PS: Speaking of "would again," I wanna MC AW for our group when we're done with the current Human Contact game.

NOTE: If you're playing in this game, reading this thread will make you sad. I recommend against it.

So, I wrote up my first Front for the Treepocalypse game. I'd welcome any comments or ideas.

The customers

* Expresses: Hunger
* Dark future/agenda: If the Rout's cast and crew don't cope with the ravening needs of its customers, Dickson is going to be merely managing something he used to own. That is, if the Rout is left standing.
* Description & cast: The customers (past, present, and future) of the Route. Includes Rolfball, Toyota, Ba, and the blacklist of former clients and those who wish to be.
* Stakes questions

• Will the protagonists have to kill Ba?
• What did Rolfball do to Balls & Absinthe's sister
• Will the blacklisters crack open the Rout?

Threat 1: Rolfball
Kind: Warlord (alpha wolf)
Impulse: hunt and dominate
Description & cast: 7' tall, missing most of his teath, gravelly voice. Leads a biker gang of "plant zombies," who are based out of the Gorge. There are about a dozen hard, well-armed thugs. Rolfball himself carries a sawed-off (3-harm, close, reload, messy) and armor-1.
Custom move: none yet
Countdown:

• 12-3: Subtle threats
• 3-6: Indirect moves against the Rout: supplies disrupted, ill-will raised
• 6-9: Direct threats
• 9-10: Seizing and murdering customers
• 10-11: The Rout under siege
• 11-12: Direct assault and takeover of the Rout

Threat 2: Toyota
Kind: Grotesque (pain addict)
Impulse: craves pain, its own or others'
Description & cast: Slim, 30s, friendly/slick, hidden knives (2-harm hand infinite)
Custom move: none yet
Countdown:

• 12-3: Rothschild, a working girl, complains about him again.
• 3-6: Toyota flirts with a PC
• 6-9: Propositions a PC for sex
• 9-10: Murder an NPC
• 10-11: Spread lies and disinformation about the Rout
• 11-12: Murder a PC in their sleep

Threat 3: Ba
Kind: Grotesque (disease vector)
Impulse: craves contact, intimate and/or anonymous
Description & cast: A kind, friendly, old, white-haired, dark-skinned man. He travels the world collecting little bits of treasure from before the trees. He trades these in to feed his compulsive sexual appetite with prostitutes, and as a result now has syphilis (though he doesn't know it). He's always got 2 oddments of 1-barter each to trade with.
Custom move: none yet
Countdown:

• 12-3: Ba starts frequenting the Rout more than usual
• 3-6: The workers are turning up sick
• 6-9: The clients are turning up sick
• 9-10: A PC gets sick
• 10-11: Ba knows about his illness and is hiding it
• 11-12: Ba betrays the Rout to save himself

Threat 4: The blacklist
Kind: Brutes (sybarites)
Impulse: to consume someone's resources
Description & cast: Assorted former clients who have been blackmailed, as well as people who want to be clients but haven't been let in.
Custom move: none yet
Countdown:

• 12-3: Supplies are interrupted
• 3-6: A rowdy gang shows up late at night demanding entrance
• 6-9: The people who know how to invite people to the Rout are showing up dead
• 9-10: Ula, who was definitively banned, returns and demands entrance
• 10-11: Total blockade of supplies
• 11-12: The blacklist is invited in as the Rout loses its exclusivity and secrecy.

Got the last character, Absinthe, played by Colleen:


Absinthe - Battle Babe
woman, luxwear, striking face, arresting eyes, gorgeous body.

Cool +3 Hard -2 Hot +1 Sharp +1 Weird +1

Specials:
Visions of Death
Impossible Reflexes


2 custom weapons:
hand gun (2 harm close reload loud)
Ap ammo (+ap)
hi-powered (+1 harm)

Chain belt
hidden (+1 infinite)
spikes (+ 1 harm)

Dickson Hx +3
Doc Hx +3

I may have overstated things with the word "panic," but yeah.

I should mention that the whole roots thing came out of Dickson rolling and failing Fingers in Every Pie to get Balls back. The failure says it comes with "strings wicked attached," so I decided to be literal.

Here's what happened in the game:

Balls was supposed to show up back home before dark (it's way more dangerous after dark; the plants are more aggressive), but failed to do so and it's getting very late. Dog Head, who is working outside to maintain the cleared perimeter around the Rout, pounds on the door and tells Absinthe that Balls is missing, and he hears Rolfball's motorcycle headed up the path. Absinthe assesses a charged situation and determines that Rolfball's gang is about 20 minutes away.

