Yep, at some point in Varkith I was definitely struggling to push in interesting directions while still retaining a core of Dungeon World. Varkith is to the point where it practically adds a game on top of the game. With that said, though, I think that setting books like the Chaos Worlds can make sense, much more so than they probably would for Apocalypse World, because Dungeon World is a toybox game.

Since Dungeon World is based on D&D more than on any other genre of fantasy, and has somewhere in its heart that D&D-ish idea that you can take it to so many different places and experience so many different adventures, it’s got a strong toybox element. We play it and we take out the toys we want for this session: that place, those monsters, this magical item, these classes, and so on. So having more toys in the toybox only ever feels like a good thing, and it was easy to initially conceive of the Chaos Worlds as me adding toys to the toybox from within the diseased recesses of my brain.

When the Chaos Worlds shifted to me actually trying to change Dungeon World, to give new tools with which to take the game to new places, writing the books started to come up against the boundaries of DW. Varkith goes farther than Lastlife did in that space, and it’s easy for me to imagine a world in which Varkith wasn’t tied to DW, but was instead a whole new thing unto itself, with new basic moves—a real toolbox, instead of a toybox.

For AW, setting books are tough because it really isn’t a toybox game, it’s a toolbox game. You can play with some portion of the playbooks, and there are plenty of fan-created ones, but really AW is largely about that core set of playbooks. And the playbooks are really the only pieces you vary like this—otherwise, you’re still playing with the same kinds of gear, and the same kinds of threats, and so on. There are no lists of monsters for you to pull from, or magical items to bring in, or compendium classes to point at, because none of those toys are a thing in AW the way they are in DW. Instead, AW is about giving you the tools and machinery to create a certain kind of story, and using its tools, I can create my own toys.

Dungeon World definitely still gives me the tools to create my own monsters, but also, I’m probably more likely to use a pre-made monster that does the job, instead of making my own in the moment. Because at the table, the process involved in making that toy is too involved—while in AW, the tools of the system are designed so I can create a new threat very quickly and easily (name an NPC, pick a body part, set ’em loose). So in AW, I’ll use those tools to create my own toys at the table, while in DW, I want the toybox full in advance.

Could be this is as much about the culture surrounding the game as anything else—that it’s a toybox culture more than a toybox game. But at least for me, yeah, that’s why I think Lastlife was straining, and Varkith was definitely pulling hard at the boundaries of DW—because they ceased to be just about more toys, and shifted some attention onto new tools.