Has anyone experience with using Dungeon World together with a pre-made setting like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk?

7 thoughts on “Has anyone experience with using Dungeon World together with a pre-made setting like Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk?”

1. It should work just fine. The first thing I would do is build fronts from the source material. Identify what is a threat, a campaign front, etc. I would also be ready to trash big sections of things that are canon as the input of you players will probably be cooler than, and offer you a greater buy-in on their part, than the original stuff.

2. You can do a pick and choose, ask your players what aspects of the setting most interest them. What they want to deal with in the game. You won’t need the whole thing, it is massive.

3. Christoph Sapinsky I used the Realms and Greyhawk as an example. I am considering the answers towards a homebrew setting (or Karthun).

4. Karthun would probably work very well, because there is a lot of “undefined” aspects of the setting, mechanically, that would be easy to fill in with narrative descriptions. Its going to be a lot easier coming up with stats for a Behemoth or walking treasure hoards in Dungeon World than D&D or Pathfinder.

   When you mentioned an existing campaign world, I immediately thought of Dresden Accelerated’s approach to using that universe.

   When starting a new game, the players all come up with a known faction or looming threat from the setting that they want to come up in the game, and after all of that, they come up with any factions or threats from the setting they don’t want to see used in the campaign.

   Then you start the campaign with the group dealing with the recent machinations of one of the selected groups or threats.

   Dungeon World seems like a good fit for this concept, because you can write each of those factions or threats into a campaign front. In a larger setting, with lots of material and potential threats, this also lets the players narrow down what they want out of the setting.

5. I did it with Ptolus. There are some tonal differences, particularly regarding the prevalence of magic items. All of Ptolus takes place in a single city as well, so the steading stuff needs to change a bit.rpg.divnull.com – Ptolus Dungeon World – DivNull RPG

6. Lester Ward Well, instead of a single settlement or steading, you could treat each ward as its own settlement or steading. I am actually also investigating using Dungeon World with my own homebrew setting. I love world-building, but I don’t necessarily love the involved D&D rules, DW just feels so much easier to GM. Especially with my recently gained play experience of other PbtA games.

7. Yes, that’s what I did in Ptolus: made each district a “steading”. You have to change the meanings of some of the tags a little, but no biggie.

Comments are closed.