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I started DMing a game over the weekend with some of my coworkers and I really like how everything is coming together. It's a crew with no PnP experience to speak of, but they got right into the swing of things. It worked out great for me, since we got ~3.5 hours of game out of about an hour of prep and character creation. My favorite part is how flexible party composition can be. I just threw down some playbooks and had people pick out what they thought would be cool. We ended up with a Ranger, a Survivor, and a Dragon Mage. I crowd-sourced the setting and the major drive of the campaign during character creation, so they established that they were all exploring a frontier and they wanted to bring in a lost colony of some sort. From there they did a great job of making up backstories and hooking the party together. The big picture view we had going in to the session was that Jax the Cursed (Dragon Mage) was a former ranger under Elowin (Ranger) who is being slowly consumed by the lingering spirit of a dragon after ransacking it's hoard. Madame Ginger (Survivor) was the sole survivor of a huge fire that wiped out her brothel and the town it was in. Jax was one of the patrons of said brothel. From there, Madame Ginger put together an expedition to the north to claim a rich source of magic gems, strong-arming Jax (muscle) and Elowin (guide) into her revenge plot. We haven't quite nailed down the specifics, but they're essentially magic batteries. Very valuable, very dangerous in the wrong hands. Everyone in the party has different motives for what they want with the gems when they get there. Ginger wants to harness their power to get revenge on her lover, who started the fire. Jax wants to use them for fun and profit. Elowin just wants them kept out of the wrong hands. Most of the first session was spent on their travel to where the colony supposed was. I wasn't sure how long to stretch it out, but it worked out pretty well to have them arrive at the end of the session. We started out camped in the middle of a canyon where they hashed out some of the above details and got a chance for some back-and-forth. When things were slowing down, I had a pack of kobolds ambush them - they mowed through them pretty quickly. Notable moments included Jax incinerating a group of kobolds and cutting off their reinforcements with a wall of fire, Elowin shooting arrows out of the air before placing one right between the eyes of the shocked kobold sniper, and Madame Ginger leaping through the flames to shatter a kobold's skull with a haymaker. Elowin finished combat by sniping a fleeing kobold at ludicrous range and - of course - nailing it in the head. From there, they decided to quickly break camp since some Discern Realities and Spout Lore rolls established that Kobolds are cowardly creatures who rarely go far from the main colony. We decided party roles for Undertaking a Perilous Journey to the north. Elowin succeeded at scouting (being an elf), Jax did OK trailblazing, but Ginger failed the Quartermaster roll. Naturally, they found that a lot of their food had spoiled and they'd need to secure new supplies before proceeding much further. Elowin had spotted an abandoned outpost nearby, so they detoured over there to scavenge for supplies. When they got there, they saw that something had trashed the place and killed the inhabitants some time ago. They decided it had been a large animal of some sort - at this point, I started statting out the upcoming encounter. They poked around, making note of how something had torn through the metal gate and started checking out the cellar for supplies. There were all sorts of things down there fairly well preserved, so they started gathering supplies for the journey. At this point, Elowin and her wolf were getting a bad vibe, so they went outside to keep watch. After some tense stalking around, they saw a dire bear coming towards the outpost. Elowin shouts down that they need to get the supplies and get out. She ran up to the second story while Jax and Ginger came upstairs. Jax channeled the power of his curse and nailed it - but the bear was going to be on them before he could finish. Elowin was raining arrows on it, her wolf jumping down and savaging the bear's back. Ginger had ran upstairs and jumped onto it with her knife. Jax then went crazy with dragon powers - savaging it with huge claws and slamming it around with a tail - while everyone else piled on it's back and started stabbing things. After it went down, they backed off and lured it under a large piece of crumbling masonry. Elowin got bodychecked across the courtyard, but Ginger stopped it from finishing her by grabbing it's head and essentially putting it into a headlock. Jax finished it by using his last bit of power to strike the masonry with his tail and crush the bear as it collapsed. The party dismembered the bear for various trophies - a claw for Elowin, a tooth for Ginger, and a large section of hide for Jax. I let them pick a free 2-5 move and had them justify how the fight had helped them develop a new technique or power. They spent the night and restocked their supplies before leaving the outpost. From there we swapped into a montage, setting up and resolving challenges with each character. They eventually reached the supposed lost colony, cresting a hill to see a bustling city frozen in time. Everyone worked together to notice that there was a very clear division between stopped/not stopped time and did some quick experimentation via chucking small animals into it to see what would happen. Eventually they decided that they needed to go into it to get answers, so they jumped through the barrier - and the session ended. Definitely a fun time, I'm looking forward to next Saturday when we figure out just what's going on with that colony.
