Space Wurm vs Moonicorn
DW Dependencies
Aaron Griffin asked this question so I got curious. So now I’m trying to figure out what all you need to know from Dungeon World proper (vs vanilla PbtA) to make sense of what’s in SWvM. Maybe Johnstone Metzger can set me straight, confirm, or firmly deny my findings!
Must have Dungeon World
* Advancement (get an XP on 6-, when resolving a Bond, acting with Alignment, maybe moves; level up when XP = current level + 7)
* Alignment (for advancement; can you change it per DW?)
* Bonds (for advancement; add new ones when you resolve old ones BUT some of the SWvM bonds are weird/interesting)
* DW combat in general (armor, damage and hit points, you can maybe guess from the playbooks and Front writeups; healing and death per DW? REVISION: Also death move, tweaked for your setting!)
* Debilities — do these ever happen in SWvM? PDF search says The Other does! I think other than The Other’s stuff, debility is mostly a GM move tool, descriptively making someone confused when they get their bell rung, that sort of thing.
* Load and encumbrance special move (but for the life of me I can’t figure out why you’d ever reference this, seems off-tone)
* Possibly the details of the basic moves, but they read as fairly easy to parse even without any DW experience.
* Recover, End of Session and Level Up special moves, I assume.
* The palate of GM moves
* Managing DW fronts and resolving dangers, if you’re sticking to DW and not just eyeballing a front as “resolved.” Which…maybe? But DW has a surprising amount of talk about fronts.
Dungeon World rules I’m not sure about but seem useful
* Recruit special move and Hirelings (skills seem to track okay to space opera, cost, loyalty)
* Steadings, and world creation in general. I think the steading tags map over!
* Campaign Map rules, ooh. REVISION: See Adventures on Dungeon Planet for details on making up new planets.
* REVISION: Journeys, camp, watch, carouse special moves depending on your setting.
* Bolster special move
* Any of the special subsystems of standard DW/CW characters if you’re mapping them over to SWvM. Like…space magic could be a thing I guess.
* Folks of the Realm? Maybe? None of the other monster settings seem relevant, especially given the focus on the Fronts, which already come with enemies.
* Weapons and Armor (esp. given the presence of Load/Encumbrance), I suppose you just map it over: plate mail is “powered armor” etc.
* Gear in general? Seems off-tone but again there’s the fact that encumbrance is a thing in the game. REVISION: See Adventures on Dungeon Planet for detailed gear.
* Custom move writing
DW rules that seem utterly unnecessary and aren’t referenced at all in SWvM
* Gold/Treasure. Looks like “what you’ve got and can get” is handled in other ways on the new playbooks.
* The rest of the special moves (death, perilous journey, take watch, make camp, carouse, supply, outstanding warrants. REVISION: all this depends heavily on your take on the setting)
* Rations or any other dungeoneering grind economy
* The Dungeon moves (REVISION: depending on your vibe; could be good for exploring space hulks or alien ruins or whatever)
* Monster settings: looks like that’s already baked into enemies associated with the Fronts. REVISION: probably useful as stat blocks for your own setting’s critters. Depends on how you do your setting! SECOND REVISION: oh shit lookit all the space fantasy monsters in Adventures on Dungeon Planet as well.
* Compendium classes, don’t even know what that’d look like. REVISION: you could totes do compendium classes but there’s no support at all for what those might look like. Still a possibly useful tool in the DM’s toolbox, especially if you have a strong sense of your setting.
I’m making lots of personal judgements about the Special Moves and I’m not 100% sure about any of them. Like, the whole journeying thing might actually be interesting in some iterations of SWvM. I just can’t imagine the most powerful being in the universe giving a shit about it.
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Hey yo, lots here! Some to think about, and here’s a disagreement: our space wyrm used perious journey, through his henchmen. They went someplace outside of his domain.
William Nichols fascinating! I can totally see it working based on how you doodle up your galaxy. There could be legitimately perilous explored regions to deal with (Star Wars, Flash Gordon, etc.). Or you could end up doing up a super-civilized Jupiter Ascending type setting. Seems like an important early decision to make.
Or maybe the assumption is that elements of those unchosen Fronts are definitionally perilous? Dunno. Would love clarity on that point.
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Oh, right. We also had a dragon. And a lich.
William Nichols literally dragons and liches? Were they sci-fi versions?
Probably the monsters are useful as easy stat blocks. Maybe I’m eyeballing the scene vibe wrong, but I didn’t think there was much monster fighting. Again I guess that is a setting decision you make early, yeah?
sci-fi versions, for sure.
