One of my favorite fantasy archetypes that’s almost never represented in class-based systems is something I guess you’d call “The Last.”
Amalthea from The Last Unicorn, Draco from Dragonheart, etc.
Is there a Dungeon World playbook that already does this, or would “majestic creature that is going extinct” be a playbook worth creating?
Only thing I can think of that comes close would be the “survivor” from Inverse World.
well being the last of your kind is a fairly emotions only thing, I dont see how being the last of something would translate into mechanics. Like oyu could just say you were the last elf wizard and nothing would change. so I think the best thing to do is to make a playbook for a creature that you would like to play, and then just use that.
The Survivor fits perfectly.
It has a big enough impact on the fiction, though, that this isn’t really the case…there’s more in common between Draco and Amalthea than between Draco and Vermithrax Pejorative. What makes them being “The Last” so important is the profound emotional effect they have on the people around them. While they’re very physically powerful in theory, both of them end up subdued by relatively mundane opposition at various points, so their fictional impact is less in the way they use their dragon/unicorn powers, and more in how the fragments of lost magic they carry in their very nature heal and inspire others.
Alisson Vitório
I’m definitely looking at the Survivor; it seems thematically CLOSE to what I’m looking for, but it’s very much intended for more of a “gritty drifter” like Fist of the North Star, so it would take some hacking for sure.
Totes hacking.
Though with the fiction you could do this with any playbook though might work better as a NPC or mcguffin.
I think for a player character it would be rougher as it would need a particular mindset to pull it off along with it being quite a trick playing the last dwarf/elf/halfling/etc. and being convinced enough as the player character that you’ve searched the whole planet to find you are the last one with zero alternative to fix the situation in a world of magic & possible active deities who could fix it.
Sounds like something that would work well as a Compendium Class to me.
Seems like you could do an alignment move:
Last of Your Kind: show or mourn what passes from the world when you die.
Constructed that way it has some similarity to the barbarian’s neutral alignment, but if the GM lets you hack it onto any sheet, you’re good to go, and that gives you leeway to make yourself the last dwarf, the last paladin, or even the last of the red hot swammis.
You could then supplement it with a CC class that I might call “The Legacy”, which would ultimately include a new Retire Character move (perhaps several, for different options) so that your eventual passing goes as you wish.
For example:
Pass the spark – your next character is a new generation of x, heralding their return to the world (with some mechanical effect, like one of your moves)
Passing Into The East – when you retire, you may remove any one thing from the world with you
Final blaze – before you retire, you win a fight. It could be against the very gods themselves, but when you make this move, you set aside the dice and tell the tale of your final victory before your kind passed from the world
Other possibilities to, of course, but that feels like what it seems you’re looking for
Thinking on it more, given how relatively limited this archetype is (and how applicable it is to characters who aren’t necessarily supernatural creatures), it might make more sense to make a playbook like “the magical animal” or some such and make “the last” a compendium class as Chris S suggested, with a condition like “when you intentionally or accidentally convince someone to accompany you on your quest to discover if you are truly the last of your kind…”
or when you learn the truth and find out that you are the last of your kind… you could get the opening move.
That’s a much better call, I think.
Michael Kailus well the trick is getting someone as active as the rest of the group while playing a magic animal. If others know of the worth of this last animal of magic, they might be hunted rather frequently. Alternatively if not, say with the unicorn, when the group goes to town, the animal player will be stuck in the stables or hiding as being the last isn’t going to be very social to outsiders.