Does anybody know if there's more material forthcoming for the Planarch Codex/Dis setting?  I've been thinking of trying another DW game now that the rules are fully cooked and I'm hopefully a better GM.  I was thinking about possibly mashing up some of Inverse World with Planarch Codex and saying the whole game takes place in the Netherworld, with Dis the infinite, hungry, infernal city at the very bottom providing a lot of updrafts.  I've never seen any actual play for Inverse World, but it seems pretty cool to me. 

Hi, getting back into gaming after exams and I've been on a Civil War kick (American Civil War, the blue and the gray, brother vs brother etc), and it struck me that it was pretty darn apocalyptic and you could totally set an AW game in someplace that saw heavy guerilla action like Bleeding Kansas or Tenessee or Kentucky, or, if you want more of a deep South flavor to your chaos, Georgia during Sherman's march.  I've been thinking about pumping up the chaos with something like "Vicksburg flu" wiping out half the population or zombies or a just a nightmarish War Between the States that keeps going and going, with more and more destructive weapons and tactics, until the civilians are equally terrified of both sides' armies and things have gotten weird and steampunk.  But I'm not sure any of that is necessary, since it was disastrous enough in the historical version. 

Any way you situate it, there's a setting of chaos, violence, scarcity, and crumbling authority, raging ideology and people shooting each other for minor reasons or no reason at all.  If the game goes well, there might be a sequel in the weird west.  For most of the playbooks, I think I can get along without huge changes, maybe adding a little steampunk or Southern Gothic flavor to the settings depending which playbooks people use and how they use them. The Brainer and Savvyhead might be a little tricky since they're both using the lost technology of the ancients, but maybe the Brainer could be reskinned as a Mesmerist or just a creepy occultist.  The Chopper and his gang are mirrored pretty well by a guy leading a rogue cavalry unit or something like Quantrill's raiders, outlaws on good horses with guns.  The Driver maybe becomes a horseman or scout, with more emphasis on freedom and riding the range and less on cool cars.  Also, he doesn't get "My Other Horse is a Tank."  I'd love to reskin one of the playbooks for the railroad, but it feels like something that needs its own playbook, or maybe a specialized Savvyhead or Operator.  Among the LE playbooks, the Faceless and Maestro D' fit perfectly, the Solace and Touchstone could be tied in to liberation and the Underground Railroad beautifully.  The Quarantine, probably not unless you want to imagine some Revolutionary War hero who got put into suspended animation by Benjamin Franklin to sleep until the Republic faced its greatest crisis.  That might be a little weird. 

Finally, for Civil War AW, along with the usual character creation options, you also have to choose one more:
Facial Hair: Clean shaven, enormous sideburns, enormous mustache, enormous flowing beard and mustache, pointy chin-beard, pointy mustache and chin-beard, [your favorite general or politician here]
These days, some of the players may be able to say that their character has the same beard they do with perfect historical accuracy. 

I ran an online game of AW called "A Town Called Gaga" that was pretty fun, set in postapocalyptic Arizona along the mystically preserved Route 66, AKA "The Old Road". 

The game ended in an awkward note, as online games are wont to do, but the players and I are up for another go at AW, and I thought it would be fun to take the same map and the same world, but start up with a new bunch of characters, somewhere between 1 and 5 years later.  It's an option for people to create a new, older version of their old characters, but I think most folks will try something new, which allows me to use the old characters as threats.  I still have the old Front worksheets somewhere, so I can figure out what happened with those threats and fast-forward a bit to present a new and interesting situation. 

One mistake I think I made with "Gaga" was that I disregarded some of the guidance in the rulebook and made a place that was too nice -- plenty of water from ancient wells, some breathing space between them and the psycho warlord on one side and the cannibal cultists on the other, an NPC hardholder who was crazy but relatively benign.  It made the characters tend to hole up and protect what they had, and even though I had threats pointed right at all of those good things, it took too long to build them up and the characters had the luxury of addressing them one at a time. 

So this time, I'm planning to make the setting that much more dysfunctional and dangerous, more haunted by shortages and scarcities.  I can do a lot of that from extrapolating from all the Fronts which raged out of control in the interim, and get input from the players as well.

Has anybody done this with AW? The title was inspired by Twenty Years After, one of my favorite Dumas novels, where the Four Musketeers reunite but things aren't quite the same.

BTW, if anyone is interested, we made a Wiki which is pretty detailed about the first session and setting, although I never updated it for the later game: http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/A_Town_Called_Gaga

I thought it might be nice to have a thread to share some of the maps we make for Apocalypse World.  I'm going to use the clickable thumbnail option with photobucket so I don't screw up the forum with big JPEGs.

I'll start with two maps I made for my "A Town Called Gaga" game:



This is the map of postapocalyptic Arizona.  I think it came out pretty well.



This is the butt-ugly map I made with Microsoft Paint to represent the town itself.



And this is the detoured map Madu made for an online game I'm in, posted here with his permission.

Again, click on the images to see full sized versions, post your own in this thread!

In my online game, I had my Chopper PC's gang rushed by a guy with an "old-fashioned gasoline bomb" as the result of another player's failed roll.  Rather than duck, the Chopper elected to stand fast and try to shoot the bomber to protect his people. Nice, but he blew the roll.

So I have two questions:
1) What would you say the stats are for an improvised firebomb?  I'm thinking something like: 2-harm area messy ap, maybe with a custom move to represent being set on fire. 

2) Despite being a prick, I find myself reluctant to set fire to the guy and his named gang members based on a single blown roll, given that this is emerging from somebody else's bad roll originally and that we're in the first session.  Am I being a wimp to either weaken the realistic effects of the bomb or to NOT have it go off and load up on other evil MC moves instead?  The Angel PC is nearby, so there's medical care available.

I was just reading Joss Whedon's run on the comic Runaways, about a group of teenage mutants and aliens who have all run away from their supervillain parents and are now taking care of each other as a little family.  It's fun because they're not really heroes or villains and they're not very good at doing either, and regularly get chumped and have to run away from situations they can't handle.  Also, they're constantly trying to figure out their identies and sleeping with each other and all that adolescent stuff.  It made me think of the sex moves from AW. 

So it hit me that AW would rock for a superhero game that was both about trying to survive and make difference in the world, and also about trying to figure out yourself and your friends.  I think you could still use playbooks as character types, just morphing them into archetypal superhero types.  Since Darkpages isn't coming out anytime soon, the world really needs an archetype-based superhero game. 

I'm tempted to switch weird to psionics, since so many mutants have some sort of psionics-based powers, but it doesn't feel quite right.  And since every character will have some kind of power, it can't map to "powers" either.  Maybe alien-ness?  The trick is that comic books like Runaways and New Mutants tend to have a mix of character types -- somebody whose mutant power is running really fast or turning to stone, and then an alien teenager who ran away to Earth, and a witch-in-training.  I'm not sure AW can handle this, it's really the opposite of an effects-based system.  (I mean that it's more like Sorcerer than Hero).