Author: Justus Goldstein-Shirley

Brainstorm with me. What kind of traps and puzzles (not to mention any other cool features) does the ancient desert tomb of a legendary dragon-slayer have?

“If the move is tied to some concept that multiple classes might have access to, like a move only accessible to those that have seen beyond Death’s Black Gates, you can create a compendium class for those moves.”

Has anyone actually made this CC? The “character who has come back from Death” concept is mentioned as an example CC a couple times in the rulebook, but as far as I can tell hasn’t actually been created, by the DW team or by fans. I have a dead paladin who will likely be affected by his experience once his pals resurrect him, and I don’t want to reinvent the wheel if someone’s already made this.

Hey gang, I could use some inspiration help. After the (very fun) first session of a new campaign, I’m trying to put together Fronts. A lot of what happened actually ended up being somewhat self-contained, but the biggest hook my players gave me was that something is wrong in the nearby swamp/forest, and is causing the animals to disappear. There’s also a wizard that may or may not be involved (he showed up around the time this started happening), but is definitely not Evil. That’s pretty much all I know for sure right now.

So help me brainstorm here. What’s making the animals go missing? Some sort of plague, which will soon start spreading to the townsfolk? I really like the idea of a chaos entity of some sort, but I don’t think I want to throw reality-warping attacks at them before they’ve had a more straightforward adventure of some sort. Maybe a tribe of frogmen have established a cult (many of the characters have some sort of divine interests) to a forgotten swamp god and are unwittingly what… poisoning the swamp? Right now I’m just treating the swamp itself as Unholy Ground, but until I know more about what’s causing it, I’m going to have a hard time prepping for future sessions. Where would you go with this information? And how does the wizard fit into all this, anyway?

Hey guys, I’m absolutely in love with DW after running it for a couple groups, but I’m a little unclear on how a few things are supposed to be presented to players. Specifically, custom moves, Compendium Classes, and magic items. My question is: how do I tell my players about these? (Long post ahead.)

With general custom moves, my assumption is that I just keep them handy, and if the players stumble onto the trigger, tell them to roll for the appropriate stat, and then give them the chosen result without revealing that this was a particular move, or what the other options were. Is this correct/acceptable? Should I be telling them the possibilities before they roll, or even telling them what the trigger is before they have a chance to do it?

Secondly, CCs. The triggers for these are so specific that I have a hard time imagining that they’ll stumble onto them by chance. Should I be making/selecting these between sessions as a response to something that happened already? Should I be telling players that, say, there are legends that people who do XYZ have managed to gain some abilities, so they can choose to seek them out if they’re interested? Should I show them to my players outside the sessions so they can pick ones that seem interesting and have their character seek them out?

Lastly, magic items. I’m torn between my desire to just let the PCs know what they do (since it’s more fun to use magic items on grand adventures than it is spending half an hour trying to figure out how it works, and heroic fantasy novels rarely include scenes like that for good reason) and my desire to lend verisimilitude to the world and make magic feel special by making them work for it a little. If they find a sword and I just go, “okay, you can use this move now,” that feels a little boring. I suppose it’s easy enough to allow a wizard to wave her hands over it and determine what it does…

What do you guys do? RAW doesn’t really specify, and I don’t see an obvious good answer for these. My default is secret custom moves, mostly just not using CCs, and telling PCs what magic items do so that they can get on with the adventure, but I’m not convinced that this is the best way of going about things. Thoughts?