Play Report 4

Campaign: Ecclesterium Exiles
Session: 1
Session Time: 4 Hours
System: Dungeon World
Perilous Encountered: 6
NPCs Encountered: 3
Fronts Visited: 2

New Side Story Characters

Here’s the thing, I really love running Dungeon World.  It’s honestly more fun than playing a character in DnD.  So, when I realized I was going to miss a weekend of gaming to a family visit, I was bummed… for about 10 seconds when I realized I could just ask my brother-in-lawses if they wanted to play a game.  A quick text, and we had our game scheduled. I ended up running for 4 of my favorite people in the world, and we had a blast!

That me in the top right.  In the bottom left in our Immolator, Paladin, and Assassin from left to right.

I landed on the idea of running the same setting that I have been running for my other games, but picking a new spot on the map, set a week before the moon turns blood red.  My game is turning into a living map style game.  Everything each player does to advance the world state can inform or challenge someone else future game.  The map for all players is being filled in by different parties at different sessions.  It’s a great way to make the most out of the prep I’ve already done, and it’s a DM style that matches my wacky, inconsistent, adult schedule.

DM Prep

In preparation for this side story, I printed out a large map of the country (seen above), since there was going to be overland travel, and I’ll want to use this map next week, when I run a game with friends at Gen Con.

I learned a lot from Walker’s thief game from last week, covered in play report 3.  The biggest take away was, “Fill environments with interesting stuff and make that interesting stuff difficult to bypass.”  So, I decided to make a point-crawl style dungeon.  No 5x5 grid, no map, just corridors and rooms corresponding to cardinal directions.

Discovering that I was going to be running a game for 4 people instead of the 2 I was expecting, I just doubled the amount of enemies, which wasn’t a great move, but we’ll talk about that in the GM wrap up section.

Play Report

Our story began with a quick character creation.  Our new heroes were agents of the Ecclesterium, operating out of the Cathadopolis, the capital city and religious center of the Norlands.  Church approved classes were chosen, and about a 30 minutes later, we had Eleanore the Bald Paladin, Yajna the Immolator of the Holy Fire, Elise the Sad Cleric, and Dalgren the Inquisition Assassin. They were summoned the chambers of the Bishopess of Leaugerview, who had an important task for her trusted friends.  They were to make haste to the Rockmourn Chapel in the mountains, two days to the south, and save an infant child who has a Church issued Death Warrant on his head.

Our Paladin was suspicious of the situation, and was liberally using her abilities to detect lies to pry more deeply into the statements of the Bishopess.  It turns out that this child, Ambrady, was abandoned by his mother, and his father is an angel.  A powerful sect within the Ecclesterium believes the existence of this child to be a threat, and will soon dispatch a team of Consecrators to kill him.  Young Ambrady won’t be safe anywhere within reach of the Church, and so must be found and taken out of the country.  The Bishopess further insures them that the fate of the world may well hang in the balance of this mission.

So, off they go, catching the road for faster travel.  After half a day’s march, they detect the rumble and dust cloud of a team of horses galloping back from the direction they had come.  Suspecting it might be the Consecrator team, they duck into the trees, except for Elise, who was fumbling to set up a tripwire.  The riders tore passed, then stopped.  They were 8 foot tall, gaunt, dressed in silver silk choir robes and eyeless steel helmets covering their faces, There were 8 of them.  The leader dismounted and sniffed the ground, like a wolf, over to Elise.

Dalgren throws a dagger into the giant rider’s chest, and Yajna ignites the rope to create a wall of flame to separate the Consecrators from the party, but the other helmeted figures leap through the flames for a confrontation anyway, burning, but registering no pain..  The Paladin, leaps out of the trees and commands the foul things to be gone, with the clouds parting to support her devine authority.  The Consectors screech and gallop down the road, heading in the direction of Rockmourn Chapel.

