/tg/ - Traditional Games

DUNGEON WORLD

#!0AsFxYzC!NcF1q8FgRg4oxkSKi_-OEa9n9hM4ViMAWliyqS60Occ

This one has been sitting on my shelf for a number of years. I bought it years ago at a Con because I'd heard stuff here and there about how it was such an awesome game. Didn't hear anything about the fact that it was just a homebrew of Apocalypse World, which I didn't hear nearly as many people talking about. Years later, there's ton of "Powered by the Apocalypse" games out there, and still no one gives a fuck about Apocalypse World. Instead, they care about all the awful games made from the framework of that game.

The book itself is painfully unimpressive. It's a 9 x 6 softcover printed in plain black and white, single column pages that have some additional little notes in the margins. Art is sparse and a lot of it isn't all that impressive. The cover by Nate Marcel doesn't actually do the full image any justice, because it's cropped down so badly and hides the cooler details from the full image. The cover sets up your expectations a little higher than they should be, also. It makes the titular "Dungeon World" seem exciting and interesting. It conjured ideas of a whole world that was one huge dungeon. That's not what it is, of course.

Since I'm still getting back into the swing of things, and since this book doesn't have a whole lot worth covering on a page-by-page basis, I'm going to attempt to hit the broad topics as I go through this book again.

>>411315

My copy of the book is also a first edition, but it was printed in June of 2013, instead of November of 2012 like the PDF, but I don't think there's any significant changes. I'm just going to be going off the PDF anyways, because I don't think any later editions or reprints could really change this system up in a meaningful way.

Table of contents is on page 5. Onlything noteworthy is that they put little symbols next to the classes for some reason. I don't think this is ever explained. First art is on the next page, and then it goes right into explaining the general idea of the game followed by the classes. It's all kinda generic fantasy prose, about bold adventures and nasty monsters.

The class descriptions are pretty generic too. The bard sings songs. The druid does nature stuff. The Fighter has a pointy bit of metal. The rogue is called 'The Thief'. There is no Monk. Wizards cast spells. Etc.

Page 12 has our first instance of the margin notes. They mostly use these for quotes from movies or other nerd shit. The only way I can really describe it is that it's reddit-y. Also worth noting that some of these pages just have an obnoxious amount of white space. Page 13 is a single paragraph, for instance. Rest of chapter 1 closes out with some of the usual shit about playing RPGs: Get some dice, some character sheets, GM narrates, players react and make decisions for their characters, they roll dice when stuff gets challenging, stories happen, characters level up, etc.

Chapter 2 on page 17 describes playing Dungeon World as a conversation, because there aren't strict rounds or turns like other games and the rules exist to help the narrative. I feel like this is the first warning sign for later problems with this book. Dungeon World is really infatuated with its own lingo, even though a lot of it isn't that groundbreaking, unless you're completely inexperienced with RPGs.

Thankfully, it jumps straight into the rules on the same page. DW uses the same basic 6 attributes as D&D, Str, Con, Dex, Int, Wis, and Cha. They are rated from 3 to 18, with 18 being the max, and the modifiers range from -3 to +3.

The next page gets into the specific quirk that seems to make Dungeon World and PBTA games so popular these days: "Moves"

A "Move" is essentially a small, self contained mechanic that comes up in when triggered by certain actions, conditions, or when the description of a character's action fits the mold.

All moves kind of work the same way, with few exceptions.

>Meet the condition to trigger it

>Roll 2d6 + [Attribute Mod]

>>Result of 1 to 6 is a failure, usually with a negative effect or two, but you get 1XP for your trouble

>>Result of 7-9 means the action succeeds, but sometimes with a minor drawback or difficult choice to make

>>Result of 10+ is a total success, usually with added benefits or the option to improve the actions

This is the core of the PBTA/World RPG mechanics. Games that use this rule framework tend to get a lot of praise because of the 7-9 rules, where things happen and sometimes they're kinda bad or force things to happen that are potentially more interesting than a simple Pass-Fail mechanic.

This next chunk is mostly frontloaded mechanics, which I've gotta say is pretty nice. They fucked around for a couple pages, but then dove right into the actual rules of the game.

