Dungeon World Endgame, revisited
After 26 sessions of frantic, sprawling action, you have 1 more session to wrap it up. What is your prep?
8 sessions back, I gathered the players’ outstanding questions that they wanted resolved, and we deliberated together about their goals and priorities. This was based on advice Jason Lutes pointed out to me on another forum:
http://story-games.com/forums/discussion/7806/ending-games-without-endgame-conditions
Since then, I have focused my prep on giving them every opportunity to answer their questions. To reinforce the end-game focus, I’ve reviewed the questions and answers-they-got-so-far at the beginning of each session, as a way of checking in and keeping their priorities in focus. At the end of each session, I’ve used their questions in lieu of “Did we learn something new and important about the world?”
As a consequence, they have resolved all the major questions they had, but they are still in the middle of a really involved plot to “save the world” that they want to resolve. Unless I contrive an artificial “quantum ogre”-style crossover between all the disparate threads, I don’t think they can resolve the main motifs without another “season” of play.
But we might not have to do that: 1 player is moving, and he has requested an explosive “season finale” to wrap up the adventure for his character, and we probably have just 1 session left to do it. We could convene another “season” with the other players some time in the future, if they want to pursue their other goals more thoroughly.
But even if it’s just a campaign finale for the one character, leaving the resolution of other character goals for later, I’m not sure how to support a “finale”-like session. We’ve had a lot of climactic sessions, but they came about in the natural flow of conversation, without special consideration. And when it didn’t come naturally, we just followed the fiction where it led.
I quite like the epilogues Jason Cordova does in the Gauntlet hangout games. In most of the last sessions of an arc, they focus on what threads they most want to focus on in this session, and then set aside time at the end for the players to narrate the epilogue of their character.
Wrote a starter for this: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7cav44145d9Y09lTTlkOERjRXc
This may have already been suggested but you could plan some kind of way of revisiting key moments in the past. I’m thinking something like a hall of mirrors. Each person looks into one and they describe the scene that most impacted them.
Why set a hard limit on session count if the story isn’t done? Is there something else driving the choice?
Thanks, everyone! I think I will create a DR-style starter plus leading questions and a custom adventure move for each player to set the table and focus on exactly what they want to wrap up, and make sure to leave time for epilogs at the end.
Jeff Wood, like I said, one player is moving in a couple weeks and he asked for a final chapter for his character.
In general, I do not run Dungeon World as a story-machine, but as an open, living world with story-rich elements. If I had expected to have a Story Arc that had to be wrapped up in a given number of sessions, I would have designed the Fronts somewhat differently, and especially I would have pruned them more carefully all along to make the campaign front more unified. That’s not my standard practice, though, and I don’t regret it.