Author: J Stein

Anyone read “Green Law of Varkith”?

I’m about 3/4 through, and although I like a lot about it (especially wanting to attach it to a Planar Codex intrusion-by-Dis type campaign), I don’t understand the central fictional conceit at all.

What does the institution of guilds have to do with combating the scourge of Heroes, at all? As in, how? If “The Five” had been a guild, would they not have rampaged? If Varkith had had guilds, would they have changed the fact that The Five demolished their /standing armies/? “The Green Law exists to prevent any individual from growing too powerful” – but how does it do that?

What does it mean “to be alone, is to be exiled”, and how does that translate into “everyone must join a guild”? The lawkeepers are supposed to hunt down the guildless, although imperfectly: how? What disadvantages are there in being in a guild, anyway – why would anyone?

Additionally, the game text recognizes that the PCs are “unique” (and, implicitly, “heroes”), in a setting built around brutally repressing heroes. How do these two things interact? So far, it doesn’t seem to.

I get it, I get it; it’s just an excuse to force everything into a guild-centric mold, cause that’s what the game supplement is about. But internal to the fiction, I just don’t get it.

I’ve been asked to MC a DW game for the first time. I’ve MC’d AW before, so I figured… eh. Having stupidly agreed, I’ve been reviewing the rules. The ration rules are giving me pause, though, and I was hoping some might help clarify. (Ordinarily it’s something I’d be tempted to hand-wave away, but one of the prospective players says he’s looking forward to a Hunter, and I don’t want to steal from him a situation he ought to be getting the spotlight in):

Salient points:

– Undertake a Perilous Journey suggests a journey costs 1 ration/day

– Human Hunter starting move states the character doesn’t have to consume a ration when making camp (in context X), suggesting rations are 1/character/day

-Make Camp consumes a ration, and again, its phrasing suggests 1/character/day

-Quartermaster skill, on 10+, reduces number of rations required by 1. On a 7-9, normal ration consumption.

Things I’d like to clarify:

1) It’s not explicitly stated, but it seems to me that the ration cost of Perilous Journey and the ration cost of Make Camp are the same cost; you make camp each night, and you measure your journey as 1ration/day. That is, this is a cost of 1/day, not 1/day of travel + 1/night of camping.

2) Again, I can’t find the explicit statement, but it seems to me the cost is 1 ration / day / character. A five day journey with a party of 3 ought to consume 15 rations. Right?

3) If I understand the above two, it seems like the quartermaster skill check is a bit odd.

A 10+ on trailblazer, if it saves even a day, will save a number of rations equal to the number of members in the party. If it saves more than that, it grows in multiples. Likewise, a miss would be measured in large proportions of total ration cost.

Scout 10+ can take a huge amount of sting out of an encounter; a miss can really hurt.

QM, on the other hand, on a miss can theoretically be crippling, and on a 10+ seems to have essentially no value over a 7-9 (e.g., a party of four traveling for a week, on a 10+, saves 1 ration off of 28; by comparison, a trailblazer 10+ saving even one day of travel would save 4 rations).

That is, trailblazer and scout each have a “oh shit,” “status quo,” and “nice!” category, depending on the roll. QM seems to only have “oh shit” and “status quo”. It just doesn’t quite seem to fit the magnitude of the other two roles, at least assuming I’ve understood the ration counts correctly, and the QM move correctly.

Any guidance?