dungeon world - - the Lichen Forest

So I'm now also game-blogging at myconidfighter.tumblr.com - - check it out sometime. I think the tone of that blog is going to be a bit more showcasy, and a bit less thinky, given that there isn't much of a story-games community on Tumblr as of yet, as far as I know. It's no G+, to be sure, so I'm not expecting reblogs and in-depth discussions. Hm, maybe I should just post on G+...

Anyway, last night was our first session of Dungeon World. I didn't know what to expect, but quite inadvertently we did some amazing stuff. We're using the Dec2011 preview version of the game, so our experience is probably a mashup of older stuff and things yet to come, but at least we have the v2.0 monster-making rules on hand, which tamps down the insane damage output a bit.

Anyway, so these rules don't have strong guidelines on prep; the first-session advice is basically "start with a tense situation. You'll build on it." Honestly, this really is about all you need - think about that alongside the Bonds questions (which illustrate connections between PCs) and you should have some vague ideas about the setting and about what could be going down in it.

In this case, I thought about their Bonds for a bit, and then resorted to targeted questions - - I asked the Wizard, Osmolord, to tell me, "What were you looking for in these woods, anyway?" He told me, "A place of power." That felt like a sufficiently Wizardly question; glad I asked it.

Then I asked the Ranger, Aranwe, "What's a creature that threatens these woods?" She told me, "That giant demon from Princess Mononoke, the one covered in worm-things." So I looked it up, tweaked it a bit in my head to make it more nature-y, and decided that when it attacks stuff it leaves sprouts and spores behind.

Boom! Gametime. The players have been sent to explore the ruins of a village destroyed by the monster. There is no sign of the villagers whatsoever; only furniture, tools, and the foundations of the houses remain - even the thatch in their roofs was gobbled up by the creature what did this.

So they take a sample of the spores and go back to the ranger's house, which she decided - very much on the fly - to be a cozy, dry cave underneath a big tree in the forest. There's a bio-luminescence theme in the forest, so I decided that elves use jars of water so they can bring glow-foam (glowing freshwater algae) home with them.

The spore sample caused the glow-foams to all freak out for a hot minute and glow bright red. Further study merited a visit with a local sage, Celion the Elf.

Celion had few answers, but he suggested that the reaction from the glow-foam could suggest that a) the spore-source is unnatural and evil and b) maybe it comes from the River of Lights?

So now that's a thing. The players spend the night at his place, and they fail their Make Camp check, so I decided to be a bit of a softie and have Celion's tree-home come to life and walk around while they're sleeping. They wake up just as it's starting to settle into a new spot, some miles west of where they started.

They bid a frightened, confused Celion goodbye and head to the River, where they capture one of the weird glowing jelly-creatures that lives in the water (very Miyazaki, imo) and see what happens when they place it (in a bowl of water) next to the jar with the monster-spores.

It freaks out and tries to claw out of the bowl, its little tendrils twitching in fear.

They relent and separate the two receptacles, but now they really think something ugly is going down. They send Aranwe's hawk-friend Apollo down south to try and spot the monster while they, up north, check out the River of Lights some more, and try to find its source up in the mountains.

That's about where we ended, and I left out some detail so as to present a more streamlined narrative.

Mechanical thoughts:

-Making monsters is a blast with the v2.0 rules! They still do too much damage, but maybe I just need to reframe my expectations of level-1 characters.

-I totally forgot to make the Wizard roll to cast his spells. I'm still giving him the XP, though, as he did use Intelligence (which was highlighted).

-I haven't quite figured out what kind of communication ability the Ranger is supposed to share with an animal companion (can they talk, or does that require Wild Empathy?), but the Command move (much like the Apocaworld Driver's relationship to his car) lets the Ranger get big stat bonuses by incorporating her companion into the action - for instance, you add its Ferocity to your melee rolls when you fight together - - this led to a sweet +4 bonus on a Discern Realities check!

-It looks like it'll be slowish going with XP and leveling. I think combat is probably going to be a good source of XP, though, and honestly I didn't mind the current (non-BBC) stat-highlighting procedure, but it may end up being useful to explore other options.