HP and damage rules aren't anything special. Take damage and it comes out of your HP. Some armor and abilities reduce incoming damage, unless an attack has an "Ignores Armor" tag. There is no AC or defense, by the way.

Page 26 talks about Death, which is what happens when a character hits 0 HP, not negatives (there is no negative HP in DW) and it does something that bothers me about this whole book. There is no setting for Dungeon World, beyond generic fantasy. It's meant to be something you piece together, yet numerous instances in this book and in the classes themselves, all have a bad habit of implying certain things about the way things work. It's not a huge issue, but it still schisms my 'tism.

Page 28 has "Debilities" which are negative status effects, each one based on one of the 6 attributes, which give a -1 and some narrative effect, like being Sick giving a -1 on Con.

Page 29 briefly covers magic and spells. Mostly, it's just the Wizard and Cleric who get spells, and in both cases, casting a spell is a Move. 10+ it is cast. 7-9, cast, but they give you some options where you might lose that spell for a while, 1-6, no cast.

Page 30 covers leveling up. Yet again, they use a lot of excessive language about leveling up and changing your character being both Prescriptive and Descriptive, which is a fancy way of saying that your character learning things and gaining stuff is nice to include as part of the story. Also, obnoxiously slipped into the margin, it mentions that Leveling Up is a Move. A lot of this section is just clarifying things that might be confusing, like gaining a new Class move that replaces an existing one that you must have.

Oh yeah, and if you hit level 10 your character has to retire, take on a new apprentice (who becomes the character you play), or change to a new class, losing some, if not most of your previous Class's moves.

This is taking longer than intended. Lemme just blow through these next few pages.

Bonds, pg 33

>little blurbs that establish relationships between PCs. Bonds can be resolved at the end of sessions if both players agree, then you get some XP.

>When you resolve a bond, you are expected to write in a new one for a different character

This sounds really nice on paper, but most times I've listened to play sessions for DW, it never works smoothly and is often ignored.

Alignment, pg 34

>Good, Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic, Evil

>Describes a character's moral compass or way of thinking

It's not explained here, but characters who live up to their alignment or take certain actions during a session, get XP for doing so.

Hirelings, pg 36

>Hired goons that are mostly just good for a few specific tasks, defined by Skill(s), Cost, and Loyalty

>Skills are little things the hireling can do, like aiding on spell casting, or granting a bonus while disabling traps

>Cost is the thing the Hireling requires to ensure their service, but it's not always money.

>Loyalty is an attribute for a special move that triggers when you command a Hireling to do something dangerous or stupid. Roll + Rolyalty

Page 40 to 43 goes over "The Adventurer's Life", which covers Dungeons, Monsters, Wilderness, Friends and Enemies, and the World. These chunks seem to be there just to sort of set the mood and put certain ideas in your head. There's lots of little reminders about stuff like how Dungeons can be any place full of danger and treasure, or that you can use certain moves to learn about monsters.

44 to 47 is examples of play. Not wasting time on that.

Page 49 is the rules for character creation, which come off as largely redundant, because each class is kind of it's own self contained character creation guide. Also we've got some art again, and it's.. Well, it's not great. A lot of the art in this book seems to be by this guy and it's just not good.

So you pick a class, each class has a few races attached to it, then you pick a name, some appearance details (also attached to the classes), then you set your attributes. They suggest a standard array of 16, 15, 13, 12, 9, and 8. There are no rules listed for determining stats in a different way.

Determining modifiers is done by consulting a table which doesn't seem to use D&D usual modifier formula at all. If you didn't notice by now, a lot of this system is "take D&D's rules and just make them a little dumber"

Then you determine your HP (class Base + Con score). Choose some starting moves from your class. Choose an alignment, also class-based. Choose gear. Class based, of course. Introduce your character to the party, then choose bonds so you can determine who hates or adores who. The bonds are also determined by your class.

And now we're onto the basic moves chapter.

Chapter 4, page 56. I empathize with the dwarf, who appears to be stuck with a couple of jackasses and wants to drink himself into a coma.

