Author: Brandon Fincher

I am thinking of putting together a little campaign based around the Castlevania series of video games for my gaming group and could use your help. Most of my players are diehard fans, so I need to be faithful to the source material, making sure to have all the familiar rooms/locations/monsters. However, I know there are elements of the video games that just wont work in Dungeon World (or any tabletop game), so I’ve come to the Tavern for advice.

Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of experience running dungeon crawls in dungeon world, so I’m not quite sure how to guide them through Castlevania in a way that hits the landmarks while avoiding the minutiae of room-to-room navigation and meticulousness that I normally equate with dungeon travel in the traditional sense. I know a big part of DW is “draw maps, leave blanks”, so my instinct is to go through some of the game maps, and work up a list of the areas found in Castlevania and put together something new yet familiar, but I’m unsure if that’s the right approach or not.

The game is ultimately about navigating through a castle full of monsters and boss fights, getting to Dracula’s Lair and killing him. I could do that, but a constant stream of combat might get boring in a game of Dungeon World. Another element tends to involve a lot of backtracking once you’ve unlocked a new area/located an item or key, but that’s one of those things I’m not sure will work. I’m not opposed to this taking a few sessions to complete, so a move for abstracting castle/dungeon travel might not be the right thing here either, in case anyone was going to suggest that.

What would your personal approach be for prepping a dungeon crawl through Castlevania? What elements of the video games would you be sure to include and what would you leave out?

Let’s say the PCs in your game come across a murder scene. You’ve got a dead body in a room that’s obviously died as the result of foul play and your player wants to look the body over. Do you let them describe going through the motions if the player wishes to get their CSI: Camelot on and answer what they find as they do the things, or do you insist on a Discern Realities roll and adhere closely to the questions available?

I had a situation like this during a recent session where I described the general lay of the land with the victim laid out on the floor. We determined that a Discern Realities roll was in order, they rolled a 7-9 and got 1 and asked what happened here recently. The player goes back and relays the murder scene to the party and when they return, another PC decides to start looking over the corpse and rolls well and finds some clues that furthered the story, which happened to be a key and a journal. The other player seemed slightly annoyed as they definitely felt they would’ve gone through the pockets of the corpse had I allowed them to, but we agreed on Discern Realities being triggered and so they never got the opportunity to do so.

Anyone else have experience with this? I think the DR call was correct, but being that they ended up going with “What happened here recently” there’s really no way to answer that in a way that has anything to do with the contents of the victim’s pockets. If your PC comes up against something like this, and it triggers a DR roll, and they end up rolling poorly, do you ask them what they want to do after the weak DR roll and let them do the things they’d be doing to investigate the crime scene further, or do explain to them that they’ve learned everything they can even though they know they haven’t done some specific thing that they would’ve liked to?

What sort of story telling techniques do you guys implement when running Dungeon World so that you don’t get bogged down in NPC interaction?

Despite having ran various games in various systems over the years, I still feel like a fairly inexperienced GM when it comes to mastery of pacing/nuance. I know from experience in our campaign that DW really sings when you’re dungeon crawling or fighting off monsters, but a lot of what we’ve done in this campaign so far has revolved around cities, and cities equal people, and people equal conversation. I feel fine when it comes to roleplaying NPCs, so I don’t think the quality of my NPCs is in question, but I need to find a way to minimize the need for NPCs and maximize the action while still telling an interesting story.

I’m fairly certain the answer to my question is to take the adventure away from the cities if I’m feeling that our sessions has too much NPC interaction, but maybe there’s a way to run DW in an urban setting where social interaction is a thing while still managing to give the players things to fight.

Any suggestions?

Anyone have any experience/suggestions for running a Sea Cave/Cavern dungeon? I’ve already got a lot of the details worked out for this place, but I feel like it’s missing some things.

First off, the entrance to this cave system is located beneath a temple that was erected within the last decade by a visiting religious order in search of a place to put down roots in this area. Going for a Lovecraft inspired approach with the coastal town the PCs are currently occupying, I’ve placed an unnatural horror at the bottom of this cave system in the form of this gargantuan oyster creature that’s been infected by an evil parasite that’s corrupted it. The combination of this parasite/oyster has resulted in a sort of psychic/magical infection on the inhabitants of this temple and it’s turned them all into these nightmarish fish men that have turned from their goddess and now worship the oyster.The corrupted oyster has been sending fish men to the town to abduct townsfolk, some of which are intended to be food, others to bolster their numbers. In addition to amassing an army of fish men, the oyster creature naturally has the ability to locally control the seas and as a result has set up this sort of Ravenloft-esque fog that’s encased the entire bay area near the town which has resulted in a complete stop of the fishing and import/export that the town was once known for as ships either don’t make it in to begin with or get turned around and sent back to the harbor.

So yeah, got a place, got a motivation for the PCs to go here, got a boss, got some inhabitants (could probably use more), but I’m wondering if anyone has any suggestions for anything that’ll help this small-ish dungeon pop. Maybe some custom sanity moves, maybe some traps, maybe some interesting encounter ideas, maybe a way to make fighting a giant oyster interesting.

Hi Guys. I’m hoping to get some constructive criticism and feedback on an adventure idea I’m working on and some tips on big monster battles/boss fights.

The premise for the mini campaign goes a little like this. An old king decides to throw a competition he calls The Great Hunt in which he sends invitations out to select warriors across the realm to compete in what is essentially a four round monster hunt. The PCs gather, are assembled into a group based on their particular talents, and are pitted against four other groups to see who can slay their monsters the quickest and return back to the castle before each deadline. I’ve got a bunch of flavor details I can share if anyone’s interested, but that’s the gist of it.

The intention of this sort of a campaign is to give my players a chance to roll up some different characters and a little downtime break from our main campaign by essentially fighting a series of boss battles in a dangerous land. The main campaign we’ve been running is going great, but the pacing is slow and we’re dealing with intrigue and cities and social stuff at the moment, and we’ve got an opportunity to do this side thing while one of the players is out for a while.

Anyhow, I’m struggling to come up with some good rules for The Great Hunt that will make it feel like an actual competition against other teams and not just a series of Boss Fights that they’re either going to win or die trying.

Being that this is Dungeon World, I intend to put my players on the spot and have them describe the monsters they’ve been assigned (each team pics a representative who steps forward and chooses a scroll from a table. This repeats each round with a different representative). I figure that way each player gets a chance to fight a monster they’ve always wanted to go up against. I’m a little concerned about how wide open this is going to make things and whether I’m ready to throw together a hunt for some crazy monster on the fly, but that’s part of the fun.

That brings me to my other concern. I’m a little worried about making a bunch of crazy boss fights interesting and making them different from one another without being able to prep ahead of time. Any suggestions on how to handle that? Maybe some non-specific approaches to big monster fights that I can drop in regardless of what they choose?

Sorry for the wall of text, thanks guys!