Play Report: Homebrew World Oneshot

The system is great. It contains all of the forward-thinking alterations to the PbtA system for which Jeremy is renowned in the community (which makes me excited to one day get a Stonetop game going again), as well as a bunch of smartly tuned moves to make short or oneshot play better. If you are running a HBW oneshot, here are my notes to myself for next time:

• Skim all of the character moves before the game, or at least skim the ones your players have picked before you start playing
• When each PC introduces their character, write down their drive. Ideally you can "tempt" each player with their drive at least once in the session
• I found XP to be on the low side, but that's mostly up to the dice. Consider options to reward XP in other ways if you feel like the XP is not flowing fast enough
• Do not print out the optional moves handout. Players will ignore the word "optional"

I ran this game with a group of four complete strangers at an event in my city. My time slot was somewhere between 3 and 4 hours long, including setup time.

For prepping any PbtA oneshot, Jeremy Strandberg has an incredible, comprehensive blog post all about it that I regard as required reading.

On the spectrum of whoops I didn't prep and oh god I'm drowning in prep, I definitely fall on the latter side. In fact I usually find that on the occasion where I don't have time to prep and have to improvise, I have a lot of fun with the unscripted hijinx; that is, in the context of a longer-running PbtA campaign.

So the question becomes: how does one prep for a oneshot, especially in a system so well known for its improvised play?

I ended up going for a mixture of styles I found in Perilous Deeps and 20 Dungeon Starters. I used the Castle Death starter from the latter, and heavily modified it. The main realisation I had was that as it was going to be a oneshot, there would be no room for repeat or boring rooms, things had to be quick and punchy, and I had to keep them moving; especially because this was a group of strangers and I had no idea how they'd play.

All of these pre-packaged starters came with setup questions, impressions, dangers, locations, and maybe some more. All of this is reasonable to me so far:

• setup questions give the players a say and stake in what's going on
• impressions don't tell you what's happening or why, but give you some extra spice for describing scenes
• dangers are the things they're up against. I don't need to say who or where they are, just put them on the board together and see what happens

Locations, however, were a bit tricky. Do I design a physical space for them ahead of time? Is there value to making it up on the spot, or somehow giving the players some control of what it is they see next? Wouldn't it be better to design something bespoke, to give the players the feeling they're actually discovering something?

Instead of taking you through all the options, and my journey through them, I'll just tell you what I did: I prepped a list of locations in the castle, in some cases paired with a description or impressions specific to that room, and took care to make them all punchy. What does that mean? Essentially, that each of these locations was in fact a soft move to set a scene, from which we could improvise completely. For example:

Rich and soiled furnishings, looted from the helpless in days gone by

I mean, don't get me wrong. It's evocative, it builds out the setting, and gives a menacing feeling to the space. But now what? With a table of sufficiently experienced players, they could take this as an opportunity to have a quiet space to mourn the many trampled over by whoever used to own this place, build some character, very nice. On the other hand, they may not say or do anything at all, and this room does not offer them anything. I think this makes a great impression, but it's not a guaranteed hook for an interesting scene.

An eerily still pool blocking your path, crumbling bones littering the shore

This is better. Obviously you can always make this kind of setup grabby by making the players face some immediate danger (see SUDDENLY OGRES), but you have a whole repertoire of GM moves that will also do the job. For setting a scene, my favourites are:

• announce trouble
• reveal an unwelcome truth
• put someone in a spot
• offer an opportunity

and not all of these entail starting a scene with a burst of violence or action!

So, by the end, my prep consisted of:

• Setup questions: to establish why the characters are there, what they plan to do, why must they hurry, and so on.

What do the locals claim to see on the battlements at night? Why do you (specifically) dread the answer?

• Impressions: prepared juicy details and sensory descriptions that I could sprinkle throughout

Crumbling ancient stonework with vine-cloaked walls, distant shrill laughter, and the stench of goblin

• Locations:

A wide-open courtyard, with a derelict fountain in the middle, lazily dripping a black ooze

• Key places: important locations that could serve as anchor points for the story

A Hidden sanctuary, in which you quickly feel rested and comfortable… a little too comfortable maybe…?

• Items: what's a dungeon crawl without loot?

