Couldn’t get this idea out of my head today.

Couldn’t get this idea out of my head today. It’s a bit LOTR-ish: give a powerful artifact to a rustic and see what they do.

Originally shared by J. Walton

Spawn Point: An Intro Adventure for Dungeon World (and WoDu)

For 1d4 players.

You are not a fancy adventurer like the types that go deep into dungeons and fight monsters. That’s just not your style. Why would you do that when you can make a decent enough living as a trapper? You might not own your own castle or go on expeditions halfway around the world, but being a smart trapper — knowing where the best spawn points are and knowing how to set up a trap that insta-kills the beasties that appear — keeps you fed and warm at night (wrapped in Grasnak pelts), and on a good day might even net you a Lesser Vitality Potion or maybe a Medium Orb, something that you can fence for a bottle of rotgut. What more could you want?

The hardest part is making sure other trappers keep their hands off your dropped loot until you can make the rounds and collect it. Well, that, and making sure you don’t accidentally step in some other goon’s deathtrap while you’re wandering around checking your spawn points. There’s a lot of sketchy trappers out there that don’t respect the fact that you’ve been working these same spawn points for years before they showed up. Carpetbaggers, the lot of ’em.

Still, life was pretty good for the most part. Until just now.

See, you took one or two of your friends to go check the traps. Somebody had been pilfering your goods and you wanted to see if you could catch them in the act and rough ’em up a bit. Nothing too harsh, just intimidate them and make it clear you wouldn’t tolerate that kind of behavior. Plus, you wanted to show your friends this ingenious new trap that you set up over a green Roktar spawn, a bladed thing that lops off their heads despite the bone frill that marks them as superior to the blue Roktars.

That’s when you saw it. It caught your eye because it definitely wasn’t one of your traps. It was a crude beam-swinger with a spiked end, way too amateur-hour for you. But sitting within the drop zone was the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen: the Greater Arc of All Dooms, a level-16 shadow-cloaked scimitar with a 0.00000001% probability of being dropped by a chromatic Roktar, much less a green one. The odds were impossible to calculate, but it was without a doubt a once-in-a-lifetime drop.

So you took it, right. What else were you supposed to do?

Here’s the thing, though: nobody in your backwater village has the kind of cash to buy this off of you. But they’d be happy to kill you for it, especially if they discover that you took it from some other fool’s trap. Really, there are very few places in this region — which is mostly a safe, starting area for noobs — that would know what to do with a Greater Treasure of any kind.

So WTF are you going to do with it? And are your friends foolish enough to help you?