After about 10 minutes, while the people inside panic and start to get ready for what they expect to be some pretty awful shit, one of Rolfball's men who had run ahead of the others knocked on the front door. The Rout wouldn't let him in or talk to him, so he dropped a package in front of the door and fucked off. Margrave and Dickson went out to investigate.

What they found was a severed hand that looked a lot like Balls's, rooted to the dirt by the stump of the wrist and twitching every now and then like a dead frog being hit with electricity. Margrave pokes at it and I offer to let him open his brain to the psychic maelstrom. Matt declines, and instead starts pulling on the hand. I describe that it's connected to the earth with a grey/brown root-like structure and it's not easily coming up. Margrave yanks it as hard as he can, so I prompt Matt that he's trying to sieze the thing by force. He agrees, gets a partial hit, and leaves me harm to give. I decide instead to make him miss something:

As he pulls the hand out of the ground, the root structure resists and is yanked up and the pressure releases a plume of spores that makes everyone hack and cough and hide their eyes. As he yanks the hand the last bit of the way out of the dirt, a fist-sized leathery sack that glows with a green bioluminescence pops out and the hand is free. The sudden loss of tension causes him to fall and crush the pod under his knee without realizing it. The fluid inside the sac dissolves into his skin, leaving no trace. The hand is dead, all the twitching gone after that.

With that, Margrave and Absinthe switch places, and the two meet Rolfball when he arrives with a motorcycle pack, the members of which are all wearing heavily-concealing clothing, and can't be seen well in the darkness. A figure swaddled in a hole-ridden, mold-eaten tarp sits on the bitch seat of Rolfball's bike. Without raising his voice or being unpleasant, Rolfball gives the figure freedom, says he's got people now, and that he's going to take his payment soon. As the figure, who everyone takes to be Balls, disappears into the Rout, Absinthe notices (too late to stop him) that "his" hand is actually her sister's complete with a ring that the sister always wore, fused to the stump of a man's wrist.

Absinthe reads a charged situation again and determines that Balls is the most dangerous enemy to her right now.

I ended the session there.

Got another PC in through email (this is a Skype game):

Doc Margrave III -- Physician for The Rout
Causal/Utility clothing
Male, Pretty Face, Hard Eyes, Spare Body

Stats:  Cool -1 / Hard +1 / Hot +0 / Sharp +2 / Weird +1

Moves: Touched by Death / Healing Touch

Gear:
Angel Kit
Small Practical Weapon: Bone Saw ("Big Knife")
Oddments: "Strange Meat"
Fashion: Blood-stained "leather" apron (1 armor)

Hx: Dixon: (-1) / Absinthe: (-1)

My gut feeling on the name list is "why wouldn't you use it?" because I'm a guy that likes to be told "this is what you have to do, make something with it." For example, in the only other AW series I played in, the Hardholder name list entry "Vega" made me think of the brothers that Michael Madsen and John Travolta play in the Quentin Tarantino movies. I got an idea for an urbane, suave sort of brutal thug. That name inspired me to suggest a character who'd set up a fiefdom of class, excess, and brutal efficiency in the ruins of the Luxor casino. All this inspiration before I moved on to the second list.

But when both Paula and another player, Matt, felt to varying degrees uncomfortable with having to choose a name from a list, I tried to sift out my emotional attachments and try to figure out the purpose that that rule might serve in the design.

I think the lists are there to give your Apocalypse World a unified feel, to give the many Apocalypse Worlds a bit of a common seed, to advertise to the fiction and the other players who your character is and what he's capable of, and to suggest what kind of Hardholder (or Angel, Battlebabe, or Maestro'D in this case) you want to be.

Also (and I think I said this at the time, but if not, I'm sorry), I don't think it's an accident that the very first thing you do as a non-MC player in this game is choose your name from a limited list. It sets you up very well for the way the game will work as things play out. You'll be forced to make a limited choice that you might not always like.

Of course, ultimately, I didn't want anyone to feel like they weren't having fun. Dickson and Doc Margrave certainly felt very apocalypcian (I pointed out that if someone wanted to be something like Jake Raiford, that would really spoil the mood and there was a whole playbook for that kind of thing). Paula got a little zealous in her offers to pick a name from the list, but I said that if she had formed an attachment to the character based on that name, and that to change the name would change her conception of the character, I didn't want to force her to do that.

So we kept the names and the game didn't feel unlike AW. In the future I'd still like to roll with "pick from a list" for the names, but I think I'll handle it like this next time if it comes up again.