As I work on my setting kickoff/module/thing, I’m looking at the core assumption I made that the “core classes” are effectively the gods of the setting (referred to as the Iconics), and pick people to be The Fighter or The Cleric and so on. Basically picking this generations heroes.
Then I thought…if those are the “good” gods (or at least the protagonist gods), who would be the “evil” ones? The antagonist gods? The negative archetypes? Would there/should there be one for each Iconic? “The Beast” who fights and destroys for its own sake as the reflection of The Fighter, who battles with cunning to protect?
This warrants further though.
Love, love, LOVE, this idea. If ever there was a game that could do an “Evil Party” game and pull it off, it would be dungeon world. Use Bonds to explain why you’re not stabbing eachother in the back at every turn, to start with.
A potential lineup;
The Bard/The Seducer
The Cleric/The Cultist
The Fighter/The Beast
The Paladin/The Blackguard
The Ranger/The Bandit
The Thief/The Assassin
The Wizard/The Necromancer
Maybe… hmm… each iconic has different aspects? Like, The Paladin could be worshiped as a good god or a lawful god, because those are the paladin’s alignment choices, and there’s sectarian differences and all that good stuff. And the Wizard has good, evil, and neutral aspects that different groups focus on…
Alternatively, you do have the danger types from the Fronts chapter as possible negative archetypes. “The Sentient Artifact”. “The Elemental Lord.”
God of Abandoned Towers! God of Wandering Barbarians! I’m actually really digging this idea, now.
Totally and there is your impetuous for the characters adventuring. They must be a physical representation of their ideologue or the whole status quo could fall to shit.
The God of Things Left in Dark Places
The God of Huge Green Things With Teeth…
Building off Matthew Keevil’s list:
BARD: The Seducer
CLERIC: The Cultist
DRUID: The Beast
FIGHTER: The Conqueror
PALADIN: The Fanatic
RANGER: The Stalker
THIEF: The Killer
WIZARD: The Tempest
In my DW games, I haven’t encountered much in the playbooks that suggests the PCs necessarily have to be good. Seems like you could use the same playbooks for both, with minor tweaks.
This reminds me that I’ve actually thought about running the Way of the Wicked adventure path with DW, for friends keen to play some thorough villains for a while.
Matthew, those suggestions made me laugh out loud.
I wouldn’t go with Good / Evil as the axis. I’d go with something that isn’t a mechanism of the game. Creation / Entropy. Change / Stasis. That sort of deal.
That makes a great deal of sense.
Also, the good/evil gods thing is mostly a D&D invention, right? There’s a lot of more interesting/realistic things you could do.
I love the idea of the opposing “pantheons” like the archetypes of Unknown Armies, too. Like, you’re The Fighter and maybe there are other Fighters who want to be The Fighter, too – and they’re going to come after you.
Jonathan Walton I defy your use of “gods” and “realistic” in the same sentence. 😛
Adam Koebel Riiiiiight, because religion isn’t a real human institution with millions of years of history 🙂
(EDIT: Wikipedia informs me I’m a little off. Perhaps just 200,000 years.)
Adam Koebel I hadn’t even thought of that; yeah you were chosen by The Fighter (the conceptual archetype thing) to be the Fighter (the guy with the Fighter class) on earth, but if someone can beat you in a fair fight, would that make them more worthy of the mantle?
More importantly…is that how people think it works? What people believe will happen and what will actually happen are two different things.
Pfft. History. I roll to disbelieve.
That said, yes. Nuance! There is opportunity for questions, for to say “okay, Fighter, why are you the Fighter? Why not the Brute? You’ve been acting more like him every day…”
Sean Dunstan I’d think about how you “earn” that title. If you’re the Thief, obviously you stole it.
I think it’s a great opportunity for meta-commentary on D&D and classes and junk. Also a really fun story.
If there’s a sort of progressive apotheosis, then maybe the Bonds of successful contenders become embedded in the divine identity. “If you want to worship X most fully, cultivate relationships like these.”