Our party marches on, reaching the village of Highchurch by nightfall.  After Dalgren poisons a few stablehands, the party makes off with for horses.  They suffer the penalties of neglecting sleep to make up for lost time.  It isn’t long that they find they are being tailed by a posse of villagers hunting for horse thieves.  Our heroes pull off the road to ride into the woods to evade their pursuers, but the Cleric and the Immolator are thrown from their mounts.  Their other party members snatch them up onto their horses and they escape capture.  They elected to camp and rest while the heat died down.

They hit the Chapel the next afternoon, finding the door knocked off its hinges.  A priest was clinging to life on the ground behind the lecturn.  Eleanore healed the priest by laying on hands, and he told them that while he tried to lock them out, the Consecrators eventually rammed in the door and began searching the catacombs for the child after sniffing out the scent of their prey.  Our heroes dreww their weapons and descended into the catacombs.

Mourners lay slain on the ground in front of grave markers, stabbed to death with many stiletto wounds.  The walked down the east corridor and heard gentle harping.  The Dalgren recalled tales of harping spiders that strum enchanted lamentations in dark places, and so they stuffed their ears with cloth, except for the Paladin, who was blessed with immunity to all enchantments.  At the end of the hall, the Paladin heard tippy tap of small metal points against stone ground as well as sniffing.  A battle ensued with a Consecrator, who seemed to be still searching for the child.  The vile giant was armed with a gauntlet with stiletto tipped fingers.  Some wounds were take and given, but in the end, the heroes won the fight.

The backtracked to catch another passage, which forked at a fountain of holy water under a fresco of the first Saint of the Norlands bringing the Ecclesterium to land a few hundred years ago.  This fountain also marked the end of the Ecclesterium section of the catacombs, the rest of the tombs are ancient pagan burials.  The clean and polished stone work gave way to crude, unshaped rocks with chizeled spiral patterns.

Dalgren’s torchlight caught the reflection of many sets of eyes in an open chamber.  Hairless, skinless apes, called Ohnobos, that groom the bodies of the dead for maggots.  Yajna, the Immolator, tried to frighten them off, but instead became the target of their territorial rage.  It was a quick fight, but our party took many minor wounds.

Next they came into a chamber with a stone table, piled high with a banquet of vat pickled python stuffed with  wrathfruit, earth cooked spider goats, and the twitch hands of grave robbers.  Witchqueen Cadaverine was attempting to dine with her beloved and belated friends in the ancient tomb, but complained that the Consecrators were causing too much of a ruckus.  She promised a favor if they would clear the catacombs of these beastly men.  They agreed to the terms.  Picking a path in the forked chamber, the proceeded onward into the darkness.

They found a new chamber, which was crawling with Consecrators, one of which was snatched up by an animated burial shroud and pulled into a tomb and silenced suddenly.  The Cleric caste a spell to detect for evil, and discovered that while the ghost moving the strangling shroud was evil, the Consecrators were not.  There was no time to debate philosophies of alignment, however, so our friends cut down the remaining Consecrators in the room, keeping a sharp eye out for ghosts.

Our heroes soon found themselves in a new chamber with the ticking of metal claws against the ground and a foul smelling fog covering the room a waist height.  Once again, the Cleric called upon her divine powers and purified the fog, which instantly peeled back and vanished.  This however did attract the attention of the Consecrators in the room.  After a few rounds of melee combat, the Cleric has the idea to enchant on of the beastly men’s helmets with a fear spell, which caused them to attack one another for a moment.  The helmet was torn off on of the Consecrators, and for the first time, they could see the face of one of these vicious killers. No eyes, no ears, and no tongue, the offending body parts had been removed to make sure that the Consecrators could see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. With dwindling HP, our heroes again prevailed, finishing off another pair of these pitiable wrenches.

They returned to the forking paths at the holy water fountain, and they drank from the fountain to gain a blessing, also filling some bottles with its restorative waters, but in so doing accidentally befouled it.  Entering the final room, the Immolator spots a Sun Eater Lamp burning over the door arch.  The flame had become twisted and deceased in this forsaken corner of the catacombs, and it ate Dalgren’s torch flame. They tried to extinguish it by throwing it into the fountain, but the fountain water turned to blood, and the fresco crumbled and cracked.  The Cleric re-sanctified the fountain, and the blessed water extinguished the flame.

