James Hawthorne – Dungeon World Tavern G+ Archives

Christmas presents ready to be wrapped!

Christmas presents ready to be wrapped!

From whybird, on the SomethingAwful forums. Thought this was too good not to share!

From whybird, on the SomethingAwful forums. Thought this was too good not to share!

“The session of Dungeon World last night featured the players getting into a cook-off against an undead chef who was being kept alive by a Lovecraftian beast of insatiable appetite so that he could keep on finding it new and exciting flavours.

As challenged party, the undead chef got to choose the key ingredient: he went for gelatinous cube. Cue the Artificer setting up a Rube Goldberg-esque trap to dump their gelatinous cube into a vat of marinade, and the Mastermind using his ‘reveal an enemy to be an ally’ move to order the cube ‘Bad cube! Down! Spit it out!’ after it broke free and swallowed members of the party.

The ending involved the Fae using her Traitor’s Knife (when she stabs someone with it who trusts her, their flesh becomes magically delicious) to murder some of their rival’s sous-chefs and add them to the marinade, and ended up recreating the Iron Chef episode from Futurama. She has now claimed the undead chef’s enchanted pepper-grinder as her primary weapon.”

Pirate World!

Pirate World! The Amphib pages. This is essentially a preview of how I’m handling races in the book, and I reckon it’d probably work quite well for other people’s races too. Each PW race has

* a Background, which includes a bunch of moves you can choose/ gain when you expand on your character’s fiction.

* Equipment to choose from

* Looks to add to your character (NB: in this example they’re tied in with Backgrounds)

* Questions to ask a player of that race, to flesh out the world

Plus example locations and a description of how they fit into the world, but that’s all explicitly ready to be chopped up to fit into your own games 🙂

Strange Idea #33: Group Moves

I had a fairly dramatic situation in a campaign earlier this year, and the whole party pulled together and rolled to affect a single result. It was damn cool and really tense, and since then I’ve been thinking about moves that require the entire party to pull off. I’m thinking each class could have one Group Move, and you’d roll 2d6+ number of helpers. Here’s a wizard example:

Pentagon

When your blood brothers place themselves on each point of a carved star, and you stand in the centre as they draw their own blood, roll +Help.

On a 10+ you call on the power and cast a potent spell from outside your normal reach (e.g. one of the level 7 or 9 spells, or a custom list)

On a 7-9 the side effects reverberate throughout the circle, inflicting pain or vulnerabilities in your blood brothers.

That move could be tied into ritual effects.

I reckon there’s tons of potential for really, really cool moves. Probably about halfway in power between a normal move and Grim World’s death moves, with fairly big consequences for failure. How would we work the rolling, though? Should it require a number of characters, or just give a set bonus for the entire party joining in? Maybe just Bonded characters, or +Bonds? In the example below we did a load of separate Aid rolls, but would it be better with one single roll?

In the actual campaign I mentioned above, the whole group came together to stab a vampire in the back. It was a momentous occasion; the vampire had been found in the halls of the dead and had been feasting on that city’s gods, so was elevated to god-like powers itself. The knife was ridiculously potent though, and if one guy could just stab the vampire with it then this Big Bad would die, releasing the gods trapped within.

One of the characters got into position and tried to stab but rolled a 7-9; everyone else decided to Aid, and we ended up with a few +1s bringing it into a 10+. Then the Gladiator, who’d been promised eternal life by the vampire, hindered the stabbing instead of aiding; carnage ensued, and the stabber got his neck snapped!

I know Aid is only supposed to stack once, but it was bloody cool all the same 🙂

Pirate World: 625% Funded! £8129 of £1300 goal

Pirate World: 625% Funded! £8129 of £1300 goal

Thankyou to everyone who’s made this campaign so much fun to run. It wouldn’t be anywhere at all without all of your support and comments, so thankyou! I just love that I now have funding to finish my book about pirates, commission some truly beautiful artwork from two of my favourite artists and get to spend more time chatting to people who love the book. This is just the best!

Special thanks to Vincent Baker, Adam Koebel and Sage LaTorra for making the awesome systems we all get to tinker around in, and double thanks for keeping those systems available to mess about with.

(Crossposting from the Pirate World g+ community)

So! What next for the project? I’ll be releasing lots of content over the coming days and weeks, previews of the art and taking submissions for the Backgrounds, Hirelings and Items parts of the book. Most of this will be organised in a file repository on my site, accessible only by backers.

That will run until early February, when everything gets collated and made to look very, very pretty. I’ll take your addresses via kickstarter survey at this point. Once that’s done, I email the PDF to the printers and to all the 467 (what!) backers. The printers take a few days to print and courier the books to me, and I start customising them, posting them out and spend time enjoying the book myself!

You’ll always be able to reach me here, on kickstarter and via email (pirateworlddw@gmail.com). I’m happy to take comments, questions or just to chat about the project.

THANKYOU, so so much!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041872302/pirate-world-the-explosive-dungeon-world-fate-sour

99 minutes left to fill your life with pirates!

99 minutes left to fill your life with pirates! I’ll be talking live when the kickstarter finishes and taking questions afterwards 🙂

(OK this is totally the last one. I swear!)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041872302/pirate-world-the-explosive-dungeon-world-fate-sour

The final reminder, I promise! There’s about ten hours left to back the project, and we’re at over 550% funded :D

The final reminder, I promise! There’s about ten hours left to back the project, and we’re at over 550% funded 😀

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041872302/pirate-world-the-explosive-dungeon-world-fate-sour

36 hours left to back Pirate World!

36 hours left to back Pirate World!

Just a reminder that about two-thirds of the book chapters (Backgrounds, Hirelings, Luncheon World, Bonus Chapter) aren’t specific to swashbuckling adventures, and are designed deliberately to fit into any Dungeon World adventure. The aim is a sourcebook that’ll be useful and engrossing, even if you don’t want to sail an underwater dwarfship filled with explosive goblins (though I honestly don’t know why you wouldn’t want to do that) or pilot an iceberg filled with vikings.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041872302/pirate-world-the-explosive-dungeon-world-fate-sour

Also, just five days left in Pirate World’s kickstarter campaign!

Also, just five days left in Pirate World’s kickstarter campaign! We’ve raised 400% of the main goal, over £5000! I couldn’t have done any of that without you guys, so thankyou very much 🙂

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041872302/pirate-world-the-explosive-dungeon-world-fate-sour

Hireling Creator!

Hireling Creator!

I’ve just released the Hireling Creation Guide for Pirate World, and will be taking community content until the 24th December! The best Hirelings will go into Pirate World’s book, assuming you’re cool with that, with full credit to you and a DTRPG link if you’d like. As I can’t run a competition with Kickstarter, it’s not a competition and I can’t offer any rewards. Sorry!

If you’ve missed it, the Pirate World kickstarter is here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041872302/pirate-world-the-explosive-dungeon-world-fate-sour