Halflings - Yup, same move, intentional, but only because I couldn't think of a better one. I had a hell of a time figuring out what a halfling does that makes them special that I can easily reflect in the rules.

Well, that's because halflings are lame and boring. (Actually, third edition made me like halflings again, by moving them away from the hobbit model toward active adventurers, more like Dragonlance's kender but without the childlike / compulsive kleptomaniac nature.) d.anderson's suggestions are good, and along the lines of what I was thinking.

Half-orcs - +1 Piercing makes sense. +1 damage isn't a big deal, but it does suck that they wouldn't see the bonus until second level at best. So maybe Half-orc clerics get Inquisitor for free, possibly +1 damage as well? There's also nothing that says you couldn't write your own dice rolling spells for those levels.

Yeah, I thought about giving them Inquisitor (or Life and Death) to start, but I wasn't sure whether that'd be too much. That works. d.anderson's half-orc suggestions are also good, but I think I'll stick with mine for my campaign.

One thought for a half-orc cleric is to give them a move similar to the human wizard move: a +1 to any rolls made for spells with a particular tag (but not for casting such spells). Due to considerations of my particular campaign setting, I'm inclined toward Death spells, but currently there's no level 5 spell with a death tag, and the level 7 and 9 Death spells do not feature any dice rolling. So Damaging would be better, though I wonder if that's almost too good. It may be counterbalanced by the fact that clerics don't automatically have access to Damaging spells, they have to choose the Inquisitor move to get them; on the other hand, that may just make the whole idea lame.

Cleric—Half-Orc: Take +1 to any dice rolled for a Damaging spell (but not for casting Damaging spells).

Incidentally: Inflict Light Wounds = 1d6, Inflict Moderate Wounds = 2d8, Inflict Critical Wounds = 1d10. Shouldn't Moderate be 1d8 rather than 2d8?

The human racial move for the thief class—"You start with an extra 5 gold"—seems pretty weak. It's a one-time advantage, unlike all the other racial moves, and although there are probably ways to finagle things so that the extra gold literally buys you some longer-term or important advantage, by default it's really just not effective in the long term compared to any of the others.

I don't have a complete alternate suggestion in mind yet. I'm thinking about something to do with the universality of humans, either something that lets the human thief blend or easily slip away into a crowd, or something that lets the thief disguise him or herself as some other kind of humanoid.

I've got a few things to say about some of the existing racial moves—it turns out more than I thought, so I'm going to put those in subsequent posts.

I've also been thinking about making some new racial moves, partly because of my complaints, and partly because I've been thinking about having other races available in my campaign instead of the standard ones. And maybe you have some ideas like that, too! So here's a thread for them.

Okay, first, although I did say the class trait provides access to the basic moves for that class, I was really still thinking of the older version of Dungeon World in which each class has more or less a primary move: the fighter can Bend Bars/Lift Gates, the ranger can Hunt and Track, the wizard can Cast a Spell… Obviously even in that version it wasn't quite that clear cut, for example you'd probably want a cleric hireling both for casting cleric spells and for turning undead. But that's where I was starting from, and I think for hirelings that's something you'd want to spell out, that a hireling has a specialist skill that you have some way of accessing, though not necessarily automatically and without cost.

Because I'll tell you, as a player, the reason I want hirelings is to help me handle unusual things that otherwise would just block or kill me. I think I mentioned that in Jason's AP thread but not in my hireling post here (or on my LiveJournal). There'd be a situation like, say, my wizard's been hit with a chaos curse, and to remove it, I've been given a quest that involves hunting down a peryton. Well, that's a trek into the wild to hunt a monstrous animal; I want to get the aid of a ranger. Or there's a known threat of undead skeleton warriors plaguing a trade route; I'm not going off to deal with that without a cleric in tow. [And since after this point I ramble on about a related topic, I'll say here that I do like what you're thinking, Sage, on how to incorporate this.]

What I'm not interested in is having nameless meat shields. I'm a hero! If my party doesn't dare venture forth without expendable pseudo-people, well, we don't deserve the title heroes. But more to the point, consider this. One of the three agendas in Apocalypse World is "Make (it) seem real", and one of the principles is "Name everyone, make everyone human." Dungeon World's agendas and principles are somewhat different and don't include those two specific ones, and that's fine; for the old-school dungeon-crawl feel, you don't necessarily want to make everyone human. But, if you make the hirelings real people, with names and cares and interests, then you open up lots of interesting possibilities. At the most basic level, hirelings become opportunities for the DM to use the moves "Use up their resources", "Put someone in a spot", or even "Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment." But also, when hirelings have names and personalities—even if they don't, in fact, offer special benefits of their class—the players will be more interested and more involved in the game, maybe not all the time, but at least some of the time.

In the first and ongoing Apocalypse D&D game that Tony's running for me and his brother-in-law Gabe, we started out with two men-at-arms hirelings and have picked up both a cleric and a paladin along the way, and they have provided a lot of interesting drama and hard choices for us as players, simply because Tony's played them as named people. I decided early on that my fighter was the fifth son of the local baron, and so the men-at-arms were not just hirelings but my father's soldiers. Suddenly that made me responsible for their well-being, which Tony has gleefully exploited. We found a section of the dungeon that's a lost and corrupted dwarven temple, and our cleric happens to be a dwarf who declares it's his duty to cleanse the temple; do we part ways with him, or aid him? If we'd simply parted ways, would he have been willing to help us out later with healing needs if we came crawling back?

That's where I'm coming from.

I'm just going to toss this out here and see if anyone's crazy enough to run with it. It's kind of a joke based on idly thinking "when you wish upon a star"… but I think it actually wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a full set of basic moves.

Stats: Courage, Conscience, Hope, Love, Magic

Wish Upon a Star
When you wish upon a star, roll +hope. On a 10+, choose 2. On a 7-9, choose 1.
* It makes no difference who you are
* Anything your heart desires will come to you
* Fate steps in and sees you through
* Your dreams come true

Give a Little Whistle
When you get in trouble and don't know wrong from right, roll +conscience.
On a 10+, you make the right decision and avoid trouble.
On a 7-9, you can get out of trouble, but there are complications.
On a miss, you blithely give in to temptation without a second thought. You'll probably turn into a donkey.

Tony's out of town right now, but hopefully when he's back he can say a bit about how he's been running hirelings, since we've been using them right from the start in our game. My impression is that the hirelings have a certain number of hit points and that they take a point of damage for each round they're engaged in combat, but I don't know how accurate that is.

I know that our hirelings haven't been looking for autonomy, but I have had to pay them regularly in addition to using the "Order Hirelings" move on occasion.