Category: The Dungeon World Tavern: Actual Play

I don’t get to game with nephew very often.

I don’t get to game with nephew very often.

I don’t get to game with nephew very often. I think the last time was a Dungeon World game toward the end of last year. He was playing a warforged fighter named Ssor, his name backwards. That game he joined my regular group for a pretty epic session that involved some planar hopping and time travel. Looks like I’m going to run another session for him tonight, so I wrote this up for the session.

Ssor,

After traveling to Hell and back, you set out from Hamshire to hunt down the demons that escaped through the portal that brought you back to the world. When you track down and battle the demon Garmantragashador, roll +STR. On a 10+ pick 2, on a 7-9 pick 1.

* You take off Garmantragashador’s head, sending him back to hell.

* Those that witness the battle see the demon’s true form and know you did not simply kill an unarmed man.

* You take from Garmantragashador the crescent moon-shaped Pendant of Arman Thul, which allows its wearer to bind shadows to their bidding.

* Garmantragashador does not mark you. If he had you would have become a beacon for evil things.

What does Garmantragashador look like? In human form? Demon form?

What were Garmantragashador’s last words to you?

If you were marked, where? What does it look like?

The Mark of Garmantragashador

When you are marked by the demon Garmantragashador:

* All foes faced with a choice of who to attack will choose you.

* If you are in hostile territory on a miss tell the GM the following: Until I arrive at a place of safety, any Defy Danger roll of 7-9 by me may draw attract a wandering monster.

When you discover how to remove the Mark of Garmantragashador the GM will detail 1-4 of the following requirements:

* The blood of a magical creature

* Midnight on the full or new moon

* A circle and/or rune drawn with a magical substance

* A significant sacrifice

* A priest of Law or Good

* Slay a powerful creature

The Pendant of Arman Thul

The shadowy powers of forgotten Arman Thul may only be called upon after sunset. When you use the pendant to call upon the long dead wizard’s powers, roll +WIS. On a 10+ hold 3, on a 7-9 hold 1. Spend hold 1-for-1 to:

* Gather shadows around you, making yourself one with the shadows for a short time.

* Gather shadows around a creatures eyes, shadowing their vision for a short time.

* Gather shadows into the shape of your choosing, creating a shadow illusion for a short time.

One of my players is about to take the Monk class with a vow of silence and I CANNOT WAIT to separate him from his…

One of my players is about to take the Monk class with a vow of silence and I CANNOT WAIT to separate him from his…

One of my players is about to take the Monk class with a vow of silence and I CANNOT WAIT to separate him from his allies and have the enemy interrogate him!

In this episode, we thank Adam and Sage for Dungeon World.

In this episode, we thank Adam and Sage for Dungeon World.

In this episode, we thank Adam and Sage for Dungeon World. Then we get down to play. If you are curious about how Roll20 works (macros and mapping on the fly particularly)  this is your chance to see it in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoIr73leBIw

The Drow Cleric, Yemi’serra, in my semi-regular game is a psycho.

The Drow Cleric, Yemi’serra, in my semi-regular game is a psycho.

The Drow Cleric, Yemi’serra, in my semi-regular game is a psycho. The character is really, really cool, but still a psychotic murderhobo.

She is a Cleric of the Unknown God, the god of Secrets and Power. She traded a powerful secret with it (in lack of better term) for the power to bend divine power to her will. The god snatched the secret from her memory and bestowed power upon her. This is why she can cast spells while regular priests cannot.

She’s outright and horribly unscrupulous however, and it is fantastic. While travelling to the Pyramid of Zelos, an abandoned temple to a largely forgotten god of the Sun and Fire (named Zelos of course), they encountered a group of Bullywugs in the swamps around the temple, twelve of them.

As the Lizardman Fighter, Gizh, rolled 10+ on his Scouting roll while they were undertaking a perilous journey, they got the drop on them. They decided to kill ’em off as they are natural enemies to the lizardmen, who by the way eats the bullywugs when they can catch them.

The fighter dons his magical boots of I can produce no sound whatsoever (yes, he has those… he can’t even speak when they are worn), and the High Elven Wizard, Javanarell, proceeds to make him invisible. They set up the ambush, and after the initial surprise attack, they proceeded to kill six of the twelve bullywugs before they even had a chance to act. The rest starts running for their lives, but only three of them makes it away alive.

One was left behind though, as Javanarell wounded it with his bow. Yemi’serra had already donned her Reaper Gauntlets, which can “catch” the souls of sentient creatures when they die and release them to heal herself 1d4 hp. They were a gift from the god of Death and the Harvest.

