Having played Apocalypse World a bit, and having gotten a feel for the scarcities the world threatens with, and the tough characters who inhabit it, I'm feeling the urge to use it as a sort of threat or fall from grace, for a story that starts in a state of innocence.

So, imagine a primitive jungle Eden.  Only a few elders remember the Apocalypse as a horror of their childhood -- they remember the journey to the forest only in nightmares. 

What's clear is that humanity faced extinction out there, and the few who escaped into Eden are all brothers and sisters, allies who have left true strife behind.  There are contests of will, yes, but there is no violence, and none of the tensions born of desperation.  Where Apocalypse World is a world of scarcity, Eden is a world of plenty.  Where the people of Apocalypse World often strive to get one over on each other, the people of Eden strive mostly to understand each other and work together as smoothly as possible.  Such a state can't last forever, of course, but the warnings of the elders, the community spirit of their children, and the small and isolated nature of the tribe have provided decades of relative bliss.

Unfortunately, Eden is now under siege.  There are reasons why the forest has remained unaffected by the outside world, and why the psychic maelstrom cannot reach in -- and not all of these reasons are benign.  Are the enigmatic forest sprites magical creatures, or leftovers of some strange technology?  Is the Archangel truly deserving of the worship it asks, or is it merely a powerful beast?  The people of Eden are faced with four threats which, left unchecked, will forever change them, or their world, or both.

The people of Eden aren't Cool, or Hard, or Weird; they don't have the tools to deal with those who lie, or use violence or manipulation.  And so, they have to choose: keep with the old ways of peace, or vanquish the threats to their world by whatever means necessary.

Can you somehow triumph without changing who you are?  Will you stay true to yourselves, but perish?  Or will you become Cool, and Hard, and Weird, eventually leaving Eden-that-was to take your place in the Apocalypse World?

I'd like to leave that last bit as a genuinely open question and see what others do with it, but for me personally, I'm most hooked on the idea of playing through the Eden module first (it'd have 4 pre-made fronts) and then bringing those characters into a full AW game second.  I think entering AW with a lived-through sense of "what has been lost" would add a perfect spice to the apocalypse.

More on the stats, moves, playbooks and fronts to come!

Just played with Shelley, who played D&D for about a year in 1999 and has never had an interest in GMing ("too creatively demanding").  I told her Murderous Ghosts was a scary horror game and handed her the MC booklet.  I asked her if she got scared by fiction easily; she said no.

We picked up the booklets and spent about 5 minutes reading through the intro pages.  Shelley noticed the female pronoun and started a chat about that; she seemed to appreciate it.

We started play a little bit silly.  There was a lot of, "Now I'm supposed to..." and reading off the page.  I was a little worried when Shelley said, "You're supposed to imagine a place where terrible violence has happened.  So, uh, imagine it."  But!  A few seconds later she started describing stuff.  First, cliches: chains and broken finger bones and skulls.  But then, "So many cobwebs you can barely move through them, and soot covering the windows!"  Nice!

For many of the pages we flipped to, there was a bit of a lull as we stopped talking to read, and Shelley once said, "Whoa, that's a lot of text."  (Page 19, I think.)

Things started slowly.  I asked Shelley a few questions, "What do I see?  Where are the exists?" and saw her scanning the book.  I said, "If there's no instruction about that, just make something up."  She wasn't sure if she was supposed to do that.  But she did start just making stuff up, and the game took off from there.

I spent a while trying to escape from one creepy but not super-dangerous ghost.  The most intense the game got was when I kept failing to get away, exhausting every option I came up with.  I think I forgot to discard once on a bust, but otherwise I drew correctly with pretty average luck.  Shelley noticed me getting blase at one point as I easily eluded the ghost, and she upped the supernatural menace quotient, which totally worked.

Eventually Shelley got tired of coming up with new ways to keep me in the first room, and let me kick through the wall into a new room.  I asked her after the game about her logic there.  She explained:

After I'd tried and failed once to escape, she used the ghost to try to get me to do other things, so she could flip from page 19 to find out what was on some of the other options' pages. 

When that didn't work right away (I was stubborn), she kept at it for a bit, because she didn't want to let me leave the room.  She'd interpreted her job as to trap or kill me, and was viewing getting 4 cards (i.e., me getting to a 4th room) as losing.

We looked back over the rules to see if that was in there.  It wasn't!  But it still seemed like a logical way to play.

When I got into the second room, Shelley started narrating nice carpets, just for variety... and then she thought, "Who keeps a room with nice carpets right next to a room of murders?  A sadistic prison warden!"  She did a great "Back in the dungeon!" mantra at me.  Spying the bullet hole in this ghost's head, I found a gun, threatened him with it, and he Darth Vadered it right out of my hand! 

I drew, busted, and that was that.  She looked at her book and laughed, "Ahh!  No!  Ha ha!"  Time for me to die.  She had the warden ghost telekinesis me into the chains in room one, where the first ghost gave me a mercy killing energy-drain kiss rather than leaving me chained to waste away.  The end.

Looks like I'll probably start running AW next week.  I was wondering if there's any way to throw up some walls between the players and the certainty of what they can expect when they roll dice without hosing the game.  I've asked elsewhere, but the jury's still out.

Any advice?

Specifics in next post.

Thanks,
-David