Monday, April 15, 2013

Dungeon World

We had our second session of Dungeon World last night, and holy crap, I am the best rogue.  Well, technically thief, but I didn't really steal anything so much as I killed everybody in my path and looted the occasional corpse.  Found some filthy coins in a supper-pot, though.  Also, this game is fucking amazing.  Last session I was a little disappointed that I never got to backstab anybody, but oh ho ho, did we make up for that this time.  I am pretty sure my halfling thief, Mouse, killed more goblins than anybody else in the party.  Mostly by sneaking the fuck out and stabbing them all in the back.  Or by throwing knives into their backs.  Whatever.  It was an awesome session, is my point.

At least twice as awesome as this gif.

Early on, we stumbled across a room with four sleeping goblins.  We spent most of our first session in this same cave, and we've already had goblins noticing us and ambushing us with their other goblin friends, so we didn't really want that to happen again.  So the group discussed what we should do, and in the end, I chose the most logical option for a halfling with questionable morals but a stern sense of self-preservation: Mouse quietly picked the lock and walked into the room, grabbed a pillow from an empty sleeping roll, and held it down firmly over the first goblin's face as she slit his throat.  Dungeon World being the delightful game that it is, the DM decided I didn't even need to roll for it, the goblin being sound asleep and completely unable to defend himself.  He did suggest that Mouse's alignment might end up changing from Neutral to Evil due to this, but in my defense, Neutral for a thief just means avoiding detection or infiltrating a location, and I completely succeeded at infiltrating that room and evading detection from the sleeping, soon-to-be-dead goblins.  Evil is shifting blame from myself onto someone else, and no way am I letting anybody else take credit for my amazing skills at murdering sleeping people.  I considered killing them all like that, but I figured it would be mean to steal the fun from my party mates, so I invited them to get in on the action.  That didn't work out so well, in that the shapeshifting druid Nils was less-than-stealthy and woke up the other goblins when he fell and knocked over the cooking pot, but it did lead into a very fun fight that gave me some more opportunities for stealth-murder, and other kinds of murder.

At one point a goblin escaped the room and ran out, presumably to alert the other goblins of our presence.  So Mouse chased him and threw a dagger at his back.  Unfortunately for Mouse, this goblin was quite a bit quicker than the others we'd faced so far, and he actually dodged the knife, caught it as it whizzed by him, and spun around to throw it back at her.  Unfortunately for the goblin, this started a game of Knife Pong.  Mouse ducked to the side as she saw the knife come at her, grabbed it from mid-air as it went past her head, and threw it back at the hapless goblin.  He was not good at Knife Pong, and that was the end of him.  Just as Mouse was retrieving her dagger from his corpse, though, there was a racket from the sleeping-room behind her where her teammates were.  Apparently, some more goblins came charging in through another entrance, and there was more fighting.  Since they hadn't seen her, Mouse ran the long way around so she could come up behind them and backstab the fuck outta those dicks.  Thanks to some truly delightful rolls, she moved like lightning, killing the first goblin in one stab before he even realized she was there, then charging down the hallway to the next goblin, also in the dark as to her murderous rampage, and stabbed him through the throat, spraying his blood all over one of her companions in the process.  Backstabbing is awesome.

Of course, that's really nothing compared to the end of the game.  Just before we finished up the session, we had to track down one goblin who got away.  We could hear him hollering at the end of the path, and again, we wanted to avoid an ambush from him and his friends, so Nils and Mouse decided to sneak after him, by Nils going ahead transformed into a rat and Mouse following behind, so she could hear him tell her what was up ahead.  Nils had taught Mouse how to talk to animals when they first met, so she could understand him when he was transformed.  Anyway, the plan had been, sneak up, decide a plan after we found out what was up ahead.  Unfortunately, Nils rolled a one when he transformed, so the DM decided that instead of successfully becoming a tiny, sneaky rat, he turned out to be quite a bit larger than intended.  You might even call him a Rodent Of Unusual Size.


As you might guess, this quickly became silly and hilarious and, yes, amazing.  Nils and Mouse went down the cave-path, and saw the single goblin hammering at a large wooden door and screaming.  We had been distracted by some very interesting beetles for a while, so he'd been there shouting for about five minutes and it was clear there wasn't anybody nearby to hear him.  Initially I had thought that since he's distracted, Mouse will just walk up behind him and backstab him.  She does so love backstabbing, after all.  Nils, however, had other ideas.  Better ideas.  So we went with those.

Imagine yourself in the place of this poor goblin: you had just been beaten to a pulp by a druid who was, at the time, large bear.  The bear was accompanied by a paladin in shining white scale armor with a large, nasty, painful-looking halberd, and an unimpressive halfling who killed half of your little goblin friends before you even realized she was there.  You decide that nope, you've kinda had enough of this crap, you want out of here already.  So you take off running down the hall until you find yourself at a locked door, but no matter how loud you yell or how hard you pound the door does not open and you are all alone.  Suddenly, you hear screaming behind you, and you spin around to see the last thing you will ever look at: the halfling from before, brandishing a short sword and howling a battle-cry while riding the largest, meanest-looking rat you've ever seen.  You don't try to defend yourself; you simply stare, hopeless, knowing that your death is imminent as the giant rat leaps and lands on you, crushing you beneath its weight and putting you out of your fear and misery for good before chewing your face off.  This is not the best day for you.

Daaang, that was a really good session.  I can hardly wait until next week.

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