Author: Fraser Simons

We just finished the 1st session of Jason Cordova’s Dungeon World Sunday – Children of the Eight-Legged She. Oh my word was it ever fun. It’s been a while since I’ve posted about how much I’ve enjoyed sessions with The Gauntlet and the players here, as well as anything about a character I’ve played. Thought I’d do that again now as I’ve still got that “great session high” thing going on.

Gerrit Reininghaus David LaFreniere and steven watkins play a Psion, a Mage, and a Fighter, respectively. And it as if we have been playing for some time even on the first session. Jason does an amazing job preparing an overall concept tethered to a mission. At the same time a lot of it is left up to the players to define and we have a ton of creative license with it, encouraged by Jason’s questions posed to us. It’s sooo dang fun and satisfying.

I’m playing Weary, a thief. I have practically no background knowledge of fantasy and DnD which, I thought would be quite challenging but it hasn’t really ever hampered me. I’m drawing on things like Assassin’s Creed and Dan Brown novels to make an ongoing conspiracy regarding a Shadow Court. This institution is a sort of inverse of the nebulous “good” institutions we haven’t fleshed out all that much.

Instead I’ve been focusing on the idea of the influence over someone’s persona and mind through the use of indoctrination emphasizing this notion that emotion is bad and that Weary is best served alone and emotionless, cold and distant. Which nicely counters Gerrit’s Psion, Arcon, continually probing and learning more about the characters. When he’s delved into Weary’s mind I’ve been able to make up some really cool ideas I’m into, his training in the Shadow Court and the idea of mental barriers and what they might look like.

Weary is also hunted by special sort of inquisitors or templars from the church as we saw in the last series, it was terrifying haha. Jason does a fantastic job picking up what all the players drop in a session and interweaving them into the sessions to come while also always moving forward to a super satisfying conclusion to a series.

I’m having an amazing time playing on Sunday mornings with everyone and look forward to more of everyone’s characters. David’s Mage is the most unique and cool magical character I’ve encountered. The psion is always contextualizing emotion and exploring deeper themes while being intense as fuck, and Steve’s new Fighter character has a very interesting set of ideas. As they are a halfling leaning into these conceptions of overcoming people’s perception of their ability to do certain things and be competent, strong, etc. I think leaning into that will make for some very cool fiction.

Just look at these evocative images from the google board we have going for these sessions, so freaking cool. Thanks everyone!! And hopefully no one minds me posting the board, as well. If so, just let me know and I can remove it, of course!

Just played an excellent session of Psi*Run. I am sooo into this emergent mystery action going down. Meet Logan, she’s scared 20 year old on the run from the chasers. She controls gravity and, so far we know that she wasn’t born with these powers. She had a flashback where she was in a room that looked like a cyberpunk operating theater! They were experimenting on her when she screamed and her distress caused her powers to trigger — a man imploded. Then the orderly got really mad and smashed her Iphone. Seems to suggest this sort of thing happens when you give young adults powers?

We all awoke in a van belted into bucket seats and quickly learned we were being pursued as we entered the Gauntlet City Cordova mall, which was being torn down. We found out one of us was bugged. We ran for a subway and as some clearly evil people tried to catch up, Logan used her powers to slow them down long enough to escape. We grabbed coffee (2 pump carmel venti tazo chai actually for myself) and our wits and made our way to an abandoned condo. There we discovered the rest of us were bugged too…ennnnd scene.

I played with mostly new people and don’t think I have them to tag on here but the game was run wonderfully by the ever masterful Richard Rogers. If the other players see this maybe they’ll post about their characters and the other cool shit that went down specific to them, I thought it’d be fun to keep it open!