Basic Moves are the universal actions that all player characters have access to. The GM and his monsters will use a different set of moves, so this isn't meant to be something where you're allowed to call the GM on how stuff is supposed to play out.

Each of the basic moves comes with a short explanation, followed by an extended breakdown of how this work, and then an example of play. I could have sworn they had a page of all the moves summarized, but it turns out they put that in a separate document available for free on their website. Brilliant.

Most of these aren't worth talking about. Hack and Slash is pretty much just "you hit, you hit, but you also get hit back, or you don't hit", which is fine. Defy danger just replaces the usual skill list in D&D clones with a broad categorization of "danger". However, here are a few that stand out as some of the things that I think largely contribute to the appeal of DW.

Discern Realities is probably the first move I read that made me say, "oh, that's actually pretty neat." because instead of just being you do something or you kind of fuck up, it gives you a list of questions to ask the GM. A 10+ gives you 3 questions, a 7-9 gives you 1, and in either case, you get +1 when acting on the answers you're given.

There's a few class moves like this, which give you a more flexible approach with some choices to pick between, and it's the thing that makes DW's rules lite gradated resolution mechanic seem so neat to players.

Starting on p74, they have the special moves, which are still things that everyone can do, but they come up much more rarely. The first on the list is "Last Breath" which is what happens when your character is dying and trying to cheat Death. Some of them, like Encumbrance and Make Camp aren't actually Moves that make you roll dice, though. This mostly just makes them feel like a flimsy attempt to keep all actions boxed up in the framework of Moves.

It's not an entirely bad idea, though, as some of them act as checklists to make sure things are happening appropriately, like the End of Session and Level Up specail moves.

And now we're onto the classes. There's not a ton of shit to say about each class, but I did want to talk about my complaints here. I'm also going to attach the "play sheets" PDF from their website here, because it condenses most of the rules and the core classes into a couple sheets each.

Part of what makes DW popular, as far as I can tell, is the fact that some of the bulkier aspects of D&D and similar games can be condensed down to a couple sheets that do all the work for you, contain all the powers, spells, and traits into a small paragraphs and checkboxes. Then people took those things and condensed them into Playbook character sheets makes it even more inviting. It lays out everything very clean and neat. It's very toy-like, in my opinion. Almost like you're assembling a little model kit.

There's also the nature of some of the class moves, which try to create this feeling that there are things for your character to do and things that they are supposed to be doing. For someone new, younger, or overwhelmed by other games, this handholding would look pretty inviting.

The problem is that a lot of it is very shallow and some of it puts a lot of responsibility on the GM to come up with shit on the fly to satiate every minor move that comes up when a player talks to someone or walks into a room.

Stuff like the "Look" of your character is kind of pointless. It does nothing, so you can just ignore it and replace it with something else, I suppose, but it's silly that they went out of their way to add this section in on every character while making it meaningless.

Relating back to an earlier point about DW not having a setting, but still heavily implying things about the way the setting should work, every class only has 2 o 3 races to pick from. This could potentially be seen as a call back to D&D, when there were racial restrictions, but DW is not an OSR game, even though most of it is built off dumbing down D&D.

Also, I hate the Bonds system. Too many of them have a bad way of implying other characters are a bigger deal than they should be. Level 1 adventurers are small time. Conceptually, they should be newbies. Not people who have songs written about them or people who have countless adventures already under their belt where they have risked life and limb for each other. That's the sort of thing that should be played out in the game, instead of implied with a boring mechanic that's so inconsequential that it could be removed without any impact on the rest of the game.

Forgot to link the Playsheets PDF. Was too large to post: #!dBclhS6I!2T7ZILIWLyl_tVK5kFJYUSgjDOmq-Olpf1Eo2HJhPaE

Probably wouldn't be taken down either way, since it's available for free, but better safe than sorry.

There's not a whole lot else to say about the classes. There's enough moves to pick from that two players picking the same class could have different characters. The spell lists aren't nearly as exhaustive or page consuming as D&D, which is a bonus, I guess. Every class also has the option to pick a Move or two from another class, which is a nice touch, since cross-classing is not possible otherwise. Unless you count hitting level 10 and starting over.

