One-shot variation for Bonds that I’ve added to the Tight One-Shot Guide
One-shot variation for Bonds that I’ve added to the Tight One-Shot Guide
When you make a character for a one-shot, don’t write any Bonds.
When you Aid or Interfere, roll +Bond like you normally would. If you have no Bond with them, roll +nothing. After your beneficiary makes their move, write a Bond with them inspired by the outcome of the move.
(tight one-shot guide: http://tiny.cc/tight-dw-oneshot)
Check out the awesome one-page summary of my Tight 4-Hour Dungeon World guide that Jeff Bradley made!
Check out the awesome one-page summary of my Tight 4-Hour Dungeon World guide that Jeff Bradley made!
Dragonslaying on a Timetable: How To Run A Tight 4-Hour Dungeon World One-Shot
Dragonslaying on a Timetable: How To Run A Tight 4-Hour Dungeon World One-Shot
When I run Dungeon World in a four-hour Games on Demand slot, I want our game to resemble a simple, traditional fantasy adventure story — a story in which some characters travel somewhere, do something, and in the end are all changed.
I’ve evolved some techniques that hit this mark pretty consistently. If you want to run tight Dungeon World one-shots, these may be helpful to you!
(Next, I need to document how to do this exact same thing in just two hours, because our Games on Demand environment is evolving towards shorter games and I want to follow that.)
Bananas #dungeonworld action at PAX Games on Demand today!
Bananas #dungeonworld action at PAX Games on Demand today! The party faced off against Death itself and I learned to love the Paladin’s moves in the process.
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The adventurers have travelled to the Obsidian Pyramid. The Paladin seeks the answer to its mysteries; the desert Druid wishes to see its mysterious threat extinguished; the Wizard seeks a necromantic place of power he can use to restore his dead wife.
The Druid Discerns that the pyramid houses a Thallas device that can make the desert verdant and green. This makes the Druid very angry. He vows to destroy the device!
Inside the pyramid, they encounter the Chimera-Hydra guardian. The poor Ranger is smashed by its goat head and faces Death. Death will allow her to escape if she triggers the Thallas device and greens the desert. She refuses and is cast into oblivion.
But wait! The Paladin runs to her body, and Lays on Hands, begging Osiris to save her. He rolls a 7; she is restored to life and Death claims the Paladin instead.
Death offers the Paladin the same bargain: make the desert green and he may continue to walk the world and serve Osiris.
The Paladin, suspicious of Death’s motives, uses his Pierce Lies oath boon to LOOK INTO THE HEART OF DEATH. He learns the truth: the Lord of the Underworld wishes the desert verdant because the new life will kill the desert and its gods and spirits and he may claim their souls for himself! The Paladin will not be party to this, so he refuses and casts himself into oblivion.
The Wizard takes advantage of the Paladin’s death and the connection it creates to the underworld. He casts Speak With Dead, pulling his wife’s spirit back into the world, and then follows it up with a Ritual to put his wife’s spirit in the Paladin’s body. The Druid, sensing trouble, tackles him as he performs the final dance (an Interfere for -2). Due to the interference, the Wizard gets a mixed success on his necromantic Defy Danger. The wife is restored to the Paladin’s body, but the corridor to the underworld allows Death to reach through the planes and activate the Thallas Device! Suddenly, clouds pour heavy rains over the desert. Everything drowns or dies in a flash flood. Death, roaring with delight, drags the desert spirits and gods to the underworld.
We narrate epilogues. The Druid dedicates himself to haunting and terrorizing the farms that spring up in the lush former desert. The Paladin’s soul is rescued from oblivion by a grateful Osiris and he carries on with his battle against evil in another dimension. The Wizard and his Paladin-wife, after a “honeymoon period,” set about figuring out how to raise their dead child from the grave next…
I have a new project that has a publisher, and so it’s time to show off a prototype!
