Seeking feedback on Fourth World, a hack for playing Dungeon World in the setting of #Earthdawn . This is a pretty raw “alpha” document: never been playtested, barely been proof-read, still missing a thing or two. Sorry for the length, as I lacked the time to make it shorter. Suggestions welcome.
Note: I will likely be editing this document in response to feedback (here or elsewhere), so you may see comments below that look like they no longer apply.
I’m probably too invested in Earthdawn to be the right person to give feedback for this, but here are some thoughts:
– Not sure about the 7-9 effects for thread-weaving when casting spells – can see them becoming agonizing for spell casting characters in play, although the fact that number of threads is entirely driven by the circle of the spell is really going to reduce the amount of multi-round spellcasting. (Speaking of which, why no specific thread requirements for individual spells?)
– In general, the disciplines feel less “superheroic” than they do in the original game – there are a lot of disruptive or imbalancing abilities in Earthdawn that don’t seem to be present here. Related to this, many of the iconic talents that set the flavor for a given discipline are missing – acrobatic strike and air dance for warriors, or taunt and riposte for swordmasters, for instance.
– Nethermancers feel more like clerics and less intensely creepy than I’d prefer.
– I understand that Dungeon World doesn’t really use durations for spell effects and so forth, but I think in the case of spells with durations that are measured in hours, it might be worth considering.
– I’d think about creating an Earthdawn-specific set of hard moves/dungeon moves.
– Matrix damage can happen on poor spellcasting rolls, but there’re no matrix strikes.
– The talents powered by thread-weaving are a fun idea.
– I need to look at it some more, but I think your blood magic implementation looks cool.
– You’ve got some nice, flavorful stuff going on with naming of things.
Thanks for the feedback! I’d say someone “too invested in Earthdawn” is exactly the right person to give feedback.
On 7-9 weaving: the intent was that people could shrug off effects of matrix weaving, might consider the risk of grimoire weaving to be worth it and would be horrified at the prospect of raw weaving. Might not have hit that. Definiately something to playtest.
On lack of per-spell thread requirements: as a rule, Earthdawn tends to add minutia to everything, which means stuff that you have to either lookup in the book or take up space with on a character sheet, all without really adding that much to the game. I’m intentionally avoiding as much of this as I can. Anyone playing a caster should be able to easily memorise the “number of threads related to circle of spell” concept, and spend time worrying about more important stuff.
On superheroism: Some of this likely comes from the moves being cribbed from DW classes. On the other hand, adepts could get two DW moves per circle, including first, so they might look like superheroes to DW characters. In general, I discovered that moves only tended to feel “magical” at around circle 6. Another thing I discovered was that Earthdawn talents are much less narrative than I remembered. A whole lot of rank shifting stuff. Some disciplines were harder to latch onto images than the others. Another aspect of this: one of the goals is to be able to leverage as much existing Dungeon World stuff as possible, and this includes adventures. I don’t want to make the characters so superheroic that published adventures become totally useless.
On iconic talents: I haven’t played all the disciplines (especially in more recent editions), so advice on what is “iconic” would be useful. What else do you think is missing in this area? And how would you (or anyone else reading) write moves for them?
On nethermancers: yeah, some of this was from using cleric moves, but some of it was bias on my part. I’ve always viewed nethermancers as seeing life and death as equally important, but the (fourth world) public tends to see only the death part. Should this class have more creepy bits or less life-afirming bits? What would you suggest for each?
On spell durations: spell duration is another one of those minutia things. At the table, it ultimately boils down narratively to something like “instant”, “a few player/GM exchanges”, “a whole combat”, “a whole day”, “forever”. Dungeon World turns the middle three into two things: “ongoing” and “ongoing with some kind of penalty”. For a player, these boil down at the table to “as long as it is interesting” and “as long as I’m willing to live with the penalty”. I tried to tune this a bit make making some of the penalties worse than others on the assumption that this would have the effect of shortening duration. No doubt I have missed the mark on the penalties for some spells.
On hard moves: this is probably a good idea. What would you include? I probably should suggest a front or two as well, though I’d be more interested in seeing what others come up with.
On matrix strikes: One of the main things I learned while doing this is that writing for asymmetric systems (where the players and GMs don’t play by the same rules) is both liberating and frustrating. Spell disruption, matrix damage and so on are definitely places where this comes up. No player has moves for making matrix strikes because monsters don’t follow rules for using spell matrices anyway. They sort of emulate them with GM moves. I suppose you could have some player move that narrates matrix strikes that denies moves to a monster or something, sort of the way the Talent Shredder spell works. On the monster side, I had in mind that existing GM moves would allow for monsters damaging matrices, but never really articulated this. Could be a good candidate for the hard move list.
I made a layout pass, here: http://thor.divnull.com/pub/aw/fourth-world-0.8.pdf