When the heroes returned to the final chamber, there was an ambush waiting for them.  The last two of the Consecrators were waiting for them, and Immolator nearly fell in battle, but with the bravery and power of Eleanore, the Bald Paladin, they were victorious.

When they sought out Witchqueen Cadaverine’s favor, she reveal a passage way that she had concealed from the Consecrators, where she was hiding the child Ambrady and the midwife charged with his care.  The day was won, and the party made for a remote island to sequester the angelic child from any more assassins.

GM Wrap Up

All and all, the evening went very well.  This was the first game of Dungeon World for all of the players, and only my fourth time running it.  They all said they had a lot of fun, some saying it was much more enjoyable than games of Pathfinder, Dungeons & Dragons, or Dungeon Crawl Classics.  The players all wanted to know more, they wanted to know what was going to happen next, what the angel baby was going to do, how long would their island hideaway remain a secret.  This made me feel very good.  As a DM, I see it as my job to make the gameworld so appealing and perilous that the players find themselves not just wanting to play again, but to be inquisitive about the gameworld and their fate in it.

My attempts to address the dungeon design I think worked very well, but next time I’m going to draw a simple map, maybe with tokens to add for the different rooms and their distinctive features.  I want to avoid revealing a specific space, like a D&D dungeon map, but something seemed lacking without a map of any kind.  The sense of discover was lost.

The combats were a bit duller than I wanted them to be.  As I mentioned earlier, when I found out we were having 4 players, I doubled the amount of Consecrators, and that cause the game to drag on a little bit.  I planned the harping spiders, the sun eater lamp, gasping fog, and strangling shroud to be elements that would spice up the combats with the Consecrators, but by that point in the night, the game was running later than I wanted.  So, the lesson is, be more creative to think of ways to adjust for more party member than just adding more baddies.  Action economy isn’t as paramount in Dungeon World as it is in D&D, so I’d like to take the chance to find a different answer to that particular problem.

The shared setting/ living map approach to these games is really fun! I found myself asking, “How can the world be saved from what has happen to the moon,” and instead of answering that question directly in the lore I answer it by letting that drive the design for a fun mission for a group of adventures to discover.  The last hope to return the world to the way it was has been saved… for the moment.

All this living map stuff has me thinking about how much fun it would be to run an evil character game that could introduce new problems for the hero characters to solve.  Could be interesting.

I have another game in this world I’ll be running with yet another group next weekend at Gen Con.  I already know what I’m planning for that one.  It fun because I’ve already created all these adventure hooks and fronts for Keaton’s game, so when I hear that I have a chance to run a game for a new group, a lot of the prep work has already been done!  More like, Done-geon World, am I right? ;P

That’s it for this play report.  See you next time!

Map of the Norlands

I've worked up a vector version campaign map to print out for times when I'm not running the game over skype.  I started by quickly tracing the shore lines, than making simple icons and copy/pasting them all over.  It isn't as functional, but it's nicer to look at.  I'm running the game this weekend and the next, so it'll prove it's use soon enough.

If you want to see some truly beautiful maps, check out Arlin Ortiz's patreon page, Monster Pamphlets!  I've learned a lot about design and clear rpg cartography from these maps!

Play Report 3

Campaign: Professional Criminal Walker
Session: 1
Session Time: 2 Hours
System: Dungeon World
Perilous Encountered: 2
NPCs Encountered: 3
Fronts Visited: 2

New Side Story Character

We were down one Immolator player over the weekend, so I talked Keaton’s player into creating a new character for a side story that took place nearby Keaton’s story, but a week before Keaton’s campaign began.  The player was a good sport about it, and I was glad to be running a game this weekend because it’s going to be about a month before I’ll have the chance again.