The lich was inside a mirror, holding someone enthralled such that his ideas could never change. Moonicurn fought the lich to a standstill, freeing the persons mind.
The Dragon was black ice, effectively a hacking countermeasure. The Mogul was a hacker and had to get past the Dragon to get access to tasty, tasty data.
These came about not due to setup, but as a result of what we want after.
I made a couple revisions to the OP.
Yeah, everything in your Must Have list is must have, except:
1. Alignment doesn’t need to be D&D alignment, that’s an anachronism, and can be swapped out for drives or motivations like other DW supplements do. I used it to make certain statements in the text, that’s all. It’s mainly for the xp at the end of session.
2. Load and encumbrance can be ignored if your game stays in civilized settings. If you have no interest whatsoever in the crawl of hex or dungeon, it’s irrelevant (unless there’s a sitch I’ve never encountered or thought of before maybe?).
Your Useful list is just that: useful IF you care at all, but not needed if you don’t. Dungeon Planet has some good world creation procedures and gear lists if you want gadgets and whatnot.
As for your Unnecessary list:
3. I would say Last Breath is necessary and part of the basic rules. I like perilous journeys and carouse a lot, I would totally use them again if I were running any version of DW, whether SWvsM or not, but they are more useful if you care than absolutely necessary. Maybe adapt the wording a bit to suit the genre, also.
4. Compendium classes are for when players want weird advancements after unexpectedly becoming cyborg wolfoids in session 6, so I wouldn’t worry about that until it happens.
5. I probably wouldn’t use the DW monster settings but that’s just me, I like to minimize the amount of stuff I have to carry to a game. You can reskin them for sci-fi if you want monsters though, it’s probably not a big deal.
Otherwise, yeah. I mean, I would expect a classic dungeon crawl through a space station complete with load and rations and making camp to come up before money problems.
Fantastic, Johnstone Metzger, thank you for the input.
I think, going through both your book and DW, the DW supplement-ness of SWvM jumped more out at me. Like, in terms of underlying themes (action/adventure!) as well as in where they diverge (ambition and ideology rather than cash-money as motivation).
There are also super-interesting implications if you carry Dungeon World to its logical scifi conclusions, like the fact there’s a Black Gates of Death at all, and one assumes demons and deities (if a Space Cardinal is in play) and so on and so on.
Looks like I’m gonna pick up Dungeon Planet as well, yikes.
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Hunh? Why would death not be relevant? Death can come for you in SWvM.
Shervyn von Hoerl it’s not the death, it’s the mythology about what’s beyond death. That’s what the move is for. You can die and not have that move be a thing in the game.
Yeah, but it kind of sucks to just always die when you run out of HP. You don’t necessarily have to use Death per se offering a deal, you can have it be whatever NPC runs the place where a PC died, or the specific characteristics of the world where they died.
^^this
Paul Beakley Dungeon Planet is cool, bu I was under the impression SWvM was nearly the same, just like a more fleshed out setting (and two additional classes).
The other monster books out of Johnstone Metzger are wild, though. Pick those up. Wizard Spawned Insanities is wonderful.
Johnstone Metzger well … sure. Guess I hadn’t really thought about just what all needs to be remapped and what doesn’t, including moves that feel setting-specific but maybe aren’t? I can totally see DW’s death move being part-and-parcel to the capital-a Adventure! element of the game.
I’m revising the OP mostly for my own use and reference later!
Sure. It’s not necessary to reskin stuff, I’m just saying you can if you want to, if some elements don’t jive. It’s totally cool to have space demons and the dark space gates of space death! The point of SWvsM is to be the kind of old sci-fi where you can propose any kind of idea and run with it, and not hard sci-fi where it’s all about sticking to the rules.
Aaron Griffin Nah, there’s no overlap between Dungeon Planet and SWvsM, they’re just the same genre.
Yeah, got it. This is a good conversation! I hope you’re not reading me as being argumentative. I think it’s interesting to look at the/your process and figure out what’s essential versus optional versus unnecessary.
I didn’t think having an after-you-die move was essential but you do and that’s interesting! That one tiny thing puts a different sci-fantasy gloss on the whole game for me.
What? No, this is very pleasant. I don’t mind talking about my work (besides, I remember you and Burning Empires). Multiple people have questioned why this is even a DW supplement!