Page 158 starts Chapter 13, the GMing chapter. The art for this one is actually pretty good, especially compared to the less than great art put before each Class chapter.

This is going to be a weird section to cover because there's some good advice in here, but also a lot of attempts to jazz up things with unnecessary terminology, and considering how much new lingo they are already trying to drop on players, it's not really helpful to add even more to the lexicon for this game.

Page 159 lays out that DW is largely for standard fantasy, with elves, dragons, magic, and such, then goes into explaining that it's the GM's job to be the Master of the Game. To do this, they say the GM has Agenda, Principles, and Moves. It then jumps back to further explain that it's the GM's job to prepare stuff, describe the scene, give details to hook the player's attention, and then make moves that will direct the action and make stuff happen.

The Agenda section is a full page to describe that the GM should try to make the game fun and interesting.

Principles are a series of concepts that are supposed to make the game more fun and interesting, like making things magical, asking the players questions and using their answers as part of the game, and maybe the only one that really stood out to me: Draw maps, leave blanks.

Moves, for the GM, are more like vague narrative beats used to create tension, motivate the players, or to make something out of a player's failure. Unlike player moves, the GM doesn't roll dice. In fact, they don't really say it, but the GM doesn't really need any dice. By design, Moves like Defy Danger and Hack and Slash are supposed to provoke the players hurting themselves, not because the GM declares that his monsters are attacking. It's oddly counterintuitive.

Page 170 introduces the Dungeon Moves, which are like the other GM moves, except they relate to being in Dungeons. Like the others, they are there to spice things up, force players to make tough choices, and keep things exciting.

A lot of these Moves feel like they might be better if they were more mechanical in nature. If the GM did have to roll dice and see how things unfold, it would add some dynamism and unexpected twists to the game. The way they are in the book comes off as flavorfully written GM advice. These aren't written because they represent some mechanical synergy with the other rules. They're here to remind people what to do if things are dragging or not very interesting.

Page 173 ends the chapter with advice on how to run fight, traps, and NPCs. There's no mechanics here. Just general notions.

Page 174 starts Chapter 14, which is all about setting up a DW game. Print character sheets, a copy of the basic moves, read the book, think about fantasy stuff, plan some stuff, but don't plan anything big, because DW isn't supposed to be like D&D. They repeatedly refer to the player characters as "Real People", which is weird and a little stupid.

There's also some common questions with answers they expect you to give to your players. One of them that stands out is "Are there other wizards?" and the answer is no, because no one else can use magic like the PCs, which, yet again, implies a lot of things about the setting which they just told you not to overplan or decide too many things about.

Page 180 is yet more advice on running the first adventure. It frames more basic advice as quasi-rules. It's not bad advice, mind you, but I'm kind of tired of LaTorra and Koebel's style of writing, where they present basic GMing advice as some kind of integral components of their carefully designed ruleset.

Chapter 15 on page 184 has a nice Black and White version of the cover image. Evokes that old school vibe that they clearly wanted for this game.

Now, remember how I kept bitching about DW's use of words and forced terminology? Welcome to Chapter 15: Fronts. The fuck is a Front? According to the book, they're "secret tomes of GM Knowledge" -- They're actually a clusterfuck of locations, monsters, dangers, and plothooks that they want the GM to construct between the first session and the next ones.

You've got Adventure Fronts, which are clusters of short term dangers and problems, like saving a town, which span a few sessions. Those tie together into your Campaign Front, which are big picture problems, like saving the world. Each one is made up of various elements, which the rest of the chapter goes over. The whole system is mostly just a way to create a semi-coherent campaign, and some parts of a Front are mostly there to establish some consistency between sessions, so you know where to guide the players and what might happen if they fail.

Even though a lot of this is couched in clunky terminology, I feel like some of this could be somewhat useful as a framework for laying out a loose campaign.

Page 189 starts laying out the specific categories of dangers, like Planar Forces or Hordes, with the following pages outlining the exact varieties of each of those things, the impulses they have, and different GM moves those dangers make. It's all laid out very plainly, and surprisingly, there isn't a whole page dedicated to explaining each of those general narrative elements.

