Krevborna – Session 3 Review

I’m happy to report that the stream of this session worked much better this time. Most of the technical issues from the previous week have been ironed out, and thus the session video is available! Or read the summary below…

Narrative

The session began with the characters deciding how to handle the wererat they were interrogating. Our Paladin went back to check on any threats, which turned out to include something that shredded a muckmonster (alligator). The Fighter decided that the wererat (Ivan) wasn’t a person after all, and so they just straight up executed him after getting a little bit of information about where the “Rat King” lived.

That meant that, when they went back into the main part of the sewer, an “animated sewage clot” attacked them. So much filth! So much blood! So much degradation and visceral disgust! It was a bit of a hard fight, but not too much, and they ended up wading through neck-high sewage to get around to the entrance to the wererat leader’s lair.

Once they reached that entrance, concealed behind a secret door, I used the miss on Discern Realities to give them a rat to fight. They then found the door, made their way around… and immediately slaughtered the mage. Poor Nicodemus – I mean, Silverwhiskers. This time, they picked up a special item (sacred herbs used for divination), but ended up fighting the REAL challenge later.

This was a custom monster I created based on a Magic: the Gathering card called “Sewer Nemesis”. That provided a much greater challenge, as it hit hard and ignored armor. 

The session ended with them marching back through the streets of Piskaro carrying the corpse of that mage. This created a few nice “player service” moments, as people who’d previously given them trouble saw them in the streets and indicated various types of respect. But when their apparent sponsor paid them, he then asked them a bigger question:

“Will you stay with us and partake of its power?”

Lessons Learned

On a technical level, I think my sound could have been a little louder, at least in the playback. But at least the players could be heard this time! In fact, they were probably slightly louder than I was.

Also, I used a slightly updated setup within Roll20 for streaming by having a separate user account logged in with a different browser, rather than “rejoin as player”. That meant the dynamic lighting worked more easily once I had multiple invisible (well, 1px) tokens with sight. There’s another trick I want to try later involving having those tokens using a GM-visible aura. That won’t show up on stream, but it’ll let me find what I need to duplicate more quickly during a scene. However, Dungeon World works better in more abstract combat setups. Probably this won’t come up very often.

Getting to the game itself: I had a slightly better grasp of GM moves this time. Moves can occur off-screen, and snowballing from things the players have already done really helps. None of this is new to DW! I’m just learning my way forward.