Last Breath is cool because it adds situation to the game, but also if it’s making your idea of the genre more “out there,” it’s already pulling its weight. It’s no good in the quick play version because dying in the middle of a one-shot is total bullshit, but the various suffer harm moves pick up that slack
(Just being clear!)
Johnstone Metzger Reeeally? I dig Adventures on Dungeon Planet quite a bit and always assumed SWvM was more of a Dungeon Planet supplement as opposed to a Dungeon World one. What would you say are the main differences?
Dungeon Planet is basically a series of suggestions for re-skinning DW so it’s science fantasy. SWvsM is a specific campaign framework that uses the DW rules. There’s 6 new DW classes, but they each have sort-of-complicated new rules that support their themes. Like, The Lover is in a love triangle with Space Wurm and Moonicorn, and would probably be pretty weird in a normal DW campaign. The really long GM section is all stuff that could be used in a Dungeon Planet game, though, or any kind of sci-fi DW game. It’s just arranged into categories that correspond to the pillars of society that Space Wurm gets to control 2 of.
Have you considered just using the one shot classes? I think the next time I run swvm: I might just do that. It also leads more naturally to troupe play, since characters aren’t falling behind the level curve.
I feel like Brand Robins and Mo Jave could speak to this more.
James Stuart yeah, I’m leaning very heavily toward doing it at least as a one-shot just to get a better feel for the game’s vibe. Stras Acimovic points out that it’s tighter and more focused.
Oh but you’re asking about using the one-shot classes in lieu of the more elaborate level-up classes, right? In a longer-term game? I dunno! I suppose you could just give an advancement away every session or something.
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So I’ve been reading the shit out of Johnstone Metzger’s Space Wurm vs Moonicorn the past few days. It’s keeping me awake, and not just because of the crazy colors. Because it’s a Dungeon World hack/campaign, it’s been making me think a hell of a lot about Moves and how all I’ve seen them work.
What follows is absolutely not a “this is how it is” post. I don’t feel like litigating any of this. I’m not telling anyone they’re running their games wrong. Good? Good.
To my mind, the first big split in how Moves are treated in the PbtA universe happened right at the Apocalypse World/Dungeon World split. I remember folks finding it hard, I think, to understand or appreciate the prescriptive/descriptive quality of AW’s Moves. Like…sometimes the player wants a thing and looks for the best button to push. So they nudge the fiction toward the things they’re good at and away from the things they’re bad at — easy enough, pretty traditional, that’s what a skill or a feat is. But sometimes it’s the GM pushing those buttons instead, right, because of some confluence of GM moves and aggregate fictional context. Some moves are more tuned to be proactive choices, some are tuned to be reactive. If you’ve got years and decades of looking at character sheets and trying to find the right skill or feat or power to use to solve a problem, that’s pretty weird stuff.
The players in my universe who don’t “get” AW don’t like the feeling the game is playing them; they’re okay with the fiction snowballing but the Moves? Triggering more Moves? Not everyone’s flavor of the day. This was a showstopper in Urban Shadows, where the snowball would keep triggering mechanical effects until the fiction was utterly beyond their sense of control.
Then you had Dungeon World (and yes, I’m bringing this back around to SWvM in a minute), which to my eyes brings the game very much back into the players’ hands. Like…I can’t think of any reactive-type moves other than Defy Danger in the suite. You’re not going to be unwittingly snowballed into Hack and Slash, say. The GM can push the Defy Danger button on your behalf (it’s basically a D&D-style saving throw at that point, right?) but you’re not really ever going to proactively push that button. Well…I guess if you do, then you’re really playing World of Dungeons instead.
Space Wurm vs Moonicorn is very much a child of the Dungeon World branch of PbtA. Besides sharing a menu of common moves with DW, all the playbooks moves are player tools. They’re resources to use, not fictional gates to pass through. That’s fine, it’s great, it’s very easy to explain that to players.
Johnstone has a whole second game kinda-sorta built into SWvM as well, and that is his quickplay rules at the end. It’s a whole second set of ultra-custom character sheets that all have the entirety of their Move selection already on the sheet. At that point you’re not playing Dungeon World with this batshit crazy setting on top of it, you’re playing the batshit crazy game as its own thing.
You know what’s keeping me awake? The fact that the quickstart Moonicorn playbook is the only one that doesn’t have a “do something dangerous” move. And that is so very interesting to me. Instead, Moonicorn has “take a stand,” and the outcomes are entirely different than everyone else’s. Of course everyone has a different “do something dangerous” move. WHY DOES THAT MATTER? I’ve been chewing on that pretty much nonstop since I went through my umpteenth reading.
