Thanks! Let me know if you do. I'm itching to know if the moves work like I hope they will.

Here's a new project Hans and I are working on, coming out of an SG thread:



A sample of a half-dozen pages of the alpha draft is available here, if you want to check it out.  Hans and I are still banging out specific options for planes, planar travel, classes, and some alternative basic moves, but what's here is almost playable as is.  It'll be more playable once I finish the "planar Hx" guidelines.

As the first page explains, each section contains options rules that can be used all together or piecemeal. You can easily use the planar travel rules without the city of Dis, or Dis without the Sultana, or the Sultana without the road wardens, or any other combination you like.  There's some links between specific options, like how the new heritage moves show up in a few places so far, but those are easy to remove or hack if you don't want to use them.

Hey, so the Marmot is floating around, right?  Or it will be soon, I guess?

I'd like to trade for it and these are the things I have available:

• a new supplemental playbook for the Touchstone, created for Elizabeth.  It's called the Mendicant and lets you treat acts of charity as barter.
• a new micro-supplement called +Insight, containing some things I think about running and hacking AW.
• a re-skin of AW as a body-horror crusaderpunk dragon-fighting thing called That Ancient Serpent, which uses the standard AW moves, just rearranged.

I'll trade these for other things too, if you've got 'em, though I have the other LE playbooks already, as far as I know. I'm especially interested in custom moves and playbooks that have been written for and actually used in your AW games, but I'll accept just about anything AW-related and a lot of stuff that's not.

Let me know what you've got and we'll work something out.

If the game's still fun for everybody, then you have a bunch of different options:

-- make some custom Gunlugger-ish moves for him to take
-- make a new playbook that's basically Gunlugger part 2
-- let him keep taking additional moves from another playbook
-- let him take a gang or hold and keep buying options for those

If the game stops being fun (or consistently as fun) for you and the other players, then you're gonna have to talk about it and reach some sort of compromise or just stop playing the game (whether you start a new one later or not).

One thing I'm having a hard time remembering, in my current game, is to keep track of the declining resources that the PCs have.  They're in space, so it's really easy to run out of oxygen or water or food that hasn't been poisoned by the Lovecraftian "colour out of space" (i.e. radiation).

Yeah, countdown clocks are good, but I'm thinking about some custom moves -- probably session moves, done at the beginning of play -- along the lines of: If you've eaten in the last 24 hours, spend 1 barter worth of non-poisoned foodstuffs. If you choose to save your good stuff and eat irradiated food, your stomach rebels and it takes a fair bit of work just to keep it down: take 1 harm AP and psi-harm.  You cannot begin to heal this harm until you've spent 24 hours eating real food and getting some of the poisons out of your system.

I'm also pondering an Inception + Push inspired hack where you play psychic mercenaries hacking into people's brains for the $$$$ they need to stay one step ahead of the government spooks that are after them. Rather than barter, your financial resources would be measured in "grands."  So you might have a move that's like: When you attempt to put some distance between yourselves and the spooks after you, roll+grands spent on diversions, false trails, informants, safehouses, etc.

Anybody else written custom moves for resources? Has there already been a thread about this that I missed?

So this may not be revelation to anyone but me...

Last week, the PCs in my near-earth-orbit game responded to a distress signal from this orbital monastic community called Sanctum. The folks who run Sanctum try to help people clear their minds from domination by the Psychic Maelstrom and, thus, escape from a life of reaver-esque cannibal savagery. Our touchstone is a "graduate" of Sanctum's psychic rehab, but apparently not all their recruits took to their training so well (surprise!), so the PCs are basically walking into a bloodbath of insane debauchery and cruelty.

I began making maps like crazy, drawing the main airlock, the cargo room, the corridors leading to the medical facility, the kitchen, the training rooms, the initiates' monastic cells, the flight deck where they launched shuttles, the central meditation chamber, etc.

All this mapping was inspired, for the most part, by our touchstone asking where certain things were, based on her memories, alongside some Reading of a Charged Situation and Opening of Brains. And then, once the PCs starting moving through Sanctum, with the vibe and setting of our game, plus the horrific atmosphere, it felt very much like Geiger Counter, surprisingly enough. Room-by-room, situation by situation, with the sense of danger building.

But what really struck me was that, unlike in some Geiger Counter games I've played, the map really served to ground the fiction in ways I wasn't expecting.  Without the movie-inspired jump cuts that sometimes happen in Geiger, the map really provided some tight constraints on player choices through the fictional positioning that went along with it. Unlike in Geiger or PTA, we weren't thinking about what the next cool scene should be about; instead we looked at the map and were like, okay, clearly we have to go through X place next.

For example: The PCs proceeded first to track down Hugo, the initiate that sent the distress signal, who was in one side of the space station.  But then, having come across some horrific scenes, the touchstone decided that Hugo must be dead and that they should proceed to the training rooms to confront Rufus, the failed initiate who seemed to be orchestrating this descent into base passions.  Consequently, as demanded by the maps and the fiction, they had to make their way across the entire rest of the station to get to where Rufus was. No jump cuts, no excuses. That was clearly what the fiction -- through the map -- demanded.

Sure, the players could have decided to do something else: go out an airlock and walk around the outside of the ship, leave and not fight Rufus, blow up Sanctum, whatever else. But their choices were limited -- in significant ways -- by the little bit of sketching I did of the station.

I guess maybe I'm used to maps as a form of railroading, showing where you clearly must go, or as a series of light cues to help you remember things you've done and preserve consistency in the fiction, but I'm not sure I've ever seen the geography of a map really matter in a game that didn't have wargame-inspired rules for cover or range calculated in squares.

So anyway, I'm thinking about that now and my future play of both AW and Geiger Counter will be better for it.

P.S. In my next game, whenever that is, I'll probably end up making the Maelstrom a bit more complex from the beginning, rather than a one-note thing, but still try to start by just projecting an attitude or desire. For example, maybe the Maelstrom will embrace people with high weird but plague people with low weird.  Or maybe it'll want something specific and strange, like for everyone to have babies, and then later we can find out why.