People say that when your players enjoy the game, they will start talking about it days and days after.

People say that when your players enjoy the game, they will start talking about it days and days after. I’m happy to say that they were true, so much true that other friends herad my players talking about how much fun they had during the vacation and now there até three more people wanting to play Dungeon World as well. Bear in mind that these new players are veterans who used to play Vampire the Masquerade and D&D.

So we all agreed that it would be best that the newer players would form a new group beginning their very own campaign (if they joined my current game we would have six players, it would be a mess). Our first session was yesterday and damn, Dungeon World never disappoints.

Our adventurers (a paladin, a druid and a thief) start in the middle of the road, during a stormy night. They were getting back from their last adventure to the nearest Village, when they met an old man riding a horse cart,, being guarded by two mounted mercenary guards, all of them looking very suspicious (they were smugglers). The paladin tried to talk to them, but they weren’t willing to listen, and after some failed charisma rolls a fight broke out.

I thought that a simple fight against two mercenaries and an old man would be an easy introduction to the game, but the players rolled REALLY bad, failures after failures, those three simple enemies were downright kicking the party’s butts and the scene took longer than I expected.

In the end, they managed to beat two of the guards, but the old man got away on his cart. Both the paladin and the druid were badly hurt, and the paladin offered himself to heal the druid with the Lay on Hands move. He rolled an eight, which meant that whatever damage he would heal It would come back on him. He rolled maximum healing (8 hit points) which was exactly how many hit points he had left, and then he rolled a 5 on his Last Breath roll. Everyone just kept laughing for quite a few minutes (even the paladin’s player, he wasn’t angry or anything like that).

We ended the session with the remaining characters picking the dead guards’ horses and giving the old man chase, stopping at the nearest Village, where they would recruit the paladin player’s new character: a Dwarf-Ogre Ranger. According to him, a Dwarf-Ogre is just like an regular Ogre, but had the size of a dwarf, which I found totally awesome, so we just picked the ogre’s racial move from Number Appearing, and yes, the whole Village was inhabited by Dwarf-Ogres.

I hope you enjoyed this story. Have you ever had a character death right in the first session? Just to be clear, the paladin knew he could die from 7-9 on a Lay on Hands roll, and he took the risk.