Dungeon World

Moves
Whenever everyone looks to you to see what happens choose
one of these. Each move is something that occurs in the fiction of
the game—they aren’t code words or special terms. “Use up their
resources” literally means to expend the resources of the characters,
for example.
• Use a monster, danger, or location move
• Reveal an unwelcome truth
• Show signs of an approaching threat
• Deal damage
• Use up their resources
• Turn their move back on them
• Separate them
• Give an opportunity that fits a class’ abilities
• Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment
• Offer an opportunity, with or without cost
• Put someone in a spot
• Tell them the requirements or consequences and ask
Never speak the name of your move (that’s one of your principles).
Make it a real thing that happens to them: “As you dodge the hulking
ogre’s club, you slip and land hard. Your sword goes sliding away
into the darkness. You think you saw where it went but the ogre is
lumbering your way. What do you do?”
No matter what move you make, always follow up with “What
do you do?” Your moves are a way of fulfilling your agenda—part
of which is to fill the characters’ lives with adventure. When a spell
goes wild or the floor drops out from under them adventurers react
or suffer the consequences of inaction.
“The vision made him
want to freeze into
immobility, but this,
too, was action with its
consequences.”
—Dune
165