Month: August 2017

These past Sunday’s I’ve had the pleasure of playing Dungeon World with The Gauntlet. I think my character, Weary, has been the only character along for the whole ride since the We Hunt The Keepers series began some time ago. Gerrit Reininghaus’s character, Arcon, has also been along for much of it.

The seeds that Jason has planted from the very start have started to germinate wonderfully with each series that finishes within the overarching campaign. Each player has contributed a lot of fiction as to what may be going on no matter how short their time in the series was.

We started as seemingly simple mission to kill what I expected to be evil people or, at least people holding evil power of some kind. Has slowly unraveled over the course of the series as something far more complex and interesting. And what is even more interesting is that we have arrived at this rich and dense lore within the fiction with mostly emergent play entirely. Jason often doesn’t know what will happen next and only have a very rough structure along with ideas he wants to explore, the rest of it is a result of numerous contributions from many players now! And it’s soooo good.

It’s exciting every Sunday to find out more about my character’s backstory. A thief belonging to the Shadow Court which is essentially an assassin’s creed, Dan Brown-esk, inspired character that believed at the start of this story to merely be a weapon, wielded by the court as they saw fit. Entirely autonomous from the church which hires us to go kill these Keepers who hold Keys. Since then we have discovered that Weary is a Manchurian Candidate type operator who is activated for these purposes sure, but also that the Shadow Court is linked so intricately with the church that we cannot discern where one begins and the other ends. The institution has many facets and seems to be just be an organism that eats it’s own tail, forever.

This session we have only now found out some of the stakes questions we have had since the very start, with the revelation being intensely satisfying as the result of this delayed gratification combined with the knowledge that nobody saw this coming, including Jason! There are SO many cool revelations I won’t ruin them, as you can watch them from the start on Youtube now.

Furthermore the character’s who hunt these Keeper’s are also the bad guys, we’ve found out. And the dissonance between our mission and interactions with the church and each other have made for this meta fiction that I think would make for some interesting viewer consumption, since often times the audience has MORE knowledge than the characters–even Weary who has been there the longest is constantly realizing he knows very little.

And where he surely would have died many times without the group, though he is trained to be one single operative exerting the will of the Shadow Court. This relationship routinely places Weary in a position where he is both a pawn as well as to question his own purpose. If he is ineffective alone yet trained and conditioned to be alone, what is his place on this chess board. I often wonder if this was chess, what piece would Weary be? And every time I think I have it figured out, the fictional status quo introduces something that jars that notion from me.

It’s been so, so fun playing in this game. I hope to play with even more Gauntleteers and can’ wait for my schedule to open up come October to play more and more games with you all!

These sessions have just been giving me life entirely, thanks so much Jason Cordova! And, I think people who like APs would really enjoy listening to these sessions of ours, found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC0IZjkhMfc&list=PL26DVDSsqVz6VlgBJpGA6qp7wCb2OydB7