Author: Pedro Bastos

After so much time pursuing the forces of Evil, our heroes step into the Door of Souls, entering the ever-shifting reaches of the maddening Far Realm, in one last, desperate push to defeat the Daemon Lich known as Ur-Gammon before it releases the terrible eldritch powers of this plane into the mortal realm.

Yeah folks, my first Dungeon World campaign (which is also my first non 1 on 1 RPG campaign) is coming to an epic ending, as the players take their first steps in another plane of existence. How would you handle the effects of a plane of madness on the players, both narratively and gameplay-wise?

Hey folks, last weekend I ran my two main campaigns. While the first one is doing fine and we’re problably aproaching the end (they’re on level 6~7), the newer group kept rolling terrible on their second session (they get such bad rolls that we had a PC death in the first session).

One thing that makes me worried is that battles take way longer then they were supposed to take, the group barely survived an encounter with a few blink dogs that kept dragging on and on. The encounter itself was pretty fun, I believed I used the dogs’ fast movements and abilities quite well, and the deadliness made this fight a pretty tense one, but still It took too much time of our session (actually I made the dogs fall back after getting badly hurt so the story could move forward, even though they were clearly winning the battle)

Any suggestions on what should I do to prevent overly long scenes?

“As you take down the daemon lord with a might swing of tour axe, the hellgate at the lowest level of this ancient castle is closed by the wizard’s mighty ritual. The helish invasion is finally stopped, and now the common folk of the nearby village can live safely.

On the moment you think you can take a little rest, you feel a great tremor, noticing that the walls and the ceiling are starting to crack, and small chunks of stone are falling all over the place. This castle is crumbling down, and it might be your grave, if you’re not fast enough. What are you going to do?”

Hey folks, how do you handle situations when the player characters have a limited time to work around?

P.S.: Please rate my flavor text above : )

People say that when your players enjoy the game, they will start talking about it days and days after. I’m happy to say that they were true, so much true that other friends herad my players talking about how much fun they had during the vacation and now there até three more people wanting to play Dungeon World as well. Bear in mind that these new players are veterans who used to play Vampire the Masquerade and D&D.

So we all agreed that it would be best that the newer players would form a new group beginning their very own campaign (if they joined my current game we would have six players, it would be a mess). Our first session was yesterday and damn, Dungeon World never disappoints.

Our adventurers (a paladin, a druid and a thief) start in the middle of the road, during a stormy night. They were getting back from their last adventure to the nearest Village, when they met an old man riding a horse cart,, being guarded by two mounted mercenary guards, all of them looking very suspicious (they were smugglers). The paladin tried to talk to them, but they weren’t willing to listen, and after some failed charisma rolls a fight broke out.

I thought that a simple fight against two mercenaries and an old man would be an easy introduction to the game, but the players rolled REALLY bad, failures after failures, those three simple enemies were downright kicking the party’s butts and the scene took longer than I expected.

In the end, they managed to beat two of the guards, but the old man got away on his cart. Both the paladin and the druid were badly hurt, and the paladin offered himself to heal the druid with the Lay on Hands move. He rolled an eight, which meant that whatever damage he would heal It would come back on him. He rolled maximum healing (8 hit points) which was exactly how many hit points he had left, and then he rolled a 5 on his Last Breath roll. Everyone just kept laughing for quite a few minutes (even the paladin’s player, he wasn’t angry or anything like that).

We ended the session with the remaining characters picking the dead guards’ horses and giving the old man chase, stopping at the nearest Village, where they would recruit the paladin player’s new character: a Dwarf-Ogre Ranger. According to him, a Dwarf-Ogre is just like an regular Ogre, but had the size of a dwarf, which I found totally awesome, so we just picked the ogre’s racial move from Number Appearing, and yes, the whole Village was inhabited by Dwarf-Ogres.

I hope you enjoyed this story. Have you ever had a character death right in the first session? Just to be clear, the paladin knew he could die from 7-9 on a Lay on Hands roll, and he took the risk.

Hey folks, has anyone made a Beholder for Dungeon World? How would you handle its multiple eyestalks, each shooting a different kind of attack?

If there’s one thing I miss from D&D is this amazing monster, I’m a big fan of beholders : P

Hey folks, yesterday I told about one of the players wanting to change our campaign’s system to D&D after we tried it on a one-shot. So I started talking with all the players (personally and as a group) and we’ve clearified some very important things:

The end of the year is coming, our vacations are almost over and we are soon getting back to college, by then we will definitely have way less time to play (we play online so it will be a more time constraint than anything else), so we concluded that it would be best If we tried to “rush” to finish the campaign before getting back to studying and whatnot, and this is key to understand the problem.

Our last session felt very, very rushed, and it was far away from being the best one. Even though the story was really pushed forward, as the villains took their biggest step towards their goal (which is bringing an ancient god to the mortal realm, where it would feast on mortal souls) it was kinda of a boring session, we had some very bland encounters, as I was more focused in bringing the story forward, I didn’t put much effort in trying to bring up cool descriptions and being creative when using the monsters, while the players weren’t very creative on their side either.