She looks at the remaining struggling bullywug for a while, then suddenly tears out its throat. Everyone watches this brutality with a slight feeling of discomfort. They know what the gauntlets does, so they weren’t surprised when they saw the gauntlets absorb the soul.

So, this was of course unnecessarily brutal, or at least everyone thought it. It would have been more palatable if they had just stabbed it. But ho ho ho, it didn’t stop there. Immediately after she yanked a roaming spirit out of oblivion and thrust it into the body while cackling something along the lines of “I compel you to seeerve!”

The body animates and rises yet again, its wound almost gone and with a blank stare in its eyes. By then, everyone around the table was freaking out and had no idea about how to react. Even the hirelings were mortified but dared not say anything.

The main “problem” is now that Yemi’serra has three mechanical incentives to murder first and ask questions later: She can suck out their souls to heal herself later, she can ask them three questions with speak to the dead with the promise that they can’t lie, and she gets a minion.

Now the player told me that she wants to become a lich.

Oh, party woes…

This session was awesome.

Hopefully I’ll be meeting up with my players this weekend!

Hopefully I’ll be meeting up with my players this weekend!

Hopefully I’ll be meeting up with my players this weekend! It’s been about a month, but and they’ve got to get down to business in the village of Graybark.

Our adventures up to this point involved successfully slaying the Sorcerer-fiend, a powerful wizard/frost troll that has plagued the land for 200 years. They killed him, and have taken an interest in the Kistvaane relic he had been dragging around with him for who knows how long. Now, loaded up with the artifact/corpse and a giant magical crystal, they’ve begun their return to civilization to be praised and welcomed as heroes for the ages. After a brief scuffle with the Sorcerer-fiend’s dark elf entourage — who looted the corpses of the party’s fallen allies and fled into the realm of the Dark Elfs with magic items galore — the PCs have wandered down the Heart of the World mountains into the valleys and come upon Graybark.

Here, everything has gotten hairy. They’ve been welcomed as heroes, which is great for them, but they’ve been entangled in the people’s socio-political problems. The village has been isolated from the rest of the world for some time, as the roads have been so dangerous from the Sorcerer-fiend’s monsters that no traders have dealt with them. They survive only thanks to the kindness showed them by the local Elfish military base. So, many of Graybark’s men and women have taken up banditry themselves, seeking out travelers on roads farther and farther out from the village, bushwacking them, and storing their goods for the town to use during tough times.

The PCs became entangled when their weaponry was stolen by the Graybark bandits after a night of celebration and debauchery.

They split up.

The Thief (Mouse) learned all of the above by befriending two child-thieves under the watchful eye of a “corrupt” village sentry and infiltrated the bandits woodland hideout. He also learned that the bandits have the blessing of the dryad’s ghost, inhabiting the forest.

The Druid (Aziz) trailed the sentry in the form of a hound and met up with the Barbarian (Ozai), who chased one of the equipment thieves through the woods and found the mouth of their cavernous hideout.

The Fighter (Ajax) and Paladin (Ozymandias) pursued another thief through a gulley and a clearing, and survived a tree-top ambush with explosives (our world has gunpowder; surprise). They made a deal with a captured bandit, to take her far away from this life — and she showed them the surface entrance to their lair’s lockup.

The party was reunited awkwardly. Ozy, Ajax, and their captive creeping in from above (Ajax got to Bend Bar Lift Gates the padlocked door); Mouse, Aziz, Ozai being shown the lock up by the two kids Mouse befriended, and then all of them hiding inside when they heard the bandit leader coming. Like a bad sitcom, you could almost hear the laugh track from eight people hiding in one glorified supply closet.

Well, things fell apart for the party there. The raiding party returned from their conquest (advanced a portent) and found the surface entrance to the lockup was destroyed. The PCs stepped out before being discovered and announced themselves to the bandit leader, as a peace offering… of sorts. The bandit leader ordered the party to put their weapons down if talks were to be peaceful. The Paladin refused (they’re in the lair of the bandits, surrounded on all sides, and there’s evidence the bandits are holding the Fighter’s squire prisoner).

So the Paladin is refusing, the party is berating him to listen to reason, he’s talking down to the bandits and their leader about being criminals, the bandits are trying to explain the socio-economic complexities of their situation, the paladin is having none of that since he’s Lawful and not Good, and then the scared captive who wants out of this life spooks. She grabs the bandit leader’s boyfriend and holds him at knife point as a hostage.

