So I got inspired and made a thing:



You Carry the Burden of the Future

Apocalypse World is no place to raise children. Sometimes, though, a hardholder or scavenger brood makes a pact—with the blasted heath, with the poisoned ground, with the Psychic Maelstrom itself—and the pact is this: OBEY THE LAW AND YOU WILL SURVIVE.

And so a haven is created amidst all the want and suffering, a hardhold of sorts but something more, something almost civilized. Children are born and raised within its limits, taught to fear the world beyond and to obey the law, taught the means of survival. Generations go by, and yet the people remain.

But humanity is curious and heedless; they do not obey the law but break it—in part or in full—every day. And thus every day the broken world chips away at this mote of security and stability, awaiting the day when it will be consumed in desperation and darkness.

The ones known as the Angel, the Battlebabe, and so on... maybe they were born and raised in a place such as this, a place long ago and far away, a place without the constant fear of death and want, a place long since consumed. If so, these are the stories they tell no one, the stories of what they used to be before the broken world made them hard, cool, hot, and weird, the stories of growing up.

Bibliography: Thanks for These Dark Dreams

- The White Mountains (1967) by John Christopher
- Clay’s Ark (1984) by Octavia E. Butler
- Invitation to the Game (1990) by Monica Hughes
- The Giver (1993) by Lowis Lowry
- Reign of Fire (2002), directed by Rob Bowman
- City of Ember (2003) by Jeanne DuPrau
- The Village (2004), directed by M. Night Shyamalan
- The Hunger Games (2008) by Suzanne Collins
- The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009) by Carrie Ryan
- The Passage (2010), parts III-VI, by Justin Cronin
- After the Apocalypse (2011) by Maureen McHugh
 - "The Villager" for Dungeon World (2012) by Jason Morningstar

You can download it here.  I haven't playtested it yet (so take it for what it is) but I plan to do so at Gamestorm later this month, assuming I don't get a chance earlier.  It'll definitely always be a hack that's 2-4 playbooks long, at most, and will never turn into a big commercial hack (I just don't see the need for it, honestly).

Hey Vx, etc.

How do you actually print and bind these booklets? They seem to be in spreads, but in proper sequence like 1-2, 3-4, 5-6... so I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do with them. I was hoping to print them double-sided, fold, and staple, but that seems impossible with this set up.

Maybe I'm just missing something.

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?

I'm pitching this concept to some locals to see if they'll bite.

Fictional Inspiration:

Justified. Man, that show is fun. And it's pretty much just right for DITV.

Real Life Inspiration:

Harrisonburg, VA has 50,000 people and 4 US marshals, the latter of whom -- along with up to 6 private security contractors hired by the Marshal Service -- are responsible for policing the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah Valley region alongside other marshals from Roanoke and Charlottesville. Harrisonburg is also home to James Madison University and Eastern Mennonite University, though Virginia Mennonites tend to be very modern, not the horse-and-buggy type.

Thoughts:

I'm currently pondering whether it would be better to replace the Mennonites with some fictional analogue, the way the Faithful in DITV make it a bit easier to address issues surrounding Mormonism.  It'd be easy to make them "the Vigilant" who are supposed to be prepared at any moment for the return of the King of Life, have a lot of them attend "Eastern Vigil University" etc. But if I'm going to go that far, I might as well also set it in a fictional place based on Harrisonburg, perhaps.  I don't know; I'm kinda on the fence about it.

I'm also thinking that, unlike in Dogs, it'd be nice if some of the issues that come up in various "cases" (the equivalent of "towns") were recurring rather than just a one time deal, allowing for problems to fester and certain hooligans to keep showing up like they do in Justified. So I'm thinking about how to make a set of guidelines for letting old cases spawn new ones, which shouldn't be too hard.  It's not like having the marshals come in and sort things out is going to stop people's prideful ways.

Finally, I'm thinking about the newer NPC rules for Dogs, the ones that describe them just as sets of dice, with each later set being rolled in the event they escalate:

6d6+2d8, 4d6+1d10, 3d6, 1d8+2d4
5d6+1d10, 3d6+2d8, 3d6, 1d10+1d8
7d6+3d4, 4d6+2d4, 5d6, 2d6+1d8
9d6+1d10+1d8, 2d6+2d8, 2d6+1d4, 1d6+2d10

And I'm thinking maybe I want a hybrid between this level of simplicity and the original Dogs rules.  Like, maybe you could assign each NPC four clusters of dice (as in the above), but specifically assign them to Talking / Physical / Fighting / Shooting.  That way, some NPCs would be good at talking but bad at shooting, but you wouldn't have to give them all traits the way you do according to the original rules.

Anyway, those are just my initial thoughts. Suggestions?

Hey Folks,

Just wanted to mention it here as well as at SG. I've made a few expansions to existing playbooks based on requests from folks and am willing to trade for them (or you can trade with the other folks that have them), especially if folks have other "limited edition" AW materials that I don't already have (you should make your own! it's fun!).

Each one contains 3-5 moves and maybe some gear or other stuff.

So far I have versions of:

The Wurm, a Hoarder who focuses on books and preserving human culture.
The Broodmother, a Brainer who thinks they have discovered what love is.

Upcoming ones include:

The Loner, a Gunlugger with a past that comes back to haunt them.
The Valkyrie, a Battlebabe who collects ghosts.
The Catalyst, a Battlebabe who's found a higher purpose.
The Fallen (or maybe the Earthling), a Quarantined from out of the sky.

If you're looking to get them from other people, I suggest checking out the "AW LE" thread on SG.

