I’ve been working on a first-session worksheet for a game of my own design, building on the one from Apocalypse World (see p28 of http://apocalypse-world.com/AW-basicplaybooks-legal.pdf), and it’s left me wondering if one could be useful for DW too?
I’ve seen someone do this using a shared map before (e.g. we took in turns to add our homelands to the edges of the map). Has anyone done anything more structured than that?
Something like dungeon starters? But for the whole world?
FOR THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD!!!!!!!
🙂
Actually, no – I mean a worksheet for prompting the GM to ask interesting questions and to build up a manageable description of the interesting things that come out of those questions. In the process, it would focus the GM on some things and gently push them away from others (e.g. the AW draws attention to the NPC threats, their motivations (e.g. “envy”) and the resources they control (e.g. “fresh water”), while not putting emphasis on the actual geography of the setting, or the relationships between NPCs).
It would be useful at this point for me to link to a populated version of the AW worksheet, but a quick google doesn’t show one online. There’s one in the AW book.
Rob Alexander Well that sure sounds interesting but I cant say ive ever seen anything like it.Â
Rob, I’m working on something like that for a hack. Start with a world map, zoomed pretty far out. Plenty of details, names, cities, etc. but nothing with inherent meaning. Like starting with someone else’s completed campaign map, but you haven’t read any of their play reports.
There are some givens to the world: there’s a world-spanning War, an evil and expansive Enemy, and the PCs are part of a secret order of adventurers-come-special-ops.Â
A big part of character creation & the first session involves filling in the details: who & what is the Enemy? What is the nature of the PC’s secret order? Where is each PC from, and what is that like? What did they do before the war? The playbooks do a lot to help answer these questions, and I intend for there to be a first session sheet as well.
Haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but it feels like it has legs.
I had a go at sketching this yesterday, but I’m not sure what to put in place of AW’s Fundamental Scarcities. So I’ve started a discussion about it over on +Powered by the Apocalypse — https://plus.google.com/101223885539785381547/posts/3rnP5SWvXgR
Over in the other thread (link above) we’ve now got lots of interesting ideas and one worked example.