With the season finale of our Monsterhearts game fast approaching, I’ve been throwing around some ideas to them about what to play next. I’m kinda keen on staying with something Powered by the Apocalypse, and today, my co-worker/player Jason abducted me briefly to pitch using Dungeon World to do something like Alice in Wonderland / Wizard of Oz. His immediate concern was with making custom classes, so of course I drop the wisdom of Class Warfare. If the rest are interested, I think I might use my burgeoning collection of Krosmaster figures as minis, supplemented with some used Skylander figs.
Now, here’s the question:
Are there any good resources for adding an extra bit of weird and fantastical to such a Dungeon World campaign? Favorite classes, add-ons, supplemental campaign materials, random tables, other inspirations, etc. that people would recommend?
True true.
I’d play that.
Some practical suggestions:
1. Put in things that are wrong
2. Ask more questions
3. Erase whatever is ahead of you
4. Use other playbooks
1. The weird and fantastical is, by definition, completely different to anything that might reasonably be there. One of the easiest way I know to get beyond reasonable is to give yourself permission to make mistakes (the bigger, the better) and see where they lead. Add and do things that would or should be wrong in the game and then accept them into the fiction.
2. The best source of great ideas for a game, that I know of, is the other players. Hand over more of the world and adventure creation to them by asking more questions.
3. Playing to find out what happens isn’t just about the next twist in the plot, it is also about whatever is around the next corner or over the next hill. Erasing everything you know about what’s ahead of the characters, and then let it arise spontaneously as they go along (see 1. and 2. above).
4. The more diverse the playbooks the characters are using, the more diverse the play is likely to get. Encourage your players to try more varied playbooks (E.g. from Inverse World, Adventures on Dungeon Planet; from one-time creators; and from more prolific writers like David Guyll).
Or from Class Warfare
What about each character using a class from a completely different game? One from Dungeon World, one from Apocalypse World, one from Monsterhearts…
That could go surreal very fast.
Terrible and game breaking idea.
Michael Barry – it’s an interesting idea to incorporate playbooks from other systems, but it would be important to design a Dungeon World playbook based on the target theme, rather than to try to bring The Gunlugger to a Dungeon World game and make it work.
The Looking Glass Wars series by Frank Beddor and associated website http://www.lookingglasswars.com are full of great material and ideas for your game.
(It took a while, but White Imagination finally triumphed over Black imagination – in my imaginescape, anyway.)
Andrew Fish, my suggestion is specific to Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland — a surreal, ie dreamlike, barely coherent and illogical realm composed of elements of reality and especially childhood games.
By all means, knock yourself out writing play books.
Michael Barry the concept is good. Surreal is good. creativity is good.
Playbooks from different PbtA systems are tailored to systems which are substantially different enough to make importing one playbook directly to another system… problematic.
Can i defy danger when you attempt to seize by force? I don’t know monsterhearts so… can i leave a passive aggressive note in your locker when you hack & slash?
If you want your system to run smoothly, it would benefit the game play to pick a system, and interpret the desired playbooks into the correct system.
Momma told me not to knock myself out, so i’m not gonna knock myself out.