Author: Jamie Frost

Originally shared by Jamie Frost

Time and possibly date are flexible! If you want to come but can’t make it at the appointed hour, let me know and we’ll see what we can do!

Come on down, and help defend a tiny kobold village* against an onslaught of XP-seeking humans, the ravages of cruel mother nature, and everything else that wants to kill and possibly eat you!

I’m looking for 3-5 players, and being familiar with the rules is not a necessity, as they are Apocalyptically simple. We’d be running for about four hours, ideally. I’m not specifically aiming for anything longer than a one-shot, but if it goes well, we might see about carrying on from there. Interested? Then hit that “Yes” button!

*A tiny village of kobolds, or a village of tiny kobolds, you ask? Yes.

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World-building essay incoming, critiques and counterarguments welcome:

“Is there a Place of Power nearby?”

I’ve played in a few one-shots and dropped into a couple of longer games over my time here, and it seems like every session with a Wizard (or anyone else with the Ritual move) involved has this question pop up. Now, I get that Ritual is an awesome little swiss army knife of a move, but for me, personally, the answer is always going to be:

“If you have to ask, the answer is no.”

I can understand the argument that Power can be likened to a natural resource, like an aquifer, so there’s a chance that you can Ritual it up a bit in a given location even if it looks on the surface to be pretty mundane. And on a more meta level, it’s true that you don’t want to put the kibosh on one of the PC’s signature moves too often. But to me, Places of Power should be strange, eldritch places, dripping with some flavor of the otherworldly. They’re landmarks, the sorts of places that have tales written about them. They’re the enchanted grove where hypnotic laughter can be heard by moonlight, the ancient battlefield where the dead never rest and the clouds never break. You might see a city built on such a place, but if you do, it’ll be a very strange city.

Mind you, draw maps and leave blanks, so the PCs can still find such places that the non-adventuring populace knows nothing of. But they’ll know it when they see it; they won’t have to ask.

Fortunately for the budding Ritualist, such places tend to attract the sorts of terrifying monsters and wondrous treasures that make Rituals most needed. And at times, of course, questing to a Place of Power and seizing control of it for long enough to complete a vital Ritual is reward enough in and of itself.

Originally shared by Jamie Frost

Greetings, everyone! I’ve been out of the game for a while now, but I’d like to try my hand at starting up a campaign, since my job currently leaves me with a rather embarrassing amount of free time on my hands.

So here are the relevant details:

1. Looking to run once a week. Date and time are flexible, both for the first session and future sessions. I know we need to find a slot that works for everyone, and I also sometimes get called in for extra hours which I frankly can’t afford to pass up at the moment. So expect a somewhat hectic schedule and the occasional missed week!

2. Looking for 3-4 people, probably. Depending on how things go, I might be open to a larger but irregular roster.

3. Perhaps most importantly, I would like to try something a little different for this game. It’s an idea I pitched quite a while back and which few probably remember, and it goes like this: before the campaign itself properly begins, there will be a session of collaborative worldbuilding using Dawn of Worlds, a freely-available collaborative setting creation game which you can find here: http://www.clanwebsite.org/games/rpg/Dawn_of_Worlds_game_1_0Final.pdf

(I had previously considered making that a two-parter, with the second part being run off of Microscope, but I think that might drag things on a little and fill in too many edges. It’s a cool idea, though, so I’ll leave it on the table if there’s a stable of interested people. If you’re in favor of this, bring it up below so I can come prepped.)

4. In consideration of the above, things could potentially go pretty far astray from the standard fantasy conventions. As such, I’d be very open to non-core classes and custom race moves, depending on how the setting turns out. So if you want to play something kinda out there, this may very well be your game. 😉

5. No hot dogs on Fridays.

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Hello, all! Got a long-ish and mostly irrelevant setup for what I hope will be a fun bit of brainstorming, so feel free to skip to the last paragraph if you like.

So, I was reading the Evil Empress Guide the other day (‘Tis the distaff counterpart to the Evil Overlord’s list, and I was quite unaware of it), and was struck by one line in particular: “If I married into the title of Evil Empress under duress then using the Hero to free me of the Overlord does not obligate me to abdicate my throne.”

Now initially this struck me as an awesome adventure twist: have the party members liberate the kingdom by killing the evil dictator with an underlying expectation of sovereignty as a reward. But planning that far ahead really undercuts the beautiful “play to find out what happens” philosophy of DW (though it might work in other games).

So then I thought, well, why not start off with killing an evil dictator, and see what happens from there? Have the royal palace be the first dungeon, that kind of thing. It seems like an idea rife with possibilities, but it would also place the game at a very… for want of a better word, Exalted level of play. Whether the PCs become the new government or public enemy number one or go off in another direction entirely, the game would still be starting at revolutionary regicide and escalating from there.

So, what do you think, taverners? Would a second-act closer like killing a king work as a first session? And if so, any advice on how to make it work well?

Originally shared by Jamie Frost

Just GM’d my first session of Dungeon World. Was a bit rough, but I got some good feedback from the players. A couple of things that I’ve learned, before I go to bed:

1. A one-shot is a very different animal from a campaign. Players said they enjoyed the world-building, but it definitely dragged on too long and filled in a lot of detail that wasn’t going to come up, and was time that could have been better spent actually doing stuff. I need to find a happy medium where there’s enough flavor to lead to an interesting adventure but not so much that we’ve spent half the session setting things up.

2. One of my biggest stumbling blocks as a GM is still present: when I lose confidence or become uncertain about where things are going, I instinctively throw boring obstacles at the players, presumably to give myself time to think. I need to learn to let the players make their own trouble instead of doing that, and focus on interesting challenges instead of meaningless ones–and also to make challenges interesting if I find a scene dragging.

3. Things were slow starting, as I opened with the players in a “how do you get to the dungeon” situation. One of my players said that he is actually in favor of starting in non-combat encounters, and I agree that it’s good to get a bit of characterization going before the first die is cast, but I still didn’t handle it very well. I think the key is to start at a meaningful threshold–the GMing section touches on this, suggesting, e.g., starting at the doors of the dungeon, but I think that’s actually a bad example. If you choose not to go into the dungeon, you just go home and things stay the same. Same thing with the quest-giver situation I started with; one of the characters wasn’t tempted by any of the possible rewards given the risks, and so was going to abstain, and though he ultimately went forwards the fact that this was a valid choice with no immediate and apparent consequences was a problem.

So, key lesson: if “the status quo is preserved” is one of the choices, the decision is a boring one. PCs should never be allowed to play it safe, so every crossroads they come to should lead to a collection of equally important places.