So I finally got to run Dungeon World for my regular group. I wasn’t sure how they’d take to it since we often play games with quite a bit of crunch – Eclipse Phase being the most recent. It turned out they were quite happy, and after some mulling over the playbooks chose an elven druid, human cleric and a princess ( Michael Atlin’s awesome Prince(ss) ). I was expecting a Brave-style princess but my wife surprised me and opted for a middle-eastern style which set the tone nicely. During the questions we established that the elves were jungle-dwelling primitives with a shamanic culture, and the cleric was a priest of the god of knowledge charged with salvaging hidden knowledge and hiding that which proves dangerous.
We began with them approaching a town, establishing that the princess had a message to deliver from her mother to a sage dwelling there. On arrival they discovered the town overrun with cultists, who turned out to be members of a rival church to the cleric’s. Some sort of ritual was happening in the town centre which we haven’t got to yet, but they beat up some cultists and began to get a feel for how the game flows.
DW suits me down to the ground since I tend to run everything by the seat of my pants and the session went fairly smoothly. I probably need to up my game on describing the consequences of 6- results – the group managed at least 10 between them iirc.
We’re continuing the game next week so we’ll see how it pans out.
It sounds like everybody had a great time. I look forward to hearing more. Congratulations on a successful first session!
Yeah, 6- are always a little tough to handle. Just keep in mind there should always be something lurking out there. On a 6-, let it out to play. Discern Realities and Spout Lore may by a bit hard to work 6- for, but there are a couple of tricks.
For Discern Realities ask them what question they want an answer to and what they’re doing to get it. A hard move, like revealing an unwelcome truth, should flow a little easier from that.
For Spout Lore, you may want to not just give them the XP, but make it conditional on them treating some false statement with interesting consequences as true.
Thanks Paul, we finished the game on (yet) another 6- from the cleric ( I’m sure the player upset the dice gods in a previous life ), and they’ve no idea what the consequence is ( to be honest nor do I, I have a number of ideas, I’ll decide when we start again).