Our new player character is Walker, a human thief, whose backstory is heavily inspired by Lee Marvin’s character from Point Blank.  Walker was running a job in the Cathedropolis of the Ecclesterium, when he was double crossed by a man named Klimpt, who is actually Keaton’s deadbeat dad.  So after pulling a nickle in the clink, Walker gets out and wants revenge on the man that set him up for the fall.

DM Prep

In preparation for this side story, I felt under prepared, but that was mostly because this was the first time I was running a dungeon environment without a super detailed WotC style module map.  I wrote up a bunch of NPCs, and drew a cross section of the major dungeon location with notes in a spreadsheet.  I knew I was over planning for number of NPCs, but I also knew they whoever survived this side story would probably show up again.

When our session starts, Walker is in the port of Chumwater, digging up information on his target, Klimpt.  I didn’t know what kind of character he was going to make, but I knew Klimpt was going to be at the dungeon, so when he rolled up a thief, I figured it would be interesting to have him hunt down his other characters dad.  Walker learns that Klimpt has moved up in the world, and has been rubbing elbows with the court of the Countess of Bath, up north.  This peaked the player’s interest somewhat, because of the prominent mentions of the Countess of Bath as having a blood cult from the previous session with Keaton.  Furthermore, Walker learns that Klimpt has been helping the Countess round up hunters in the area and tossing them in the prison castle, Chateau Diva.

Walker, it turns out, it one cold bastard, and the player proceeds to roll 10+s for basically everything all night. Just keep that in mind while you read what happens in this session.

Walker figures he needs to sneak into Chateau Diva, so he finds a huntsman delivering a deer carcass to a butcher in Chumwater, follows the huntsman back to his cabin, walks back to town and drops a dime on the poor guy.  He mets with some men of the guard at a pub called, the Low End, and tells them that he’s found a hunter who has been poaching on royal land.  The guards are very interested in this, indeed, and get on there way over this huntsman’s cabin.  After a brutal arrest, the guards load their new prisoner into a wheelbarrow and set off on the two day journey to Chateau Diva, all the while being trailed by Walker.

They come to the dungeon gate, and after yelling for a guard for about 20 minutes.  Walker could see that this castle, whatever was happening here, was not very well staffed.  After the two guards leave the castle with an empty wheelbarrow, Walker sets a little trap for them.  Long story short, one get set on fire, and the other gets a poisoned dagger between the eyes.  Walker dresses himself in the poisoned guards uniform, loads both bodies into the wheelbarrow and hoofs it back to the mountaintop to the castle.

Walker, posing as the guard who was just there, buffs his way back into the castle, saying he and his partner were jumped by the brother of the hunter who they just turned in.  Castle guard says they don’t need dead men, but offers a cot in the barracks to Walker for the night, provided he disposes of the bodies he’s brought in.

The first body is fed to a pit of mistreated wolves, but not before Walker doses the body with sleeping potion.  They second body is laid into an extra deep grave that Walker digs in the chateau’s old chapel yard.  Walker find the guard back at the gatehouse, and asks him over to share a drink as he says a few words over his fallen comrade.  The castle guard provided its over with quick.  Upon remarking that the grave seems extra deep, the castle guard is struck in the head with a shovel.  Walker covers up the bodies and finishes off the wolves in their drug induced sleep.

Walker then climbs up the side of the tower to the roof, effectively bypassing the entire dungeon.  Thinking back on it now, this is probably why most dungeons are subterranean.  He spots his mark on the roof talking with a witch about the setup for a ritual that will take place in just two nights, when the moon turns red in Keaton’s campaign.  There were scaffolds setup with a dozen sacrificial tables with toffs that would empty into an ornate bathtub set up in the center.  Walker, however, doesn’t care about rituals or witches, he just has his cold revenge.  He ties a noose to a gargoyle, lures Klimpt over to the edge, lassos Klimpt with the gargoyle noose, zip zop zoop, Walker just has to make his escape now, mission accomplished.