Okay so let’s talk about what the fuck’s going on with Space Wurm vs Moonicorn.
The executive summary: it’s a space fantasy campaign setting for Dungeon World that summons up Jupiter Ascending, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, Farscape, pretty much any of the grand sweeping good-versus-evil space adventure stories. It is very tightly tuned: there will always be a Space Wurm (ultimate evil, fixated on control) and there will always be a Moonicorn (ultimate good, fixated on freedom and revolution). The game ends when one of those two has either secured or defeated all the Fronts in the game.
The Fronts of the game have four dangers you have to overcome. There are a total of 7 broad scifi tropes (Aliens, Cybernetics/Robotics, The Empire, Space Travel, Religion…augh I don’t want to have to go look it up…um um The Spice and, damn it I had to look it up, Secret Police). The Space Wurm scratches two of them out — so, like, there might just not be any aliens or space travel, easy enough. Orrr no robots and no spice. Whatever. Space Wurm controls two of them outright at the start of play, and then the last three are the neutral Fronts to which everyone else is attached, and from which all the external threats will emerge.
There are six custom playbooks for the campaign. Besides SW and M, there’s also The Lover (torn between SW and M), the Mogul (captain of industry type), the Other (weirdness from beyond space), and the Spy (who is secretly working for one of those three neutral Fronts). You can pull in literally any other Dungeon World playbook into the game and it works, because it is still fundamentally a (space) adventure game.
There’s a mixtape for every playbook (I looked some up on Youtube, they exist!) and lots of the moves are named after songs. The whole game is very stylish and specific, at least specific to psychedelic space rock opera.
It’s most definitely a Dungeon World campaign setting and not just because of the common moves and the general moves-as-player-tools vibe. I wrote a thread about the DW dependencies, and the list is pretty long. But you know what dependency caught me the most off-guard? The fact the game uses the “Last Breath” move, formally a Dungeon World special move: instead of, you know, just being dead, it’s a bit of script immunity, maybe — you might make it out okay, you might have to make a hard bargain, you might just die. It cracked me up that Shervyn von Hoerl was shocked that I thought this was optional, but I defy you to name another PbtA game where you don’t just die. You get a Last Move in Urban Shadows, sure, but you’re still dead. Ditto AW, Sagas of the Icelanders, Night Witches, Cartel, whatever. “Last Breath” is distinctly a creature of Dungeon World.
The playbooks are all ultracustom and nothing at all like straight DW fighters or magic users or bards or whatevers. Each one has its own internal economy, many have their own take on DW-style Bonds that interact with their moves in surprising ways, and of course many, many moves that directly reference either Space Wurm or Moonicorn, because those playbooks are utterly mandatory.
Something that jumps out at me about the Move design, other than their fundamental DW-ness, is that in many cases they’re not in the typical “on a 7-9 pick 2” or “on a hit, blah” — the Lover, for example, has a move that says if someone is fascinated (a specific game state) with you, they can’t deal damage to you until you deal damage to them. It’s an absolute prohibition. Fantastic! I think those kinds of moves really constrain the fiction to this game’s specific vibe, and I’ll bet they will evoke the same “but the game is playing me! wah!” out of the folks who want absolute fictional freedom.
I think what jumps out at me about Space Wurm vs Moonicorn is that it’s a masterclass in the adage that design specificity is the highest and best achievement, particularly in the indie universe of game design. This totally would not work as a generic “space adventure” game — The Expanse or Killjoys would never work with it.
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Howdy everyone! How’s your isolation going? Today was the first day of having my daughter home, figuring out some homeschooling/unschooling strategies for the upcoming weeks. We’re taking a break, so let’s talk about 2016 in indie RPGs.
This was the first year I couldn’t track everything coming out. Kickstarter became the primary funding/marketing venue for gaming, at least in my world. I stopped neurotically tracking every update to every backed project, which means I stopped paying as much attention to chitchat out of designers. All but one, that is.
If you’re following this series or want to go backward from here, the 2015 edition is here.
The Series
2010 | 2011| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019
Blades in the Dark
The flagship of the Forged in the Dark design platform.
PDF and book available via DriveThruRPG.
2016: Blades in the Dark/Forged in the Dark
Honestly, I had a hard time deciding what year to plop John Harper’s Blades in the Dark. I backed it on Kickstarter in 2014 and didn’t receive the final book until 2017, but it was 2016 when I started playing from drafts released to backers. I never play games from playtest drafts, but even early looks at Blades showed me there was something interesting there.
