different motivations than the Thieve’s Guild, even if both are theoretically in the same profession.

    One other thought is early fantasy is lousy with weirdness, weirdness that operates a lot like Bards and Druids in that it’s not really ‘magic’ it’s just stuff that’s weird in the world. Play up the fact that the druid is part of a mysterious and unique part of society, and it’s flavor doesn’t seem at all out of place in low-magic fantasy. The druid especially seems a good fit.

    YMMV, and all that. 🙂

  5. The racial moves could easily be cultural moves instead—you just need the names of four or five different cultures in the starting area, and replace each race with one of those cultural names. Bam, now you know something about the setting, and then you can ask the players leading questions to flesh it out more.

  6. As for alignments, you could drop the ethical labels but keep the actions and call them something like “traits”. “Thieves typically have one of these three traits, pick one, if you act on that trait during the session at least once then you get an XP.” And then just be flexible about letting people change traits as their characters develop away from the starting stereotypes. (There are rules, or guidance, on changing alignment, so that’s already part of the game anyhow.)

  7. I’m going to create some cultural moves to replace race moves and some, as yet undecided, moral code/ideals moves to replace alignments.  I’m even considered making Virtue and Vice moves, but, well, we’ll see.

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