In this section, they also suggest incorporating custom moves, which is where they actually mention that Player moves use the dice, but GM moves don't. The idea is that certain aspects of the Dangers and Fronts and other shit can be rolled into a custom move where it's left up to the dice.

Page 194 covers Grim Portents, which are a kind of sequential list of things that could happen to further the plot. They're narrative milestones towards the eventual bad thing that's going to happen that the players presumably need to stop.

There's a terrible, ugly flowchart on page 196 that attempts to explain how all this Fronts and Dangers and Portents shit goes together, but it just doesn't help at all.

Page 198 goes over Stakes, which are just questions about the overall plot. They explain that Stakes need to be "concrete and clear" but their examples are vague and a little confusing. Feels more like they just wanted an extra thing to tack onto the Front rules. The last few pages of the chapter are about resolving Fronts, which is mostly just a matter of checking what it was you wrote down and if it's all taken care of.

Page 202 has an example Front, which was kind of interspersed into the previous section.

Page 204 starts Chapter 16, Za Warudo. The art is pretty nice. The rest of the chapter feels really out of place for this system because it's unusually in depth. For 15 pages, they outline the rules for building Steadings (another unnecessary bit of terminology), determining their population, whether they count as a city or keep, what kind of bonuses and tags they have based on the resources they have and the relationship with other Steadings, and how they can change in relation to events from a Front. It's weird.

More nice art for Chapter 17, which is all about monsters. There's 90 pages of this stuff and I'm not going to cover it in depth.

Monsters have their own moves for the GM to use, but they're the same kind of narrative beats as the other GM moves. They've got Instincts that describe what sort of thing motivates them within the confines of the narrative, a description to cover what they look like, Damage to rate how much hurt they deal, Tags that cover how they attack or their size, HP for how much hurt they can take, and any special qualities they have.

The rest of the chapter covers how to design your own monster and the different settings they might exist in.

From page 234 to 321 is the bestiary itself, broken into chapters based on the setting they belong to. Each one starts with some art, but there's nothing in between. Just each monster broken into a minimal stat block and a brief description.

Page 322, Chapter 18, is the Equipment chapter. There's not much to say about this either. There are some nice rules in there where the price of certain goods is calculated as Cost - Charisma, which is a quick way to simplify the usual haggling and negotiating process that can slow down these things.

One thing which feels like it's one of features of DW that people like, and which I forgot to mention back in the Classes section, is the Adventuring Gear. Instead of being a laundry list of specific items in a pack, it's a resource with 5 uses, and each time you need a reasonable piece of adventuring gear that could be in the pack, you mark off a use and get that item.

On 332, there's a section of magical items. Some of them have associated moves or bonuses attached to them, but most have narrative effects that aren't tied to dice rolls.

344, Chapter 19, has some of the ugliest art yet. Look at this fucking orc. It's so ugly and awful that I didn't even not the tits at first.

This chapter is all about adjusting and hacking DW to better fit other settings and concepts beyond their nebulous generic fantasy. Of course, they propose this by talking more about the Moves mechanics and changing up classes and adding new moves. This section is pretty in depth, but it's only something worth reading if you're actually interested in hacking DW.

On 358 they talk about changing the way the GM plays by altering their principles. Instead of going into things with the intention of making the game fun and magical, the GM could be aiming to make things lethal and mysterious, for example.

The section ends with some advice on making monsters different and ways that they could be more evil and deadly.

Page 362 talks about their influences. Apocalypse World and D&D of course. Not really worth reading.

363 lists the tools they used, special thanks, and contributors, with 364 being a list of kickstarter backers.

380 starts appendix 2, which is all about teaching the game and how to pitch it.

384, Appendix 3, is about converting existing adventures and modules to DW.

392, Appendix 4, is a list of tables to roll on to instantly generate NPCs.

396 is a reference list for all the Tags in the book and what they apply to.

400 is the index.

There's one last bit of art, a few blank pages, and that's it. That's Dungeon World.

