After much ado, the first version of my cyberpunk mission-based action hack is ready for public consumption:

Take a look and let me know what you think!

After the OrcCon playtest, I've reworked character creation a little. Details on my blog: Making a Character.

I played Dungeon World at Kapcon in the weekend, in fact, about 20 people played Dungeon World at Kapcon, much of which was my fault.

I ran three games and Russell (screen_monkey) ran another. Here are my reports of all four games.

Day 1 (Sessions 1 and 3)
Day 2 (Sessions 4 and 6)

They're heavy on the story time, but DW enthusiasts should be able to pick out a few moves here and there and I'm happy to expand as memory allows.

I just wrapped up the mini DW campaign I've been running with my Hollywood group this evening. The final game was a raid into a cult strong hold in the Blasphemous Caverns to stop a cult ritual using a relic stolen from the group's cleric.

The Blasphemous Caverns: Some Love Letters.

The first session of the campaign was Marshall's The Goblin Hole. The relic was stolen in the post-hole carousing and the second session was an overland pursuit of the thief. In the third session they sought out a magic map that would help them find the thief (aka the Harry Potter map). The fourth and final game was their attempt to recover it.

When we next play, Tral the faceless goblin assassin will be out for revenge. Tral was a guard in The Goblin Hole who had his face kicked off by Inga's hobnail boots... yet lived!

I'm excited already!

I'm sure you've already noticed this AP of The Bloodstone Idol on Story Games.

I'm not sure what your plans are viz-a-viz the list of questions for Spout Lore in the AG version versus the open sandbox of the Red Book version, but I think the  dissatisfaction quoted below might have been removed if the list of questions had been available to spark player ideas.

I definitely could have been more flexible with the Idol. There's nothing in the book that says, "the character's can't do anything with it," it's just that there's nothing for it to really do in the context of the adventure. It's there as the subject of Grundloch's ambitions, serving the countdown clock of, "Does he wake it up and use it to wreck the countryside?" I should've been more flexible and made up stuff you could do with it.

Hm, what I could've done, when you were Spouting Lore and learning about the Idol, was detail whatever process was needed to go through to control the Idol--i.e., what Grundloch was doing. Then you could've decided whether to try and control it, etc. I didn't do that because it felt out of the scope of the adventure, and again, fictionally, it felt like you guys weren't powerful enough. Le sigh.

Personally, find the "tell them something interesting and useful" harder to run as a GM than a "How can I make it do _____"-type question too.

I ran MotW at Gateway 2011 in LA over the weekend and it went down really well. All 4 players had a great time and one of them wants to run it for some friends of his.

Here's my report

In the first session, I ran Monster of the Week for a full table of four players. I had played with three of the four before and GMed for two of them a couple of times. Monster of the Week is designed to handle episodic monster hunting settings (Buffy, Angel, Supernatural, X-Files) and my scenario "A Town Called Malice" was at the X-Files-y end of the spectrum. I offered a restricted set of characters; the investigation types rather than the ass-kickers with the exception being the Initiate as a thematic anchor for the group (the group were associated with his ancient order of monster hunters). The character options were: the Mundane (think Xander), the Expert (Giles), the Flake (the Lone Gunmen) and the Spooky (a creepy sorcerer); the Flake was not chosen. I won't say too much about the game as I expect to run it again, so suffice to say it went well.

Between the game itself, and subsequent conversations, I learnt a lot about running AW games and about running MotW specifically. The playbooks we used were all flavourful and the history options resulted in a fun group dynamic and really supported the theme and genre. My only concern on that front is that calling gear "crap" is too much of a hold-over from AW. Maybe just call it "gear" or "stuff" (as the text does frequently). "Crap" is jarring.

Aside from that, as I was looking back through the playbooks to see if I had specific comments about the player moves, I realised that while all of the moves are really evocative and fit the genre really well, I am uneasy about some of them.

The Initiate's Sacred Oath is a mechanically sub-optimal choice (does nothing useful and lets you mark XP once per "quest") and the Mundane's Don't Worry, I'll Check It Out and Always the Victim seem like they'd probably generate only the same amount of XP (or less!) as having one of the active playbook moves with a checked stat.

Have you considered giving these very flavourful moves to the respective classes for free, then having them pick 3 moves from the rest? Perhaps there's a dynamic that happens in play that makes these abilities more useful than they appear. Has anyone else had more experience with these moves?