So this last session left a bad taste in our mouths, and we didn’t notice that it was purely our fault. With that said, our most engaged player was preciptioulsly thinking that maybe If we change the game system we would have better sessions again, but after sitting down and talking we concluded that we had screwed up with Dungeon World, and not the contrary.

I think that this became very clear after our D&D one shot, as most of us didn’t really saw much of a change: yes, the rules were different, yes the combat was more tactical, but the experience in itself wasn’t better, we were just doing the same thing we always did in a different manner.

In the end, we all agreed that playing more is not the same as playing better, and agreed with staying on Dungeon World, taking a more careful aproach, even If we get to play it less beacuse of college. I’m very thankful for all your great responses, guys, you are awesome.

Hey guys, I’m having a weird situation here, and If not properly handled it might become a problem later on.

You see, one of my players is always very enganged with the game, he truly enjoys it, more than the other players actually (the others enjoy it greatly too). He asks lots of questions, enjoys his moments under the spotlight, is interested in the story, etc. So far so good, right?

The problem is, this guy is a big hack and slash fan, spent hours and hours playing games like Path of Exile, he’s a true min maxer to the core, and at times he kinda complains about Dungeon World and its “limited options”, suggesting that we should try another, more crunchier system, something like D&D that has more character customization options.

So, one of the players told me he wouldn’t be able to play on the next session, so I suggested the others that we could play a d&d one shot, using the free rules and pre-generated characters available on the Wizards’ website, and they agreed. I made a very small, deadly dungeon populated by goblins and let them explore it during this session, teaching the mechanics as they delved deeper, kinda like a tutorial.

In the end we all enjoyed it, but most players seemed to feel like there was nothing they were missing, kinda like a “nothing to see here, folks” feeling, except for the minmaxer. His eyes sparkled with all the spells and whatnot present on D&D, and loved the more tactical combat (we used a grid and tokens).

Alright then, most players seemed to prefer Dungeon World, but the one that preferred Dungeons & Dragons is being very vocal about it, almost like he’s trying to convince the others to make the change, and I’m not entirely sure about how am I supposed deal with this (I enjoy both games for very different reasons, maybe leaning more towards Dungeon World).

So, what do you guys think? These guys (most of them newcomers) are all very close friends and I don’t want to get into awkward situations because of boardagmes, you know. Any suggestions?

Hey guys, on my last one-on-one game with my brother, his character helped a group of friendly druids (he had already met them during a previous session), and they rewarded him with a magical flute that allows him to call an animal of his choosing as long as he plays the right song (it must be an appropriate choice, he can’t call a whale right in the middle of the desert for example).

The following lines describe the custom move he triggers when he uses it, with some flavor text (because flavor text is awesome).

The Druidic Flute of Animal Calling:

It is said that a long time ago, a Bard got lost in an ancient forest, and was found by the fey creatures that live there, who sheltered him/her for the whole season. In the time he/she spent with the fey, the Bard learnt their language, a wrote beautiful songs with it. The fey loved those them, and created magical instruments to play those amazing songs, and when they did, all animals from the forest would come to hear it. With time, the druids and other guardians learned how to make those instruments, and started to make their own beautiful songs as well.

When you try to call an animal of your choosing (it must be a natural creature from the area) by playing this flute, roll + INT. With 10+ the animal you choose comes and it will obey one command. With 7-9 choose one:

– A different animal comes (of the GM’s choice), but you still get one command

– The animal you wanted comes, but it won’t necessarily obey you

P.S.: the Bard mentioned on the flavor text is not my brother’s character, it’s a mysterious, legendary figure that supposedly was the first person to explore the region our campaign takes place.

So what do you think? Any feedback?

Hey guys, how do you handle long travels? I’m asking that because in my games I’ve mostly dealt with small areas (like a campaign taking place in a small, isolated barony).

The longest “perilous journey” on my games took just some days on horseback, but what if the players want to cross the entire country or the entire continent? How would you handle that? A single “Undertake a Perilous Journey” roll seems very underwhelming to me. How would you handle rations and how would you handle this long journey narratively?

Hey folks I need some help.

On the closing scene of our latest session, one of the player characters (an evil elven mage) tried to murder the town’s mayor (the party discovered his corruption schemes) but she was interrupted by the other PCs, as they knocked her unconscious and let the guards take her away to prison.

The whole group is totally fine with that (including the player that is in jail now), we all laughed and had a great, fun session, but the question is, how am I going to start the next session, considering that one of the characters is going to start separeted from the rest, locked in a dungeon, while the others are free?

I was thinking about the local feudal lord taking the corrupt mayor to jail and putting one of his most trusted captains in place, a person who would rule the town with an iron fist and would not tolerate any kind of criminal, putting the elven mage’s life on some serious risk.

Any suggestions?