Big finale and our first defeated Front last night! I could feel it closing in last week with our guest players, but this week they delivered the final blow to the Space Void Madness danger.
The table action was so fast and wild that it’s kind of impossible to recount, and it’d be boring anyway because you weren’t there. But in our roses-and-thorns debrief (I’ve been waiting to do one until we’d gotten past one of the Fronts) everyone agreed that the moves are starting to interact and mingle with the Dungeon World common moves in some exciting ways.
Observations in bullet form for your bathroom reading pleasure:
* I’m all-in now on the bam-bam-bam speed of die rolling/move invocation in DW. We rolled a heck of a lot last night, and everyone rolled like craaaaap so there’s been quite a lot of advancement. I think at … six sessions? … everyone’s level 3 or 4 now. My modification to a flat 7XP per level is working great, and it’ll mean everyone has a chance to get into the 6-10 level moves. At the old pace, everyone would just now be level 3, and it’d keep getting slower and slower.
* I got to use some of the extra-weird DW tools that I haven’t really messed with, specifically a treasure drop after they defeated the big bad. They’ve been beating up on lesser critters and I haven’t bothered, but the outcome for beating the source of the Void Madness was too good to pass up. I don’t know that I’ll do it every time though: lots of the results are just X coins, which seems totally off-tone for SWvM.
* I sense some mild dissatisfaction at the abstraction of the “when you defeat a danger” move, and how it plays out into the fiction afterward. Basically, Space Wurm has actual negotiating power to get folks to “back” him in taking over the front: you get a +1 per PC who wants to back you. I assume you cannot back both, because that makes for a much tenser and more interesting roll! But so anyway, with the defeat of the source of the Space Void Madness, both SW and M made their 10+ rolls with the backing of the other characters: The Lover backed Space Wurm and will be taking control of the Interstellar Transportation front, which is very cool, and the Other backed Moonicorn for…other reasons. Basically the Other is just grossed out by Space Wurm.
* I’m going to take a “months later” jump ahead for next session and reset some of the situation. The Spice front is already in motion but I haven’t even introduced Religion’s threats yet, so I think, like before, we’ll have a session or two of just kind of wandering around in the setting until events start to gel. I don’t really mind that tbh; it lets the characters do more interpersonal stuff and firm up their personal arcs a bit.
Anyway, the game’s proceeding swimmingly and with all the new moves getting unlocked, the interplay of those moves is getting super interesting. Niftiest twist: everyone has taken a move that helps other players get more XPs. Now everyone’s incentivizing everyone else all the time. My 7XP/level hack might end up biting me!
We fiddled with XP, too, and wound up with everyone at or around level 10 at the end. It worked out super good.
Oh and sad news, MadJay Brown: your Engine of Destruction fell into a prison of eternal nothingness along with the big bad. The Edict had a 7-9 kind of day.
William Nichols DW advancement just doesn’t work for me. If/when I ever run it straight — probably with one of the Chaos Worlds settings — I might just keep my hack.
Yeah, what we did was to double end of session XP. So that those questions became the primary driver, rather than XP on a miss.
William Nichols oh that’s interesting! Probably better than my solution.
But what did you do about the “notable treasure” question? I mean we did one, finally, six sessions in. It just doesn’t feel very notable-treasure-y.
we found treasure, after a fashion.
Moonicurn once found a communicator that let her speak to a particular NPC who was locked on a spaceship. Noteable!
Space Wyrm once found a new servant who was treasure instead of mere currency.
As the Mogul, I once took over the treasure vault of a company allied against mine.
And these are just the ones i remember.
Oh! We just had this conversation last night. It appears that only PCs can be evaluated as treasure or currency by Space Wurm. I’m not 100% sure though, since the treasure/currency rules appear under “Bonds” and I don’t know that there are any DW-side constraints on who can become a Bond.
Honestly I’m a little hazy on DW’s Bonds rules in general.
I’m orderin’ this damn game. I loved the one-shot, and hearing you go over the full game and after reading these actual plays, I think this is my next campaign-size game.
BUT WHAT ABOUT GOODWIN
My hope is he disappears into The Void and his forgotten and continues his research. That is, making creepy, gross biobot things out of his body.
Jeremiah Frye oh oh, yeah, Goodwin built his portal-for-three but then Space Wurm and Cypris showed up and things got awkward because not everyone could leave.
“Maybe if we just all squeeze together real close.”
Which inevitably leads to a “The Fly”-like incident.
I bet the Edict’s dad just sat and watched that go down like that too! đŸ˜‰
MadJay Brown​ he’s the one who knocked the Edict in!
Literally a 7-9 on defy danger. You can save Cypris buuuuut…
LOL! That’s Awesome!!
Patrick Riegert Get the hardback. You won’t regret it. It is super pretty. To be honest, Johnstone Metzger seems to have a real knack for laying out games that look damn good in print-on-demand hardcover.
Paul Beakley Bonds in DW are for other PCs only, but being able to have bonds with NPCs is better.
Johnstone Metzger I thought so re DW, but I’m not understanding the second half of that sentence. Just a commentary on how to improve DW?
Yeah. Like if at any point during a game you think “this PC should have a bond with an NPC” just do it. There are custom moves out there where you take bonds with NPCs, with objects, with deities, whatever, they all work, there’s no real bad way of doing it. Maybe reconsider limits on the number of bonds if you do this, but otherwise, it’s hard to screw it up. And even if the table decides they don’t like it after all, it’s easy enough to erase and ignore after.
Johnstone Metzger I would pay good money for a bonds supplement by you, to go with my copy of Class Warfare. Just sayin’.
Tim Jensen I’m kinda thinking my efforts right now are best put into a full PbtA game (or games plural), instead of more supplements, to be honest. Which isn’t to say you won’t get what you want, of course.
What is it gonna be, Johnstone Metzger, and where can I throw money at it?
Tim Jensen speaking of which… I really should pick up a copy of CW…
William Nichols I would like to have a short playtest thing done for Go Play NW (just as an arbitrary deadline), but I’m neck deep in something completely unrelated at the current moment, so we’ll have to see how quickly that gets done first.