![]() Embracing monstrosity could lead to great power, but also at some very frustrating costs. My inspiration came a lot from the vampires in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. As the monster character became more powerful, it also became harder to exist in normal society. ![]() Every monster class was designed with moves that made the characters a little more horrifying to look at or vile in some other meaningful way. The idea here was very much that of a devil’s bargain: you get power in exchange for your humanity. ![]() As such, I named the compendium classes monster classes and made a very simple hack: when a character with a monster class leveled up, they chose a new move from their base class AND the compendium class. The act of being adventurers put the characters in danger of becoming twisted and monstrous. For my campaign setting at the time, one of the themes was that nothing in the game world went unchanged for very long. Taking a compendium class is a lateral move. Compendium classes are very much meant to be alternate classes – something different but not inherently better than your normal class. This is an alternate class of sorts that characters can unlock in the fiction and then use to get different moves than the ones they learn from their base class. One of the mechanisms in Dungeon World that I wanted to explore in a different way even early on was the compendium class. If you want to take the focus off of alignment for your particular Dungeon World game, this hack can probably achieve that effect for you. In my experience, it basically made that experience point a free space, something everybody could get at the end of the session with little effort. In my experience, characters whose alignment move is based on a social trigger are going to have a harder time earning that XP, so broadening things so they can receive their reward even when socially isolated (read: in a dungeon) could actually be helpful for them. It simply made earning alignment XP a lot easier, which is more significant for some classes than it is for others. Now all that being said, the hack itself didn’t have too huge of an impact on play. A player who is trying to shoehorn her alignment move into every session just wants to level up her character and win the game – she’s playing the game right, not wrong. The intent of alignment moves is to prompt players to have their characters play out specific actions that add something interesting to the session in order to try to earn XP. If his traps “derailed” the game, that’s because I wasn’t doing my job as the gamemaster and making soft and hard moves when appropriate. If you’re not already seeing the flawed reasoning behind this hack, allow me to point out my own mistaken thought process here: this “issue” wasn’t my player’s fault. If they could point to at least one instance in which they represented their alignment, they earned the XP reward. I felt like that was an issue at the table, so I decided to cut alignment moves from the game entirely – instead, characters earned XP simply for behaving like their alignment during the session. One example I clearly remember is that I had a player whose alignment had to do with trapping innocent people – he would often drag out scenes by attempting to set traps for NPCs so he could get his alignment XP for the session. Specifically, I was seeing that my players often “derailed” the session in order to pursue their alignment moves, going far out of their way in order to do things a specific way for experience points. One of the first aspects of Dungeon World I found my players struggling with was the concept of alignment moves. We’ve got a lot of hacks to discuss, so let’s get started! I’ll also order them from least-to-most invasive, as some of them took a lot more effort than others to pull off. Today’s post will go into each one, why I did it, and then whether or not that hack was successful in my experience. Regardless of the reason for the hack, house rules and homebrew content appears at most gaming tables, so I thought it could be a fun topic to discuss on this edition of Tabletop Tuesday.ĭungeon World is my favorite tabletop game (“ WE KNOW!“) and as a result of the number of times I’ve played it, I have definitely incorporated some hacks into the game. ![]() Other times you might simply want to add a little something that makes the world feel more your own. Tabletop games are great, but sometimes there’s a game mechanic that doesn’t quite fit the table and needs to be adjusted for the group. There comes a point in the tabletop journey of many a gamemaster where they begin to feel the desire to experiment with the systems they have come to love.
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