I am thinking of putting together a little campaign based around the Castlevania series of video games for my gaming group and could use your help. Most of my players are diehard fans, so I need to be faithful to the source material, making sure to have all the familiar rooms/locations/monsters. However, I know there are elements of the video games that just wont work in Dungeon World (or any tabletop game), so I’ve come to the Tavern for advice.
Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of experience running dungeon crawls in dungeon world, so I’m not quite sure how to guide them through Castlevania in a way that hits the landmarks while avoiding the minutiae of room-to-room navigation and meticulousness that I normally equate with dungeon travel in the traditional sense. I know a big part of DW is “draw maps, leave blanks”, so my instinct is to go through some of the game maps, and work up a list of the areas found in Castlevania and put together something new yet familiar, but I’m unsure if that’s the right approach or not.
The game is ultimately about navigating through a castle full of monsters and boss fights, getting to Dracula’s Lair and killing him. I could do that, but a constant stream of combat might get boring in a game of Dungeon World. Another element tends to involve a lot of backtracking once you’ve unlocked a new area/located an item or key, but that’s one of those things I’m not sure will work. I’m not opposed to this taking a few sessions to complete, so a move for abstracting castle/dungeon travel might not be the right thing here either, in case anyone was going to suggest that.
What would your personal approach be for prepping a dungeon crawl through Castlevania? What elements of the video games would you be sure to include and what would you leave out?