Saul Alexander – Dungeon World Tavern G+ Archives

I’m running a session featuring Johnstone Metzger’s Flower Goblins tonight.

I’m running a session featuring Johnstone Metzger’s Flower Goblins tonight. In my setting they used to be elves, but became corrupted when this gigantic magical tree of theirs was cut down and defiled. Around the fallen tree they have a garden of freaky, colourful and pretty scary plants that the PCs just entered (in pursuit of another foe).

The goblins just surrounding them in a threatening way, but I want to flip things around at the top of the new session by having them suddenly start offering the PCs strange potions and unguents and foods and such (at the right price). I.e. It turns out this is a market, not a fortress.

To this end, I need a list of freaky flower goblin concoctions that the players may (or may not) wish to buy. Anyone want to throw an idea or two my way?

Intro to a one-shot I’m running for extended family on the 26th:

If there’s one thing your mumma always told you, it was: “don’t get involved dwarfish politics”. (Or she would have, if she’d bothered staying sober long enough to give you any advice at all.) And yet here you are. The Brightforge clan have accused the Quartzhammer dwarves of kidnapping some of their children.

Why in the Forty-Three Hells would they do that? Some tiresome tit-for-tat that goes back centuries, but you zoned out and missed the details. Why do you care? You don’t. Except that the Brightforge matron says she knows exactly where you can find Doctor Pinchferret, that damnable heretic you’ve been hunting all these months. And Inquisitor Valeria ain’t the type to give up just because a thing is impossible.

But that’s all academic at the moment. Now you’re in the forest, things have a simpler shape to them: tracks to be followed, lookout to be kept, wildlife to be murdered.

Does it strike you as strange that the trees are crowding closer and closer together as you go, to the point where they’ve blocked out the sun and you’re losing all sense of time? Not really: you endured far worse in the Mire of Dreadful Parasites. What about that hypnotic, otherworldly singing on the edges of your hearing? Nothing a bit of bread in the ears won’t fix.

But now… well, this is a little strange. Unless you’re much mistaken, the Quartzhammer clan don’t make their home in a dumpy little hut in the forest’s deepest glade. And yet here the trail leads.

You suppose there’s nothing for it but to draw arms and kick down that rotten-looking door…

The hut is the Grumblehut, from Johnstone Metzger’s Market in the Woods. What follows is a “dungeon” inspired by Alice in Wonderland and Terry Pratchett’s Carpet People.

Looking for some help to add colour to my game.

Looking for some help to add colour to my game. I’m starting a new campaign that follows a group of deserters who have fled a war zone and are trying to find their way home (by sea). They’ve been swept off course by a magical storm and have ended up in a mysterious archipelago. Hit me with your best seafaring/island-hopping impressions (sights, sounds and smells)!

So even though I haven’t run Dungeon World yet, I guess marinating in it for the last few weeks has had an impact on…

So even though I haven’t run Dungeon World yet, I guess marinating in it for the last few weeks has had an impact on me, because I had a DW dream.

I was at some unknown gathering where I was staying overnight at this house with a bunch of people, and I convinced two of them to give DW a try. There were numerous “real world” interruptions from other people in the dream, but we got through a little chunk of play. This is how it went:

The two characters were travelling along this extremely steep cliff. One of the players said that her character (a fighter) was “looking around”. I asked her to give a slightly more detailed fictional description, and she did. I don’t remember quite what she said, but I remember liking it, and I called for a Discern Realities. Unfortunately she whiffed it, so I described how she lost her footing while searching, and called for a Defy Danger (Dex) to regain it. She failed again and went tumbling down the slope, taking b[2d10] damage.

I think it was at this point that I realised/revealed that the entire cliff face was actually the body of a giant, and that the giant was stirring and lifting itself up. (There was also an interlude somewhere around here where an old guy came and expressed some interest in the game, being surprised at how quickly and dynamically it played. This was also where we learned what the character’s names were, I think, although I don’t recall them.)

Anyway: his friend’s body tumbling away from him at high speed, I asked the other player “what do you do?”.

His response was: “I throw a grenade”. This gave me pause for a moment, but then I realised that he was somehow playing a class that came equipped with a crude explosive, so he could essentially do just that. (Does such a playbook exist? I might have to make it.)

Anyway: I thought at first that he was aiming to hurt his companion with the grenade, so I was going to call for an interfere from her to disrupt his attempt. But no – he explained to me that his goal was to blow open the giant’s stomach, so that his friend could have a nice soft (but messy) landing. Nice!

He rolled (Defy Danger +Wis I think, although I’m a bit fuzzy on my reasoning) and he got a 7-9. So I ruled that his plan came off – the beast’s guts blew up everywhere and his companion plopped “safely” into its stomach cavity. But now the creature was swaying wildly, threatening to topple and throw our other hero to his doom…

“What do you do?” I asked.

(Anyone else had a DW dream?)

I’m going to be running a Dungeon World one-shot (or maybe two sessions if I’m lucky) for some family members over…

I’m going to be running a Dungeon World one-shot (or maybe two sessions if I’m lucky) for some family members over the Xmas/new year period. I was thinking at first that I’d just re-run an abridged version of Death Frost Doom, but on reflection that might be too grim for the occasion. I may just use a dungeon starter or come up with something original, but does anyone have any suggestions for good one-shot scenarios with a more adventure or swashbuckling tone?