Had my players (all new to DW) answer this to kickstart our Roll20.net DW campaign. I let each player choose (secretly) his two favorite options for each of the five sections. The “winners” were used to complete the sentences. Then we thought about what this would mean for our adventuring world. It worked really well.
Well, that’s kinda awesome.
Yeah, that is really cool.
Nice!
Awesome tool!
Can you elaborate on what they picked and the choices you made because of it?
Well that’s nifty!
Great.
Stealing this for a con-game.
Keith Stetson : When the results were very close/tied we tried to consider first and second place per category. This was the initial setup after votes (with second place in brackets):
“We camp in a ruined city [a desecrated temple] at the edge of the world [in a desolate wasteland] where the gods wage war for souls. We left our homes because the riches of the ancients await discovery [because our homes were destroyed]. We never let our guard drop because Lady Luck is a fickle bitch.”
We decided that the choices in the first two categories could be easily combined: desecrated temples mix very well with ruined cities as do desolate wastelands and edges of worlds. The “left our homes part” was trickier to combine. We decided that an external influence related to some ancient power forced the abandonment of the adventurer’s town, but while most of the survivors fled to seek shelter somewhere else, the adventurers decided to face the dangers and seek out the source, claiming this power for their own.
=> Consequences for the game world in the next post.
As a GM this signaled to me that the group was out for a grim setting but with options for heroics, divine interventions and good old treasure hunting. We started the first session and made this the intro:
“The adventure begins in Kel R’annon, City of Justice. A remote city far in the north and the first to fall to the scourge that is by now called “The Endless Famine”. Formerly a city of almost 50,000 it is now a desolate, ruined place covered by snow and ice. Thirty years after its abandonment it is by now separated from the next settlement by three weeks’ worth of travel though the frozen tundra of the Northern Wastes. Before the cold came, the valleys south of Kel R’annon were the bread basket for half the northern continent but these days are almost forgotten. After a long, hard travel, the party enters the ruined temple of Braal, god of nature, harvest and trade. It’s a giant building still standing tall amidst the ruins of the city, at the heart of the former temple district. Parts of it have collapsed but there is easily enough space to give shelter to ten times their number. The party collapses exhausted to the ground, glad to have a roof over their heads again.”
At night, the party was promptly ambushed by some nocturnal creatures dwelling in the structure. During the battle, the Barbarian knocked down a wall which exposed the temple’s main altar room. On the altar they found the ritually sacrificed body of a humanoid lizard creature and bloody runes covering most of the space. The Wizard promptly identified the arcane symbols as a set of rhymes calling to a far older god, worshipped by a mythic, long dead race. That’s when they started to hear strange noises from somewhere deep in the structure and we were off to play and find out …
Dorian Knight Sure, why not. It’s just something I brainstormed and put in a jpeg for easy use in Roll20. 🙂
Oliver, Love the chart, but could you make one change? The “Lady Luck is a fickle bitch” just hits me wrong. Would it be possible to get a copy where the “bitch” is taken out, if that’s not too much trouble?
Ferrell Riley I’m not a native speaker so it didn’t sound problematic to me. Would “Lady Luck is fickle and uncaring” work better? or “mistress”?
Oliver Lind Not a problem, a more common phrasing is actually “Lady Luck is a fickle mistress”. Thanks!
Put it up and tagged you.
Very nice! I’ll have to use this someday.
Such a great idea. It allows to steer the campaign in some direction, still leaving many meaningful choices for the players. I guess I’m going to use it when we start the second season of our AW Fort Thunder campaign.
Thank you very much for the idea.
Our allies that have helped us before are…
…the wealthy and powerful.
…a mystery cult.
…the followers of the one true king.
…the disenfranchised of society.
…beings from another world.