My thoughts on Dungeon World can be shortly summed up as: I can kind of see the appeal, but that doesn't stop the game from being weirdly shallow and uneven. The obsession they have for their Move ruleset and their habit of giving everything a kitschy special term makes the book a chore to read, but for all I know that may be a remnant from Apocalypse World.

From what I've seen, Dungeon World has replaced Fate as the indie homebrew darling, only now they call them "Hacks" because of course they need a fancy new term to describe something people have been doing with RPGs for half a century. Feels like there's a new DW hack popping up every week, and some of them are outright cancerous, like Monster Hearts, which makes being a gay teenager part of the rules.

There is some useful information in there and I don't think all the mechanics are worthless. I feel like the Playbook style of character sheet could be quite cool with an adjusted system, and having the gradated successes tie into narrative choices and non-optimal decisions is a nice way to jazz up the usual flow of gameplay. I would say that a lot of the decisions that went into this game were made with the intention of improving roleplaying and creating less opportunities to minmax.

In a way, the game reminds me of D&D 4e. The way that they try to box everything into "Moves" feels a lot like 4e's visual design of boxing up every power, spell, magic item, and monster in those little MS Word tables. An attempt to mentally segment chunks of gameplay to change the way players use them and interact with the game.

At the very least, I can say I read it, and if the need arises, I can just steal the mechanics that work from this mess, because none of them are interconnected or dependent on one another.

>>411374

>as for the bit about front's to be fair is no clearer in the original material

I suppose I'll have to page through Apocalypse World to get a better sense for it.

>Its not an RPG its a choose your own adventure with a dice mechanic for dungeons and dragons like story.

I'd say that's painfully accurate.

>>411539

Thats how I used in the last thread when I was going through with Anima and thats how I intend to keep using. It was dropped pretty quickly since the concurrent posting fell off fast. Thats what I'm talking about and I'm pretty sure it happened because I fucking did it.

>>411623

Just don't. This isn't the kind of thread that benefits from overlapping activity and there's no reason for anyone to jump in the middle of another live read to post about something else, unless that person is trying to be a dick. By even starting this stupid fucking argument, you've already done this thread a disservice and now I don't want you to post anything on /tg/ ever again.

>>411630

>don't post anything

Okay. I won't post in this thread anymore.

>silmarillion - war to get shiniest jewels

>war between elfs and dwarfs started over jewelry

>war of the ring for the piece of jewelry

Finding time to read has been harder than expected, but I did managed to take some time to page through a few books. The only downside is that there's not a lot to talk about like I'd hoped there'd be. Thanks to the rollback, we lost all our images which means you don't have to look at the horror that is Dungeonworld's art.

After taking forever to do so, I finally got my hands on PDFs for several of Ewen Cluney's games. Cluney, as some of you might know, is the guy who helped popularize and translate MAID RPG, and then later went on to make the very popular Madoka-inspired homebrew game Magical Burst. He stuck with the game design thing and went on to digitally publish a variety of small games under the title Yaruki Zero Games, including a newer version of Magical Burst called Magical Fury in 2015. He also published a ton of other stuff, most of them smaller games, modules for other games, add-ons to other things he's made, and a bunch of tongue-in-cheek comedic games, most of them going for under 10$, and only a few of them available in print format.

I purchased Magical Fury, Mascot-tan, School Girl RPG, and Kagegami High a number of years ago. The first 3 are in at slightly smaller dimensions, meaning they fit awkwardly on most shelves. Kagegami High is printed at a larger, standard size, but all are softcover, on pretty average paper, with no severe defects or problems. They're decent enough for the price and about what you'd expect from a one-man job.

For tonight, I'm going to start with Magical Fury, which can be found here, in New Zealand.

#F!JYsDQAQI!qmXbkyOPOJG6c2NRqAmW6A

This is just going to be a brief one to kick things off again. Magical Fury sits at a miniscule 35 page, covers included, so it won't take long to go through. The formatting is pretty straight forward and basic. The art has a few original pieces, but mostly it uses some generic creative commons icons, and some little pixel art animu girls.

