Dungeon World Alignment Moves

I am a fan of Dungeon World as a member of the Adventurer’s Guild.  When I heard about the idea of “Alignment Moves”,  I was fascinated. D&D was the perfect game for alignments to have mechanical effects and moves seem ideal for this.  Since I couldn’t find any of these in the text of v 2.2 of the Beta, I wanted to post them here as a hack.  Dungeon World is by Sage Kobold productions and the following text is public domain.

 

Alignment Moves

When you are faced with a complex ethical or moral problem that impacts bystanders or society on a whole, Roll+ Wis. When acting on the solution provided, take +1 Forward.  Each alignment has it’s own move with different lists of items to choose from. On a 10+ choose two from your list. On a 7-9, choose one.

Lawful Good 

  • You uphold the greater good
  • You uphold the law
  • Give one of your allies +1 XP

Neutral Good

  • You uphold the greater good
  • You uphold the status quo
  • Give one of your allies +1 XP

Chaotic Good

  • You uphold the greater good
  • You uphold freedom
  • Give one of your allies +1 XP

Lawful Neutral

  • You uphold the balance of power.
  • You uphold the law
  • You gain a personal benefit

True Neutral 

  • You uphold the balance of power.
  • You are confident in your alignment.
  • You gain a personal benefit

Chaotic Neutral

  • You uphold the balance of power.
  • You uphold freedom
  • You gain a personal benefit

Lawful Evil

  • You increase your personal power
  • You uphold the law
  • You hurt an enemy indirectly

Neutral Evil 

  • You increase your personal power
  • You uphold the status quo
  • You hurt an enemy indirectly

Chaotic Evil

  • You increase your personal power
  • You cause anarchy
  • You hurt an enemy indirectly

 

 

Lantern’s Legacy

 It has been a great pleasure to participate in GameChef 2012, where I completed a game titled “Lantern’s Legacy”  Here is the intro blurb.

Our world is ending, as it has countless times before. Our mortal worshipers are passing into the void as this apocalypse claims their lives. We hope to maintain our divine mandates with the ancient Lantern Rites handed down since the dawn of time. We can speak with the few mortals who remain and petition them to take our cause. Their final moments will give us the light we need to find a new world in the void. In exchange, we will remember them and provide them a legacy in our new home. 

Which of us will each Lantern choose? How will they spend their last moments? What legacies shall we pass along into our new world? Those are divine mysteries we hope to explore.

I have enjoyed the process of designing this game and I think it’s a great deal more playable than my 2010 entry. My take away from this process was that I need to seriously consider purchasing a copy of Adobe InDesign. Scribus was not doing the job and the errors were slowing me down significantly.

Here is the game for your enjoyment; I would love to hear any questions you might have.

Lantern’s Legacy

GenCon 2011 Seminar Recordings

One of my guilty pleasures at GenCon is to attend a variety of interesting game design panels with digital recorder in hand.  I was quite successful this year with 5 distinct seminar recordings.  I have done some rudimentary audio clean-up on the recordings but I currently lack the skill to properly polish them.   They are definitely worth a listen though, in my opinion I present the seminars in chronological order as I attended them.  I will try to link to the presenters websites whenever possible.

Things You Think About Games

Event Number: SEM1122700

Presenters: Jeff Tidball and Will Hindmarch from Gameplaywright (http://gameplaywright.net)

Things You Think About Games

 

The No-No’s of Game Design

Event Number: SEM1128758

Presenters:

Stan! (http://www.stannex.com/)

Jeff Neil Bellinger (http://killerbunnies.com)

Daniel Solis (http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com)

Matt Forbeck (http://www.forbeck.com)

 The No-No’s of Game Design

 

 

Lessons from Indie Publishing

Event Number: SEM1122904

Presenters: David A Hill Jr. from Machine Age Productions (http://machineageproductions.com)

Lessons from Indie Publishing

 

Design an RPG in an Hour

Event Number: SEM1122800

Presenters: David A Hill Jr. from Machine Age Productions (http://machineageproductions.com)

Design an RPG in an Hour

 

 

Game Design is Mind Control

Event Number: SEM1120297

Presenters:

Luke Crane (http://www.burningwheel.org)

Jared A Sorenson (http://memento-mori.com)

Game Design is Mind Control

 

The Legal Rules of Gaming

Event Number: SEM1118576

Presenters:  Neil A. Wehneman (http://boardgamegeek.com/blog/377)

The Legal Rules of Gaming

 

 

In addition to those excellent seminars, I also had the pleasure of running 2-3 playtests of the Spark RPG with some excellent gamers and/or designers.  I didn’t request permission to post those game sessions online from the participants, so I will not post those particular recordings.  I was told a couple of things by all of the different groups of playtesters.

  1.  I need to improve the presentation of the rules; teach them in a better fashion with more clear character sheets
  2. I should change the GM Fate tracking sheet into a variant of the normal player character sheet.
  3. It is counter-intuitive to have conditions which only help you or only impede you, regardless of circumstances.  I will consider changing this around, though I am uncertain how exactly that would affect the economy.

I hope the seminar recordings and I wish to thank all of the fine participants of GenCon who supported my playtesting endeavours.

 

GenCon 2010 Seminar Recordings can be found Here.

 

Amaranthine – The Chess Game Eternal

So, Machine Age Productions will be releasing a brand new RPG at GenCon 2011 by the title of Amaranthine“Amaranthine is a game about yesterday, now, and forever. Amaranthine are immortal, destined to reincarnate from here until eternity. They’ve lived many lives before, and every other immortal they meet, they’ve met before.”

I pitched in on the Kickstarter drive and in honour of their release, I volunteered to produce a hack of the game system.   This is a hack of their resolution system, which replaces the dice with a chess board.  I hope some of you immortals enjoy playing the eternal game!

You can find it here and it is released under a Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike License.  This hack was produced by Genesis of Legend Publishing, but I chose to cede all rights to Machine Age Productions

Amaranthine Chess Hack PDF

Have fun and feel free to leave a comment if you have any thoughts concerning the hack.

A Sojourn in Alexandria – Virtue’s Edge

I am pleased to announce that I have managed to complete a playable game for Game Chef 2010.  In the spirit of the competition and my personal whims, I am releasing the work to the Public Domain.  Use it for absolutely anything, any where, any time.   Love to hear if you play the game or are inspired by it but even that is at your discretion.

Disclaimer; this was produced in two-weeks of insanity.  It contains hippy indie story game concepts, extremely limited playtesting and my own amateur layout skills.  I still offer you a 100% satisfaction guarantee or your money back!    The Spark RPG will have a great deal more polish and a significantly higher word count.


A Sojourn in Alexandria concerns both physical voyages and ethical journeys. The characters try to walk the knife’s edge between the deprivation of the harsh Desert and the excess of the opulent City. Walk in the footsteps of Alexander the Great!


Get it here and have fun!

A Sojourn in Alexandria