-The fact that casting a spell counts as a move means that you can highlight your magic-stat and reap lots of XP that way. It is a bit of a risk, of course...

-If anything, I think the Fronts are more comprehensible to me now than they were with Apocaworld, partly because I'm putting less pressure on myself and partly because I'm more familiar now, but also there's an element of "duh, of course!" when designing Dangers. I do miss the more abstract/conceptual options AW presents, but I'm okay with having the human Mayor count as a planar force - construct of Law on the basis that his impulse is, indeed, to "eliminate perceived disorder".

-I'm trying rilly hard not to get ahead of myself with Campaign Fronts and Dungeon Fronts (I don't quite understand these yet - - I think the latter carry the presumption that play will be dungeon-centered, but that's a big if). Basically, I think DFs are for contained or limited-area threats that are directly challenging the players because of their current situation, while CFs are for broader "motive forces", like the movers and shakers of the setting or the world.

I think the best, biggest asset to making Fronts in DW is the very simple, focused ethos behind them: what would happen if the players weren't around to be heroes? Since DW characters are supposed to be problem-solvers, this makes it very easy to have thoughts like "the elves and humans would go to war" or "the Mayor will declare martial law" or "the monster will destroy most of the farming villages before it can be killed".

In AW, I found it more challenging because I didn't inherently see the players as being good guys - they were just around, and even though RPG expectations and even genre expectations were a factor, I didn't point the NPCs quite directly enough at the players in conflict. I eventually got the hang of it, but there was definitely some disconnect early on, with NPCs just doing their thing and almost ignoring the players. But that's going too far (for my purposes) in the direction of creating a world that exists for its own sake, and not enough of creating a world while exploring what the players are up to.

I think that once my AW players started to feel like it was their world to conquer, things got much more interesting, but at first I was acting like the players would break the setting if it tried to come up and talk to them. I feel a lot more competent with it now, and our DW game will get to reap the payoff on that. Session 2 is tonight, and we have a third player joining us! What will he play, I wonder?

gm style flowchart/eulogy for a PC

Yes, this chart has some age to it. but you don't come here to read new ideas, do you? haha

The full image doesn't fit in this space, but the format in that link there is pretty good.

[below is x-posted at Story Games also]

So! Different topic: last night's AW session. One of our protagonists died.

Keep in mind that this PC was nicknamed the Ronin, took potshots at Mudflat villagers kind of "just because", and never fully backed down from a fight, not once.

Let's explore this a little more. His name was Rue Wakeman, a Gunlugger. He had bad, bad scars from when his boss, Diamond the Chopper, beat him up and left him in the desert, where his wounds went bad and exposure did its thing, and made him really hard to look at.

He lived in a drainage tunnel that fed a semi-toxic river outside of Adobe-town; hallucinogenic mold grew inside the tunnel, which Rue ate to open his brain to the Maelstrom. Doing so got him in trouble a couple times, like the time the Mudflatters finally arrested him for deadly assault and he ended up thinking his captors were dog-headed monsters serenading him, so he shot one and ran away.

The guard lived, but only just. Thanks to Boo the Angel on that one, I think.

Anyway. So Rue forged his nemesis when he was walking past the Mudflatter work-camp in town (across the river from the Mudflatter village of Northside) and a couple of guys stopped him to ask if he'd be up for making a little money.

Rue: Sure, what's the job?

Roy (Mudflatter): There is a ... forgive me, but a child we wish for you to assassinate [the playgroup started telling John, Rue's player, that this must be a reference to Dr. Last, a semi-immortal warlord from down south whose current form is that of a 6yo boy.]

Rue: A child, huh?

Roy: Regrettably, sir. Will you take the job?

Rue: *shoots Roy* No.

Roy's friend runs away. When Rue is eating, later that night, Roy and two buddies jump him. Rue manages to kill two of them and send Roy packing again, but this time the Mudflatter camp all saw what happened and formed a big old gang to hang him and put an end to this.