I have a new project that has a publisher, and so it’s time to show off a prototype! Any feedback would, of course, be greatly treasured.
http://www.random-generator.com/index.php?title=Parts_Unknown
The project is called Parts Unknown and it’s a hexcrawling oracle + some DW / WoD goodies.
http://www.random-generator.com/index.php?title=Parts_Unknown
(reposted from my home circles)
(reposted from my home circles)
Had good success improvising two-hour Dungeon World games this weekend at ECCC Games on Demand. Three players appears to be the magic number for that.
The first game was bananas. The Paladin was tasked with retrieving a forbidden book from the Tower of Sorcery. He brought a Thief and an elf Wizard along as subject matter experts. Total Conan type stuff. They each hated the Tower for their own reasons — most notably, the elf had a lot of wizard nerd rage going on, he thought the Tower sorcerers were just stupid humans, phony enchanters who did magic crudely and without properly appreciating it.
So the first thing the party did was improvise a massive tower-destroying bomb out of all the eldritch oily rags and gas cans and such that they found in the basement. And of course they triggered it with about four minutes left to go when they were cornered by some evil dream warriors.
I asked them how they survived the explosion. The elf had the best answer:
“I reincarnate,” he said.
And I was like “oh man I am so gonna make you come back as a dirty human, you pointy-eared bigot.” But the player boxcarred his defy danger! He opened his eyes centuries later, safe in the arms of an elven midwife.
Creating 7-9 results on Defy Danger is the hardest part of GMing DW for me. I thought I’d write down some of the…
Creating 7-9 results on Defy Danger is the hardest part of GMing DW for me. I thought I’d write down some of the techniques I use to generate worse outcomes and ugly choices.
(I don’t really think about hard bargains because I’m honestly not sure how to differentiate between a hard bargain and an ugly choice.)
LOOK AT THE GM MOVES. To make a worse outcome, look at Defy Danger like this:
6- : GM makes a move
7-9: PC defies danger but GM makes a move.
10+: PC defies danger
Say Omar the Thief is running from the city guard and rolls a 7-9 with the Danger being that he’s caught. As the GM, I’m going to grant Omar his escape. But I can also:
Use a monster, danger, or location move — Omar accidentally runs into a vogue of Necrodancers and gets hit by their Fresh Curse move.
Deal damage — Omar sprains his ankle while running. (this is kind of zzzz)
Use up their resources — Omar had to drop some of his loot in order to get away.
Put them in a spot — Omar escapes pursuit….by hiding in the Rancor pit.
Separate them — Omar gets lost!
WORSE OUTCOMES CAN BE SOFTENED INTO UGLY CHOICES You can turn a worse outcome into a hard bargain by explaining the worse outcome and asking the player to choose between eating the danger or suffering the worse outcome. I think this softens the move somewhat; you’re collaborating with the player on their fate rather than just imposing it.
PUT SOMEONE ELSE IN THE CROSSHAIRS. What else is at stake at this very moment in the fiction? Is another character in a questionable position? Can they suffer the downside of the 7-9?
Say Omar has leapt aboard a panicking wooly mammoth and is trying to calm it while Sanguinus the Paladin battles orcs nearby. The Danger for Omar is that the mammoth will continue rampaging. The Worse Outcome version is that Omar calms the mammoth, but not before it has bowled over Sanguinus and made his fictional position worse.
Say Omar is creeping through the quarantine districts, looting the houses of the dead. The Danger is that he gets the plague. On a 7-9, Omar doesn’t get the plague … but he becomes a carrier of it, and his friend Bug picks it up some time later.
Say Omar is reading the Canticle of Sog-Yothoth aloud to close the Murder Gate (danger: the gate stays open) while Xeno the Wizard casts their Mirror Image spell to distract some cultists. The Dark Gate is closed and Omar’s brain isn’t melted … but the flux of freaky energy results in Xeno’s mirror image becoming a permanent, independent, reverse-alignment version of Xeno.
Sometimes I will totally cheat at this and cut away to another character just before a Defy Danger move is rolled so that the situation can develop some more facets before we start messing it up with mixed successes.
