Scale & Shadow Bonus: GM Advice part 1

The golden age is long over. 

Whether by cruel kings, savage beasts, or unwise wizards wielding forgotten magics too great to be contained–dark times are upon us. The only hope for a comfortable life is to delve into what ruins remain to plunder the treasures of your ancestors to sell to the greedy and the foolish. 

Be warned, as if flies to a candle, the worst monsters are drawn to the brightest lights and no one is left to save you in the darkness. 

The heroes of legend have died long ago. All that remains is:

Scale & Shadow

This time:

Austin and David get together to discuss what we learned by running/playing this game and what advice other GMs out there might learn.
We go over:
—What to do when a player can’t make a game session
—How to let players delve into their backstories
—How to use Dungeon World’s bonds and flags
—The definition of three birdin’

Thanks for listening

All rights reserved by their respective owners.

The cast of Scale & Shadow is:

Austin as Kastr the fighter

Brandon as Silmigar the wizard

Oscar as Kuan the Monk (a playbook from the Lore & Lords pack by Peter Johansen)

Jacob as Kuvair the swashbuckler (a playbook from Awful Good Games)

David as the Game Master

The music you heard was:

Mass Extinction by Karl Casey at White Bat Audio and Eleven by Kaupe

Our cover art (and this one above that we almost went with) was created with MidJourney

Scale & Shadow is an actual play of Dungeon World, a game by Sage LaTorra and Adam Koebel with some of the suppliamental material from Perilous Wilds by Lampblack & Brimstone and Flags by Rob Donoghue. For this episode, we used a modified version of “the labyrinth move” from the Gauntlet. Read about it here.
We drew inspiration from Against the Cult of the Reptile God (1982) by Douglas Niles and The Village of Hommlet (1979) by Gary Gygax