At the PAX DW panel, Adam Koebel brought up the idea of using racial moves in a world without multiple races to…
At the PAX DW panel, Adam Koebel brought up the idea of using racial moves in a world without multiple races to represent things like what clan or nation you belong to.
Which got me thinking; how about using alignment moves to represent something besides alignment? For instance, instead of picking an alignment, what if you had to pick a deity? I think it’d be an interesting way of setting up the gods of a setting, since you’d have to look at the gods from the point of view of “what kinds of champions do they pick” and “which gods support which classes”.
Fighter Gods
Pelor: Stand in defense of the innocent.
Kord: Defeat an opponent stronger than yourself.
Iuz: Lose half your hit points and keep fighting without healing.
Any news on the barbarian? We’re converting a game from DCC next monday and we need it for a mighty dwarven pirate, also the following weekend there’s a big italian convention where I think I’ll try to run the slave pit of dhrazu and I would love to bring the barbarian to the party.
Working on a thing for the Planarch Codex: a set of jobs that you can insert piecemeal into the ones available for…
Working on a thing for the Planarch Codex: a set of jobs that you can insert piecemeal into the ones available for your crew, to form essentially a Front going on in the background of Dis that you can choose to engage with or not, but that continues to develop until you get draw into it.
Short version: it’s about dragons being a disease vector.
THAT ANCIENT SERPENT
Nobody’s seen a real dragon in several centuries. However, there are a few families that keep practicing the dragon-slaying arts, teaching them to their children in case the wyrms ever return. But the siege weapons that were once used to bring down the great flying beast are all ancient and rusty. And with only 20+ people who know how to man them, half of them ancient themselves, and no officials manning their posts who know how to conduct a real quarantine after a dragon has been slain, nobody is ready for what’s about to happen.
Gravediggers and treasure seekers uncover part of a mummified dragon corpse deep beneath the sands of a distant desert plane, with the insides still fleshy and warm. Soon they are infected, turning into monstrous beast-men with mouths full of fangs and a hunger for flesh. Many of them flee into Dis and are slain in grisly street battles. Entire parishes are put to the torch and the sword, attempting to stop the spread, but it is too late. A few of the infected escape into the city’s alleyways and sewers, where their skin molts off and their true form emerges.
The dragon-slaying families go to work, their rusty skills now the only chance of halting the disease. But they are hampered at every turn by parish councilors and the Road Wardens, who are charged with preserving freedom of movement at all costs. When a dragon attacks the palace and is finally brought down, no quarantine is declared, even though its blood is everywhere. Soon the city is teeming with monsters.
Somebody’s going to have to put an end to this, and nobody but the old slayer families and a few enlisted allies can do it. But that will mean enforcing the quarantine on their own, including some of their brothers, sisters, and kinsmen who become infected over the course of their messy job. Hoo-rah.
(Cover image by the renowned dinosaur illustrator Jaime A. Headden, thought my layout is just a draft. I wanted a dragon based on actual pterosaur paleobiology and the result is, I hope you’ll agree, AMAZING.)
Are there any plans to curate the Monster Codex? It seems like there are roughly three kinds of entries: “serious” monster archetypes, “silly” monster archetypes, and specific NPCs. Perhaps just a field to categorize and filter the entries would be helpful? I know my DW isn’t the same as your DW, but I’d like to be able to filter out monsters that don’t fit my style.