Stabs him, throws the rapidly-dying guy, and runs. The bandit leader is busy cradling his dying lover, in a panic, as the captive uses the chaos to put distance between herself and everybody else.

The problem in which the party finds itself involves the Ghost of the Forest Dryad. She has bestowed her blessings upon the bandits because she is blood kin to one of them. She is blood kin to the bandit just stabbed and now dying. She begins to coalesce in front of the party, summoned by his cries. The PCs are in a bit of a situation.

And I’m excited to see how they get out of it!

Continuation from previous, the party wander through the sewers eastward, as the man-made sewer bricks give way to a…

Continuation from previous, the party wander through the sewers eastward, as the man-made sewer bricks give way to a…

Continuation from previous, the party wander through the sewers eastward, as the man-made sewer bricks give way to a more broken, uneven terrain. The sewer trench becomes an underground stream. They continue onward until they notice that the natural ceiling is beginning to show root tips. After a while longer, the roots are thick and slowing progress.

Taran decides to stop, pull a small trench shovel from his Adventuring Gear, and dig upward. Akra hoists him up to dig further and soon they break the surface. Taran crawls out doing his best risen dead impression, just in case any undead are around, but he is alone.

Using rope, the other two join him, and they decide to make camp. Nothing happened overnight, so they continue into the forest and soon notice that things seem extraordinarily colorful and vibrant. Discerning Realities, they see that some plants move. They see an Ent (different from Tolkien in that they don’t just get up and walk quickly – movement is verrrry slow aside from moving branches and the like), and in the distance that the forest grows darker due to thick webbing in the treetops.

Zahara goes and speaks to the Ent, against Taran’s advice, and learns a little about the spider menace and a Spider Queen, who has captured the water Nymph that guards the forest’s stream. The Ent asks her not to harm the forest in her efforts, as he realizes she is a Pyromancer. She agrees and also scratches an itch for him with her staff, then they press onward.

Reaching the edge of the webbing, they decide to scout the area. One spider pokes through the upper webbing as they are deciding what to do, and slowly lowers toward them. Taran decides to talk to it, asking if it could show them where the stream is and the location of the Nymph. The spider hisses that it can, grabs him by his clothing and begins hoisting him up into the webbing, hissing sarcastically, can you see it? (Conversely, he can from up there – the Nymph is bound in a cocoon and stuck to the wall). Taran then draws an arrow from his quiver that he’d dosed with golden root when they made camp. He uses it to just scratch the spider’s leg and of course he is the first creature the spider sees, so the spider now sees Taran as an ally.

Taran asks his new ally if he and his friends could be taken to the Spider Queen, so they can bring tribute to her. They arrive, with Taran riding his spider ally, and the Queen comes out of a wall of webbing. Taran realizes the golden root effect will be lost soon when he proves himself not an ally, so plunges his rapier through his steed and kills him. Quickly he tells her that this spider was conspiring against her and they were sent to aid her. She asks why Dara’keth (the Lich King of the undead front) would send the living to aid her, and he uses his thief move to lie about his alignment, saying he is evil, essentially. She believes him but wonders why he is in the company of one bearing the symbol of the Platinum Dragon? Zahara steps in, saying they are in disguise in the village, trying to blend with the good people as spies…

…then she goes on to say that she is Zahara Flameborn, perhaps the Queen had heard of her. She had, but because Dara’keth warned her of the Wizard. Suddenly they are under attack as the Queen morphs into a Dryder/Ettin sort of creature and five spiders lower from the ceiling of web. Zahara casts Fountsin of Flame around the Queen (injuring her badly), which also sets fire to the surrounding webbing. Taran bolts to the Nymph, trusting Akra and Zahara to hold the spiders off, so Akra Defends him while Zahara unleashes a fireball over 4 of the five spiders, leaving 1 HP on each. The uninjured spider jumps on Zahara’s back but cannot get through her armor with its bite.

Akra goes on the offensive with the Queen and ends up pinned to the ground by one spider leg, while she keeps her attention on Taran. Taran is pouring a healing potion in the Nymph’s mouth and is bitten by the Queen but not poisoned. Her focus on Taran allows Akra to get free, attacking her from behind and finishing her off. Zahara backs into the fire, Defying Danger of getting burned, and burns the spider on her back and killing it. She mops up the fleeing spiders (1 HP left each) while the Nymph is tended to.

The Nymph purifies the stream, Taran harvests poison from the Queen, and everyone rests there after being rewarded by the Nymph with a useful magic item.

Now they focus on the town again, having restored the town’s water supply and had a healthy drink of their own…