#Dungeon World

[aurosoulart]

demon host Nimble Berry Boy and his unicorn Briar (from a Dungeon World campaign with my bf :))

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played DUNGEON WORLD ?

By Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel

Dungeon World is a high fantasy dungeon crawler and adventure explorer, made using the Powered By The Apocalypse system.

Combining high-action dungeon crawling with cutting-edge rules, Dungeon World is a roleplaying game of fantasy adventure. You and your friends will explore a land of magic and danger in the roles of adventurers searching for fame, gold, and glory. Dungeon World's rules are easy to learn and always drive the action forward in unexpected ways. A missed roll is never a dead end-failure introduces new complexities and complications. Life as an adventurer is hard and dangerous but it's never boring!

Poll Runner note : Yes I know about A.K. But I chose to put out this poll now because Luke Crane from Burning Wheel has acquired the game's rights and is preparing a second edition.

[yourplayersaidwhat]

This is a higher tech setting and the party is stopped for Airship repairs.

Druid Player: I guess I'll check what she's watching before I mess with the TV. What's on?

GM: Okay so it's an anime about cows that turn into magical girls to fight bad guys. It's called Sailor Moo.

Druid Player: Alright, screw my plans. My character sits down and takes notes.

GM:.....notes on what exactly?

Druid: "Wow these are such cool druids, I wonder if I can learn their techniques."

GM: Tell you what, if you ever transform into a cow if you roll perfect on a d100 I will let you be a magical girl cow.

[vforvalensa]

Just got reminded of my homebrew dungeon world setting I never got around to running where the bit was that the whole world was a cosmically massive labyrinthine super structure built by god to imprison the cosmology's satan figure, a literal Dungeon World, and all the monsters and magic and rpg shit were like emanations from the imprisoned satan guy and the shit keeping him locked down.

Any way i think dwarves in this setting would be cosmically radical prison abolitionists who dig cause they're trying to free the devil from hell

[faetourdie]

*leans on pure air because background hater* your son looks like a girl

[iiamdrawing]

campaign lineup

[manyo-af]

my dnd character Kasyo😳🌸

[the-river-delta]

Let's talk about Grimwild, and why it's maybe my new favorite D&D replacement

Over the years, there's been a lot of tabletop RPGs that have attempted to bring over the structures and conventions of cinematic and story-driven indie tabletop RPGs and apply them to the themes, tropes, and stories associated with the ur-TTRPG that is Dungeons & Dragons, whether that's the messy and venerable Dungeon World or the more modern attempts like Daggerheart (not to mention the plethora of games that are interested in totally different things).

Now, I've been rather free of the gravitational pull of The Dragon/Elf Game for quite a while - I've not played D&D proper for 4 or 5 years now, and even been Pathfinder-free for a year or two as well, content to play the variety of smaller games totally orthogonal in terms of rules and theme to the fantasy dungeon-crawling and monster-killing game, so I am by no means in a position that resembles "I'm fed up with D&D but it's the only thing I know or want".

At the same time, every now and again, the craving for that very style of adventure strikes me, but after years of becoming so accustomed and comfortable with the Powered by the Apocalypse and especially Forged in the Dark styles of play (where a cinematic and character-driven focus, tidy rulesets, and short, sub-15 session campaigns and oneshots have long been my comfort zone), it feels daunting to imagine picking up a d20 game again; Outside of playing some OSR-adjacent games every now and again (or perhaps something like 13th Age, which I still haven't gotten to), I no longer desire beat-by-beat dungeon crawls and monster fights that can eat up whole sessions by themselves and make even seemingly short stories take up the better portion of a year (or god forbid several) - I am too cursed by ADHD to manage that as either player or GM.

So, right around New Year's Eve, along came Grimwild, an RPG by one J.D. Maxwell of Oddity Press I remembered looking at in summer last year when it was brought up on the Wildsea Discord server as it apparently had some inspiration from it, but was very confused by its somewhat rough (but understandably still beta) presentation at the time.

Since it was free and looked like an interesting mix of D&D themes and Blades in the Dark-style cinematic storytelling, I decided to dive in, and came out with an early contender for my 2025's game of the year.

