Dungeon World a la Guy Ritchie

There should be an AP coming from one of my players soon, but I'll give you the short version.  My players wanted to be members of the City Watch in a seething metropolis, cutting deals and trying to uphold the law, with large sections done in homage to crime movies and police procedurals.  So we spent one long afternoon coming up with all of the various horrible problems that they would likely be facing and laying the groundwork for a campaign setting that continues to give us joy.

The players are four of the members of a newly created Underwatch, the section of the city watch meant to keep order in and investigate crimes in the city's underground sections.  Their jurisdiction begins and ends at the surface, but the city bureaucracy expects them to keep watch on the *entire* underground.

As the newest members of a terrifyingly large series of overlapping organizations, they receive very little help and even less respect, all while being expected to cater to the whims of their various bureaucratic superiors.  Since they have perhaps 1/6th of the normal funding and staff assigned to a single quarter of the watch, it is a recipe for very exciting disaster.

The first session started with a dead body sitting on the desk of the commander's desk (Commander Marlow, our party's Thief).  It's been pretty much non-stop problem time ever since.  Every time that it seems like they may have solved a problem, I make sure to Show Signs of Doom, either insinuating that there are other problems which are even more pressing or that whatever they did to fix the problem actually had a number of unanticipated side effects.  I love simply being able to look at whatever they've done and build others' responses off of it, more fiction flowing naturally from their own.  I'll leave further explanations to our dear Commander Marlow, who should be posting something here some time soon.

Leaving aside game stories, one thing that we noticed was that XP advancement felt awkward and uneven because of how I was running the game.  Since the game was less of a dungeon crawl and more of a series of criminal investigations with some bursts of action, we found that players had a hard time playing up their character's theoretical party roles.  As a temporary solution we decided to pool XP, but it appears to have worked fairly well.  This rewards each PC for asking for assistance from someone else better suited to solve their problem, and has fostered a sense of teamwork that goes well with the "us against the world" themes of the setting.

I'm not sure what else to mention, but I'd be happy to answer any questions you folks have.

Sounds wonderful Henry! Thanks for sharing, looking forward to the AP :)

Wow, man. That setup is so good it makes me want to kill my current dungeon game and start an Underwatch game immediately.

Very cool!

I agree with the inestimable Mr. Harper.  Suddenly my mind is filled with Underwatch adventures of an almost Ankh-Morporkian bent.  I've never thought to use DW for a game like that, so I'm not even sure how to decide whether it would work or not.

Well, if you do want to make your own version, I strongly recommend that you do something like what we did; the "first session" actually had no gameplay, but we spent hours just making things up about the city and the characters.

Feel free to have your own answers ready, but remember that your primary goal is to create a working cohesive vision that compels you and your players.  A few good questions to ask:
-what words or phrases describe the setting?
-what is definitely in the setting?
-what media (film, comic, book, tv, etc.) inspires this setting?

My group's answers to the first one were great, and gave us a wonderful jumping off point for talking about geographic features, thematic places, etc.  Here's the list:
-sprawling, crowded, metropolis
-tidal estuary, London?, coastal, port, river
-huge, really old
-multi-layered
-councilors, republic & oligarchy (vestigal royalty)
-elevation change, river comes out of hills
-several universities, a magic university
-bureaucratic [the entire Council is on top of the Captain of the Watch]
-limited scrying
-guilds
-ambitious bureaucratic underlings (who don't want to work as Captain o.t. Watch)
-5 quarters of watch: North, East, South, West, River
-new 6th quarter: underground

So, of course, I had to ask why the Underwatch had been created.  There had been some incident that really pissed off a council member but that the normal watch had refused to investigate, claiming that the areas below ground weren't zoned as belonging to any particular quarter, and therefor were not part of their jurisdiction (no one wants to go underground, it's just too frickin dangerous).

So the council created a new watch, specifically meant to deal with underground threats.  The pissed off councilor did his best to empower it, and several other councilors tried to cripple it so badly that it couldn't possibly succeed.  Members of the watch couldn't be forced to shift to the Underwatch, but every quarter had to put forward a minimum of ?five? volunteers.  The worst miscreants from each quarter were "volunteered," and the ambitious 3rd Lieutenant Marlow stepped forward to accept a promotion to Commander (skipping a few ranks).

I give you that background, because this was all stuff that we came up with once we had the basic setting in place.  Each character established their bonds (we did char. gen. after making the setting), and we created elaborate backstories for everyone, finishing with the reason why they had ended up in the Underwatch.  It really worked beautifully.

Sounds like a Dungeon Starter right there! The answers your player's came up with are just like Marshall's 'impressions', as are those wonderful plot hooks established through the players playbook flags.

I was thinking, you could almost steal a few 'regiment' moves to re-inforce the special unit philosophy embedded in this setting / situation.

Thanks for sharing Henry, its fantastic and wonderfully evocative!