Month: May 2017

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Hey Mom!! I’m doing a thing!

Not since Champions (IMHO) have I been thrilled about a supers RPG!
Cortex has been a source of some fun con games I’ve ran: Justifiers! and Overwatch:Black hacks I’ve made in Cortex.
One of my fondest memories was taking out the Hulk as Capt. America using only a helicopter and Ben Grimm 🙂

And take a look at that Star Spectacular Spotlight list! 😉
Outstanding!

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Space Wurm vs Moonicorn

Big finale and our first defeated Front last night! I could feel it closing in last week with our guest players, but this week they delivered the final blow to the Space Void Madness danger.

The table action was so fast and wild that it’s kind of impossible to recount, and it’d be boring anyway because you weren’t there. But in our roses-and-thorns debrief (I’ve been waiting to do one until we’d gotten past one of the Fronts) everyone agreed that the moves are starting to interact and mingle with the Dungeon World common moves in some exciting ways.

Observations in bullet form for your bathroom reading pleasure:

* I’m all-in now on the bam-bam-bam speed of die rolling/move invocation in DW. We rolled a heck of a lot last night, and everyone rolled like craaaaap so there’s been quite a lot of advancement. I think at … six sessions? … everyone’s level 3 or 4 now. My modification to a flat 7XP per level is working great, and it’ll mean everyone has a chance to get into the 6-10 level moves. At the old pace, everyone would just now be level 3, and it’d keep getting slower and slower.

* I got to use some of the extra-weird DW tools that I haven’t really messed with, specifically a treasure drop after they defeated the big bad. They’ve been beating up on lesser critters and I haven’t bothered, but the outcome for beating the source of the Void Madness was too good to pass up. I don’t know that I’ll do it every time though: lots of the results are just X coins, which seems totally off-tone for SWvM.

* I sense some mild dissatisfaction at the abstraction of the “when you defeat a danger” move, and how it plays out into the fiction afterward. Basically, Space Wurm has actual negotiating power to get folks to “back” him in taking over the front: you get a +1 per PC who wants to back you. I assume you cannot back both, because that makes for a much tenser and more interesting roll! But so anyway, with the defeat of the source of the Space Void Madness, both SW and M made their 10+ rolls with the backing of the other characters: The Lover backed Space Wurm and will be taking control of the Interstellar Transportation front, which is very cool, and the Other backed Moonicorn for…other reasons. Basically the Other is just grossed out by Space Wurm.

* I’m going to take a “months later” jump ahead for next session and reset some of the situation. The Spice front is already in motion but I haven’t even introduced Religion’s threats yet, so I think, like before, we’ll have a session or two of just kind of wandering around in the setting until events start to gel. I don’t really mind that tbh; it lets the characters do more interpersonal stuff and firm up their personal arcs a bit.

Anyway, the game’s proceeding swimmingly and with all the new moves getting unlocked, the interplay of those moves is getting super interesting. Niftiest twist: everyone has taken a move that helps other players get more XPs. Now everyone’s incentivizing everyone else all the time. My 7XP/level hack might end up biting me!