TL;DR: DUNGEON WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORLD!

I had the fortune to run a Dungeon World game at one of my favorite RPG cons, Nerdly Beach Party. It was a fun and interesting experience for me, not only because I got to play with some friends I rarely see, but also because I got to practice my very rust GMing skills.

Some background first. Dungeon World is a game that came out of a hack of Apocalypse World. It takes that game’s simplified narrative action and joins it to D&D fantasy tropes to create a fun, streamlined, yet authentic D&D experience. I have only a little background with the game itself. After playing in Colin’s amazing Tower of the Eye Tyrant pickup game at Gateway, I was hooked. The game provided an open narrative experience that I always felt was being stifled by D&D many simulationist rules and copious note taking. It provided an open and easy to play experience, while still having enough differentiation between the classes to make each player feel unique in way that played up D&D’s many tropes. My thief was trying to steal everything in existence, not only because it was a fun and silly thing to do, but because the game mechanically supported and encouraged that. It didn’t break when I tried to steal the rest of the party’s stuff or sneak ahead to loot the next room. As a matter of fact, I got rewarded for it by being awarded XP each time I used by thief skills or stole something of value. Since each of the characters were being motivated to do awesome things not only for awesomeness’s sake, but for XP too, there was a lot of strong, decisive, and VERY entertaining action taken. I am pretty sure the wizard leveled when he managed to get the demon to take my soul rather than his. Freaking occultists.

As I said earlier, I was hooked. I found out later that con that the game was going to be sold in a limited hardback beta thing called Redbook. I managed to purchase the game just in time for Nerdly Beach Party, where there was such a demand for it that I sucked it up and signed up to run a game. Prior to this, I had only run six games ever, most of them in the not so recent past. However I believed in Dungeon World. It was fun, fast and easy. Not only was there a good framework, but there was more source material than a six year olds crack addled imagination. I had all of D&D’s past and freakishly odd Gygaxian creations to pull from.

What I ended up creating was “Into the High Temple!”, a shortish scenario invoking some gnolls using Avandra’s Eye to further the plot of bloody, bloody violence against the PCs. The players were generally new to Dungeon World, so I was on my own in trying to explain the game. Luckily each class had a pamphlet-style handout that provided all information about that class, as well as some nice flavor text that really captured the spirit of psychopathic ego-centrism that is D&D. I have to give props to Sage LaTerra and the rest of the team on these Redbooks. They conveyed a lot of information about what the classes were and helped shaped the characters without much input or knowledge from me. We ended up with the traditional four classes: Fighter, Thief, Cleric and Wizard. Character creation was easy and straight forward, though there was some issue around the bonds. The players either really latched onto the bonds as a source of dynamics between them and the other PCs, or they completely ignored them. Both +Hamish Cameron and +Ryan Macklin have written more about this, and my game pretty much was in line with what they wrote. The only other noticeable change I made from the standard rules was setting the highlighted skill to the highest and lowest skills they characters had. I had an issue in a practice game where some characters had levels more XP than other characters because their highlighted stats were more useful to them. In picking the highest and lowest skill I was trying to encourage players to do awesome things and to fail at doing awesome things.

The game itself ran fairly well. I had two fronts, or sources of conflict, for the scenario. The first was the High Temple itself and its long term occupants. The Temple was going to provide a series of obstacles to the PCs, both in the form of traps and roaming bands of vicious magical beasts. This front wasn’t well planned out though which was my fault. The PCs meandered around a bit, killed some Perytons (nobody got their heart eaten out! *shakes fist*) and made their way into the temple’s depths where they encountered a Grell Philosopher. The beat down the PCs brought was surprisingly immense, but the Grell did provide enough of an obstacle that it was able to capture the Thief. A bargain was struck up between the Grell and the Thief, leading to much awesome later on.

The second front went much better. This front was the gnoll Shaman and his henchmen, which who just directly attacked the PCs while they summoned a demon at the top of the temple.