Last night we played Dungeon World in another game of our Arabic fantasy setting. This is a “West Marches” game which means every session can have different players and different characters – so is truly an ongoing drop in – drop out kind of game for casual players. BUT if you want to return often with the same character that is very welcome too!
We had 3 characters:
• Gumpert – (returning character) an elderly retired fighter with a mouth on him and a new-found anger towards magic.
• Fahim - a mysterious wizard with apparent mild agoraphobia and a magic rope.
• Farador - a holy Paladin who disagrees with Fahim about the best kind of magic.
The group spent a little time in the city of Dhuliban and heard stories (mostly from Gumpert) about the recent incident involving the Sultan and an evil Djinn.
Asking around the bazaar they heard about the "Devils Bridge", "The City of the Dead" (a pyramidal necropolis nearby), the "Valley of Plenty", The "Oasis of Seven Palms" and several other interesting locations for likely loot and adventure.
They latched onto the mystery of the Valley and the abandoned temple said to be nearby, as so many townsfolk said to avoid the place due to its horrible curse. "Curse schmurse" was I believe the response from Gumpert. An elderly cleric in town told them a story about how he was away from the temple when he received word to never return there after some tragedy, so the PCs assumed it was abandoned in a hurry and therefore likely to be filled with loot.
The group set out into the wasteland and with a super roll made the 5-ish day trek without incident. Reaching the edge of the Valley near nightfall, they saw a small impoverished village down below with only a dozen or so people in it. They decided to camp where they were in the sands, and soon after dark an old man in tattered clothes approached their camp-fire. Like all those other people, he warned them not to enter the valley. When pressed for why, he explained that he was a big player in the events 30 years ago that caused the curse…
The old man is Wei-Han, and he and his wife had a beautiful daughter Wei-Ma. The whole town loved her and since she was very clever they begged the temple to educate her, which of course they did. Over her years of study she grew close to a young monk named Jui-Yan until the two were inseparable, studying together, laughing together, and taking meals together. One day Wei-Ma vanished after she and Jiu-Yan stayed out late chatting.
The villagers believed that Jui-Yan had killed her and formed a mob to get vengeance. The temple priests and acolytes defended Jui-Yan, causing a face-off with the angry villagers who vastly outnumbered them. Eventually, the clerics fled, the villagers hung Jui-Yan for his crime, and the curse of these angry ghosts came upon them.
I think at this point Gumpert called BS on the ghost story, but rolled <6 on Discern Realities. The old man fled the camp-site, and a cold wind came upon them. Looking out into the pitch black each character saw their dead selves out in the darkness in ghostly form. This gave Fahim an idea, so he cast his speak with spirits spell and summoned the apparition of himself to speak. He asked a couple of questions including if this was "future dead him or alternative timeline dead him" to which the ghost gave an unsettling answer (I think he said possibly "both"?). The ghost also said that the old man knows more than he is telling (but now I realise the PCs forgot this clue until right near the end…).
The next morning they made their way down into the valley to the village, meeting the dozen or so elderly people who scrape by growing whatever they can in the inhospitable desertified farmland. They got the same sort of messages- "you shouldn't have come, you'll die here etc". Fahim scared a lot of people by talking about summoning the ghosts that have been haunting them, so they ran away and locked their doors (more rolls of <6 on the Parley move). They went to find the old man Wei-Han at his house, but Gumpert kept outside regaling villagers with stories of his prowess.
Inside, Fahim charmed the old man to get more of the story out of him, and ended up getting a little wooden carved duck toy that used to belong to Wei-Ma - his idea being to use it in a magic ritual to find her corpse. He realised that the only place he could conduct the ritual is up in the haunted temple, so set his mind on getting there and the group agreed this was the best course of action to resolve the hauntings.
Outside, Gumpert went looking for the tree they hung Jui-Yan from and found it - seeing an apparition of a body hanging from a branch, he went to poke it but it reached out to grab his throat. Gumpert stumbled back and landed on his butt in the desert sand and the ghost vanished. A shaken Gumpert was found by Farador sitting dazed on the ground, but Gumpert claimed he was just resting.
They made their way up into the foothills heading towards the temple and encountered a chasm spanned by a ricket rope bridge. Fahim and Farador baulked at the idea of crossing, but Gumpert just stormed out onto the bridge - to be ambushed by a waiting predatory monster. With the head of a lion, wings of a dragon, and a tail covered in projectile spines the great creature soared up the ravine and fired its tail spikes at Gumpert who withstood the assault. Thinking fast, Fahim cast a spell of sleep putting the creature down, but attracting attention to himself (7-9 roll). This attention was the (now snoozing) beast hurtling towards him as it fell to earth asleep - luckily Farador jumped in the way but was crushed beneath the monstrosity (<6 defend roll). Fahim stabbed the sleeping beast to death and got Farador out from under it.