So, what does Grimwild, which proudly labels itself as Cinematic Fantasy Adventure right on the cover, do that makes it stand out among the crowd?

Well, the good news is you can see for yourself immediately by grabbing the free edition (which, similar to Kevin Crawford's Without Number games, is a complete experience, but you get some fun extra goodies if you snag the physical or paid PDF version), but if you want some autistic girlboy's thoughts on it, head under the cut!

"What is a tabletop RPG?", "What is D&D about?" and "How do you play an RPG?" are two subjects that the internet at large will never fully agree on, but what I'm moreso interested in are games (and designers thereof) that are at least in some amount of agreement and alignment with my preferred answers to those questions (enough that I don't feel like I'm swimming upstream) - and from the very first pages, Grimwild excels at this in my eyes, as both its introduction as well as the player and GM principles echo a lot of the wisdom and ideas I've enjoyed and picked up in indie games like Blades in the Dark and Fate - I love to think of TTRPGs like movies and TV shows in terms of pacing, structure, and vocabulary (like the all-mighty camera), and evidently so does J.D. Maxwell.

I also enjoy some amount of player collaboration and GM-facing structure - I don't like to think of the GM as an omniscient authority (nor do I enjoy the stress that comes with that much power, from experience!), and Grimwild delivers on both fronts, with mechanics and advice that offer both sides of the table fun toys and clear guidelines to follow to ensure a consistent and smooth play experience.

But, it's not just about the theory that I already know and love from other TTRPGs - Grimwild brings plenty of fun rules and mechanics of its own, which feel familiar (to me at least) while still offering some novelty and honing in on its desired play experience - though at the time of writing I have not directly witnessed it firsthand, but stay tuned for a potential followup after I run my group through a oneshot or two!

The core mechanic should feel familiar to anyone who's played Blades in the Dark or Wildsea: roll a pool of d6 dice based on a stat and some bonuses, then look for the single highest result (6 is good, 3 or less is bad, and 4 or 5 is both; two or more 6s is a crit). Where it gets interesting is with thorns, optional d8 dice added if you're impeded by wounds, the environment, or other factors, which downgrade your result level if they come up on a 7 or 8 (which can stack, and potentially downgrade you to a particularly nasty disaster if you go below a 1-3).

The thorns strongly remind me of Wildsea's cut (where you remove X topmost dice from the pool after you roll it), but slighty less harsh, and both are an interesting way to directly alter the actual roll chances in a way that standard FitD doesn't really have any tools for (position and effect only kick in for the fiction after the fact, apart from perhaps -1d from level 2 harm in Blades).

Another notable mechanic are diminishing pools, which function as something akin to a dice-based take on progress clocks and tracks from the aforementioned games - a pool can represent some challenge, timer, or resource that can be triggered at various points in the game, wherein you roll the dice and decrement the pool for each 1-3 result. I have yet to see how it fully plays out in practice, but I love clocks and am always intrigued by different takes on the idea.

Grimwild also gives players (and even the GM!) some metacurrencies to play with - for PCs there's Spark (gained in various ways and used to boost rolls) and Story (used to declare significant character- or story arc-relevant world details) while GM gets Suspense to dole out harsher consequences (in a manner akin to Slugblaster's Bite, or even Discord from Tendencies: Spirits & Glamour, a PbtA game by a friend of mine). Some people find metacurrencies and especially GM metacurrencies contentious for reasons I am unbothered by, but I think they contribute greatly to a game like this.

Things like Story and Suspense, as well as other rules they tie into like Vantage (a sort of codified fictional positioning that helps abstract away matters like "would your PC have this item for this" or "can I narrate this action as this kind of magic"), Story Arcs (which come in both personal and group-wide flavors), player character relationship Bonds, and Quarrels (a way to quickly resolve player character drama in a way I adore envisioning in my head) is where Grimwild's cinematic elements really come out, at a pretty light rules and cognitive footprint at that!

While there is a good amount of new terminology introduced here, I found most of it pretty intuitive to wrap my head around - your mileage may vary depending on what your TTRPG background is primarily.

