Category: The Dungeon World Tavern: Actual Play

Had a pretty good game of DW last night. Fully intended it to be a one-shot, but the players asked me if we could keep it going for later.

We chose playbooks based on what we had never played before. We had:

Titanius the Paladin, who is a lawful human on a quest to find the meaning of his fancy holy symbol. Supposedly it arrived and he doesn’t know by who or why. 

Steve the bard, a chaotic human with bardic lore focusing on the undead. He travels with Titanius to find out information on the undead.

During bonds we were able to discover that Titanius has a secret.. his family is over-run by demonic blood, and if he doesn’t follow strict adherence to his lawful paladin ways it will overcome him. We also discovered that Steve is a wanted man, as he played a prank on the Fighter’s guild in King Osric’s capital, and they are after him.

So we start the game as far from the capital as civilised land stretches. The town of Hanfield is a small village next to a large mountain and a decent sized lake. The trade with the nearby village of nook’s crossing, and their main supply is a small quantity of adamantium, mined from the mountain.

Steve enters the town, and finds a wanted poster with a poorly drawn picture on it and his name. “Steve, wanted dead or alive for 20 coins”. He decides to scribble on it, trying to make it look like someone else, but a nearby watchman discovers him and lets out a shout.

Steve tries to claim that in fact this doesn’t look like the criminal at all, he introduces himself as William and says he was trying to improve the drawing. The watchman asks Titanius if this is true, but alas, Titanius is under a vow to always speak the truth. He tries to deflect the question, ordering the watchman to take them to his captain. He obeys and they are introduced to Marco.

Marco is a gruff man who gets straight to the point. The undead have started surfacing in the area. He has sent a few men to try and find the source, but none have come back. Steve manages to convince him to offer an adamantium reward if they find it out, and he agrees. At this point, another watchman comes forth and says that more undead have arrived, and its more than they’ve ever seen. Marco gets Flynn and Evans to summon the militia, and Titanius and Steve go to help out.

The combat takes up most of the rest of the session. There are about 40 zombies coming out of the lake, and more still coming. A good chunk of the villagers die, and eventually an abomination comes out, terrifying the rest into fleeing. Titanius is able to finish it off by setting a barn on fire with the abomination inside, but not before Steve nearly dies trying to sing a song to it while its charging at him. (Nearly as in, we spent about 10 minutes assuming he had died, only to find out he had calculated his maximum health wrong at the start of the game).

At the end, a palantir-style orb falls out of the charred remains of the abomination, and Steve touches it to temporarily meld minds with the Lich controlling the undead. The lich sees Titanius’ holy symbol and recognises it with disgust, the first hint of its origins seen yet.