Why is there not more discussion about fronts in this community?
Why is there not more discussion about fronts in this community? Is everyone just supper down with creating them and using them?
Adventures in Planes and Time!
Adventures in Planes and Time!
I had the opportunity of running a game for two of my players last week. Since their characters are from different campaigns and worlds, I went for a planar and time-traveling adventure. Here is a front/module/thing I wrote after the fact, in case some of you fancy a Dungeon World and Doctor Who crossover.
Feedback welcome!
Edit: I should really thank Michaël Croitoriu and Sebastien Delfino for agreeing to this silly idea, and David Girardey for joining in at the end to play his Wizard-from-a-year-ago.
Grim portents for gritty “It’s a trap!” adventures
Grim portents for gritty “It’s a trap!” adventures
I own a bunch of adventures written by James Raggi. If there’s a consistent design feature of his adventures, it’s that the dangers are usually “laying in wait” for the players to unleash upon themselves. In one adventure I won’t name [SPOILER ALERT] there are a few environmental hazards, but the major world-transforming menace depends on the players taking a specific action to awaken something awful. If it weren’t for their curiosity and avarice, the delvers could just walk in, grab some loot, and leave—and that’s okay: Play to find out what happens. The fact that players have to work for their impending doom is part of what makes the adventure appealing from a GM perspective, and it’s a pattern that appears in different ways in other LotFP adventures.
But the idea of “nothing happens unless you stir up trouble, and then hell explodes” seems counter to the way Fronts are set forth in Dungeon World. In DW, grim portents are described as the bad things that happen if the adventurers don’t intervene. In Raggi World, the grim portents often follow the delvers’ own choices.
Is it trying to fit a square peg in a round hole to use adventures like this for Dungeon World? How would you convert threats like this into Fronts?
#weird_fantasy #traps #fronts #grim_portents #impending_doom
I’ve a con in a couple of weeks and will be running several sessions of DW.
I’ve a con in a couple of weeks and will be running several sessions of DW. In between these session, I am going to run the fun little game below – The Eeevillll! where A Kid, his Stuffed Best Friend and their Toy Allies must thwart a great Eeevillll!!! For Tone and Frame of Reference think Calvin and Hobbes, Toy Story, Winne the Pooh and Rugrats.
This is just a rough front that I kicked out in an hour while the muse hit me. Play books and rules changes will come later.
Comment as you will.
Does anyone have a list of good example front/dangers/etc. that I could peruse?
Does anyone have a list of good example front/dangers/etc. that I could peruse?
Fronts’ fodder
Tonight my group decided to postpone our weekly DW game because we were missing a player.
Tonight my group decided to postpone our weekly DW game because we were missing a player. I was good to go, especially since the player in question wasn’t key to my plot.
I realized then that while having one character acting as the plot driver for the campaign (Paladin with a Quest) I should give the other players some time in the spotlight.
So, here’s my idea: Try to have a Danger which is tied into a character, or is well suited to a character.
So far we have a quest for the paladin and a bunch of dangers that stand in the way of the quest. Great but it makes the paladin irreplaceable and the rest of the party, by extension, replaceable.
To rectify this situation I am going to add a couple of dangers that aren’t strictly related to the mcguffin at the centre of the paladin’s quest. For the Cleric I think an undead menace for him to tackle is an obvious answer, especially considering I was already working on one from when I thought the Paladin was going to miss a session.
Now I just have to come up with something for the thief. It could be something that leverages the thief’s abilities or threatens the thief directly. Anything that will make the player feel like their character is important.
I think this would make a really interesting front.
I think this would make a really interesting front.
Originally shared by Wil Hutton
The fact that intentionally submerging towns is creepy enough, much less an accident.
Wow, Fronts finally clicked for me.
Wow, Fronts finally clicked for me. Where once I struggled to create a second danger for a front I was able to quickly write four.
If you are having trouble writing a front take my advice: Stop and play the first session. Ask lots of questions of your players.
In my case a stole a map from http://rpgcharacters.wordpress.com/ and plunked my player’s out front. I had some monsters I wanted to use planned and that was it. I asked my players for the mcguffin. “Why are you here?”
The answer was “we’re here to retrieve a relic”
When they found the relic I asked them what it was: An evil crown that allows you to control people.
It was the paladin that came up with this and I suggested he make his quest move using finding the crown as his fiction. Now he has a quest to destroy the crown, although he doesn’t know how that can be done.
End of session and I sit to write my Front. Front is destroying the crown and it’s a campaign front.
Danger: The Order
The order that the paladin is a member of. They are misguided good and seek to keep the crown from corrupting. Anyone who comes into contact with it are potentially corrupted and a danger.
Danger: The Orcs of Ashara
A horde of Orcs who wish to recreate the kingdom of Ashara, the evil kingdom the crown built the last time it was unleashed upon the world. They have raiding parties looking for it and will soon be coming across the border en-mass in a war of conquest
Danger: The Blue Eyed Man
The blue eyed man is a mysterious collector of all things arcane and evil. He has agents seeking the crown and he will collect it by hook or by crook.
Danger: The Demon
The source of the crown’s power. All suffering caused by the crown increases his power and prestige amongst the demons, to the point where he may be able to cross over into our world.
All this because I played my first session and asked lots of questions. Up to now I’d only played one-off dungeon crawls where I thought the dungeon would be my front. Doing it that way is hard. Making it fantastic is much easier.
I wrote a little more of it on my website: http://tyler.provick.ca/2013/10/16/dungeon-world-fronts/
I have a couple of people who have expressed interest in playing DW, and I want to make sure I have fully grokked…
I have a couple of people who have expressed interest in playing DW, and I want to make sure I have fully grokked the campaign structure. So here’s how it goes, in as plain and concise language as I can. Please correct me if there is something overlooked.
The first session is mostly to establish the world and the group’s place in it. Building off of the initial details and what the players offer by asking them questions, the GM builds a rough outline of a world, giving just enough detail to get the first adventure going and leave plenty of blank spaces.
Now that the world is established, the GM can come up with some dangers, the Big Bad guys. Each danger has an Impulse, that’s what the Danger wants. If the danger is a group of cultists, their Impulse may be to summon their elder God.
Next comes Grim Portents. These are the events that warn the players that the Danger is taking another step towards their goal. A Portent should be some kind of significant event that the characters can interact with, not something that happens off-stage. When all of the Grim Portents come to pass, the Impending Doom is realized, something very nasty with far-reaching repercussions.
The GM can now add more details to the world’s history and to the map. Not a lot, just a few places of interest that will become relevant as they relate to the various Fronts that will come marching along. The details will be filled in by the PCs when they get there. There should be ample opportunities/questions to make the characters more involved, not only by tying them to the world and Fronts, but also the people and places that are still only rough outlines yet. When the PCs interact with them, they become more detailed through play.