The witch, witnessing the assassination of her colleague, curses Walker with a moon beam that follows him around, to keep him from skulking around in the shadows any longer.  After barely talking his way into getting the witch to turn her head for a moment, Walker stabs her in the back with a poison dagger, tosses her over the edge, and throws another poison dagger at her as she magically slows her fall to the ground.  The Witch goes inside to alert the guards, and while they are all climbing up the tower after him, Walker rappels back down the wall, lifts the gate a few inches, jams the gate pulley with his short sword, and runs off into the night, with the moon curse still lighting him up like a Steak n Shake sign.

Dinner was ready, and we got a late start, so that’s where we left it.

GM Wrap Up

Making Klimpt the Walker’s mark was an interesting but ultimately dissatisfying move for me storywise.  This player is more into winning and overcoming than he is into discovering story, so it’s probably no big loss for either Keaton or Klimpt.  As he made good his escape, it did seem to hit him that Walker was witness to something very dark that is connected with the more apocalyptic events in Keaton’s story, and perhaps the irony of so effectively achieving Walker’s goals making things more mysterious for Keaton will fester between this session and the next.  What was the Countess doing with all those wolves and hunters? Who was the witch?  Why was Klimpt working for her?  Whelp, Walker has other things to worry about, and Keaton may never find out what happened to his dad.

When I run dungeon again, I’m going to have a lot more details on the map.  I like trying to find ways to simplify resources to make them more handy to run, but skimping on the Chateau Diva made the session seem too empty.

A solo player game in the PbtA system works really well, unless the player rolls really high numbers over and over.  Walker went through the session like a hot knife through butter.  I should have been throwing more danger his way, but his plans seemed plausible enough, and he also had the rolls to back it up.  Next time, more enemies and more damage.  Lesson learned.

The Parley move in Dungeon World isn’t very descriptive of how it was often used in this game, so I may rewrite it, or look at other PbtA persuasion type moves.  Walker was bluffing his way through several situations, and I was left without a great move for it.  Parley is the main +CHA move to call for, but “When you have leverage on a GM Character and manipulate them,” doesn’t really describe it, and neither does “Defy Danger.”  Something to think about.  I would love a more specific move for bluffing that really phrases the stakes and danger of lying in a compelling way.

That’s it for this play report.  See you next time!

Play Report 2

Campaign: Sly Hunter Keaton

Session: 2

Session Time: 3.5 Hours

System: Dungeon World

Perilous Encountered: 3

NPCs Encountered: 1

Fronts Visited: 1

New Player Character

We added a second PC for the second session.  When I was blabbing about the first play report on social media, a friend commented that he wanted to play Dungeon World after having read the rules some time ago.  I cleared it with Keaton’s player first, and we added him in.  The one of the reasons I started with only one player in the first place was because it makes scheduling easier, but hey, adding just one more couldn’t make thing too much worse for a game played over google hangouts and a spreadsheet.

So, we added Spark the Immolator to the game.  We worked up a quick backstory and reason for why he was sent to search for Keaton a week after he left for salt for the village.  We landed on Spark being a young mage from a nomadic group of fire worshipers who have had contact with Keaton’s village when they visit the volcanic mountains nearby on a semi regular basis.  When Sparks tribe comes into town and sees that many folks are missing, it is mentioned that Keaton hasn’t been seen in a week on an errand the should have taken 4 days tops.  Spark discovers Keaton sheltering with Peg Leg the Priest and a mule under a skiff only a day’s travel from the village at the mouth of the river, with serious wounds and no salt.

DM Prep

In preparation for the second session, I came up with a bunch more monsters, added factions to the GM map, and restructured my encounter tables.  The encounter tables are loosely based on this post from the blog Pencils & Paper.

2	powerful mystic	1	Surprise!
3	recurrent npc	2	Two encounters right on top of you
4	terrain encounter	3	Escape is impossible
5	outsider faction encounter	4	Approaching from middle distance
6	local faction encounter	5	Approaching another encounter
7	nothing	6	Spotted at a great distance
8	nothing
9	local beast encounter
10	weather event
11	tough monster / recurrent monster
12	dragon / extraplanar abomination

The idea is that you roll 2d6 of different colors.  The sum determines the type of encounter on the left, and the red d6 determines the proximity.  

