Fourth World Hack

Fourth World Hack

Fourth World Hack

So we ended up dropping The Veil of the campaign I had. A lot of player rotation and a few other things. It was a blast but our dynamic changed too much. Now we have a new group assembled and we settled on Fourth World, the hack of Dungeon World. (Action Movie World was a close second and will be an interlude game when the one player who doesn’t really feel it is absent) that I really like a lot of the changes too (like aiding, some of the depth and flavor) but also a lot is “out there” and I’m wondering if there’s any advice on how to treat players differently.

I’ve run dungeon world about 11 times and a lot more pbta sessions so that’s par for the course, but are there any good advice touchstones for, say, “naming art” or a different way to approach the story telling?

If it helps, the players are going for a low area type story or one that doesn’t have the world ending stakes. the anime “Konosuba” was a touchstone along stuff like Harvest Moon & and Spiderman Homecoming.

44 thoughts on “Fourth World Hack”

  3. I haven’t looked through Fourth World yet, but I assume it’s Earthdawn PbtA? That’s pretty cool, and an interesting detour after a cyberpunk game (even if it wasn’t technically Shadowrun). Can you expand on “naming art”?

  4. I haven’t looked through Fourth World yet, but I assume it’s Earthdawn PbtA? That’s pretty cool, and an interesting detour after a cyberpunk game (even if it wasn’t technically Shadowrun). Can you expand on “naming art”?

  5. Hannah Banks, I’m far enough into the 1.5 revision that your game may benefit from seeing a draft of it. It changes the tech around Passions to something with a bit more bite, similar to “icon influence” from 13th Age. It also takes a number of one-off rules (some summoned spirits, companion animals, mounts, hirelings, etc) and folds them into using a unified version of the followers rules from Perilous Wilds. Some other stuff as well (fewer moves per discipline, large changes to beastmaster, some move tinkering, such as my recent post about changing probability of the Aid move). Let me know if you are interested.

  6. Hannah Banks, I’m far enough into the 1.5 revision that your game may benefit from seeing a draft of it. It changes the tech around Passions to something with a bit more bite, similar to “icon influence” from 13th Age. It also takes a number of one-off rules (some summoned spirits, companion animals, mounts, hirelings, etc) and folds them into using a unified version of the followers rules from Perilous Wilds. Some other stuff as well (fewer moves per discipline, large changes to beastmaster, some move tinkering, such as my recent post about changing probability of the Aid move). Let me know if you are interested.

  9. I was a big Earthdawn fan back in the day. I bought the book the week it was released. I’ll have to give this a serious look. Thanks Lester Ward for making this. A mash up of two amazing things!!! Hurray!

  10. I was a big Earthdawn fan back in the day. I bought the book the week it was released. I’ll have to give this a serious look. Thanks Lester Ward for making this. A mash up of two amazing things!!! Hurray!

  15. Lester Ward I’m definitely interested in that and I know at least one of my players would love it too! It’s always amazing to see how many people are in this community

  16. Lester Ward I’m definitely interested in that and I know at least one of my players would love it too! It’s always amazing to see how many people are in this community

  19. Heya I’m in the Fourth World game mentioned above. Cheers, Lester, for making a supplement that surgically deals with all the small frustrations I have with the core system! Loved v1.3 when I ran it a while back, eager to play in 1.4 or 1.5.

    Glad to hear of 13th Age influences; that’s my favorite game personally to run.

  20. Heya I’m in the Fourth World game mentioned above. Cheers, Lester, for making a supplement that surgically deals with all the small frustrations I have with the core system! Loved v1.3 when I ran it a while back, eager to play in 1.4 or 1.5.

    Glad to hear of 13th Age influences; that’s my favorite game personally to run.

  23. OK, special links for those reading this thread. This is an in-progress draft of Fourth World 1.5. Note that, for space (and ease of editing), the main book no longer describes each discipline. That is now done only in the playbooks (which is where everyone read that stuff anyway). The changes to weaving/casting are very fresh (and may still be bleeding).

    https://thor.divnull.com/pub/aw/fourth-world-book.1.5.alpha.pdf

    https://thor.divnull.com/pub/aw/fourth-world-playbooks-1.5.alpha.pdf

  24. OK, special links for those reading this thread. This is an in-progress draft of Fourth World 1.5. Note that, for space (and ease of editing), the main book no longer describes each discipline. That is now done only in the playbooks (which is where everyone read that stuff anyway). The changes to weaving/casting are very fresh (and may still be bleeding).

    https://thor.divnull.com/pub/aw/fourth-world-book.1.5.alpha.pdf

    https://thor.divnull.com/pub/aw/fourth-world-playbooks-1.5.alpha.pdf

  27. Is there a changelog, Lester Ward?

    Also: and this is important to me specifically – if I were a Windling Beastmaster in 1.4, with a bee on a leash because you gave me:

    >Your companion spirit may gain the miniature tag. When

    choosing a species for your companion, include: bee,

    dragonfly, kue, spider.

