Looks like I won’t be running Pathfinder tonight so I thought I would talk about furthering my ideas about classes…

Looks like I won’t be running Pathfinder tonight so I thought I would talk about furthering my ideas about classes that turn Dungeon World on it’s head. My first shot at this was with the Apostle of Peace. With an Apostle of Peace in play, all players have an incentive to bring the violence level down. This changes a lot of what Dungeon World is about. There are still threats that even the Apostle of Peace will stand against, undead, demons, monsters with no ability to reason but over all they are more interested in reaching a non-violent solution than your typical Dungeon World character. I admit freely that much of what I came up with for the Apostle of peace came from the two AW playbooks, Touchstone and Solace. I saw the utterly disruptive power they had and coupled it with my favorite Prestige Class from 3.5.

So what is the next step? The next step is to build. Build people and places. Dungeon World has a system for managing the settlements that surround the dungeons that the PCs are exploring. This system is mostly in the DM’s hands and the only way that the PCs get to mess with is indirectly. I want to create a class that changes that and gives the players a chance to dig in and really make a difference in a location. At the lower levels this will mean that the class has abilities that allow it to discover the things the town needs and the things standing in the way of what the town needs and gives them bonuses when going after those things. At the higher levels this will about pushing townsfolk into positions to create the surpluses that the town needs to grow and discovering individuals outside of the town who can help as well.

The final piece is governance but I am not sure what that means quite yet. I know that it has to do with authority and the ability to distribute that authority. The key moves of this class will be to expand it’s authority and give it’s moves to others. Like I said, this class is the most up in the air as I really need to define the second class before I can describe this one as “the space the other leaves open”. This class would include the ability to muster armies and declare war which solves the big problems that the Apostle of Peace are going to cause. There will be some who will not negotiate, there will be those in Dungeon World who want to watch it burn, this is the class that answers “What do we do with those guys?’. This classes answer is to destroy them with overwhelming odds. 

Together these three classes are meant for a very specific kind of game, not every Dungeon World needs them, I’m not sure any but my own little Dungeon World where I want to watch this play out need them. I do know that I would likely not lay them all out on the table at the first session unless I had talked to my players about it and they were bought in to the idea of this kind of game. I would leave these classes in reserve until someone lost a character or hit level 10+17XP. Only then would I throw out these options and I would probably only throw in the Apostle of Peace until someone had hit level 10+17XP or the story seemed to be moving in a more political bent.