Category: Worlds of Adventure: Playbooks

Noticed a potential bug with the Druid. The background move Totemist (which I think is good) says:

You are bonded to a specific animal or beast; your Tell reflects it, and you always possess its Instinct. When you use Shapeshifter to take the form of your totem, you always succeed as if you had rolled a 10+.

The move Shed (also good) says:

When you take damage while Shapeshifted, you may choose to forcibly revert to your normal form in order to negate the damage.

Together though you have kind of an at will damage shield—nothing is stopping you from repeatedly shifting in and out of your Totem form to block all damage. I think the way to fix it is to put a limiter on Shed. Maybe “you can’t shift into that form again until you’ve made camp”. Or instead of negates all damage “reduce the damage by half” or “reduce the damage to 1”.

I’ve been working on a Monk playbook for DW for a long time. There are a lot of Monk playbooks out there already so why create another? None of them did exactly what I wanted. What I wanted was a Monk that had the same “feel” as the base playbooks—streamlined, mostly setting free, with a some cool moves that referenced the tropes of the archetype. I especially wanted to try to remove explicitly Asian flavors as I find it unnecessarily guides the fiction. For example Diablo III’s Monk has kind of an Eastern European flavor that I think is fresh and different. I wanted a monk that was about devoting oneself to mental and physical practice to achieve mastery.

I’ve drawn inspiration for this from multiple sources, including Peter Johansen’s Monk in the Lore and Lords Pack, Jason Shea’s Monk in the Donjon World Hack, Friendly Neighborhood Gamer’s Monk, James Mendez Hodes’ Monk, the Flow Monk, the Prisoner Monk, David Guyll & Melissa Fisher’s Monk, thesmitster’s Dungeon World Ideals project, Johnstone Metzger’s Class Warfare, Multiple editions and supplements for Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, and references to a wide variety of traditional media.

I really like what’s being done with the World of Adventures project, so I made some changes to make my WIP Monk compatible and decided it was finally time to share. I’m particularly proud of the moves Drunken Master and Shadow Clone. Hope you like it.