    Then I’m now saddened in 1.5 because I get:

    >When you discern realities using a companion’s senses,

    you may use astral sight.

    And I gotta confess, I’d rather have the fiction of the little bug friendo than the huge boon of Astral Sight.

  28. Is there a changelog, Lester Ward?

    Also: and this is important to me specifically – if I were a Windling Beastmaster in 1.4, with a bee on a leash because you gave me:

    >Your companion spirit may gain the miniature tag. When

    choosing a species for your companion, include: bee,

    dragonfly, kue, spider.

    Then I’m now saddened in 1.5 because I get:

    >When you discern realities using a companion’s senses,

    you may use astral sight.

    And I gotta confess, I’d rather have the fiction of the little bug friendo than the huge boon of Astral Sight.

  31. Ant Wu, read the “Animal Companion” move and the chapter on followers. Absolutely nothing is stopping you (or any other beastmaster, regardless of species) from building a bee follower and bonding it it.

    The whole notion that only certain species could have certain types of companion animals was dumb needlessly restrictive, and got eliminated. You and your GM can figure out what kinds of companions you can use; you don’t need the rules to lock you into something.

    You can also bond to more than one companion now.

  32. Ant Wu, read the “Animal Companion” move and the chapter on followers. Absolutely nothing is stopping you (or any other beastmaster, regardless of species) from building a bee follower and bonding it it.

    The whole notion that only certain species could have certain types of companion animals was dumb needlessly restrictive, and got eliminated. You and your GM can figure out what kinds of companions you can use; you don’t need the rules to lock you into something.

    You can also bond to more than one companion now.

  35. Some comments from playing 1.5.

    In terms of goals at the front of the packet:

    ~

    – Change as little as possible so that other Dungeon World material

    can be used without much tinkering.

    – Integrate rules variations from some other sources directly into

    the playbooks.

    ~

    I don’t these two goals really make sense for players like me, because whenever the book references The Perilous Wilds, that makes it just a bit harder on me. Same with Mounted Combat. It means I juggle rules I’m not familiar with to get things working – while it may work better for your own homegame, I think 1.3 worked a lot better for the friendly neighborhood stranger. Haven’t tried 1.4.

    Also, changing the basic moves makes the game harder to play, too. I don’t mind the changes individually, but I question what they add, because mostly it just means a re-learning curve which didn’t exist in previous editions of your hack. If Fourth World were entirely self-contained and in-print, with all its rules consolidated, I’d be fine with this sort of “minutiae hack”. However, Fourth World is meant to be something layered on top of Dungeon World, and this makes it unclear where Fourth World starts and Dungeon World begins. I know you’ve got the changelog, but the changelog takes a while to replace my memory of Dungeon World’s moves.

    Honestly, 1.3 just worked more cleanly for me. With 1.5, I feel like I’m doing splatbook juggling in order to just get through a session. In reality, I’m blowing that sense up with my own personality quirks: I want to know all the options at my disposal, even if I don’t necessarily use them. I didn’t actually use Perilous Wilds to build my own follower for example, but I felt uneasy using Sample Animals without reading it, because it references pages from that booklet for guidance.

    Playing as beastmaster also just requires a bit more flipping than before without the animals on the playbook. The ‘ease’ of the former beastmaster may be a marginal loss – flipping pages is obviously not exhaustive. But little extra steps add up.

    Passion expansion is a neat idea, but in practice (for us at least) we found it tricky to incorporate, because it isn’t just 13th Age Icons, it’s a mix of abstract ideas and avatars of Passion and also Passions can have delayed effects which somewhat feel shoe-horned in until you sort of get a sense of them. We still enjoyed them in terms of EXP generation.

    In summary…it’s a lot added, basically. At minimum, I feel like there should be a change in your “goals” at the front of the 1.5 edition, cuz I think those goalposts have moved a bit.

    From around 9 hours of play so far (and more than that spent reading the system), 1.5 feels like a game which on the verge of being standalone, but it isn’t yet, which mandates this cross-referencing. It feels like playtesting rules for a new edition of D&D rather than playing a game for its own sake.

