Not everyone could make it to our regularly scheduled AW session, so I ran DW.  We’d been planning to play it in a couple weeks with a larger group, so this was a good opportunity to test drive it. 

I sketched out a swampy, anarchic river town at the southern end of civilization.  New Orleans with demi-humans.  A generation ago a war wiped out a big chunk of the population, especially the “hero” caste, giving me an excuse for lots of abandoned keeps, towers, lairs, etc.

Dylan played Premisl, an evil human cleric, who’d lost almost everything.  In his desperation he sold his last remaining child, a son, to Voitsech of the Hand, a local theatrical impresario/whore-monger.  Unfortunately, most of the payment was in books.  Fortunately (?), those books opened Premisl to the worship of the Stranger, God of What Lies Beneath.

Ben played Ebbot, a neutral Halfling thief.  He left home when his innkeeper father allowed a surly elf patron to slap Ebbot’s mother for a trivial offense.  He met Premisl while trying to steal the cleric’s books back for Voitsech.  Premisl decided Ebbot might make a good convert, and so the two teamed up. Ebbot has no idea that Premisl got the books from Voitsech, and Premisl has no idea Ebbot was hired by the same man.

Premisl dabbles in speaking with spirits, including the demon Nalfeshnee, who informed him that the wards on the late sorcerer Quinn’s home had finally faded after twenty years.  The wards had been set to kill anyone who tried to enter the garden surrounding the small cottage.  The neighborhood had long since been abandoned, since people dislike living near invisible, deadly force fields, so the two men were unobserved on the night they chose to loot it.

The overgrown garden was infested with red-eyed beetles the size of small that had a disconcerting habit of leaping on to one’s head and digging in.  Ebbot held a trio of them off with his rapier, killing one and wounding another, while Premisl broke the door in.  The two hurried inside and slammed the door.  While a slightly worse for wear Ebbot held the torch, Premisl began searching the cottage, finding some loose change, a few knick-knacks worth fencing, and a door to another room that appeared to be blocked from the other side.  Poking around the main room’s chimney provoked an attack by another mutated beast, a giant bat, which they dispatched after taking a couple more hits.  Ebbot decided to fix his torch to a wall to keep both hands free, and they blocked the chimney with a table in case anything else decided to come down.

Out of the corner of his eye Premisl noticed the blocked door slowly swing open.  An elven zombie shambled in, moaning for Quinn.  The cleric took control of the undead, and directed it to leave the room.  Of course, a vengeful beetle was sitting in the doorway, waiting for an opportunity to attack, and leapt on the zombie.  The brave adventurers fled into the now accessible bedroom, and slammed the door.  Crap, the torch!  They used up another dungeoneering unit to light another one.

On the floor by the door was a large circle of dried blood, a very nice, a dagger of Elvish make, and a few pages of parchment.  The parchment included a map to an observatory upriver, and a series of careful instructions for invoking the ward, with “DO NOT COMPLETE FINAL STEP BEFORE EXITING GARDEN”.  Scrawled across the pages in crude charcoal letters was an apology to Quinn from someone named Lorccan.

The duo searched the room, finding a cache of odds and ends under a loose floorboard.  Ebbot set off a trap, and got a needle stuck in his finger.  It didn’t *seem* to have any real effect. Rather than go back through the front, they opted to jump out a window.  Sadly, before they could sneak away, more beetles attacked, and the ruckus attracted the zombie, who had a beetle firmly embedded in his head.  The stalwart warriors routed the enemy, taking many more wounds in the process, with Ebbot finishing the fight by shooting a beetle off Premisl’s face.  Meanwhile, a fire broke out from the torch they had left in the cottage.

The now second-level adventurers, both hanging on to life by a thread, decided to head back home before anything else happened  (also, the GM was tired).  The next day the townsfolk marveled at the strange corpse of an elf outside of the smoking ruins that was Quinn’s home.

The players took new bonds.  For Ebbot, the knowledge that Premisl is a good man to have in a graveyard at night.  For Premisl, that he can trust Ebbot to shoot a bug off his face.

All in all we had a lot of fun.  My favorite parts:
-   Asking the initial questions to get some back-story on the characters and why they’re working together.  Those probing questions are my favorite part of AW, and I was happy to use the technique again.
-   I like where the style of combat sits between D&D and AW.  The former often feels a little monotonous, constrained and grinding to me, while the latter can be too loose and sudden. 
There were a few things that felt bumpy:
-   I didn’t have a good feel for what was enough of a threat, vs. too much.  Levels of monsters and characters don’t really mean the same thing as they do in D&D, and I haven’t gotten a good sense of what they do mean.
-   I also don’t have a feel for how much treasure is reasonable.
-   I had a few “gee, what move is that, anyway?” moments, but those moments can come up in D&D and AW, too.
-           Some of the spell and power effects were a little fuzzy, perhaps purposefully so.  For example, how complicated a command can a cleric give the undead?
-   We didn’t use initiative, which was fine for two players, but when we play with a larger group I may need it to keep track of everything.

I’m looking forward to playing this again, and I think the players are, too.

Our Hocus decided to go out of playbook and took the Brainer's casual brain receptivity move as an advance.  He's playing it an interesting way: if he's trying to read someone while engaged in conversation, he wants to use sharp, but if he's going all psychic spy, he'll use weird.  Fine by me, especially since he's actually penalizing himself, being better at Weird than Sharp.

My question is, how do people play out psychic reads?  Do you skip the whole conversational aspect of reading a person and just have the PC ask questions 1-2-3, or do you play out some sort of stream of consciousness interrogation, or something else entirely?