Hey everyone!

Hey everyone!

Hey everyone! I’m looking for people who might be interested in beta-testing my *world hack, Adventure World! Here’s the pitch:

Adventure World is a game about stories. You know the ones. Heroes and villains, destinies and dooms, true love and dire battles—there are certain themes universal to our legends, and these themes become the common ground between the world of myth and our own lives.

Adventure World offers a look at fantasy role-playing through the lens of telling your own stories in the veign of our favorite adventures. While it is nominally a “fantasy” game, it is setting neutral and can be used for stories in the middle ages, the golden age of piracy, the distant future, or whatever else you may dream of – the thread that ties it all together is the sense of mystery and wonder that permeates our favorite stories.

The “beta package” includes five out of ten of the eventual playbooks (called “Archetypes”). Here are some of the things that feel novel to me within *world hacks:

A system that puts the creation of what would be fronts in other games on the players, known as Threads. The players are given tools to explicitely state the direction that they will be taking the story in, leaving the GM (the “Narrator”) to make sure that things move towards that in some form. The most dramatic example of this is The Sage, whose main class feature is that they describe some great Doom or Apocalypse that is on the horizon, that then becomes central to the plot of the game.

Some tweaks on Hx and aiding, called Trust/Stand Together, which serves to convey the idea of a group of disparate individuals slowly coming to terms with their differences, and also heavily rewards/encourages people to come to the rescue of one another.

A set of cards, dealt out randomly to the players and kept secret, known as Triumphs, that create those Crowning Moments of Awesome that we know from our stories, and serves to create a natural narrative of struggle into triumph.

A slightly fiddly but also elegant and intuitive way of handling both an encumbrance mechanic and an attrition mechanic.

and more!

Are you interested? Want to run a game or maybe just read it and absorb it for your own ideas? Drop a comment below, and I’ll share a link to anyone who’d like a look.

54 thoughts on “Hey everyone!”

  3. Sean Smith I’ve got one more year of school before I can start thinking about as big of a time investment as that, but a kickstarter for a physical edition is definitely something that’s been in the back of my mind.

  4. I’d be interested in having a look. From the sounds of it, comparisons to Dungeon World are probably inevitable. Is the focus on narrative structure the key differentiating feature? 

  6. I was just noodling around trying to build an “Adventure World” with Joe Mcdaldno’s Simple World for my 5 yr old. I would love to see what you have put together.

  7. Marc Isaacs from the sound of it, the major difference is that DW and all its base moves are built around sword and sorcery and dungeon delving… It can do other things, but the tools are for that specific job. This seems to have all its widgets and gadgets aimed at Harry Potter, Eragon, Stardust, Star Wars, and similar heroic journey mythos.

  9. The pitch doesn’t really do it for me. One of the things i like most about world games is that they care about the life of the characters and not about their story. What comes out of that is most likely a really cool story but gameplay itself doesn’t care about the story or story tropes in any sense. 

  11. Tim Franzke that’s true, but step back and think about that — what makes AW, M<3s, and DW gel so well is that we mechanize the tropes to make then work for the fiction. That's how we get the stories that fit the genres, so well. If the books and their moves power these tropes, I don't see it being any different that a Fighter smashing bridges because that’s what they do or a thief backstabbing because that’s what they do.

  12. Marc Isaacs Of course the comparisons could be drawn. I do owe my introduction to the system to DW, but Alfred Rudzki has it right. DW has its roots in a long legacy of D&D and the things it has inspired. Adventure World, by contrast, looks to the narrative tropes of Tolkein, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and other such stories as its guiding element. The result is completely distinct games. It’s like if I made a *world Gamma World game, it would be very, very different from Apocalypse World.

  13. Tim Franzke I can totally see that! I’ve met a number of people for whom Dungeon World is a much better fit for their fantasy role-playing needs. This game came about because I’ve seen a number of good stories come out of my old role-playing experiences, but I’ve never (before playing this game) experienced the sensation of being inside and in control of something that resembled my favorite stories.

  14. (I am actually moving away from Dungeon World so that is not the point for me)

    I am also in no way saying your game is bad or anything, just that it doesn’t grab me instantly. 

  15. I would like to have a look, sounds interesting to me. Where can we get the materials? I could as well set up a game with my group tonight or tomorrow.

  24. I won’t get time to playtest this most likely. I can give a critical readthrough and dumb a bunch of feedback on you though if you want me to. 

  37. I am clearly interested. Even though my players are very narrative in active gameplay, the care very little about the development of their Characters. We might be able to test this in the next weeks

  47. I’m interested too. I moved away from DW (game balance was not right for my group), but I’ve been running an AW campaign for almost a year now and will run a short Traveller World mini-series in august. I’d be curious to compare your take on the system with the others.

  52. Kevin Tompos, thiago flores, and MisterTia86, sorry that some of you got a very delayed response, but I’ve been kept oppressively busy for the past months. The current semi-public version of Adventure World can be found at https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B44pJYUVgNfYX05hektWZ0cxWkU&authuser=0 , but if you’re willing to wait for a few days to a week, I should hopefully find the time to show people a new version that (I think) smooths out a lot of the problems I’ve been running into in playtesting.

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