Adventuring Gear
Summary
Adventuring Gear is a Dungeon World inventory mechanic that abstracts the miscellaneous equipment and supplies characters carry. Rather than tracking individual mundane items, each character has a limited number of adventuring gear uses (typically 5) that can be marked off when they need to produce a useful mundane item appropriate to the situation. This system represents both the depletion of carried supplies and the creative use of found objects during play.
Properties
Adventuring gear functions as a consumable resource with 5 uses per instance. Each use can be marked off to obtain a specific piece of equipment appropriate to the situation. When a character needs a mundane item that they could reasonably have packed or found—such as rope, torches, containers, tools, or string—they can declare they have it and mark off one use of their adventuring gear.
The GM explained the mechanic: "See if you, if you were to mark off whoever marks off one of those, you would get like a torch." This allows players to retroactively produce mundane items from their supplies without needing to track individual pieces of equipment beforehand. The transaction is immediate—the resource is spent, and the item becomes part of the narrative.
The system operates on player declaration rather than pre-established inventory lists. A player proposes that they have a needed item, and upon GM approval, marks off the use. Multiple party members can carry adventuring gear simultaneously. The specific item produced reflects both player creativity and the fiction at hand, representing either pre-packed equipment or opportunistically repurposed objects.
Items obtained through adventuring gear are typically mundane and non-magical: rope, chalk, flint and steel, basic tools, containers, or makeshift animal restraints.
History
Session 2
The party's adventuring gear saw its first recorded use when the group entered a dark underground tunnel and required light sources. Multiple members of the adventuring party—Vasso, Sucks, and Cat—each possessed adventuring gear with 5 uses.
Without coordinating their actions, all three non-bat party members independently decided to use their adventuring gear to produce torches at the same time, resulting in humorous redundancy when they realized none had coordinated with the others beforehand. As one participant noted: "Yeah, we all didn't know that the other people had originally gear. So we all, so we all just used it." Another asked humorously, "How many lack of communication does adventure gear have?"
The simultaneous expenditure meant the party produced three torches when only one would have been necessary, leaving each character with 4 remaining uses of their adventuring gear for future situations. Katniss—who possessed bat-like senses—did not need to rely on artificial light sources.
Session 3
The adventuring gear mechanic appeared when Sucks encountered dangerous toxic waste and needed a container. The GM instructed: "So you can scoop some of this up, mark up point of your adventuring gear." Sucks marked off a point of adventuring gear to use his 2-liter Coke bottle to collect the purple sludge. After Sucks marked the use, the GM confirmed the result: "Did it? Yep. Now you got a bottle of this." This established the bottle of toxic material as an item in his possession for potential future use, demonstrating how adventuring gear can represent either pre-packed equipment or opportunistically repurposed objects.
Session 4
Cat uses adventuring gear during the party's attempt to create a leash for The Frozen Blob using Popcorn as bait. When the group discusses their plan, Cat asks, "Do we have any string in adventure gear?" Brad confirms they have adventure gear available, and Shawn approves the expenditure: "So you can mark off a point of that for your string". Cat marks off one use of adventuring gear to obtain the string, which the party then attempts to use in their improvised frozen-blob-wrangling scheme.