Stonetop

Stonetop

I wonder...

A running list of open questions, things that you wonder about but:

• you don't know how to ansswer
• you want to leave unanswered for now and see it get answered through play

During prep use it to:

• identify the adventure's central opportunity or threat
• help write the setup questions that you'll ask the characters

During session use it to say something interesting. Can you say something that answers one of these questions? Or that hints at the answer? Can you turn one of these questions back on the characters, and ask them to give you the answers?

See GettingStarted.

Running Stonetop

Your agenda

GM goals:

• Portray a rich and mysterious world:
  • Mundane concerns — crops, trade, weather, the opinions of your neighbors — are important.
  • Fantastic elements are important, too, but they are strange and scary and poorly understood. The past sleeps unquietly. Questions abound.
• Punctuate the characters' lives with adventure: PCs have lives to live, homes to take care of, families to feed. They have demands on their time. Your job is to make that stuff matter, but also to interrupt it with threats and opportunities
• Play to find out what happens

Everything you do should support one of these goals. If it doesn't, than do something else.

Establish the situation

• Frame the action: establish who, when and where; PC/NPC, place and time
• Describe the environment: 3 strong impressions
  • Senses like smell, sound or sight
  • Emotions like grief or tension
  • Morality like dirty and desperate next to well-fed gentry
  • Focus on what matters
• Give details and specifics: it'll give the situation texture; what's happening, who is doing what, where is everyone relative to everyone else, what can you sense
• Ask questions, ask for input
  • Don't ask them to make up key details
  • Prompt them for a detail that fits a theme
  • Ask what they are feeling or experiencing or what they are doing or what they are thinking about
• Portray NPCs and monsters
  • NPCs: describe them, what they are doing, how thy are reacting, speak in their voice
  • Monsters: desribe them, their size, movement, sounds, smells, what they are focused on
• Answer questions, clarify: be honest and generous with truth and details; if the answer isn't clear to the PCs, tell them how they can find out

Make a soft GM move

It should either:

• Provoke action
  • Something bad is about to ahppen or in the process of happening, but PCs have a chance to react to it
  • Offer an opportunity or present options and prompt them to pick
  • In social scenes NPCs can say something vulnerable or emotional and look to a PC for a reaction
• Increase tension
  • Use up their stuff, foreshadow trouble or add trouble that can't be acted on right away

Your GM moves

Your GM moves should inspire and empower you; they shouldn't constrain you. Don't stress if your move isn't on the list.

• Announce trouble (future or offscreen)
  • Soft - provoke reaction, create worry or crank up the tension
  • Hard - turn a peaceful scene into a fight or conflict or make it clear that there will be strong consequences later
• Reveal an unwelcome truth
  • Soft - great for Know Things or Seek Insight, the answer is honest or interesting, but they don't have to be happy about it
  • Hard - let them know a bad thing is true; twist the screws
• Ask a provocative question
  • Soft - ask the player a question that spurs a decision or response
  • Hard - ask the player to author badness you asserted through the question
• Put someone in a spot
  • More aggressive Announcing trouble - do something now or it'll get ugly
• Use up their resources
  • Can be items, supplies, ammo, reputation, trust, loyalty, HP or similar
  • Make it together with other GM Moves
• Turn their move back on them
  • Hard - flip the Move on them
• Demonstrate a downside
  • Show the Move's limit or baggage or item's tag effect
• Hurt someone
  • More than losing HP: inflict a wound or problematic injury or debility based on tags, damage and fiction
  • Announce permanent, disabling injuries before inflicting them
• Separate them
  • Split the party by putting obstacles or foes between them
• Capture someone
  • Soft - capture, but give a chance to react
  • Hard - cut to them being bound, captured, dragged off
• Offer an opportunity (with or without a cost)
  • Give them an opening, a chance to act
• Tell them the consequences/requirements
  • Use as an interrupt, to clarify, to set the stakes or force meaningful a decision or give a path forward or to make them pay to take an action
• Advance towards impending doom
  • Show that a grim portent of a hazard or threat has come to pass

Your principles

• Follow the rules
• Begin and end with the fiction
• Address the characters, not the players
• Ask questions and build on the answers:
  • establish intent
  • clarify intent
  • clarify the fiction
  • ask the characters what they are thinking or feeling
  • ask about their past or their day to day lives
  • ask things they would know
  • about what they have heard or believe
  • ask questions that assert details while asking for input
  • ask the characters to paint the scene for you
• Be a fan of the player characters
• Embrace the fantastic and the mundane: if the focus is on the mundane, add a dash of the fantastic and vice-versa
• Exploit the setting guide
• Respect your prep
• Bring your characters to life
• Think offscreen, too
• Bring it home: make the village the foundation, let them make improvements and put down threats, show how the neighbours, far and near, react, during adventure ask questions about their lives in the village, talk about how they are greeted when they return and about their daily lives
• Let things breathe: avoid following the PCs day to day, hour to hour, allow straches of time to pass between adventures
• Let things burn: play to find out what happens, nothing is sacred, protect no one and nothing