    1.3 felt 90% like a class hack to Dungeon World, with aspects of magic added. It was something I was a lot more comfy with, I confess.

  36. Some comments from playing 1.5.

    In terms of goals at the front of the packet:

    ~

    – Change as little as possible so that other Dungeon World material

    can be used without much tinkering.

    – Integrate rules variations from some other sources directly into

    the playbooks.

    ~

    I don’t these two goals really make sense for players like me, because whenever the book references The Perilous Wilds, that makes it just a bit harder on me. Same with Mounted Combat. It means I juggle rules I’m not familiar with to get things working – while it may work better for your own homegame, I think 1.3 worked a lot better for the friendly neighborhood stranger. Haven’t tried 1.4.

    Also, changing the basic moves makes the game harder to play, too. I don’t mind the changes individually, but I question what they add, because mostly it just means a re-learning curve which didn’t exist in previous editions of your hack. If Fourth World were entirely self-contained and in-print, with all its rules consolidated, I’d be fine with this sort of “minutiae hack”. However, Fourth World is meant to be something layered on top of Dungeon World, and this makes it unclear where Fourth World starts and Dungeon World begins. I know you’ve got the changelog, but the changelog takes a while to replace my memory of Dungeon World’s moves.

    Honestly, 1.3 just worked more cleanly for me. With 1.5, I feel like I’m doing splatbook juggling in order to just get through a session. In reality, I’m blowing that sense up with my own personality quirks: I want to know all the options at my disposal, even if I don’t necessarily use them. I didn’t actually use Perilous Wilds to build my own follower for example, but I felt uneasy using Sample Animals without reading it, because it references pages from that booklet for guidance.

    Playing as beastmaster also just requires a bit more flipping than before without the animals on the playbook. The ‘ease’ of the former beastmaster may be a marginal loss – flipping pages is obviously not exhaustive. But little extra steps add up.

    Passion expansion is a neat idea, but in practice (for us at least) we found it tricky to incorporate, because it isn’t just 13th Age Icons, it’s a mix of abstract ideas and avatars of Passion and also Passions can have delayed effects which somewhat feel shoe-horned in until you sort of get a sense of them. We still enjoyed them in terms of EXP generation.

    In summary…it’s a lot added, basically. At minimum, I feel like there should be a change in your “goals” at the front of the 1.5 edition, cuz I think those goalposts have moved a bit.

    From around 9 hours of play so far (and more than that spent reading the system), 1.5 feels like a game which on the verge of being standalone, but it isn’t yet, which mandates this cross-referencing. It feels like playtesting rules for a new edition of D&D rather than playing a game for its own sake.

    1.3 felt 90% like a class hack to Dungeon World, with aspects of magic added. It was something I was a lot more comfy with, I confess.

  37. When I released 1.4, I mentioned future iterations would assume Perilous Wilds but cautioned “once going down that path, the whole thing might just be better served by a PbtA hack more customized to Earthdawn”. Sounds like that instinct was correct. I’ll definitely change the goals section, at least.

    Fortunately, 1.3 is still around, if you’d rather play that one.

  38. When I released 1.4, I mentioned future iterations would assume Perilous Wilds but cautioned “once going down that path, the whole thing might just be better served by a PbtA hack more customized to Earthdawn”. Sounds like that instinct was correct. I’ll definitely change the goals section, at least.

    Fortunately, 1.3 is still around, if you’d rather play that one.

  43. Version 1.4 was released a year or so ago, with a more recent re-layout (link below). I’m in no particular hurry with 1.5. (Even less so at present, as I’m in a Greek taverna.)

    I need to complete some sections, still, but nothing hugely critical. I may add a conversion of another adventure, because it’s burning a hole in my brain and would highlight some of the cool things about magic items.

    I also want to build some different styles of sheets, rendered automatically with code. (If you search my blog, you can see I’ve done such things before. It is not difficult.)

    I’d think by the end of the summer, but make no promises.divnull.com – Fourth World 1.4 relayout | DivNull Productions

  44. Version 1.4 was released a year or so ago, with a more recent re-layout (link below). I’m in no particular hurry with 1.5. (Even less so at present, as I’m in a Greek taverna.)

    I need to complete some sections, still, but nothing hugely critical. I may add a conversion of another adventure, because it’s burning a hole in my brain and would highlight some of the cool things about magic items.

    I also want to build some different styles of sheets, rendered automatically with code. (If you search my blog, you can see I’ve done such things before. It is not difficult.)

    I’d think by the end of the summer, but make no promises.divnull.com – Fourth World 1.4 relayout | DivNull Productions

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