Play Report

Spark discovers Keaton camped at the river mouth.  Spark decides to help Keaton on his errand for getting salt for his village’s winter prep, let’s face it, poor Keaton needs some help.  Spark and the Peg Leg Priest of the Ecclesterium DO NOT GET ALONG.  Keaton’s player loses interest in my explaining the relationship between the Immolators and the Ecclesterium, but he’s a surly, impatient fellow and wants to keep the game moving.  Fair enough.

They set sail for the port of Whalebone, hugging the coast to keep their barings in the thick fog that rolled in overnight, obscuring the blood moon that has risen every night since Samhain (Halloween).  Spark is concerned about these heavenly omens, but Keaton’s only concern is getting these barrels of salt and getting back to his village before the heavy snows come.  

Camping after a foggy day of sailing, Keaton notices an approaching group of silk hooded men on horseback leading chained prisoners along the coast in the night.  Keaton leaps into action against these hooded men, waking up Spark with a deafening whip crack at on the hooded men.  Odd thing, when Keaton’s whip tears open an artery under the man’s neck, he scables to collect his lifeblood into a brass goblet, and the other man carefully takes the filled goblet away from his expiring companion and places the goblet on the ground without spilling a drop, prayerfully muttering, “For the Countess.”

Spark leaps up from his sleep and causes his torch to explode in a bright flash, blinding the remaining hooded man, allowing Keaton to follow up with another devastating attack and ending the combat.  Spark investigate the men discovering a few intriguing facts: These men work in the Castle of the Countess of Bath, to the South; They have clay jugs filled with blood; They are leading these prisoners back to the Castle.  Our heroes free the prisoners and wake up Peg Leg, letting him take these folks and the horses wherever he will.   Spark and Keaton bid good riddance to the priest of the Ecclesterium, and rest the night away to set sail again in the morning.

They sail the rest of the way relatively free of incident.  The encounter table is was pacing out the excitement as intended.  They make it to within six miles of the port town, when they see a 50 foot tall dorsal fin cutting out of the top of a dark swell of water.  Spark abandons ship immediately and swims for the shore.  Keaton stand his ground to defend his skiff and mule, the only apparent means of returning home with his cargo.  But he recognizes the identity of the beast, by its time-space devouring mouth filled with spinning rows of razor sharp teeth.  He faces the All-Shark.  So he grabs his wallet and jumps ship too.  The mule and skiff are sucked into the gaping maw of the All-Shark, but our heroes manage to make it to shore safely, although they dropped several important possessions and supplies.  Wet, tired, and depleted, our heroes are within an easy walk of Whalebone as the sun sets.

Spark is weary of the town, knowing it to normally have its street lit up at night with whale oil lamps, but not even a candle burns in the town, apparently deserted.  As they step on the cobblestone streets of the vacant whaling town, the smell of rotting fish and garbage nearly causes them to dry heave.  Spark wants to see if his old candle maker friend is safe, and if he’ll give them a place to stay the night.  As they make their way to candle maker’s shop, they hear the faint echoing of a church choir and see a bright glow from the local Ecclesterium Chapel in the middle of town, and give it a wide berth.  There is a sign hung on the shop that reads, GONE SINGING.

Keaton says he’s going to get some barrels of salt, steal a boat from the pier, and leave.  He makes it very clear that he does give even a single shit about what is happening in this town and he just wants to leave with what he came for.  Spark help Keaton break into the general store to steal some salt and supplies and loads up a fishing boat, but then says he has to at least check on the chapel to see if his friend needs help.  I make it clear to Spark’s player that this is a sandbox game, and he won’t be spoiling the fun if decides not to go, but he is very curious about the chapel.

