Rat Queens Dungeon World

Dungeon World was the game of choice at the most recent Monday Night Game Lab, and it was the first time playing it for everyone involved. We'd all played Monster of the Week though, and three of us had played Apocalypse World, so none of us were strangers to the basic mechanics.

The key differences were the types of Basic and Special Moves, the magic system, and the use of hit points. I think we solidly understood everything by the half-way point of the game, except for the concept of Bonds. Normally, you establish Bonds when you create your character: how are they connected, bonded, to the rest of the characters?  In this case we were using pre-generated characters and they had been filled in for us.

On a few occasions we felt the rules were implying an actual modification to the die roll based on Bonds, but we could not find what that would be. Bonds are actually quite important; in addition to helping you decide how you would act in a situation, and how your character would interact with another, there IS a die mechanic involved:  "When a move has you roll+bonds, you’ll count the number of bonds you have with the character in question and add that to the roll."

Dungeon World is a very fun, fast and enjoyable system. If I was going to introduce someone to role-playing games for the first time, this is the system that I would use if we were playing in a fantasy setting.

For more information on Dungeon World:
http://www.dungeon-world.com/

We were Rat Queens in the game we played. Rat Queens is a fantastic comic about a company of adventuring women. They are rowdy, sarcastic, hard-partying and violent. They are sexy and they are hilarious. If you don't know the Rat Queens, you should check them out immediately!
https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/rat-queens

[Major Spoilers if you are playing this at 2014 Nexus Game Fair]
The Rat Queens were in trouble for leading an angry murder of goblins into the city of Palisade while fleeing.  Sawyer Silver of the City Watch offered them a chance to get out of prison by finding and rescuing the missing children of a small farm community. Saying No meant staying in prison, so...

The girls had to leave immediately, or right after they took a bath, because they reeked of goblin and it was making people ill.

Upon arriving to the village one woman remarked, "This is who's going to save our children? They look more like prostitutes than heroes!" That set the tone for their helpfulness.

Dee was able to commune with the dead, getting details on the last time something like this happened from Edna Smith, the dead grandmother of the village headman. The dead are sometimes more useful than the living.

Striking out towards the low hills, Betty got them a little lost and soon they had to make camp. After getting a fire built and eating some rations, Betty broke out her bag of magic mushrooms and indulged. 

Violet and Dee decided that would be fun too and also dipped into Betty's little bag. Soon Hannah was the only one with her wits about her, and keeping watch. Halfway through the night she heard whispers and sensed she was being watched. Getting Betty's attention she told her they had company and to quietly tell the others. Betty thought she was being quiet but had no sense of her own volume, using a loud stage whisper to say "Grab your stuff girls we got company!"

Battle ensued. Hannah cast Light on a rock and threw it over to where she heard the noises, illuminating several humanoid shapes dressed like ninjas. Dee raised a Zombie Servant from the very ground!

Similar dress, but in tatters, filthy, and more flesh hanging on the bones.

Violet went to chase a fleeing assailant but went off-course and ended up throwing her shield, to no avail. Betty stabbed one of them in the back. Hannah clobbered one with her staff. Soon the Rat Queens had a prisoner, whom they began to question.

The assailants were Underelfs, who had been kidnapping children. Eventually they give details about where the kids were being held, and why--the Elf Queen was going to sacrifice them in a hideous magic ritual that would destroy the surface of the world.

The Rat Queens found the entrance and Dee used Dispel Magic to destroy the magic barrier. Walking in they ran into an annoying, smelly little albino goblin. They eventually decided to walk in the direction opposite of "where heroes go" (as the goblin said) and take his chamber pot, making it into a helm for Happy the Zombie Servant, as Dee had named him. Dee cast Light on the chamber pot and embedded Hannah's Light Rock into Happy's chest, a la' Iron Man. The girls sent him forward to light the way and scare the hell out of Underelfs.

They ran into several guards, some with very well-defined pectoral muscles and the open shirts to prove it. They killed or ran them all off.  Happy the Zombie Servant got the chance to eat Elf brains, and moaned for more. A fancy if dirty cape was found, and affixed to Happy the Zombie Servant. With the chamber pot on his head, he looked a lot like Mysterio.

They found a room with an altar, and Violet discovered it was hollow! Opening it revealed a trove of diamonds. Dee left a note on the altar for the Elf Queen: "Thanks for the diamonds." Dee also took the time to draw a happy face on Happy's brightly-illuminating chamber pot.

Hannah cast a spell that allowed her to see a tiny purple pony with wings when she closed her eyes, and that led the way to where the children were. Unfortunately it didn't care about walls, so Violet and Betty spent some quality time knocking through a stone wall to reach the children. Probably there was an easier way.

