Where have all the Hit Points Gone?

We’re playing Dungeonworld, which is still going through the various stages of beta: pupae, chrysalis, and so on. In the latest phase, character hit points were dropped to about a quarter. So there’s our party, burning the corpses of the vanquished rat man, when suddenly everyone has one quarter of the hit points they used to have.

And I have to say that if the intent of this rule change was to inject some low-level anxiety into higher-level play, it worked. Soon everyone’s scrambling around, trying to decide how they’re going to live in a low-hit-point world.

Magnus loots the rat mens’ cache of stolen trade goods and ties a wooden throne to his back so he can carry it back to town and sell it for enough to hire a bodyguard. Leman takes a similar tactic, but instead she bribes three of the rat mens’ prisoners to carry the stuff for her. They only rip her off a little bit. Ebag dips into the private stash of treasure that nobody else in the party seems to know he has and uses it to buy some mithral chain from the Thieves Guild. Karl… well Karl seems to think this stuff is all beneath him. He almost gets killed next encounter, but that still lies in the future.

Other than the hit point shuffle, this session is mostly about getting safely back to town, checking the job board, and dealing with some overdue town stuff.

Next session–a surprise wedding!