Starting a new campaign this weekend, so of course it’s time for another Dungeon Starter! This one’s a bleak apocalyptic setting, akin to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire. Pregame kibitzing has it a toss-up whether we’ll use this or Planarch Codex.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5JodNrQ2KpGWUt1SEFTLU03OU0/view?usp=sharing
Awesome! It sure feel like Athasian adventures.
We used this adventure last game session. It played really fast and I had to fight a lot to insert the many impressions (and failed at it). I had a hard time using the weapons introduced within since they don’t have a damage stat and players keep asking. The armor class of the sentinels is near to invincible. The Sandstorm moves and creatures are a lot of fun as well as the Judge. I had to hack it a little bit making the sentinels control-dependant on the easier-to-beat judge, or witness a TPK under unfair conditions, since my pcs were all 1st level (It’s a starter, remember?) I also added a place of power inside the fortress since the wizards needed to raise the paladin somehow to stand a chance. It all played in 4 hours. We had a lot of fun. Keep writing awesome adventures. XD
Oney Clavijo: Oh, wow! Thanks for giving it a go! I think that’s the first I’ve had somebody actually play a thing I wrote for DW, haha.
Your criticisms about the impressions being too widely spread and the monsters being invincible are fair. I tend to write Dungeon Starters more as campaign starters, I realize, where the critters and impressions are likely to be spread out over many sessions. I thus rather expected the players to find the Sentinels unkillable, and flee to make an adventure of obtaining armor-ignoring magic weaponry before facing them head-on again. But of course that’s not written down anywhere! (As a minor counterpoint, DW isn’t necessarily built to have encounters be fair or balanced. In a brutal world like “Reign of Rust,” fledgling adventurers probably shouldn’t attempt to exchange blows with the mightiest minions of the Big Bad…)
I noticed this contrast on my own time when on Saturday I ran “The Goblin Hole”–almost everything in there, Impressions, Things, and Monsters alike, saw play. I discarded a couple of Questions I found tepid, and forgot to include the cave rats, but that’s about it. It worked really well that way. I will aim for that in future Starters I write!
Re weapons, I based them on existing stat blocks, and very few core DW weapons have +damage tags. I do find that players often have a little bit of trouble grasping that damage is based on class, not weaponry, at first, so it’s not an unusual thing.
I would edit “Reign of Rust” to incorporate some of your feedback (I’d also like to make some of the Questions more character-focused), but unfortunately a cloud sync error ate my original document, and I don’t have the premium version of Adobe to edit the PDF directly. 🙁
If you’re interested in other stuff I’ve written for DW, I’ve done two other Dungeon Starters:
“Valley of the Titans”, inspired by Shadow of the Colossus: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5JodNrQ2KpGZF9BX2tIeEVONFU/view?usp=sharing
“The Sandstone Prophecy”, a one-pager inspired by The Banner Saga: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5JodNrQ2KpGNTcxUC1IRDZFeXc
“Valley of the Titans” kicked off the longest-running Dungeon World campaign I’ve ever run. We didn’t get as far with “Sandstone Prophecy”, but it would be an awesome fit for The Perilous Wilds.