Ol' Rue got away that time, but after Diamond's boss, Havok, ate it in a gunfight down south (Boo got him), and things started to settle down a bit, Rue made the error of robbing some Mudflatters playing dice in an alley. Well, Rue had been sleeping in the desert for a bit, ever since the first near-lynching incident. Now that he was back, and they sure knew his face, about fifty Mudflatters got together to stop him for good.

They chased him out of town, throwing rocks. The elder of Northside sees what's going on, sees Rue's defensive counter-fire, and sighs. He was in the middle of a visit with Diamond and Vega (the Operator, old boss of Adobe-town), and apologized before giving the order for the village guards to shoot Rue on sight.

Diamond: Honestly, I helped him get out of town last time a mob came after him. I'm done.

Vega: He'll probably be okay.

Elder: ...

So the gunmen from the village go charging out into the desert, and soon enough they intercept the mob and a tiring Rue. He turns to lay a little cover fire before taking off down a nearby dune, and flubs the roll. So he doesn't get away, and they get him with small arms fire (2-harm; Rue has 2-armor), and he rolls a natural 11 on the +harm move.

I tell him he's incapacitated.

Right before Rue dies, A. (playing Vega) turns to me and says, "Is Rue gonna die? That's harsh."

Me: "I mean, it's what the fiction demands. I have mixed feelings about it, but I can't not do it."

A brief discussion of "be a fan of the PCs" vs. "look through cross-hairs" ensues.

This is when I get a little nervous. I've hardly killed any PCs in my time, so I feel kind of bad. I describe Li, one of the Mudflatters, a guard who's got a thing for Vega, coming up and delivering the fatal back-of-the-head shot himself. He then goes to throw up.

Later, we're packing up to go, and John (ex-Rue) says, "Maybe I'll play a Faceless next. I really want to do something that's noticeably different from Rue, though." Clearly I got worked up over nothing. I did have to sit with it for a couple of hours (I have anxiety; what can I say?) but I got over it, and Lord knows, John got over it in about sixty seconds. Next week, onward and upward!

La Familia - starting the first playtest campaign

I might be running a playtest campaign of La Familia soon. As Anna pointed out in our first get-together tonight, LF could totally work as an early-19th-century Cosa Nostra game, set in Sicily.
But that's not the coolest part: a mob game set in Sicily in the 1920's, where Benito fucking Mussolini is the Tyrant (quick recap: the players play members of powerful families; the gm plays a central authority figure in society, called the Tyrant). It would be RAD to play Mussolini.
One of Anna's suggestions was to blur the distinction between the gm and the other players, such that it's not a really "gm'ed" game anymore. I think the easy way to do this is to call one player the Tyrant, give him the power to set Laws, and make his protagonist the Tyrant of the setting. Easy peasy. The word "gm" is incorrect, anyway - the only diff between the Tyrant and the other players is that the Tyrant creates Laws.
Given that you could basically run The Godfather using LF, Anna also pointed out that I should consider putting specific kinds of scenes into the rules - some kinds include Betrayal (maybe a scene in which a Grudge's rating is increased), Retribution (taking revenge for the increased Grudge), and Placation (smoothing over the source of the increased Grudge).
I'll give it some thought.

another quick one before bed

Big lesson for the night: Story Now! games can learn a lot from other forms of story-media, like television.
Case in point: the premiere of House reminded me just how important scene-framing is, especially pretty aggressive scene-framing, to keep games interesting and fun. Lesson learned -> it's not about emulating other genres, it's about using the tools of other genres to have more fun doing RPGs.
I could have cut a LOT of travel sequences from Mask and made the game a lot cooler. For that matter, I think I should avoid the "see the world!" impulse in games unless it stays within the emotional framework of the story - it is HARD to evoke wonder and awe when describing physical or sensory experiences. No problem at all to get a bunch of oh, damn's from the group when describing an action, between people, but it's damn hard to evoke the English countryside and have that be, you know, fun.
I plan on being a lot more aggressive from now on with my scene-framing, as GM - I may start keeping tabs on the next Bang coming up in the story, just to keep myself from thrashing around in old-school, we-must-record-every-moment style crap.
Whew.