Man, I was sick on Tuesday and now I'm booked until late today, so I can't get the last few bits of my Game Chef duties finished, much less have time to work on my Apocalypse World hacks.

Here's some notes before I forget:

Community creation is done as a group. You sit down at the table with the other players and the first thing you do is create the "nest" that the characters are a part of.  Some options include:

Lonely Nest: The folks in your community are the only human beings you've ever spent significant time with, aside from those lost to you. You can use advances to raise stats or buy things for your community (like it's a hardhold) or develop your own unique custom moves, but you don't get access to buying moves from the Sciences (at least until you build an academy or uncover lost secrets and develop the Sciences yourself).

Outpost: You are a branch of a larger cluster of micro-communities. Containing the characters plus a few other NPCs. With advances, you have access to purchasing options for your local community, the larger community of which you are a part, PLUS the Sciences, since you have access to a larger community of knowledge and practices involving star travel.

Plus a few others, maybe you're a traveling group of bandits or gypsies, without a local home that you can buy things for but with access to other kinds of knowledge, like an oral tradition that is basically a unique take on one of the Sciences.  Or maybe you're a group of bandits that steal secrets from others.  Or maybe you hail from a significant community with developed knowledge of the Sciences but have been separated from them somehow.

In any event, as a group you first decide what your starting community is like, by choosing traits off a list of options, just like you do for a hardhold, followers, etc.  Your community sets the limits on both your starting moves and traits and your subsequent advancement, so everyone will develop the community as a group in order to develop their own characters.  It's a bit like Starcraft or other real-time strategy games in that regard, in that you have to build a Dark Temple in order to have Dark Templars.  If certain characters are full members of multiple communities (which will undoubtedly happen), then they can buy or remove traits for all of them.

Your starting community traits also tell you what to initially draw on your map.  So you pick your outpost location and then you pick where your home community is.  Then you decide where the other known outposts are.  Then you connect them with lines, either solid lines showing that the path is familiar and well-lit, or dotted lines showing that it takes some work to travel between those locations.

The background of individual characters will also generate bits of the map, some of which may only be known to specific individuals.  For example, if someone decides they were lost for a while in a specific area, they could have mapped a nearby or distant region heavily, but not everybody else may be as familiar with it.

Finally, each community also has specific gigs (there will be a new term) that they are responsible for collectively.  Individual characters or groups of characters MAY have gigs too (I haven't decided), but most tasks are community based, like a hardholder rather than an operator.  Gigs include things like 1) maintaining the network of beacons, 2) conducting rescue and recovery operations, 3) investigating certain ruins, 4) trying to make contact with other known communities, 5) expanding the existing network so as to facilitate travel and recovery, etc.  You roll gigs either A) at the beginning of a session, B) whenever there is downtime or nothing particular the characters want to do, C) whenever somebody wants to do something that is clearly represented by a gig (i.e. you can use gigs as moves). Succeeding or failing on a gig almost inevitably creates new action to deal with, just as normal.

Lately, I'm thinking that the stats are the three Sciences (Archeology, Astronomy, and Cartography).  Maybe that's it.  Plus you take Hx with people and maybe stars.  You stats in the Sciences are your raw talent in those areas, but you don't get access to more sophisticated moves -- just the basic ones -- unless you find a community that can teach or develop such knowledge and skills.  Or you uncover and decipher a bunch of lost secrets, which is more or less how most communities came upon their starfaring knowledge in the first place.

When creating Mysteries (the Front equivalent), the GM will almost always create several custom moves that are attached to places, objects, people, etc., similar to the way Front moves work.  However, unlike Front moves, unlocking the Mystery often gives players access to these moves, either by uncovering secret knowledge, possessing ancient artifacts, understanding how to awaken the beacons and other fixed assets of the ancients or converse more directly with the stars, etc.  Generally I think you purchase these custom moves directly for your character or for your community with an advance, but you have to unlock that possibility first, fictionally.  So I could use an advance to seize control of an ancient rod of rough cast iron that allows me to interfere with other characters when they roll on the Distance (Harm) table if I cause them to take Distance.

Anyway, more thoughts soon.

I had this revelation a few days ago, while playing.

There repeatedly seem to be questions surrounding what to do about stats that characters are less likely to use, due to purchased special moves.  In my mind, resolving this at the social level ("hey dude, can you mark a different stat?") is fine but prone to edge cases, especially in instances where you partially substitute stats (like how Charismatic allows a Hocus to manipulate with Weird but still have to use Hot for seduction; or instances where you normally don't use a stat at all, but then get a new move that calls for that stat specifically).

Here's a new suggestion for how to handle this:

<b>Fuck what stat you're actually rolling, as far as determining if you mark XP; mark XP based on the stat you were originally supposed to roll.</b>

This has a number of advantages:

1. players and the MC can mark whatever stat they like, without worrying about whether you ever roll that stat

2. when marking others stats, you actually can think about "I wanna see you be Hot this session," without having to know which stat the other character uses to do Hot things

These are character types that I want to be able to play!

The wild crazy fucker who lives in the wilderness up in the mountains or deep in the burn flats with just a bowie knife and a half-tame cougar/alligator named Gunther.

The weird child who still has some of their innocence but is way too connected to the psychic maelstrom or other strange forces.  Maybe they have mysterious tattoos or blue skin or were formerly part of some mad experiment.  Maybe they are the last child born alive. Their sex move should be that they are no longer a child and have to pick some other character type's sex move.

Who do you want to play that may not have a proper playbook yet?