Now I’m also thinking maybe the split is “Idealized/Corrupted” or “Externalized/Internalized”
Like, the Paladin is the “ideal” holy warrior, fighting to protect people and for general goodery; he’s “externalized” because his goals revolve around others. But the Fanatic, that’s what happens when a man of faith becomes too focused on his goals to the exclusion of what or who he fights for. His ideals become “corrupted”, and his ideals have become “internalized” because he’s not doing things for others anymore, he’s doing them for himself whether he realizes it or not, and whether he thinks he’s doing it for the right reasons or not.
Adam Koebel I’m just working off some of the implied ideas from the “Villager” playbook and filtering them through an old D&D zero-level adventure.
There’s a lot to be said for Tekumel’s Stability/Change split, since you get all kinds of mixes of motives, interest in justice and other virtues, and like that.
Selfish/selfless is a split they use in In Nomine for demons and angels, respectively, and it works pretty well.
Hmmm. You could do something very interesting with the protagonist/antagonist split, because of how differently the opposition is built in DW. If you really wanted to get complex, you could modify mechanics such as Grim Portents into a player variant: antagonist-style characters could build up a Doom track with a specific triggered move, and then another move unleashes the equivalent of a Grim Portent (but on a much smaller scale).
This is another of those passing thoughts that’s going to fractal out into another supplement I’m never going to finish, is it?
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3324/4605982416_6ba6d5db94_z.jpg
If you didn’t want it to fractal, you shouldn’t have asked for outside input 🙂
The more outside input I get, the greater the chance I might actually finish something.
Interesting. I mostly have the opposite experience. It’s great if other people enjoy my stuff, but if I’m not ultimately doing it for myself, finishing it can be like pulling teeth.
So here is a thought. The classes in DW are a bit like the Hero of Time in the Legend of Zelda series. At any moment in time, there is one Hero. One Link, whose destiny is to save Zelda from Ganon and to represent Courage in the Courage-Power-Wisdom triad.
In any given DW game, there’s a Fighter. There’s the Fighter whose job it is to protect the Wizard and fight the forces that want to resolve their impending doom. There’s a Paladin who will always be there to rebuke the Thief and debate with the Druid. The Ranger will guide them, etc. When their story is done, maybe they go away for a while and another party comes to light when the world needs them.
So what you need is your Ganon. You need a thing that works against these archetypes = a counter-narrative. The Apocalypse Dragon is something that you could look to for inspiration. It’s a monster, sure, but it’s also probably a Front, with dangers and dooms attached to it. Maybe these are like Dark Link – a reflection of the negative side to each of the classes. Or maybe it’s just recurring things that threaten the world (Sorrow, Entropy, Pain) that crop up for the archetypes to battle against.
The big question, I guess, is purpose. Why do the archetypes exist? Why do they keep emerging? What purpose to they fulfill in the world?
I envy your finding out!
….Zelda as a Dungeon World game.
What have you done?
My eyes are opened.
Andy Hauge I’d just make three playbooks, The Courageous, The Wise and the Powerful and then just play the game that way.
Adam Koebel: That would be a freaking awesome hack. You could do some neat stuff with puzzle dungeons and Fronts, too…
I would play the shit out if Zelda World.
This was an amazing post and then Zelda showed up and it got even better.
I have two partially finished Zelda games (Ghost Opera, Super Farmhand/Super Snow Queen), and would happily squeal if there were more Zelda games out there.
Your god “alignments” aren’t Good and Evil. They’re Matter/Energy/Time/Thought/Entropy. Old School, yo!
I cold bang out a mythic Hyrule game pretty easily, I think. You’d play the oracles, telling tales of the ancient hero and how he saved Hyrule.
Jonathan Walton “Interesting. I mostly have the opposite experience. It’s great if other people enjoy my stuff, but if I’m not ultimately doing it for myself, finishing it can be like pulling teeth.”
I have the opposite problem. I work on an idea, but then I get distracted by another idea and I start working on that, leaving the first one unfinished. Then before I finish the second idea I come up with a third one, and so on and so on. That’s why I need people to at least ask “hey, whatever happened to that thing you were working on?”
Oh I have that problem too. Hence: 2 unfinished Zeldaish games.