So... my DW gaming group lately consists of me as the GM and 1 player (my 14 yr old son). Yeah it's weird, but that's the way it is right now.

Couple of questions:

1) Does anyone have suggestions on running DW with a single player? I know it's not really made for that, since Bonds and inter-player relationships are such a integral part of the game, but I'm wondering if something like that can be modified to work with NPCs played by the GM? Ideas?

2) How do I leave blanks if the character knows nothing about the world? Here's what I mean: the way the first adventure and the world shaped from his questions, the character is a cleric to an unknown god (unknown by others) and comes from a reclusive village that was actually protected in ages past from some ancient danger that no one remembers why by some sort of magical barrier. No one has come or gone down the road leading in or out of the village for hundreds of years.

Except for him.

He stepped through the magical barrier and found himself in a world he knows nothing about. So far so good, but then I ran into problems. It feels like I can't leave blanks for him to fill in if his character has never been here, how would he know anything? Or are blanks more than what the character knows? Can it be something that the player can help out with even if the character knows nothing?

Similarly, can Spout Lore work in such an unknown world?

Part of the difficulty stems from me not fleshing out the world some the first place. I should have given more structure to start with and maybe it wouldn't have developed the way it did.

Things are getting better now that we have two sessions done, but still it's a little weird not leaving blanks. Ideas?

Some magic/spell related questions. I'm using the print-layout version.

Invisibility
Level 1, Ongoing, Illusion
Choose an ally: nobody can see them. They’re invisible! The spell
persists until you make a move or dismiss the effect.

So, it says choose an ally. Is that supposed to include or exclude the castor? If the castor is included, perhaps this could be written as choose yourself or an ally.

---
Another question.

Cast A Spell (Int)
When you release a spell you’ve prepared, roll+Int. On a 10+, the
spell is successfully cast and you do not forget the spell – you may
cast it again later. On a 7-9, the spell is cast, but choose one:
  • You draw unwelcome attention or put yourself in a
spot, the GM will describe it
  •The spell disturbs the fabric of reality as it is cast,
take -1 Ongoing to Cast a Spell until you Prepare
Spells again.
  • After is it cast, the spell is forgotten. You cannot cast
the spell again until you Prepare Spells.

The second bullet item:

The spell disturbs the fabric of reality as it is cast,
take -1 Ongoing to Cast a Spell until you Prepare
Spells again.

Is the GM actually supposed to apply an effect that "disturbs the fabric of reality"? Like, "Sure, you're fireball goes off, but something unexpected happens... it starts raining droplets of flame as well. Soon the trees around you are catching on fire. What do you do?". Or is that phrase just intended for flavor text for this -1.

Personally, I think it'd be fun (ie fantastic) to have a "weird" magic effect happen with that result, and going with the Agenda to make the world fantastic, I should probably do it, but was curious about the author's intent.

The PDF makes reference to filling out your GM Worksheet after a session but I didn't see any printable worksheet? Is there something official that's in the works? Or is this just a diff way of saying, get out your own notebook and take notes.

Hi all. First timer. I wanted to give some feedback and join the adventure's guild. First some background. Long time roleplayer and sometime gamemaster, but not familiar with this system. I  mainly run d20 styled games. As a full-time dad with little time to get together for face-to-face group of the old gaming buddies, I usually end GMing for my 13 year-old boy.

He was asking to play an RPG that was something new and where it didn't take an hour to make characters. So, we gave this a shot. I didn't really have anything prepared at the time, but I broke out a PDF of Dungeon World I had sitting around when I was a player of an earlier game.

He decided to play a befuddled aged wizard character, and after he examined his whopping 4 hit points, he also decided to make a second character (a fighter) and play both.

I eventually took over the Fighter character to help improve social interaction, but he would play it like a hireling--giving it orders and so on.

The adventure setting took place in a small village a few days journey from real civilization and the adventure hook was him seeing something suspicious pass by outside his window on a dark and windy night.

We got bogged down a little on figuring out how well could his character spot something that was hidden. We thought perhaps Discern Realities move, but the wording is "When you closely study a situation..."

But his char wasn't closely studying it... He was just glancing out the window to get a better look. So, I guess it was hard for us to break away from the standard d20 "make a spot check" type roll. Eventually I just told him what he saw according to what I thought would be most fun and just ran with it.

One of the cooler aspects was his Contact Spirits spell which he employed to figure out who or what it was that passed suspiciously by his window. I like how the spirit decides the questions it asks itself on a hold. We enjoyed role-playing that out and it added a lot of flavor to the game. The spirit, in fact, instead of just answering the questions and leaving, would try to bargain with the wizard to see what it could get out of it for providing information.

The spirit told him someone had tied and that launched off an entire investigation scene and the plot thickened from there.

It was decidedly light on combat since he was playing a wizard char so the adventure was largely investigative with him tracking down the murderer which turned out to be a small boy in the village, which in turn wasn't really a small boy but only a shape-shifter type creature that had taken the form of the real boy. He killed the shifter when the murderer's treachery was revealed and the boy attacked him, and blasted it out the second story window of the boy's room with his magic missile spell with all the villagers.   

We liked how quick it was to make a character and the speed of the game. We had played Tracy Hickman's XDM previously and wanted something fast, but with a bit more structure. This seemed to fit the bill.

Some things that I think would help the game:
  * Give more examples of things. Combat for example. I know there aren't rounds or initiative, but he got a little upset when things started to happen without him because he didn't speak up when I paused to let him say something. Maybe take a typical encounter and describe the moves that would be used for different things as a party of characters works through it.

  * Explain what a hold is better. It took us a while to grasp what a hold really was. Give some additional examples.

  * There are things that are mentioned but aren't explained in the PDF. For example, Make a Stand or Pull a Stunt are referenced in some moves or spells (like Sanctuary for Cleric) but the rules don't explain these elsewhere (at least not in the version we had). I still don't know what they are. There may be others.

  * Maybe provide some optional rules for running an undersized party (maybe even 1 on 1) games if such variations are available.

All in all we had a fun night an will likely grow our oneshot into something larger. Thanks for the good work.