After our Wrath of the Righteous campaign, we needed about nine months of palate-cleansing one-shots. We like Pathfinder still and I’m running Reavers still under PF but it’s a lot of law/math for the fun, so we decided our next campaign would be the Pathfinder Adventure Path Mummy’s Mask – but using the Dungeon World rules!
We’ve played Dungeon World and some other “Powered by the Apocalypse” games like Monster of the Week. We’re mildly concerned about whether it’s too simple for a long campaign – sometimes the same list of 3 things that goes wrong with every 7-9 roll can become trying on the GM and players’ patience – but the attributes of being fiction-first, player-driven, and rules-light attracts us. So today, Paul started it!
We’ll have the usual session summaries; the first isn’t ready yet though, but I thought I’d give you all a teaser. I’m playing Khaled the Keleshite burglar – I immediately thought “hey I want to play one of the classes that always sucks playing in Pathfinder,” which put rogue and blaster wizard at the top of my list. But we for sure needed a rogue so I went that way.
Patrick is playing Usif bin Adeen, the Osirian Immolator (fire guy); Tim is playing the ifrit (efreet-heritage race) cleric Denat, and Chris is playing Murdus the Osirian fighter. It’s a lively bunch. Usif is part of some weird fire cult. Denat is a cleric of Thisamet, and his cries of “Food for the Food God!” cast fear into the hearts of our enemies. (Well, in theory; most of our enemies have been bugs and stuff so far.) Murdus is convinced he’s the reincarnation of Hetshepsu, one of the Pharaohs of Ascension. Khaled is kind of the odd man out – unlike the other three he’s Keleshite (fantasy Arab) instead of Osirian (fantasy Egyptian), not particularly religious or weird, he just wants to make a big score and live the easy life. More of an Aladdin meets Assassins’ Creed kind of guy. But since he’s a professional, and reasonably charming, the other three like him. We named our group the Mummy Rustlers (you need a group name to sign up to loot tombs in Wati).
We are working on looting a tomb, but the inter-party interaction and stuff going on in Wati itself is just as entertaining. Murdus’ sister is also convinced she’s a reincarnated Pharaoh and is messing with us; Khaled is trying to seduce the purple-hatted Taldan noblewoman who runs one of the other teams… Join us for our adventures looting the Necropolis of Wati in Mummy Rustlers!
Geek Related 
Once again you all have interesting characters with, like, proper back stories. Is that just something everyone likes making? Do you get together for a Session Zero to generate characters together?
My group likes the idea of it more than actually getting into character, though I’m adapting my GM-ing to let the rules go a bit and promote the drama and RP.
Your Mummy Rustlers sound like a blast already, I’m looking forward to the session summaries 🙂
Hey man! We did character generation during our first session too (it goes very quickly in Dungeon World). As we went I pulled up the Pathfinder Wiki with some Wati information and on the fly we created our backgrounds – first a stub, and then as we created bonds with each other (and answered some prompts by the GM) they fleshed out fast. As an example Khaled learned his trade in Absalom, came to Wati for a “big fish in a small pond” change of scenery, hooked up with the smuggling gang the Fading, gained the enmity of the other smuggling gang the Silver Chain when he ripped off one of their spice shipments, but got cursed in the meantime and went and traded his spice to Denat, cleric of the Food God, for a cure. Usif, Denat’s buddy, had the idea to invite him along once his skill set and connections with shady antiquities dealers became known. He also ran across a crazy guy with a big axe in the desert and gave him some water and brought him to town (Murdus) who became their fourth. All that plus some related color was developed in the first hour or so of the first session interactively with the group. A couple people had picked a class beforehand, and Tim was in love with the “Food for the Food God” concept, but no one had full characters or backgrounds of any sort before sitting down. Plus we got in like four fights, a bunch of RP, and more than about half of a tomb exploration – in one session.
Cool! I’m definitely going to arrange that the next time I start a campaign. If you’re ever stuck for a blog subject… 🙂