Other things to do

• Takes notes: NPC names, historical notes, interesting details, summary of events
• Draw maps: and lots of them
• Leave blanks: leave blanks in your maps, wonder about things, leave questions unanswered
• Keep things moving: keep up the momentum, frame sceens agressively, skip ahead or make a GM move
• Involve everyone
• Take breaks
• Engage players in worldbuilding
• Sometimes, disclaim descision making: put the outcome in the PCs hands, discuss the outcome or let the dice decide

What not to do

• Plan a storyline or plot
• Tell them to roll before they tell you want they are doing
• Tell them to roll just because
• Stop making GM moves

GMing is a practice

Even if you are experienced running Dungeon World, you may need to unlearn certain habits.

Ask players for feedback:

• what did they enjoy?
• what felt rocky?
• what do you want to see more next session?

Ask for clarification if you need it, but don't get defensive and don't try to explain yourself.
Try to be humble and receptive.

After each session:

• Review your agenda:
  • Did the world feel flat, hollow, arbitrary?
  • Did you let things drag?
  • Did you force things down the path that you thought they should go?
  • What would pursuing my agenda have looked like? Do that next time!
• Review your principles:
  • Did you ever fail to follow them?
  • How did it impact the game?
  • What would following the principle have looked like instead? Do that next time!
• When were you stumped as to what to do next?
  • Where were you in the loop when you got stuck?
  • What could you have done differently?
  • What sort of prep might have helped? Prep more of that!
• Did you miss to trigger certain moves?
  • Did you miss any moves getting triggered?
  • Did you call for a player move, even though its trigger wasn't really met?

Prep

• To give you interesting stuff to say
• To speed up play, and not make everyone wait while you decide what happens
• To shore up your weaknesses; if you always forget about the PCs' followers, prep what they might do or say
• To hone your craft, make it more consistent or thematic, it flows better, it builds on stuff that came up earlier
• To give yourself permission to play hard and visit badness on the PCs
• Prep only as much as you find useful and valuable

Consider prepping:

• Threats: ongoing, recurring problems that cause trouble for the PCs, things that are going to get worse if left unchecked
• Hooks: when you want to push the PCs into the field with a threat or an opportunity
• Expeditions: prepare your choices for the Chart a Course move; drawing a map, prepping points of interest and roughly imagining a few encounters
• Locations: important place you expect the PCs to explore or encounter during a session. What's it like? How will you describe it? What questions will you ask about it? What's its story? Do you need a map or a visual aid? Are there dangers or discoveries within?
• Dangers: hazards and monsters and hostile NPCs
• Discoveries: puzzles, clues, mysteries, treasures, arcana
• NPCs: think about their names, the questions you'll ask about them, their defining traits, how you'll describe them and potray them

It doesn't go against playing to find out what happens.
You're prepping things that give you interesting stuff to say.
Prepping involves laying a groundwork to help you improvise.

See RunningStonetop.

Harm and Healing

Types of harm:

• damage to HP
• debilities
• problematic wounds
• death or lethal wound

HP definitely are not a measure of how injured or uninjured a character is.
They're a combination of fighting spirit, determination, pluck, luck, and skill; the ability to turn what should be a lethal blow into a graze.

Align it with the flow of fiction.
If you don't know what harm you want to inflict, let me damage roll inform you.
Messy and forceful tagged attacks are especially destructive.

See HarmAndHealing.

Goals

• Paint a picture of daily life: pictures of their home, mundane life, a home worth fighting for
• Explore relationships: push NPCs and their relationships into the spotlight
• Identify what's important to them:
• Push them into the field: don't let the village itself be a major source of conflict, at least not at first
• Establish details, but leave blanks: be asking questions like crazy
• Play up both the mundane and the mysterious: have a bit of both
• Draw them back home: encourage them to go home

See FirstAdventure.

Expeditions

Travel is an important. Don't gloss over it.
It is a chance to flesh out and explore the winder world and reinforce the relative safety of their Steading.