Kind of like this I guess. Never imagined such an image would be on my blog.

The kids were scared out of their minds by Happy the Zombie Servant but Dee calmed them down and Betty gave them candy. Just regular candy. Everyone trooped out the way they came, but there were a bunch of angry Underelfs waiting for them in the altar room, including the super-creepy necromantic Elf Queen. She demanded the children, Violet told her they peed on the altar, and battle was joined.

Like this, but against Underelves

The kids saw a chance to run out the front and took it. The Rat Queens covered their escape until the Elves were worried more about protecting their Queen, and the girls followed the kids--only to find that the annoying albino goblin was preventing their escape. Betty launched a dagger at him and hits him in the eye! He fell down dead and everyone escaped, with the kids and the diamonds.

The Rat Queens deserved an epic fiesta after that, I'm sure...

HOLLOWPOINT: Those Angels and Rebels and Aliens Aren't Going to Kill Themselves

Many thanks to Sarah for this awesome drawing.

I volunteered to run a roleplaying game called Hollowpoint for our Monday Night Game Lab. I'd never run anything for the group, but this game sounded like a low-prep, fun one-shot and that was exactly what I was looking for.

"No one in this game is innocent.
You're an Agent. No one ever messes with you, because you are that far above the common herd of men that sleepwalk through their lives. You get things done, and that usually means blood. Or pain. Or, when you are feeling generous, death."

Character creation is fast and easy, which is good because you are expected to die or "move on" in some way at least once during the session.  The game is set up as a series of Conflicts that become progressively harder for the characters to beat.  The conflicts themselves are resolved by rolling big handfuls of dice and using the sets that appear--pairs or more--to narrate the action.  I'm told by a reliable source that the mechanics have similarities to The Pool and InSpectres. At any rate, you'll need a lot of d6 dice for this game. I used every d6 I had in the house, and only had enough because another player brought a bunch of her own.

I got a test-run in with someone who is only an occasional player of roleplaying games and it was very successful. In that game my partner played three characters and I ran a modified version of an example scenario provided in the rule book.

In the test-run, the Agents were highly trained and skilled humans that worked for Heaven, doing a lot of dirty work for the angels who were few and far between on Earth. There were rogue angels and demons roaming our planet and they needed to be kept in check. The Mission this time was to find and destroy a Construct, a kind of Frankenstein's monster that had been created by rogues or demons for some hideous purpose.

The Objectives in this case were clear-cut, as they should always be in a game of Hollowpoint: find out where the creature was being kept, and destroy it. Don't talk to it, don't think about it, just kill it.

The action was fast as the player described their interactions and investigations in Las Vegas, which led to a raid on a warehouse in the desert guarded by a rogue angel and his human minions.  One Agent moved on. The game is not made to be played by one player and a Narrator, but I have to say, we both enjoyed our test game a great deal.

Two days later I ran a scenario of my own design for three veteran RPG players.  Walking around the south wing of my palatial mansion, I noticed one of my favorite books: Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. That was my inspiration. I quickly sketched out the nature of the player's Agency, the location of the story (Mars in this case), the Enemy, and the two Objectives. Each Objective has at least two conflicts. Then I decided on two Principals, important NPCs who would generate retaliations when messed with.

The players seemed to enjoy character generation, and we ended up with a hard-core group of Protectorate Agents who would be arriving at the end of a planetary rebellion to find and secure an alien artifact, a ship in this case.

I feel like I was less-clear than I should have been when I explained the first Objective to the players: were the Agents primarily concerned with finding the location of the rebel base that housed the alien artifact, or were they to focus on killing the Generalisimo who led the colonial rebellion and was still alive?  It's important to be clear about the difference between Objectives and Conflicts, and I muddily combined the two. 

Example character from the book

We also ran into a problem at one point that wasn't covered in the rules, or that I perhaps missed: is this a Story Game, where the players are creating their own reality and dictating the environment, or is it a More Regular Game, where the Narrator prepares the world and the players react to it? The particular situation came up in the last act, as the players approached a large white tent with an airlock, with researchers and rebel guards around it. I had envisioned this scene as leading to a deep shaft, which would in turn lead to the alien ship once the players were underground.  One of the players, however, declared that the ship was in the tent. So which one is true? We decided in this case to play it out the way I had planned it, but I'm still wondering if that was correct. On the plus side, the Epic Final Battle was epic.

Hollowpoint is written by Brad Murray and C.W. Marshall, published by VCSA Publishing:  http://www.vsca.ca/Hollowpoint/