Does anyone have any experience with Hardholder-like playbooks? Specifically, playbooks that deal with the steading rules and give a home base like the Landed Gentry CC? How do they work in play?
Does anyone have any experience with Hardholder-like playbooks?
Does anyone have any experience with Hardholder-like playbooks?
Or stuff possibly borrowed from A Dark Age (or whatever the pre- AW 2e playtest was) ?
I’m not so sure DW is very good at telling that kind of story. The goals of DW are by my reading:
1. Explore interesting places
2. Kill monsters
3. Take their stuff
Why wouldn’t you just play AW if you want to run a village?
There’s a Landed Gentry compendium class out there. That’s pretty close.
And last I checked, what DW is good at is:
1. Portray a fantastic world
2. Fill the characters’ lives with adventure
3. Play to find out what happens
That absolutely works within a town. Just remember: the town is also a dungeon!
Jeremy Strandberg’s #StoneTop might do what you want
I don’t have any play experience with anything like the Landed Gentry or the Merchant or any of those other location/enterprise based CCs. I assume Johnstone Metzger has some experience.
Stonetop isn’t quite the same thing, but it’s got some inspiration from those classes, sure. The Landed Gentry, for example, makes the demense of one PC central to a character, which can in turn make that character and their demense central to the campaign. A natural extension is to have Fronts and Dangers that threaten the demense, and use the start-of-session rolls as adventure/situation generators. That’s a pretty core part of what I want the Steading moves & playbook to do in Stonetop.
You just have to make sure the connection between PC and setting is an element of play. Kind of like Signature Weapon: the mechanical rules part is fairly minimal, but if you treat it like a significant part of the fiction, you can get a lot of mileage out of it.
If you want a game where PCs are constantly on the move, though, it’s kind of a waste. DW supports a wandering dungeoncrawl party, sure, but it also rewards persistent relationships between PCs and NPCs and setting elements.
Yes, Hardholders do add a lot to the world right off the bat. The hardhold definitely needs to be a source of trouble for PCs to get into.