They pushed on into the darkness of night and stumbled into a graveyard and were attacked by the ancient dead which they pretty effortlessly fended off with only a few minor scrapes. They pushed on further and arrived at the temple only for Fahim to miscast his 'light' spell and instead entrapping the group in evil magical darkness. Farador decided to bull charge towards the temple but quickly discovered the darkness was filled with dangerous 'barbed wire' style webs, and also looped around like a mobius strip so he ended up arriving back with the others. Fahim used his magic to commune with spirits and summoned the angry ghost of Jui-Yan who could barely restrain his desire to murder them. They asked him some questions but he was less than useful, more focussed on murdering them, when eventually he got loose, tried to possess Farador, and then grabbed Fahim by the throat to choke him out. Farador used his paladin magic to rebuke the evil spirit, sending him away and causing him to drop Fahim and also cancelling out the evil darkness.
They searched the 3 main temple buildings, with Farador "noping out" of the right-most temple when he encountered the dripping wet ghost of a young girl near the well. Fahim and Gumpert went to the middle temple and Fahim set up for the ritual he needed to perform to find the dead girl (not knowing that Farador had already seen her…). Gumpert went straight into the subterranean temple store rooms looking for nice loot. Down there, Gumpert was met again by the ghost of Jiu-Yan who possessed the ageing fighter, so when Farador happened upon him they came to blows as Gumpert tried to murder his companion. Fahim heard the fighting and rushed in to cast dispel magic to end the possession and stop them from killing each other.
They all went upstairs and did the ritual, found that the corpse of Wei-Ma was down the well in the right hand part of the temple. Who'd have known? (Farador, that's who! :D) They went to the rightmost temple again and found the dripping apparition of Wei-Ma by the well looking forlornly down into it. Fahim went to look down so of course she shoved him into it!! He fell down to the bottom and the ghost vanished, but luckily he easily found her corpse inside the chamber below, and then used his magic rope to get back to the top with it. Realising that they had 2 angry ghosts on their hands and would need BOTH of them put to rest, Fahim decided to search her corpse looking for an item from Jiu-Yan to repeat the locating ritual for his corpse. He found a masculine ring on a chain around her neck and rightly assumed this belonged to Jiu-Yan. Exiting the smaller temple building to head back to the main one, they saw that the graveyard denizens had all come to life and were now slowly marching to converge on the temple. Hundreds of them.
Fahim determined that he would need to rush the ritual, as Gumpert waded into the crowd of like 100 skeletons and started swinging hard, cracking heads. Wracking their brains for an answer on how to speed up the second casting of the ritual before the undead reached them, Fahim and Farador were struggling for answers (temporarily considering "blood sacrifice" as a viable option… but struggling to agree on whom should be the victim…) when Gumpert shouted out from the middle of the crowd of undead he was mowing through "sacrifice something important and use its power for the ritual" (rolled Spout Lore with double 6's!). Fahim knew he had to give up his beloved magic rope, and completed the ritual as quickly as he could by destroying the magic rope and channelling its power. He got a clue - Wei-Han knows where the body is, he's known all along as he was the one who cut the boy down from the hanging tree and buried him - near the tree in almost the exact spot that Gumpert had landed on his arse earlier.
Deciding not to fight their way out through the undead, the group jumped back down the well and found an underground river leading out of the chamber which was blocked by a boulder. Farador did a bit of an impression of Sloth in The Goonies and lifted the boulder while everyone escaped - simultaneously releasing the torrential flow which swept them for many miles through pitch dark tunnels, banging them on sharp rocks and nearly drowning them all. Battered and bruised and near to death, the found themselves in the bottom of the well in the village in the Valley of Plenty… and the well was filling up now that the underground river was released. The villagers helped them out of the well, and after admonishing the villagers for unjustly killing Jiu-Yan (and having the body of Wei-Ma as proof of his innocence), the weary adventurers made their way to the hanging tree to lay Wei-Ma to rest in a proper grave right there next to Jiu-Yan with proper headstones and markings for each to be remembered for all time.
Epilogue:
• The abandoned temple is now cleared of its curse and is open and ready for looting.
• The town in the Valley of Plenty is looking likely to return to 'plenty' now that the well has water again for the farmers to grow crops. It'll take some time but things should return to greenery in the coming weeks and month.
• Gumpert decided to settle down in the town for a while with a 'spry young lass of 60 or so'.
• Farador decided to stay too and help establish the town and perhaps clean up the temple to be used by his holy order.
• Fahim mourned the loss of his magic rope, and made a vow to return it to 'life' and has set himself that quest.
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