Tag: dungeonworld

I have been meaning to post this all week, but my AP write up has become a true monster, so I thought I would give a quick shout out to the folks that helped me pull this off. 

So my daughter turned 10. For her birthday party she wanted me to run an RPG. She didn’t really care about the ruleset (when you are ten, who does really? I certainly didn’t), So I picked DW because I felt the focus on telling a story (as opposed to rules crunch) would be easier with new folks. Audrey gave me some loose guidelines (it has to take place in a forest, with giant trees, and as many creatures as possible) and I filled in a loose set of encounters. 3 primary encounters (deranged wood elves, who need your help, Tomb of the centaur king, Ogre chain gang) to the 4th and final encounter to save the forest by removing the cancerous dragon from the forests mother tree. Each encounter was set up to focus on at least 2 of the characters moves (i.e. tomb was for the cleric and thief to shine, but the since the cleric ended up deciding to be evil it all became wonderfully muddled,  “There is NO WAY I am going in there with the evil cleric”)

For prep I printed out Jeremy Friesen http://takeonrules.com/2013/05/08/dungeon-world-campaign-playbook/ for me and +Patrick Henry Downs character sheets http://nerdwerds.blogspot.com/2013/05/dungeon-world-playbooks.html for the girls which truly was the best thing I could have done, as the girls immediately groked the rules based on the moves and the book format with a big image on the front was a plus for drawing them in. Also I convinced Eric from Gamma Ray Games  to let me rifle through a new box of reaper mini’s for 10 year old girl appropriate adventurers (which they all got to keep as the party favor). The char sheets and the minis made everyone very focused and excited.

Chargen took a while (“Encumbrance? What is that”?, “Ignore it we always did when we played”), but it was pure fun (bonds were insane). We only hit 2 of the planned encounters (Deranged Wood elves, and the Centaur King’s Tomb) in 3 hours before folks had to go home, but there was a great set up scene at the last wobbly inn before the forest (which came from the girls) and a shit ton of in character table banter/ and bickering. Turned out the whole party goes to adventure school together and this was spring break. The 2 encounters were fantastic, and after the first one the ideas of moves and holds really settled in.

Bonds were sealed and much experience was gained (I was trying to get them enough to get the sensation of leveling up, but we didn’t have enough time, the Thief came the closest). Every girl except for one wanted to play again the next weekend (to which most parents responded, “maybe this summer”!) Overall it was an incredible experience, that I am not sure could have happened without #DungeonWorld .