Using Monsters

A monster is any living (or undead) thing that stands in the characters’ way.

How you use these monsters follows directly from your agenda and principles. Stay true to your principles, use your moves and pursue your agenda—you can’t go wrong.

Your first agenda is to portray a fantastic world. The way you describe the monsters and adversaries the characters face can be a tool to help you fulfill that agenda. Describing those creatures and people in vivid detail will bring them to life. You’ll eventually need some stats for those monsters, too—the rules in this chapter are here to help you create those stats quickly and easily.

The player characters are the heroes. Monsters exist to illustrate what a dangerous awful place Dungeon World can be—how it will remain if the heroes don’t step in. You shouldn’t be rooting for the monsters to win, but they may challenge, and even sometimes defeat, the heroes. If you feel like your monsters are being beaten too quickly, don’t worry. Let the players revel in their victory, there’s always more monsters.

The principle of think dangerous sums up that philosophy—think of every monster like an arrow fired at the characters. The monsters are ammunition of the danger you’re presenting. Some may be smarter, faster, or more dangerous than others but until a monster warrants a name, a personality, or some other special consideration, it’s an arrow. Take aim and shoot. Don’t worry if you miss.

A monster stops being mere ammunition when something in the world puts the spotlight on it. This might be a spout lore roll that leads your description in an interesting direction or the result of your asking questions and building on the players’ answers. Maybe the characters were overwhelmed in battle and had to run away, giving them a new-found fear and respect for the beast they fought. When these things happen, feel free to give the monster a name and consider creating a danger to represent it.

One thing that your agenda and principles don’t say anything about is setting up a fair fight. Heroes are often outnumbered or faced with ridiculous odds—sometimes they have to retreat and make a new plan. Sometimes they suffer loss. When adding a monster to a front, placing them in a dungeon, or making them up on the fly your first responsibility is to the fiction (portray a fantastic world) and to give the characters a real threat (make the characters heroes), not to make a balanced fight. Dungeon World isn’t about balancing encounter levels or counting experience points; it’s about adventure and death-defying feats!