The most fun I've had on the player-facing end of RPGs has very rarely been in combat; it's almost always in the exploration and verbal conflict resolution. I've also always loved fiction and games about scrappy little folk digging around in the (literal or metaphorical) ruins of fantastical civilizations (The Last Unicorn, The Hobbit, Perdido Street Station, Mega Man Legends, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, Castle in the Sky, Ico, Dark Souls, Star Wars: The Force Awakens). Apocalypse World and Dungeon World already deal with these themes, to a degree, but I'm thinking of writing a game that puts exploration and puzzle based basic and MC moves at the forefront, pushing violence and PvP conflicts of interest to the wayside. My goal would be, in play, to recapture some of the aesthetic experience of reading the part in The Hobbit where Bilbo emerges from the forest canopy and sees the butterflies above Mirkwood, or in The Wind Waker when you see the entirety of old Hyrule on the ocean floor.

The default mode of play would be scraping out a living by delving into (here largely uninhabited to cultivate a sense of relative desolation) for valuable scraps while facts about the characters relationships (and the death of the old world) emerge organically.

(For even more isolated play, I've been brainstorming a Murderous Ghosts hack inspired by Shadow of the Colossus and Dark Souls)

I know mounted combat doesn't really come up IN dungeons much, so it makes sense that it isn't a default move, but I thought something like this might be interesting . . .

When you charge into the thick of battle on a mount, roll +STR

*On a 10+, deal your damage, or choose from the 7-9 list and deal your damage +1d6. *On a 7-9, deal your damage but choose one

• You are thrown from your steed and take d6 damage
• Your steed panics
• Your steed is injured

Thoughts? Should mounts be an entire supplement to the rules in the style of hirelings? Obviously all of this can just be handled in-fiction and by use of the defy danger move, but I'm curious what you all think is suitable for a more cavalry-oriented campaign.