Play Report 1

Campaign: Sly Hunter Keaton

Session: 3

Session Time: 3 Hours

System: Dungeon World

Monsters Encountered: 3

NPCs Encountered: 1

Fronts Visited: 1

Last night I ran my first Dungeon World game, and it was lovely!  It felt like flopping into a comfy hammock, it was shaky, but I didn't fall on my ass!  I ran for a single player, who is playing a young monster hunter, Keaton, from a reclusive tribe of monster hunters.  Keaton was tasked with going to a nearby village to buy a few barrels of salt to help with the village's preparations for wintering in the mountains.  He had to get there and back again before the first blizzard of the season, which would come in 20-30 days.  It was a pretty simple milk run, except that I was running an apocalyptic hexcrawl, so the story turned into an epic story of Hero VS Nature immediately.

Player Character

Keaton is a 15 year old novice monster hunter.  He has a pet Monkey Rat named hopscotch.  The Monkey Rat is just a possum, but he’s never seen a possum before, and no one in his village wanted to correct him.  Keaton tries to be tough, this is his first time on a solo mission.  All the other hunters are busy and or missing, so he’s on deck to run this moderately safe grocery run by himself.

DM Prep

For the last month, in my spare moments, I’ve been taking notes for NPC encounters, monster designs, name generators, loot tables, and a 1000 x 600 mile grid map of a fantasy country (the Norlands).  I wrote fronts for all the surrounding towns and forests, as well as drop in some NPC encounters along the path I assumed he would take.  I made a Google spreadsheet with a player-facing map, character sheet with playbook, and list of basic and special moves for quick reference.

Play Report

So, things got buckwild immediately.  Keaton decided to take a skiff down river to the bay, then sail southward to the Port of Fishear to purchase his salt.  It was a pretty solid plan, he would have to cover more distance, but he could move faster on the water than he could on the road.  I had not anticipated this path. When he told me his plan, I broke out in a cold sweat as glanced through my monster tables and saw only a single aquatic type monster.  I had not prepared for this, but I was determined to roll with it!

18 miles into his journey down river, on Samhain (Halloween), Keaton encounters a monster his tribe has never seen before, a black stag with obsidian antlers and a swirling black hole where its head should be.  It’s called a Space Eater in my notes. Here are some highlights from the battle. He rolls his first Defy Danger move of the game trying to calm the beast, as his skiff passes by, and rolled a 6.  It turns out that the Space Eater is an aggressive beast, especially during rutting season. It eats the space between itself and the skiff and stomps down on Keaton with its front hooves.  Keaton brings out his trusty monster hunting whip and uses it to trip the beast into river, which forces the beast to gag up all the water it’s swallowing.  The gag reflex is so violent that the Space Eater turns inside out and dies.

That night, a blood moon rises and he see a few stars blink of the sky.

Keaton takes off the next morning and hits the bay in the afternoon.  He is attacked by a Pentacroc, a 12 foot long starfish made out of 5 crocodile heads joined in the middle.  The Pentacroc is the only aquatic monster I made, so he was bound to run into it at some point.   Keaton has only brought one weapon with him, his whip, so fighting this underwater enemy is a challenge for him.  Here are some highlights from the fight.  Keaton baits the Pentacroc by dangling his pet possum as bait, then suplexes the monster onto the skiff with him.  However, in the process of tying up the chomping mouths of this beast, he gets a couple of bites taken out of him.  Keaton, lacking any other weapons, grabs and oar and jams it straight into of the Pentacroc’s open mouths, but the beast bites down on Keaton’s arm with a death vice and he loses consciousness.

Our heroes is revived some days later by Peg Leg the Priest, who had just drifted back on an iceberg from preaching the good word of the Ecclesterium to the Polar Bears at the North Pole for 30 years.  He has a peg leg and he believes that God has put Keaton in his path for a reason.  Keaton wants nothing to do with this church man, but feels he cannot turn down the priests request for help getting back the Capitol Cathedropolis.  So the young monster hunter agrees to take Peg Leg with him to the nearest port at least.

Another blood moon drifts through the sky that night, and the stars continue to blink out.

It is at this point that Keaton realizes that he has no idea where he is on the map.  He drifted out to sea, but doesn’t know what shore he beached on.  I’m running the game with my own GM map, so I know where he is, and he start asking question about what he sees to regain his barings. Unfortunately, he surmised incorrectly and sails a day in the wrong direction and then has to backtrack once he discover his mistake.

A freezing rain begins to fall on our travelers and they pull onto shore, flipping over the skiff for shelter, but they have nothing with which to build a fire for the night.  Keaton spots a campfire flickering in the distance, so he leaves to go investigate.  As he gets closer, it smells of salted and seasoned venison steaks.  Keaton creeps closer and observes there is no one at the fire.  After observing for an hour, and witnessing no movement or smoke from burning food, Keaton tries to sneak off, but instead attracted the attention of the carnivorous Angler Fire which raises up and begins to chace our young hero.  Keaton does manage to give the monster the slip eventually, and the Angler Fire settles back down, assuming the form of an inviting campfire once again.

Keaton returns to his soggy cold camp to tell Peg Leg that he’ll be taking the first watch that night.  Our hero has ends his first session of this hex crawl at the mouth of the river that he first left on.  He’ll start the next leg of his journey roughly a week behind schedule almost right where he started.

GM Wrap Up

My player really enjoyed playing Dungeon World for the first time stating that the system is well suited for a single player story, but also that he felt his actions were more dramatic and his choices were more interesting and perilous because of the system.  He also really enjoyed the Hero VS Nature story that he discovered in the Hex Crawl because all the action emerged from his choices.  I was very pleased to hear this, as I suspected my player would enjoy this style of play as much as I would enjoy running it.

Keaton believes his encounter with the Space Eater to be tied to Samhain in some way, which shows how high the player’s by-in is in this game.

I felt I did a sufficient job prepping for the game, which was mostly brief Front descriptions, monster notes, and chance NPC encounters.  I’m especially glad of my NPC encounters, because I had Peg Leg on his return trip from the North Pole in my back pocket for when Keaton his 0 HP on the open sea.  Perhaps I should have had him roll a Last Breath move, but since this was the first session and only one player, I felt it would be better to have him revived by an NPC.

Keaton’s attempts to discern where he was on the map was really fun, and my player very much enjoyed being given enough rope to hang himself with, so to speak.  He commented that he felt like he was actually at odds with a dangerous fantasy world instead of a fairly balanced fun house. Although he was frustrated to have to backtrack, because there are heavenly omens and a ticking clock, his wasted time just makes his journey seem more urgent.

I will say that my attempt to meld an OSR inspired hex crawl with Dungeon World was largely successful, DW doesn’t explicitly kit the players out with the equipment they would need for such an adventure.  I suppose I might have said, “Oh, um, I guess you have this and this and this,” but I wanted to let the player deal with it.  If he would have said, “I surely would have brought some firewood and a flint and junk,” I would have allowed it.  But he didn’t, and seemed to be happy to struggle with insufficient supplies.  Though, I think I will beef up his equipment a bit between sessions, just to move things along a bit more smoothly.

All and all, it was a fantastic game, and the most fun I’ve had running a TRPG in my life!  The moves and fronts of Dungeon World make it easy to find a story emerging from play, and it’s not a lot of bookkeeping and rules lawyering.  The house rules hexcrawl and encounter tables need to be more finely integrated into the DW system, but that’ll be easy enough.  If you’ve found yourself stressed out of the prep work or bookkeeping of 5E, I highly recommend Dungeon World or some other PbtA title.