Over on the GM side of things, we have moves (very much in the PbtA vein - with general story moves, soft-hitting suspense moves and hard-hitting impact moves), the aforementioned suspense GM resource, diminishing pools, and challenges - a really pleasing way of structuring threats and monsters and the like in tiny little stat blocks.

(Which can also be linked, whether for particularly complex and dynamic scenarios or multi-bodypart enemies!)

If you're one of the comparatively few but extremely correct and sexy people who thought D&D 4e was actually a good game with fun ideas, you're in a for a treat - monsters in Grimwild have tiers (from mooks you can wipe out en masse to imposing elites and bosses), role descriptors (which have some further advice and tactics in the paid version of the game), and even ways to give the battlefield itself some textures and things to do. Tactics in a narrative game? It's possible, folks!

And if you thought SWN's faction turn or Blades' sprawl of Doskvol gangs was the coolest thing, you will be delighted too, with this surprisingly tight but useful section on writing up and running factions in the game world.

[Looks back on this post] Well, that's gotten quite long, and I haven't even gotten to talk about everything I actually enjoy about this game - because I like damn near everything I see here.

So, I will leave you with these - probably my favorite path (class) in the Warlock (which makes extensive use of many of the mechanics I brought up here), some monsters (which each have sensory details like smells and sounds, just like in the Wildsea!), and the very flexible Story Kits, which are basically modular and flexible do-it-yourself adventure outlines, a structure I find far preferable to standard massive linear modules.

Go get this game. Even if you don't play it directly (though I strongly encourage it!), there is a lot of good advice and plain fun ideas in here that can enrich either your existing D&D experience (I've not brought up basically any of this game's incredible rolling tables, Crucibles) and general TTRPG wisdom.

[pyjamacryptid]

Duirith of the Great Forest + this text post from @jupiter-suggestion

Those photo edits + words/poetry but for my OC Duirith

[mydnd]

Dungeonhack

So this is what I have been working on lately. I know some may roll your eyes at this, but here it goes: Dungeonhack is a homage to the tabletop games that ignited my passion for roleplaying. It cleverly fuses the story-driven and player-centric approach of PbtA games with the familiar and reliable framework of d20 fantasy games (D&D). As I delve into crafting the second edition of Chimera, I felt compelled to revisit Dungeonhack and share it with a wider audience, hoping to inspire more gamers that like crunchy systems to try PbtA games. If you're interested in hearing more, just let me know, and I'll be happy to share additional details about the process.

[thesixthplaneteer]

Cannonfodder!

Art of my character for a Dungeon World game!

Art by the amazing and talented @the-art-block !!!

Cannonfodder is a "Kobold" set out into the world to achieve his goal of "self-rediscovery" alongside the two companions he's convinced he can grant a wish for. Harnessing his inner flame he can reveal secrets in the ashes, or create a wave of burning devastation. It's a balancing act of soothing his pride and keeping his, not as okay with murder, allies on his side.

[franciscolemos]

Even though one of their members is down, the group decides to advance into the catacombs, hoping to find the passage to the basement of the Water Cathedral.

[impossiblepackage]

say, i heard you reblog a post about role playing games. do you happen to know of any ones that i, a beginner, could feasibly get into in this day and age? i tried DnD but a combination of not having anybody to play with (whether irl or online) and a dissatisfaction with low level boringness kind of made it fizzle out for me

oh hey an ask from 3 months ago that I didn't even see. hi.

ANYWAY. First things first, i cannot recommend @theresattrpgforthat enough. Ain't nobody better at recommending rpgs than that blog right there. Now, on to my thoughts.

If you want a DnD-like rpg, Pathfinder 2nd Edition is gonna be my first recommendation. It's harder to find games for on account of being significantly less popular than dnd5e but it's probably the 2nd most popular game. It's also completely free, with everything being hosted on https://2e.aonprd.com/. It's got everything except adventures, those ya gotta buy. For the next 10 days, there's a humble bundle that includes PDFs of lots of the pre-remaster legacy books, and includes a couple adventures, including a whole adventure path going from level 1 to 20. As a whole, the game is different to dnd but it's recognizable. Big fan myself, and paizo isn't a bunch of pricks. The setting is also super gay. There's a potion of trans your gender, and one of the main religions in the world is the worship of 3 gods in lesbian polycule.

