Was it a bad idea to give the player a Dungeon World equivalent to nukes?
Still reeling from tonight’s session. I think it made everyone’s heads spin.
Ruthless Calculation
by Asbjørn H Flø, revised
When you move a bead on Death’s Abacus, you exchange a life for a life. Choose one soul who is claimed by Death. They live again. The GM will choose someone alive. They are dead, and have been since Death claimed the soul you restored. This might change the world forever.
About that leading question, it was rhetorical. Why would that be bad?
When I get a chance to write, I need to give y’all an epic elegy to Sugar the Bard.
Until then, peace out.
One-for-one is great, sure. How many uses? Any risks that could turn into rolls?
How many beads in an abacus?
(Also, I love the GM being given the death choice, it’s like a simpler version of “Through Death’s Eyes”)
👍
Matt Horam, we never found out how many uses. As far as I was concerned, it could be used again and again, until something happened that made it unusable. Or in our case, until using it changed most of the history of the entire campaign, and left the player who used it bereft of an abacus.
> Any risks that could turn into rolls?
Goodness yes. Those didn’t have to be written into the move, though—they just arose out of the fiction.
I can’t wait to hear the full report Deep Six Delver! This could potentially become a whole new campaign. Sort of a Man in the high castle situation.
Last night (Session 18), Sugar the Bard used it to bring back a friendly NPC who died in Session 2. Looking back at that session in my minds eye, there were two characters who might have died in his place: Sugar himself, or another major character.
Either way, the butterfly effect would have been unguessable. It didn’t feel right to simply pronounce Sugar dead, and the obvious response was to Play To Find Out What Happens.
So we went back to the scenario in Session 2. The heroes kept their memories and advances, except for the Compendium Class moves that were unlocked by events later in the fiction.
Because of their new knowledge about the epochal significance of that session, it played out differently immediately. They Discerned more Realities and Spouted more Lore and unpacked a lot more information about the scene.
But they also rolled worse this time, bringing about a lot more doom in the form of hard moves. At the end, Sugar the Bard gave up his own life to complete the ritual that would prevent two planets from colliding.
The friendly NPC survived.
3 players did not have characters in the flashback scene—they hadn’t joined the game yet. They sat there riveted by the mind-bending action, pitching in their ideas, cheering their companions on, and holding their breath as the tension escalated. We had a few cut-scenes to see what they were doing, and some new details came of that, but the players were all more interested in the events surrounding Sugar the Bard.
My mind is still reeling today.