The Codex of Wonders: a thick tome with a latching cover. If you use the codex to research a magical item, roll with INT: on a 10+, you figure out what it is, how it works, and any limitations or drawbacks; on a 7-9, you figure out only one of those, a way you could learn more; on a 6-, you misinterpret one of the them, in a potentially dangerous way. Mark XP only if you act on this misinformation.

• Dangers: monsters, traps, and the bosses

Black nettle that stings like crazy, growing all over the place.

The Bugbear: Leader, Large, Intelligent, Organized, Stealthy, Cautious, Hoarder. Damage: Morningstar 1d8+4 (close, forceful) HP 10, Armor 2

Now onto the day of the game. I met my players, and quickly learned that all but one were completely new to PbtA, and had mostly only played D&D before. Truthfully that made me a bit nervous, but I quickly went over the rules and character creation with them and they started making characters.

This is where my first note-to-self comes into play: players had questions about moves, about backgrounds, what terms meant. When it came to system-wide things like Defy Danger or Hack and Slash that was simple, but for their playbook-specific concepts and mechanics, it really slowed things down for me to take the sheet from them, skim it, potentially misinterpret, have to go back and read more closely, and so on. All to say, I wish I'd done some more playbook reading in advance.

As we went on into setup questions, I had some difficulty getting interesting answers out of the players. I could chalk this up to any number of things, but for now I think I am just going to need more practice at it, because I'd never used this strategy before. Nonetheless, I did get some good stuff!

What do the locals claim to see on the battlements at night? Why do you (specifically) dread the answer?

I've heard they've seen hulking creatures covered in fur, and especially during the full moon. I really hope it isn't werewolves… I've got a personal grudge with them for terrorizing my people.

At last we began playing. In one of my setup questions I asked a player what monsters they would have to sneak past in the swamps surrounding the castle, and I got giant, truck-sized frogs. Okay, pretty cool. The Ranger takes the lead on guiding them through the swamp, and rolls well: I kind of regret how I'd set up this section, with just one roll between them and leaving the frogs behind.

But worry not, our Thief comes to the rescue, deciding to Spout Lore about the frogs. Perfect. He rolls well, and seems interested in if some part of them is valuable.

Ah, yes, you've heard about these creatures before. They've got this little gland, the size of a baseball, tucked just behind their jugular. It is wildly valuable for the making of perfumes and colognes, and you even know a buyer back in town who would pay a pretty penny for it.

and from there, lightbulb for a great soft move.

The four of you have made your way through the swamp, following the twisting lines of solid ground and are finally approaching the castle. There clearly used to be an enormous outer wall here, but some great battle, or maybe just the frogs, has led to it falling apart into giant pieces. There's a section that's broken off and acts almost like a bridge over a mud-filled gully from your current location up onto the solid ground on which the castle stands.

Soundly asleep directly beneath your would-be bridge is a hulking beast of a frog. As you walk up the bridge and over the beast, you are struck by a pleasant smell, almost like tea with a hint of vanilla. If you look down, you can see a football-sized bulge with glands beside it, exhaling thin wispy vapours.

Just like that, we already have the PCs bickering about if the Thief can manage to literally slip a beast's throat out from under it. Can the Barbarian dangle him by his legs, maybe? Ultimately he is persuaded against it and we move on. I think this makes a strong case for why PbtA can be so fun: all the levers were in place for the Thief (pushed by his drive to do risky and dangerous things for coin) to poke at the world and for me to come up with interesting answers that invite the players to do fun exciting things.

There were a few moments throughout the session where I zoomed out like I did for their navigation of the swamp, but for some reason I've always struggled with running these macro-level moves. In fact, I reduced exploring most of the meat of the castle to one move, and I'm not that happy with how it turned out: I imagined something more interesting but the players just rolled a 10+ and I had nothing to do but give them the next scene.

Here's where another of my notes-to-self crops up, and it's specific to the game printouts. Especially with a table full of people new to the system, I wish I hadn't printed the optional moves handout. Not that I did it on purpose, the game smartly packages the PDF so that if you print double sided, they come on one sheet with the basic moves. That's clever, but also a problem, because I didn't intend to use them, and I didn't want to kill the momentum of play, so I just let them use them. This was ultimately fine, but I'd fully planned on not using those moves, and didn't think that players would just pick up anything in front of them and ostensibly say "I want to do that" (even if they did dress it up properly in the fiction).

Thanks for reading! I'll hopefully be able to run some more HBW oneshots and do little writeups like these to develop some of my ideas. Stay tuned!