Running the journey

Break the journey up into:

• points of interest
• legs of travel

Legs of travel

Follow the steps:

• Frame the action: where they find themsleves, how long have they been travelling
• Describe the environment: give 3 impressions from different senses; things they see, hear, smell, or feel; the travel almanac has examples
• Ask questions: ask the characters questions about the terrain or what it's like to travel through it; suggest that they Keep Company
  • Questions are listed on the GM cheatsheet
• Portray NPCs: describe what they're up to, what they're talking about, how they're reacting to this leg of travel
• Add details, answer questions, clarify the situation: elaborate as much or as little as your player interest demands
• Make a soft GM move:
  • Present one of the challenges you listed when they Charted a Course
  • Present an encounter from your prep
  • Have an NPC or follower get into or start some trouble
  • Stir up conflict between the PCs
  • Offer them an opportunity to do something as they travel, or else to arrive at the next point of interest
  • Use your exploration moves
• Resolve their actions
• Repeat

Points of interest

Points of interest:

• a landmark that has not yet been seen in play (or that has changed since the PC's last visit)
• a specific place where you plan to frame a scene and make a GM move
• the journey's destination

Follow the steps:

• Frame the action: arrive at it or establish tension by having them observe it from a distance
• Describe the environment
  • What makes it distinct from the surrounding terrain?
  • What are its obvious, defining features?
  • Give 3 impressions from different senses; things they see, hear, smell, or feel; the travel almanac has examples
    • Any scene: light, visibility, space, anything constant and unignorable (wind, rain, heat, cold, sound of a stream, etc.).
    • Social scenes: the people present, details that reflect their physical or emotional state, their attitudes, the "feel" of the place.
    • Exploration scenes: footing, line of sight, likely paths, details that tell the place's story and reflect what has happened here.
    • Action scenes: dangers of course, but also footing, clearance, distance, obstacles, line of sight, relative positions, momentum, things to knock over/fall from/burn, etc.
• Ask questions
  • Questions are listed on the GM cheatsheet
• Portray NPCs: describe what they're up to, what they're talking about, how they're reacting
• Add details, answer questions, clarify the situation: elaborate as much or as little as your player interest demands
• Make a soft GM move
  • GM moves are listed on the GM cheatsheet.
  • If nothing else, offer them an opportunity.
  • Use your exploration moves.
• Resolve their actions
• Repeat

What to prep

1. Chart a Course: make your choices with tick boxes, so you can tick them as you present them
2. Draw a map
3. Identify points of interest:
   • any landmarks
   • any places where you plan to have a scene
   • the journey's destination
4. Identify legs of journey between points of interest
5. Make notes about each point of interest or leg of journey:
   • brief description
   • 2-3 impressions
   • questions you want to ask PCs
   • any challenges from the Chart a Course
   • any dangers or discoveries
6. Prepare up to seven possible encounters: dangers, discoveries, events for when the PCs miss a roll on 7-9
   • 1-3 sentences
   • tie into large story
   • for creatures include disposition or activity - what are they up to and how are they likely to react to the characters?
   • for any encounter, use it to show the characters the bigger picture

See Expeditions.

Keeping fights interesting

Fights should be interesting, dynamic and tense. Don't let it devolve to trading blows.

Make soft GM moves all the time: raise tension and provoke action.
Make your moves, especially monster moves, colorful, descriptive and specific.
Demand the same from your players.
Consider the momentum of the action and fictional positioning. Incorporate it into descriptions and actions.

Vary your GM moves: don't always hurt them or put them on the spot.
Respect the fiction of the attack.
Keep in mind what other foes are doing.
Keep the spotlight moving.
Give less-combat oriented characters opportunities to shine, discoveries, puzzles and fragile treasures.
Incorporate the environment: lighting, weather, visibility, fog of war.
Populate your battlefields with potential energy: things to knock over, high places to fall off, kindling to start a blaze.
Use active hazards too: blazing buildings, crumbling ceilings, ...
Recap and summarize the situation regurarly.
End fights earlier rather then later.

See Dangers.

Burden of leadership

Followers are useful, but they are also a source of stress and conflict.
Followers get scared, freeze up when surprised, flee from a terryfing foe or panic in the face of a supernatural horror.

Loyalty can be spent to overcome these limitations.
If Loyalty isn't spend, make the PC convience them or resist freezing up or panicing.

Followers won't do what they are told if:

• they’re angry, miserable, shocked, or otherwise overwhelmed
• the order is unreasonable, foolish, degrading, distasteful, etc.
• the order goes against the follower’s instinct, tags, cost, or other traits

Play up a follower’s instinct, tags, and traits as a source of trouble for the PCs.
Emphasizing a follower’s fear, foibles, and troublesome behaviors makes their Loyalty valuable.

See Dangers.