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Jan 13, 2015 22:40
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:45 |
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Man, two sessions in and all I can say is that my group has really surprised me. My rough sketch of the session looked like "Explore shanty-town -> ??? -> Enter inner city -> Dragon cult?" What it ended up as was the players starting a huge turf war between rival gangs to throw off some people they thought were following them, not really thinking through their escape strategy, and then spelunking through the hidden tunnels under the city to rescue the Dragon Mage after he got trapped under a giant pile of rubble - ill-advised parkour on shoddy construction, naturally - and carried off. Then our Ranger proved, despite being the sweetest Southern lady in real life, that she has some killer blood-thirst. Necks were snapped, people were stabbed, and her wolf feasted on the flesh of the living. Everyone's at level 2 now, so there's a pretty interesting spread of powers and whatnot. The Dragon Mage grabbed the freeze move from the Winter Mage (I spotted him the chill stat, but not the damage-cancelling part of it), the Survivor picked up a Signature Weapon (a huge axe, naturally), and the Ranger took the Spout Lore with WIS move. The Dragon Mage has proven himself a combat monster in the past and now has fire and ice powers, the Survivor is super charismatic and talky, and the Ranger has a lot of narrative control with Spouting Lore/Discerning Realities with a +2. Overall, lots of fun, and we'll finally check out the rumored Dragon Stone Mine next time. Home to some sort of monster infestation, mutated by exposure to ambient magic. Should be a good time. Are there any general guidelines for creating compendium classes and keeping them reasonably balanced?
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Jan 27, 2015 21:41
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Glazius posted:Not any more than there are guidelines for creating moves in general. Okay, so in the setting of the game I'm running, dragons don't really pass on when they die. Their spirits are shackled to their corpse, unless something disturbs them. After a long time, the corpses can break down into small blue gems that contain fractions of these souls. The Dragon Mage was a guy who touched a dragon's bones and is now hosting a dead dragon. He's expressed interest in adding more dragons into his collection to get crazy elemental powers and they're going to be going into a mine full of those dragon gems. So, depending on what all goes down, he could end up stuffed to the gills with dragon souls. So I was thinking something along the following lines: Vessel of the Dragons When you absorb the souls of many dragons, you may take this move when you next level up: Essence of Tiamat When you call upon Dragon's Fire, you may instead emit a blast of frost, lightning, acid, or poisonous gas. Choose or create an additional Dragon's Desire, you must satisfy both desires when the Dragon's Desire overtakes you. -- Not sure how to word this. Basically I just want him to need to do both to escape the penalties associated with Form of the Dragon and Dragon's Gift. Once you’ve taken Essence of Tiamat, the following moves count as class moves for you. In addition to your normal list of moves, you may choose from this list when you level up. Scales of the Five When you gain +Armor or immunity to an element, it applies to all elemental damage. Chromatic Might When you attack using Rending Claws or a Spiked Tail, you may add one Elemental tag of your choice.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:09
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Error 404 posted:Those all sound good. Yeah, that sounds really cool. I'll have to do some thinking on fun conditions.
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Jan 30, 2015 18:46
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Arashiofordo3 posted:So I've been trying to make a playbook based around the idea of bringing dream/nightmares and dream/nightmares logic into reality at the cost of disconnection with the real world around you. The problem is that I loved Gnome7's Swordmage playbook so much I keep trying to think of ways to use moves dicelessly. Which lowers the risk from actually using them. So far I've only managed to put together a move about going deeper into the dream and loosing your connection. It seems like there would be little downside to rocking depth 4 whenever you wanted to be in dream mode, since it would be providing avenues for all sorts of crazy dream logic solutions to problems. Also, the penalties would, fiction-speaking, be applied to everyone - including enemies - instead of just yourself. If that's the case, then you dumpster everyone's rolls (-4!) while you swap into Freddy Kruger kill mode. It's spotlight stealing writ large.
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Aug 2, 2015 17:09
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It might be cool to have The Dreaming as a "When you make camp, hold X" sort of deal that you can spend to choose from a list of effects. That would keep the main thrust of having a move that reliably does cool dream stuff, while preventing it from being something that constantly steals the spotlight. The other levels seems fine as a different move and the disconnection element would be interesting, I just think that the fourth level is a weird fit.
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Aug 3, 2015 01:29
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The Witch is always a fun one.
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Jul 31, 2018 16:55
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Shanty posted:Which one? There's a couple on DTRPG http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/113399/The-Witch--A-Dungeon-World-Playbook
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Aug 2, 2018 18:59
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:45 |
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That'd put him at, what, level 6? I think it's pretty reasonable that something he poached for the cost of one 2-5 move doesn't give him effectively unlimited casting, particularly when Paladin has some of the silliest +numbers advances in the game and he's likely the best straight-up fighter as well.
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May 16, 2019 15:29
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