Saturday, August 17, 2019

Dungeon World RPG Homebrew: The Spell-Coder and the Hunter

As promised, here is the Spell-Coder class, serving the role of the de facto wizard of a dead technological nightmare-scape.

The Wizard was the first class I set about modifying from Dungeon World, once I had decided to pair it with my existing notes on my own future-fantasy setting. The major underlying theme of the setting is that humanity no longer has a grasp of technology, which long ago hit a peak in integrating and replacing the natural world. With the collapse of human civilization, this indistinguishable-from-magic environment has since fallen into a slow death of stagnation and sterility.

The Spell-Coder embodies that fragmentary grasp of an environment too robust to completely fail but too complex to fully understand.  Their powers come in the form of a set of memorized commands, a sequence of gestures and phrases from extinct programming languages. I've likened it to my RPG group as "imagine every public space had its own holodeck and you know some powershell commands."



My real revisions to the original class was to flavor the names and descriptions of spell-casting so that magic and technology were seen as one and the same.  I did add a few extra spell-codes to chose from at level 1, and more that can be found during play and added to the character's codebook.




The Hunter is a natural pathfinder and stalker of wild creatures. Unlike the Scavenger, they are hardier and capable of following close behind their prey, laying traps and staying just out of sight. The Hunter class was lifted almost verbatim from its incarnation in the Compendium. In that document, the Hunter was designed an alternate version of the Ranger with traps instead .of an animal companion. As I had already borrowed the animal companion moves for my prototype techno-druid (which eventually became the Machine-Speaker), the Hunter became the obvious replacement.

The only major change was actually just added today: upgrading the Camouflage move from an Advanced move to a Starting move, and borrowing an Advanced move from the Monk playbook to take its spot. There was a curiously lack of stealth moves among the standard classes, so I felt its addition to the Hunter gave them improved distinction as a 'silent killer' apart from the Scavenger's 'scrappy assistant'.



Should I elaborate more on the world these classes are meant to exist in, or should I just push straight to showing them off and let their moves speak for themselves? Surely, if you've read this far down you must have an option, and I'm not just throwing these into a digital void.

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