Starting on page 4, we get our first surprise: It's kind of based off the Powered by the Apocalypse ruleset. The game uses the same 2d6 mechanic, but with a slightly adjusted range. 2-5, 6-8, 9+ instead of the usual 2-6, 7-9, 10+, but the overal intent is still the same. 6-8 is your partial success where you get those tough choices and success with a cost. There's also moves and such, which are the same kind of tidy little mechanic that kicks off when you do certain things.

Unlike Dungeon World and other PbtA games, Magical Fury has only one kind of character. There are no additional classes, playbooks, or anything like that. Everyone makes a character the same way, by answering specific questions. What's your name? What does being a girl mean to you? (because only girls can be magical girls) What are you afraid of? and What is your Wish? And that's it to start.

Page 9 defines the various innate abilities of Magical Girls in this vague framework, and tells you to pit them against the threat. Crazy stuff has happened, the world is getting weird, there's a monster, and the player characters are magical girls now. I think this section is supposed to be like a live tutorial, with example moves to give players a chance to throw some dice.

This first threat is meant to set things up and weave into the story. There's no given HP or stats, which is minimal even for a PbtA game, but the outcome of the battle, after everyone has taken an action, is determined by how many hits the players dealt to the threat. They can get their asses kicked, or drive it away with collateral damage, or possibly win triumphantly. This is kind of neat in my opinion.

Once that's resolved, the meat of the game is explained on page 11. Instead of having a natural, open narrative flow like you might be used to with most games, Magical Burst has the players and GM take turns picking what sort of scenes they want to play out to advance the story. There are GM scenes and Player scenes, most of which are kind of like Moves, with the 2-5/6-8/9+ mechanic, with their results guiding how the scene turns out.

Page 14 covers "Shifts" which are Magical Fury's version of damage. Instead of losing HP, they accumulate Hope, Magic, and Trauma. Whenever a player gets 3 of any one of them, they take a shift and have to pick one of the options off a list of stuff. Hope shifts are typically good, Magical shifts are like mutations, and Trauma Shifts are dramatic. If you ever tick all 4 of the options for Magic or Trauma over the course of play, you have to pick an Extreme Shift instead, which is either really bad and destructive, but wipes the boxes clean. For Hope, the same thing, except it's good and typically keeps some of the bad shit at bay.

Page 15 has a section about adding new characters to the game or retiring existing ones as part of the story. Page 16 and 17 have a ideas to throw into the game to help with worldbuilding. These are mostly suggestions because the rest of the game is meant to follow the very freeform, improvisational style.

And finally, page 18. The Appendix of Tables. If you didn't know, Ewen Cluney loves tables. He's written entire books of nothing but random tables. It's something that's going to be very apparent once I get to these other books later on. His experience with MAID RPG really left it's mark on him, because he absolutely loves to write d66 and d666 tables.

For every option and idea that's been listed and offered to the players with a few options to choose from, or the choice to write in something of your own creation, there is a table that coincides with that and gives you the choice to simply roll your whole character, and when the opportunity comes up, roll for outcomes, Shifts, and other stuff.

There's an afterword on page 34, and the character sheet on page 35. And that's the whole thing. It's a really barebones game, and that's understandable given the sort of thing he was going for. It's not an especially deep game, so it doesn't really get in the way of anything you might come up with, but at the same time, there's not really enough there to sink your teeth into. To really enjoy this game, you'd need a full group of Magical Girl enthusiasts who are ready and willing to improv and worldbuild on the spot, and then play through these really vague scene prompts, where things mostly boil down to one roll.

It's playable, but at the same time, I hate to say that it really needs to be more like Dungeon World. Some more actual choices and less restriction on the flow of scenes and story. I'll have to grab Magical Burst and compare in at some point in the near future. Back in 2015 or so, Dungeon World and PbtA games weren't as big as they were now, but I get the feeling that Cluney picked up a copy and was enamored with the novelty of the move system and the player-driven input for worldbuilding and storytelling. There's 3 other books that go along with Magical Fury that I didn't get my hands on, but I might look into them, if only to see if he went back and tried to make the game a little more substantial.