Dungeon World Magic Items
Dungeon World Magic Items
I was chatting with Brian Holland and was thinking I would share some thoughts with the rest of the community to see what people think.
This year, instead of writing a novel for NaNoWriMo, I’ve been writing a project that may possibly be released as a “Sword Breaker Presents:” product. The basic idea is sort of a journal full of descriptions of magic items and where they might be found. Jesse Ross and I thought it might be cool to release it as a stand-alone book with no stats. That way, it could be given directly to the players and they could decide if they wanted to pursue any of the entries. We would have downloadable stat books for various systems that the GM could reference.
Here’s where all this is going. Robert Bohl once posted that he didn’t like system neutral stuff because game materials are always influenced by the gaming preferences of the creator (correct me if my paraphrasing is off Rob). That holds up in this case. As I’m writing these, even as just prose journal entries, I have thought about how I might write them up for Dungeon World. Jesse and I talked about possibly hiring or recruiting “experts” to write up the stats for other systems. I have to admit, I think a lot of my entries would be hard for some systems to deal with.
An example of this is a powerful item with numerous abilities. In a lot of games this kind of thing would be annoying. It would either be too “O.P” or the GM would have to negotiate the slow reveal of each power. In DW you can simply make a Compendium Class out of it. The player can unlock the awesome as they level up.
A lot of the items aren’t really easy to use. Unlike a lot of game systems where powers are sort of on, off, one-shot, or pay-as-you-go, I can build in iffy results and consequences with a few easy lines for DW.