The short pitch, in case you’ve somehow you’ve never heard of it: players play gang members in a spooky steampunk city. The focus is on the shared enterprise of growing the gang, with trope-enforcing playbooks and cinematic caper rules supporting that. The system itself feels like a mashup of Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel, a trindie game more on the indie side of things.
I’ve written a lot about various Forged in the Dark games over the years. I’ve played Blades, the sci-fi version Scum and Villainy that started as a stretch goal and become a freestanding book from Evil Hat, and most recently Band of Blades.
Is Forged in the Dark the next big design platform? There are certainly a lot of adaptations out there now! A few that jump out at me: Hack the Planet, Beam Saber (on Kickstarter right now!), Copperhead County, A Nocturne, and Brinkwood. This isn’t even close to comprehensive, just a quick list of what’s sitting on my hard drive. If you like playbooks, explicit negotiation with the GM about your effort’s fictional positioning and desired effect, a party-focused orientation, and fun mini-games that handle downtime and your party’s shared enterprise (your gang, your ship, your family, etc.), it’s time to get into a Forged in the Dark game. The original is a safe place to start.
2016 Runners-up
Invisible Sun
This infamously ultra-luxe production from Monte Cook Games
was first funded on Kickstarter this year. It’s raised a lot of questions! Does
a premium product deliver a premium experience? Is it wildly overpriced or is
the rest of the market wildly underpriced? Is a game this big really “indie?”
This is my first runner-up because a very generous patron backed the reprint of this game for me the following year, after the initial release produced a lot of hype and noise and conversation. In a very real way, the Indie Game Reading Club blog would not exist without it. I started the deep dive into the Black Cube mid-2019, and we played the game itself both at the table and online, with mixed results. My Invisible Sun wrapup is here, with links to the rest of the series.
The Black Cube is cheaper on Amazon, but if you want the PDFs you need to buy it direct from Monte Cook Games.
Masks
I had my first dose of actual play the year before Brendan Conway’s Masks came out, but I’ll list it here. Masks is a PbtA teen superheroes game, and it does superhero gaming exactly the way I want: focused on interpersonal melodrama, not the physics of interacting superpowers. I’ve put my time in on the Champions and GURPS style supers, I’ve played Brave New World, I mean…I’ve played a lot of superhero games. Which is funny because I’m not really a fan of the genre. But Masks gets me. Highest recommendation, even if you feel iffy about playing teenagers. The teen part of the game is more about their relationship with adults, rather than exploring their emerging personalities like in Monsterhearts.
You can buy Masks on DriveThruRPG.
Space Wurm vs Moonicorn
This dose of sci-fantasy psychedelia flew under my radar because of the name, but playing it blew my mind. It’s a layer that sits atop Dungeon World, and maintains that D&D-ish “fantasy party” vibe to a point, but mostly it’s about the extensive prep that goes into creating the world. SWvM is ostensibly built as a pseudo-competitive RPG – Space Wurm is trying to take over the galaxy, and Moonicorn is trying to get out from under the galaxy’s oppression – but really the good stuff is in the absolutely gonzo interplay of setting weirdness, playbook weirdness, and big scene-chewing melodrama. The game also comes with a self-contained one-shot version, with every move in the game explicitly on the playbooks. No common moves! It’s tricky for the GM to run because of that, but it’s a neat format.
I wrote a lot about SWvM back when Google Plus was my platform. I haven’t gotten everything tagged but here’s a good intro from my first session.
Get it on DriveThruRPG!
Coriolis
This Year Zero Engine sci-fi ship-crew game has an amazing setting, truly: generation ships head off to settle a far-off world, but while in transit instantaneous gateway travel is discovered, wars are fought over the gates, societies are trapped behind the destroyed gates and fall and rise over the next several thousand years, and then those generation ships arrive. It’s a very hot mix of Arabian Nights and Firefly and cyberpunk. And the production values are jaw-dropping. And I love the Year Zero Engine! But Coriolis was the first time I felt disappointed in the Year Zero Engine.
In doing something “different” for Coriolis, Free League messed with its dice mechanisms, introduced a “darkness point” economy that didn’t work, and broke action scenes into discrete “action points” that I found exhausting to engage with. I think we ran three or four sessions of this and ultimately felt disappointed in the result. Coriolis makes this list because it was the first time I realized I need to not fall in love with Year Zero Engine games sight-unseen.
Get Coriolis on DriveThruRPG.
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