Keaton sighs and says he’ll help. He loots some bees wax to stuff their ears to avoid possible audio ensorcellment, and Keaton devises three basic hand singles that mean, “This is my friend,” and “I don’t care,” and “It’s time to leave.”  After a solid five minutes of hysterical laughing, I collect my composer and the heroes make their way to the chapel.

The can’t hear anything because of the beeswax, but they feel the vibrations of a multitude of voices as the get closer to the chapel.  Inside, the villagers are adored in sackcloth and ashes.  Many of them have collapsed where they’ve been standing and defecating, singing lamentations for the passed week.  In place of the ceiling is an open sky in the center of the eye of a swirling storm, and around storm or swaying circles of chanting angels.  The angles have been decapitated from the eyes up, and their open-top skulls spew smoke and ash into the storm around them.  Keaton readies his lude hand signals.

Spark sees his friend at the altar of the church, deep in throws of this horrid worship.  Rather than go deeper into the church tries to bring one of the closest worshipers out of the church, but they began to thrash violently, so Spark and Keaton just booked it back to the boat.  They started looting some of the boats nearby for whatever they could find, but a procession of singers started to march out towards them.  As their boat pulled away from them in the red moonlit night, the singers just marched into the sea and drown.  Our heroes made camp at an island six miles away and slept as peacefully as one might expect after such an ordeal.

The next morning they seat sail in their new boat, their supplies for Keaton’s village in hand, and sailed until they saw a longboat with red silk sails heading their direction, cutting off their path back to the river across the straight back to our heroes destination.  Keaton attempted to make a quarantine flag to frighten off the ominous vessel, but to no avail.  They saw five hooded men of the same sort from earlier that week, this time with ten chained rowers.  After our heroes ducked a salvo of blow darts, the hooded men threw some grapple hooks over to Keaton’s ship. Keaton ran up the grapple line like a ninja and started attacking the armored captain.  Spark dispatched a few men with fireballs and lept over to the enemy vessel.

Keaton had several very good rolls in combat and made quick work of the captain, kicking him into the chained rowers, so they could wrestle with him while Keaton aided Spark in his fight with the other hooded men, who were armed with daggers and brass goblets.  The captain managed to throw a trident into Keaton’s back before he was strangled to death by the rowers.  And this is where we ended the session.  They have tow boats, ten prisoners, a couple barrels of salt, and maybe two more days of travel back to Keaton’s village.  To be continued.

GM Wrap Up

The new table was a HUGE success! If I was to change anything about the table, I might have the non-red d6 determine attitude or mood of the encounter.  Using a 2d6 table is wonderful because you can incorporate frequency by designing encounter types that correspond to the bell curve of dice results.

Terrain encounters and weather events are neat, I need to retool them to make sure the are adding tension or obstacles to the game.  How does rain affect campfires, and how does that affect resting, etc. I’ll fix this for the next session. Should be easy.

The encounters with the Hooded Men from the Castle of Bath were both results of the “outsider faction” from the encounter table.  Adding factions to the map was a wonderful element to add as well, as it’s a way to generate curiosity in the world in a dynamic fashion. Now our heroes are very interested in what these hooded folks are up to!

I forgot to do end-of-session bonds stuff, just not used to it yet, but it’ll be easy to do first thing next session.

Also, we discovered that I calculated the PC’s starting HP incorrectly, so once we fixed that it freed our Immolator up to be more aggressive in combat.  If I have a major fault as a GM, it's that I don’t make my PC’s take enough damage.  So now that I know they aren’t as squishy, I’ll try to be more brave about that.

I’m thinking about running the next session as a game of “The Quiet Year” or “Do Not Let Us Die in the Dark Night of this Cold Winter” when they return winter in Keaton’s home village.  After that, I’m thinking about opening up the game to a West Marches style of play.  Let the players figure out the schedule and how many players they want for each session.  Our main obstacle to this is, even a quick there and back again journey to buy salt will end up taking three sessions.  It’s not unsolvable and it could lead to some really interesting decisions for players who want to play multiple characters in the same world.

That’s it for this play report.  See you next time!

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.