CONSIDER STAKES AT EVERY TIME SCALE I usually categorize stakes as immediate stakes, scene stakes, or campaign stakes. I group them by asking when the pain from failed stakes will come down. If it will come down right away, it’s an immediate stake. If it will come down by the end of the scene, it’s a scene stake. If it will come down sometime later, it’s a campaign stake.
For example, let’s say that Omar the Thief is jumping from rooftop to rooftop (immediate stakes) trying to escape the guard (scene stake) while also remaining anonymous (campaign stake). That’s three goals in the single action. One of these stakes must be the stated Danger of the Defy Danger.
Let’s say that the Danger is that he falls. The complications of the mixed success can be that he makes the leap and escapes, but he is clearly identified by his pursuers and his anonymity is toast. Another possibility is that he makes the leaps safely but so does his pursuit and so he has to figure out another tactic to elude them.
Alternatively, say the Danger is that he’s caught. On a mixed success, he might elude pursuit — by falling and spraining his ankle while the pursuit concentrates on the rooftops. Or he will escape, but lose his anonymity.
I’ve just finished a draft of Getting Lost, the place-creation tool that I’ll be publishing later this year in…
I’ve just finished a draft of Getting Lost, the place-creation tool that I’ll be publishing later this year in Boomtown It’s designed to help DMs make every place in their campaign colorful and exciting — like a dungeon.
It’s been pretty useful for me so far but of course I’m interested in others’ first impressions of it. If anyone wants to check it out, comment here and I’ll send it along.
Tuesday night is Planarch night!
Tuesday night is Planarch night!
The Paladin gets lost while eluding a horde of Rat Thing bravos. Just when he thinks he’s clear of them, the Greatlune weather sirens howl. A huge acid storm is about to roll in from the Chaos Sea! He seeks shelter in the only nearby structure, the Horn Head distillery.
Since the Wizard and Bard are still recovering from their heritage infusions, we spin up some PC greenhouse slaves using the Slave Pits of Drahzul playbooks. The Paladin rescues them from the disintegrating greenhouse and leads them into the distillery workshop, which is solidly built and protected by magic runes.
Alas, they discover, the secret ingredient in Horn Head fruit rum is the essence of Chaos pleasure demons. The Capra (goat-headed) demonologists who run the distillery are not pleased at the Paladin’s intrusion!
We also discovered that a tooth fruit will lick wounds back to health if it is sufficiently charmed or frightened.
Planarch heritage hard move help needed!
Planarch heritage hard move help needed!
In Ditchbiggin last night, our Bard and Wizard both sold all their heritages to a heritage infusion lab, melting themselves down into the mean form of all sentient life (which looks like a Stage 2 Invid pilot, thanks Kevin Siembieda!)
After that, they spent all the money they got from their donations on bargain-basement infusions. The Wizard got a dose of Pixie with a hint of Mushroom Folk. She rolled a 4 on her “receive infusion” move (copied below) and now I have a week to think about what kind of pain will be brought down. I told everyone I didn’t want to do any hard moves that weren’t fun, and the Wizard has pretty much given me carte blanche to do whatever I want, up to death (not interesting to me). This is the one I’m not sure what to do with.
The Bard got shot up with a Black Pudding and an Eldritch Ant-Queen. He rolled 10+ on the pudding infusion but 5- on the ant infusion. I’ve got some clarity on this one, I think that the Bard will not receive any of the Ant-Queen’s moves or looks but will receive all of her baggage. I think that maybe the deep races fought a genocidal war against the Eldritch Ants generations ago in some parish pre-Dis, and some terminators have been lying in wait for the Ant Queen to reawaken.
(the move in question)
When you receive a heritage infusion, you gain a heritage move appropriate to the donor. Then, roll -the number of “native” heritage moves you currently have. On a 7-9, choose two, on a 10+ choose three.
* You may choose the heritage move you gain
* You permanently gain the heritage move
* You do not bodily transform to resemble the donor
* Your future offspring will be viable
* You are not haunted by anxious dreams of your new-but-alien heritage