Ironsworn: probably my favorite RPG, period. (also has a space version, that works the same way). It is narrative focused, and designed for solo play or in groups with no GM. Works just as well by yourself, as a duo, in a small group, or in a traditional way with a few players and a GM. It's structured around it's vow system. Your character makes a vow, you decide how difficult that vow should be to accomplish, and as you do things that advance it, you mark progress. Eventually, you make a roll to try and fulfill the vow, with the difficulty determined by how much progress you've made. If you fail that roll, it's bad. Cool thing is that just about everything works that way. Undertaking a journey, delving a dungeon, fighting a dude, it's all handled with the same system. It's a game about perseverance and struggle and relationships, both with people and with places. also very fun to play for writing practice. It's mechanics are rooted in it's setting, but there's no reason you couldn't play it in basically any setting. the youtube channel Me, Myself, And Die is, essentially, Critical Role But It's Solo RPGs, and he did a great season where he played Ironsworn, check it out. Also, Basement Fort on youtube did a duo playthrough. I've only seen the first episode but it seems like a fun watch, as well as showing off duo gameplay.

the Witcher RPG: i haven't played this myself or even looked at the books yet, but everything I've heard about this game has me super excited about it. the general consesus seems to be "yo this is wayyyy better than I thought it would be, why aren't more people playing this, what the fuck". If somebody more familiar wants to talk about it, that'd be dope.

gonna ramble about the rest much less, LIGHTNING ROUND OF RECOMMENDATIONS

Dungeon World: same genre as dnd, but much less crunchy gameplay. Much easier to learn.

Kids On Bikes: it's Stranger Things but as a ttrpg.

Call of Cthulhu: get spooky, idiot. The players are investigators unraveling some mystery or another, and trying to keep their sanity in the face of some cosmic bullshit.

Lancer: it's about mechs! closer to anime-style mechs than battletech style, from what I can tell. I've heard good things.

Vampire: The Masquerade: you will NEVER guess what this is about. It's a classic, it's great, it pretty much redefined the way I think vampires should work. The new version of Werewolf: The Apocalypse is coming soon, and I'm real hyped for that, too.

Shadow Of The Demon Lord: my understanding is that this game is basically "DnD 5e, but good".

[tockwork]

"What people forget, rock remembers."

I've been long overdue some Zab art.

Zab is a cave (prehistoric) druid who communes best with fungi, earth, and fossils. His favourite form is a cave bear, though he is also fond of transforming into a bat. He enjoys teasing his younger brother, telling bad jokes, and smoking stinkweed, the latter of which is most certainly not a coping mechanism for deep-seated trauma.

He is partially blind and utilises his enhanced hearing to orient himself.

Not pictured here, but he has a cast fossil of mycelium across his back.

[cuddlefsh]

https://www.spoutlore.com/listen/

Any Drawfee fans looking for a new actual play podcast should try Spout Lore! Its a wacky, thrilling, silly, touching, awe-inspiring, piss-joke-making, helluva good time. Even if you aren't a fan of Drawfee already, you should pick up spout lore if you enjoy listening to a group of friends (mostly professional comedians) having a goofy good time and world-building some lore for laughs that ends up having very serious implications down the line.

[spirited-spider]

So the story goes… A loving wife, happy with her marriage. A bitter husband, who began to fall for another. His betrayal was so unexpected, so horrible, that her anguished heart left behind a black stain upon the world as the poison took her.  The Wraith of Point Sorrow, a being of pure rage and hatred, with no goal save to spread suffering without thought or direction. With a single, furious wail, she struck the entire town dead. To this day, Point Sorrow lies abandoned, the vengeful horror still casting her baleful shadow across the ruins… …Though I don’t really take stock in such tales.

I threw this together in preparation for the second major boss of my tabletop campaign! She's basically a banshee, but I'm trying to establish my own world-building and lore regarding how the setting I've created works, so she's not a ghost, but just an echo of the person left after they pass on. The players had a hell of a fight with her though, it's really fun finally capitalizing on foreshadowing.