Grim portents for gritty “It’s a trap!” adventures
I own a bunch of adventures written by James Raggi. If there’s a consistent design feature of his adventures, it’s that the dangers are usually “laying in wait” for the players to unleash upon themselves. In one adventure I won’t name [SPOILER ALERT] there are a few environmental hazards, but the major world-transforming menace depends on the players taking a specific action to awaken something awful. If it weren’t for their curiosity and avarice, the delvers could just walk in, grab some loot, and leave—and that’s okay: Play to find out what happens. The fact that players have to work for their impending doom is part of what makes the adventure appealing from a GM perspective, and it’s a pattern that appears in different ways in other LotFP adventures.
But the idea of “nothing happens unless you stir up trouble, and then hell explodes” seems counter to the way Fronts are set forth in Dungeon World. In DW, grim portents are described as the bad things that happen if the adventurers don’t intervene. In Raggi World, the grim portents often follow the delvers’ own choices.
Is it trying to fit a square peg in a round hole to use adventures like this for Dungeon World? How would you convert threats like this into Fronts?
#weird_fantasy #traps #fronts #grim_portents #impending_doom