Could someone clarify something for me? The summary talks about impending dooms and grim portents in one way, but the body of the chapter seems to talk about them differently.

Specifically, the summary tells us first to choose an impending doom for each danger, and then to add a handful of grim portents for the overall front. The body of the chapter then discusses grim portents first, and then impending dooms (in reverse order from the summary), and talks about grim portents in terms of dangers rather than fronts, tying grim portents to impending dooms in a way that isn't clear to me (e.g., pg 250 reads, "When all of the grim portents of a danger come to pass, the impending doom sets in.")

Please clarify the relationship between grim portents, dangers, and impending dooms.

Thanks!

I just finished playing Psi*Run for the first time with friends on Google+. We rocked that game so hard! It's 1am now so I'm going to bed, but I'll get an AP thread started soon.

If you were wondering whether to pick up Psi*Run, the answer is yes, do it.

Hiya folks. I managed to run a session of Dungeon World over Google Plus with some friends, and I'd like to talk about it.

Before the game, I daydreamed a starting scenario like this:

The goblin warren has thrived in the deep woods for some time, but it never affected Nook's Crossing before. When an otyugh, deep in the warrens, started an outbreak of Filth Fever, Skullthumper the Orkaster sought to solve the problem with magic. Whatever half-baked spell he mustered, it turned the infected into undead and started a different sort of outbreak. Most of the survivors have fled into the countryside and begun proliferating wherever they find themselves, and life in Nook's Crossing's has been poorer and more dangerous for it.

My descriptive palette included words like fetid, swollen, dank, reeking, musty, cloying, acrid, foul, offal, refuse, discarded, ramshackle, rotting, dark, close, cramped, soft, and cold.

During introductions, the players heard this:

Nook's Crossing has suddenly fallen victim to increasingly bold goblin raids, and no one knows why. You'll start at the edge of the forest clearing looking upon an entrance into a tunnel braced by random deadfall in the side a hill. You've found a goblin warren.

I made sure to describe the day-long drizzle they'd trekked here under, and the fresh, delightful odor of a forest rain in spring, in contrast to what would follow.

Inside they would find a handful of surviving goblins in a foyer of sorts, bracing a makeshift barricade against something deeper inside. More on that later. Next up, it's character introductions and bonds.

P.S., can I be in the adventurer's guild?

I can't open the Dungeon World files from GitHub because I only have InDesign CS4. Would anyone be so kind as to export a version I can open with CS4? It doesn't have to look pretty; I just want to see how DW has changed since I bought my red book. I plan to run it for my d20 grognards.

Thanks!

My technical communication class briefly reviewed ethical considerations today (as they pertain to making recommendations in analytical reports, but who cares?) and a couple things lit up my brain parts about Apocalypse World so here it is:

When making decisions we weigh priorities in three categories,

• Anticipated Consequences
• Values/Convictions (independent of consequences)
• Obligations

Each category can hold all kinds of ideas, specific or abstract. The key word in all this is priorities. We may all value safety, prosperity, and personal freedom, for example, but we might prioritize them differently.

For asking provocative questions, this comes in pretty handy. If I'm stuck for ideas I can just pick two categories, or two ideas within one category, or two ideas within different categories (the boundaries are blurry anyway), and ask the character which is more important. Note that I can ask provocative questions implicitly by putting someone in a spot or offering a hard bargain, or probably other moves I haven't thought of, which is to say I misdirect as instructed by the principles.

Example? OK.

Does Boxer prioritize Lala (his lover to whom he is obligated) over his oft-stated conviction that everyone must pull their own weight around here (a value)? Does he prioritize Lala's happiness over that of Shazza, his chief lieutenant (conflicting obligations)? Does he prioritize Lala's safety over preventing a neighboring hold from attacking (obligation vs. anticipated consequence)?

For some of you this may seem obvious, and we probably all do it intuitively anyway. Yet here I am posting about it just in case.

Summary: when asking provocative questions, sometimes try to clarify the character's competing priorities and make him choose between them. The closer they compete, the better.

So far my players have chosen playbooks that don't include explicit built-in motivations or NPC relationships, i.e., no hardholder, hocus, operator, or chopper. They basically freelance smuggling and escort gigs up and down a river valley dotted with hardholds. Since I don't want to come up with all the NPC relationships alone, I made this custom move:

When you roll up to a new hardhold, you know someone there. Describe the relationship to the MC and roll+hot. On a 10+ both, on a 7-9 choose 1:
*they're not pissed at you
*you don't owe them a favor

What am I failing to account for with this move?

Rather than necro'ing this thread, which I love dearly, I'd like to share here a few "get the ball rolling" questions I came up with to use when I draw a blank during the first session (coming up this Sunday), and solicit similar general questions from you, gentle readers.

"When you wake up, what's the first thing you think about?"

"What does your place look like? What do you display there? Who gave it to you and why?"

"What's unusual about your morning [or any] routine?"

"What do you seek out purely from habit? Who do you get it from?"

"Who reminds you of [the abstract thing we're talking about]?"

OK, so what are some of your favorite general-purpose questions?