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Topics - Rich Stokes

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Apocalypse World / Any chance of those updated mini-books?
« on: October 04, 2010, 10:35:24 AM »
I'm starting a new game on Wednesday and I'd really like to have some updated mini-books I could use.  Mr Harper's landscape sheets are nice, but lack important information (like Angel kits and some other gear stuff) and there's no such thing as Legal size paper over here in the UK.

If not, we can make do with the old versions which I still have.

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Apocalypse World / Augury: How does it work in YOUR game?
« on: August 10, 2010, 12:37:45 PM »
We had the first use of Augury in last night's game.  It was cool.

Sorrow the Hocus is head of a crazy, mixed up cult who worship a complete mashup of pre-apocalypse religions and pop-culture stuff.  The Touched Madonna, Ares and Saint Brangelina all feature heavily, but it's a mash-up with a heavy pop-culture Voodoo theme.

So Sorrow hands out peyote, snake venom and all kinds of nasty psychotropic crap to his congregation at their nomadic camp and they all dance around the camp fire like something out of a bad movie, chanting and yelling and beating drums.

Once he tunes himself in to the heightened minds of his congregation Sorrow is granted visions of things.  We've established that the psychic maelstrom in our game is like a sponge which absorbs echoes of whatever is going on around it.  So Sorrow can see what's going on elsewhere (as least, a dreamlike, caricatured, hallucinated approximation of it) through his augury.

Sorrow's not exactly a shyster, he believes in what he's doing, but he's also a hell of a showman.  Dipping into the visions of what'd abound in the world takes him about 10-15 seconds, but he's charging people for this stuff, so he makes sure it looks the part.

How does Augury work in your game?

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Apocalypse World / "Reactive" players and short first sessions
« on: July 20, 2010, 07:57:01 AM »
Two important facts before I start:

1) I've just started running AW.

2) I'm quite lazy.

To expand, there are 4 players, a Driver, a Chopper, a Savvyhead and a Gunlugger.  Since 2 of the 4 character types are innately very mobile, (and the Savvyhead has a van as her workshop) the game is based over a reasonably large area of dusty, scrubby desert rather than being based around a single Hardhold.  I keep thinking of maybe Dukes of Hazard, only in a desert and with more murder.

Thing is, most of the players seem to be having their characters reacting to what's going on, rather then striking out and trying to get their characters to achieve something off their own back.  Which is OK, but it's down to running that balance between nudging the players into action and leading them around by the nose.  Plus, as I said, I'm lazy and I want the player pulling me in their directions and I can nudge them towards conflicts rather than having to put them in motion.

After a very, very short first session, we seem to have created just a very small bubble around the PCs.  Partly this is due to time, we just didn't have time to create that much world.  Partly, it's the setup, the player characters are spread out physically(which is fine), but also clumping together whenever action happens (which is also basically fine).  Thing is that the NPC population is also spread out, and there are fewer chances to bump into people.  Finally, there's the fact that the players aren't driving their characters as much as I'd like.  Not a massive problem, but I think they need a bit more input from me than I was originally expecting.

My plan, I guess, it to treat the second session as a kind of "1.5 session" that's not really quite a first session, and not really quite a full-on session with the requisite fronts and all.  Basically, I'm not sure I have enough from that first session to build enough Fronts to make things interesting, so this next session is going to be digging a bit more and working with what I have already.

I'm not sure if this is typical, anyone else have a similar experience?

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