Just finished reading The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway and thought I'd mention it here. It's a bit wordy, but it definitely portrays a post-apocalypse which might offer some inspiration for MCs, especially in terms of potential psychic maelstrom-related effects.

Having committed myself to completing 23 creative projects by the end of the year, I thought it might be cool to do some custom playsets as part of that. Since MotW is currently the version of the Apocalypse Engine I'm most familiar with, that's probably what most of my playsets will be for. I have a few ideas in mind for MotW playsets, and there were a bunch of potential playbook pitches made in an older post, but I'd appreciate any other suggestions folks might have.

Here are the ideas I've got so far:

The Magical Girl: An MotW twist on this class of anime heroine. Given the implied tone of MotW this would probably be more in the style of Puella Magi Madoka Magica than the more traditional examples.
The Sole Survivor: The Sole Survivor and her friends were hunted by some kind of supernatural terror, and only she made it out alive. She came out of the experience hardened, and maybe just a little unhinged. Think Ash from Evil Dead, or the 'Final Girl' of any horror movie.
The Teen Detective: Based on the likes of Brick or Veronica Mars, the Teen Detective is a meddling kid of the hard-boiled variety.
The Tomb Raider: A modern day Indiana Jones, the Tomb Raider tracks down ancient and powerful artifacts and keeps them out of the wrong hands.
The Writer: Everybody wonders where the Writer gets his inspiration from, but none of them would suspect the truth: he's actually living it! Think Richard Castle, if he wound up following a monster hunter rather than a homicide detective.

Cool, thanks Mike!

Here's a link to the current draft of the Beat playbook, all it's missing is a cover image: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4UFQOrOzEi0cU1kUzBuWld2T28

Yeah, it's sort of a combo reference of Buffy and a manga I used to read called Ranma Half.

Glad to help with officializing the Beat, the only other issue I've had so far is finding a decent image to use for the cover. For my own playbook (the Fugitive), I'm going to be commissioning an artist friend to draw up a cover for me, but I can't afford two commissions at the moment. :<

Also, those history options are so awesome it's going to be difficult to choose which ones to add to the book. :o

Anyway, I'll post again once I've got the initial draft of the playbook done. :D

Basically, the way the conversation went was as follows:

The Chosen's player asked if his character had a title in-game (like the Slayer), and I said, "Well, what do you think?"

Another player (playing the Flake) then responded that I should 'stop doing that', i.e. offering the player the opportunity to answer their own question.

I then explained that there was no fixed setting as such, that my job as Keeper was to ask them leading questions about their characters and the environment to build up a picture of the setting.

The Flake's player immediately responded with: 'that's stupid though[...]With an IRC game you need to have some planning to it'.

That was pretty much the extent of his argument and I was feeling too frustrated at the time to try and argue the point. But I spoke with another player, and she said she'd been thinking that maybe for IRC there needs to be a seperate world-building session.

I think I'm gonna take a crack at doing the Fugitive. I need an extra creative project to busy myself with over Christmas, so I'll see about putting a playbook together for that. :)

For the opening scenario of my IRC campaign (which isn't getting off to a great start, quite honestly) I've modelled the vampires in it on a mixture of traits from vampires in Buffy, the Dresden Files and Ultraviolet.

As for general tone, I like my horror dark and with a slight edge of sci-fi to it, so I draw a lot off of the Cthulhu Mythos, and TV shows like Fringe, Supernatural and the X-Files. I like to add a bit of Joss Whedon-y humour as well, so I also draw from Angel.