Category: The Dungeon World Tavern: Actual Play

This week in my home #Stonetop game…

The PCs returned from the Great Wood in the dead of night, having recovered the body of a woman who’d been sacrificed to an evil spirit by someone from the village.

They were really smart about things! They ID’d one of the cultists and spooked a confession out of them, confirming the PCs suspicions of who the cult’s leader was. They gathered the nascent town council and presented evidence. Then they went to get the cult leader, who the sheriff’s apprentice had been spying on. I was expecting this to be the end of the cult!

But… I had the Sheriff’s roll +Quality for his apprentice (we’re using the Perilous Wilds follower moves) and he rolled a miss. I decided what happened but didn’t give them any immediate details.

The Fox (our rogue analog) snuck up on the cult-leader’s house, peered through the shuttered window and spied the cult-leader alone in his house, calmly smoking a pipe at like 3 in the morning–and some vague, muffled sound coming from out his life of sight.

The Sheriff and Ranger joined the Fox, then left him at the window and went around front to burst in the front door. The cultist appeared to hear (or sense?) them coming and sighed, hoisting something from the floor outside of the Fox’s view.

The Sheriff kicked in the door to find his apprentice hog-tied and bug-eyed, the cult-leader hiding behind him with a knife to his throat. The Sheriff used his I am the Law effect to demand that the cultist let the kid go, and got a 10+, but the cultist choose to attack. I revealed his newly-acquired Word of Pain, wracking the Sheriff and temporarily stunning him (7-9 to Defy Danger with CON).

The Fox tries to burgle through the locked shutters and take the cultist out from behind, but biffs the roll. I reveal an unwelcome truth: the shutters were warded! The Fox’s hand and arm ripples with debilitating pain and drops to the ground, writhing.

The cultist (apparently a sorcerer, now) gives a gloating smirk at the Fox’s grunts and the Ranger darts in and closes the distance (Defy Danger 10+). She then tackles the sorcerer with a 7-9, succeeding but drawing an attack as well… the sorcerer grabs her face and zaps her with a painful, poisonous touch that spreads under her skin! She mentally calls her saber-toothed tiger to come help them.

The sorcerer gets up, hits the Sheriff with another Pain Word , and walks out the door to find himself face-to-face with Sita, the saber-tooth tiger. The ranger rolls +Quality to have Sita do her thing, and… misses.

We cut to one of the other PCs passing the house, bringing the victim’s family to the common house. She sees Sita wimpering in the snow, and goes in to find the Sheriff and the Ranger recovering, and no sign of the sorcerer. He’s gone, in the wind, his tracks vanishing a few steps outside his door. And we end the session there.

Play to see what happens!