Author: John at Deep Six Delver

Jeremy Strandberg, the Dungeon World Tavern seems to have largely reconstituted over at MeWe, led through the perilous wilds by the staff of Yochai Gal and including bunches of people you enjoyed talking with over here.

I hope we don’t lose you though! How are you faring in these straitened times?

Dungeon BINGO

This is a fun idea for lightning-fast prep that I picked up from Risus Monkey’s Tim Ballew.

It’s not a GM Master Tip, just something I did not know until I saw it in action. The post includes examples and resources from the Risus Monkey archives.

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.

Dungeons

Rough estimate: What percent of your Dungeon World play involves “dungeons”, or location-based adventure?

What percent of your Dungeon World prep involves dungeons?

Have you every estimated the Load involved in carrying a person?

My guess is that most people would be 5 weight—that’s 1 more than Plate or a Keg of Dwarven Stout, making it possible for a horse to carry 2 people, unarmored.

Last Breath Questions and Revelations

A few weeks ago we had a character bite it, and when the player heard Death’s offer, he wanted to make a counter-offer.

In that moment, my judgment was that Last Breath doesn’t let you Parley with Death. And besides, making Death an offer on Last Breath is an advantage explicitly granted to the Barbarian class, and it would devalue that class a little to let anyone do it.

Have you ever had players bargain back with Death during the Last Breath move? What did you do?

The player rejected Death’s offer, but after the session I got to thinking that the offer I gave was kind of lame, on the verge of not being a fan of the character. We decided to “re-shoot” the scene with a more interesting offer. Mistakes can be corrected.

It taught me a lesson, though: No matter what has happened before in play, the 7–9 result on Last Breath has an unstated requirement: Death wants the character alive for some reason.

Maybe that’s obvious to everyone else who ever read the move, but events in play really pushed the boundaries this time.

That requirement was blurry to me in the moment, because this character had cheated Death repeatedly, gave his heart to a witch to further escape Death, and later even stood by idly while the witch “killed” Death. It has been an ongoing drama in throughout the campaign, and I couldn’t help seeing the 7–9 bargain in that perspective.

But looking at it from the perspective of “Death wants this character alive” immediately suggested a much more interesting bargain.

–

This reminds me of something else I notice in every Dungeon World game I’ve played for more than 1 session: Death’s “agenda” comes up a lot, because of the Last Breath move: Who makes it (by sheer chance)? Who doesn’t make it (by sheer chance)? What offers does Death make? What gets narrated about the Black Gate and the world beyond?

I’ve given Death a different persona in every campaign, sometimes more or less fleshed out through these encounters. But Death’s “agenda”, whatever it is, always tends to come into focus based on how the questions above shake out—through chance and through the offers—and even become a major theme of the campaign.

Is finding out Death’s interests an inevitable feature of the Last Breath move, in your experience?

Have you played Dungeon World in which the Last Breath move (as written) came up more than once without Death’s interests becoming focal, at least as a subtext of the campaign?