I'm watching a TV show on Netflix called The Elephant Princess right now, with the premise that a teenage girl, when she turns 16, suddenly discovers that she has magic powers because she's actually the heir to the throne of a fairytale kingdom who's been stashed on Earth for safekeeping.  The show revolves around her balancing her normal life with learning her powers and occasional jaunts into the fairytale kingdom. 

It's funny how many of these shows fit into the Monsterhearts paradigm -- Joe should really make a cut-down version of the game minus the sex moves for the tween crowd.  It would be a big hit. 

It's a great idea!  It really fills a gap in the current game. 

Do you think the monstrous quality of the Beastly character could be left a little more undefined?  I mean, I could definitely see a Beastly character who got that way after  a car accident or some awful disease (the original Hunchback had tuberculosis), but I could also picture a Beastly character whose monstrous quality is that he's a racist skinhead and scares the crap out of everybody. I realize this requires rewriting the moves a little, but I really like the skins that could be overtly supernatural or just creepy people with psychological issues.  The Beastly feels like a Minion from My Life with Master in the high school setting -- he/she even gets a "master" in the form of the person who gets the two strings.  Maybe that relationship should be emphasized more.

I also get a strong "Phantom of the Opera" vibe off of this character.  Maybe the Beastly should get a secret lair as part of his starting equipment -- the place where the mask comes off and he/she practices their secret art, and nobody is allowed except the one they love.  Which, as jadanol pointed out, should have some mechanical weight behind it.

Final note: "Love me!" doesn't work as written, I think -- the character is built to be rejected, after all.  If we're going to stick with the Quasimodo/Phantom theme, then the Beastly should get a bonus when getting revenge on people who have harmed his/her love object, or have threatened to harm the love object, or might conceivably pose a threat to the love object... this incentivizes creepy stalking behavior. 

When the book says that everybody's a threat, I don't think it means everybody wants to kill the PC's, just that everybody can make the PC's lives more difficult.  That girl the Gunlugger rescued now wants him to help her get revenge on the nomads, for example. Or the guy who knows how to keep the water machine running is in love with someone else's wife.  There are lots of problem that can't be solved with 3-harm. 

That said, there's nothing wrong with playing Apocalypse World like a Cormac McCarthy novel where characters are getting shot like rabbits just as the reader gets to know them.  That's totally legit and in-genre.  Depending on the playbooks you choose, it's often the most mechanically effective way to approach the game. I think you can reflect that a bit in your MC'ing -- make a front of "everybody gets shot or runs away and the PC's are left alone in a ghost town" and make a doomsday clock out of it. 

You can also have the NPC's reflect the situation: "That new guy, he sure likes to put people in the ground.  I never saw somebody so bloodthirsty who wasn't a cannibal too." 

Regarding the stoning: sometimes MC's feel like they have to get graphic to sort of rub the players' noses in their actions, but I like to get sneaky -- ask them what they're doing, if they got a big rock or a little one or if they snuck away when the stoning was about to start,then cut away, then later bring it up in a different context.  ("When I saw you pick up that boulder, I says to myself, there's a man who means business.")

John, how do you feel about online playtests?  
I know some folks don't like their IP spread all over the internets, and other people like being able to watch a game in progress.  I've been excited about Regiment, and I think it would make a great one-shot.

I'm also not going to have treasures spill forth from the bikers' gaping wounds like final fantasy. The player made a move and I made the hardest move I can in response. This, in the short term, will lead to fuckery, of course. But It could also lead to greater rewards as the character deals with the fallout from this incident.
in any case, the story moves forward.

I just got a great idea for a Scott Pilgrim/Apocalypse World crossover. 
"Hey, coins!  Cool."

Sniping at random passersby from hiding is pretty effective in the real world, IMO, when deranged folks do it. No reason it shouldn't work in Apocalypse World, too. I try not to keep my guys from doing their thing when I MC the game: the Brainer's going to screw with people's heads, sometimes fatally; the Gunlugger is going to shoot people in valuable body parts; the Hardholder is going to do terrible things out of expedience.  It's baked into the game, trying to keep them from doing stuff just messes it up, IMHO. 

But letting consequences flow is totally appropriate. Don't forget that there are lots of ways for things to come around in AW, too.  Besides the obvious thing of having him kill somebody he didn't want to have killed, the Gunlugger can boast about it later or have a Brainer read his thoughts, the biker gang can turn into a serious threat, the ghosts of the murdered bikers can stalk him through the Maelstrom... lots of possibilities.   

I was very dubious of the Abacus at first, but the boss stuff has fired my interest.  I think there's a nice archetypal role for the violent fixer who follows the boss around and takes care of stuff for him.  He's sort of a human pit bull, someone who's traded in his individual agency and conscience for obedience and efficiency.  Like Luca Brasi in The Godfather, or Darth Vader in the first couple Star Wars movies.  I've always enjoyed playing this kind of character in RPG's, so I'm very interested in this take on the Abacus.  

If you do TVTropes, he's The Dragon.  They come in two varieties, the clever ruthless administrator and the slow-witted heavy.  Either way, they do the dirty work for the boss and are ruthlessly loyal.  Their destiny in most fiction is to die in the service of their boss (Luca) or to turn on their boss in extremis, and die (Vader).  

So I think that's the archetype the Abacus could legitimately fill. I think the playbook needs to play up the loyalty and dependency of this character on the boss, and give it mechanical teeth, like it's Acting Under Fire to disobey a direct order from the boss.  You've given up your soul to the boss in exchange for power and privilege, and the devil will have his due.  Maybe there should be specific rules for going against the boss besides that, similar to how D&D Paladins lose their mojo if they go too far.  

So the guidelines for creating an NPC Boss need to be fairly nasty, I think, so the Abacus' player can't pick a kindly old honorable warlord to work for and call it a day.  If the Abacus' boss is another PC, say the Hardholder, do you think we can rely on the player's innate deviltry to make life difficult for the Abacus?

Also, maybe it's late in the day for new moves, but since the Abacus has lousy Hot, I was thinking of a specific, narrowly defined Move called "The Boss Said So" where the Abacus could enjoy a bonus to Seduce/Manipulate rolls only when claiming to be expressing the boss' direct order.  Or maybe the Abacus just needs to get things done with Go Aggro and leave it at that.

EDIT: Ooh!  Count Rugen in Princess Bride is a prime example, too!  I also note that often this type of character has some oddity or obsession of their own: Vader has the Force, Rugen has his obsession with pain.  I don't know that this needs to be in the playbook, unless maybe mentioned in gear that the Abacus has a prize posession of some sort with great monetary or symbolic value.  And there's Winston Wolfe from Pulp Fiction, with his coffee fetish.

I really like it.  It's got a technology vibe but also a bit of a voodoo loa quality.  Spooky as hell, but in a distinct way from the Brainer and the Hocus.  I also like the "failed prophet" aspect of the playbook -- they prepared, they saved up, they tried to warn people, and they've been warped by the Apocalypse worse than most.

I'd like there to be some explicit failure modes with the antennae, though -- it's seems pretty risky to send your soul across the maelstrom into somebody else's body.  What if somebody or something else gets hold of a body instead, so you've got some kind of angry ghost or demon running amok with a body for a certain amount of time? 

Also, what if there's problems with crosstalk between antennae, or antennae blurting out the things the Radio is saying or thinking at inappropriate times?  That happened a lot to the nasty sorcerer in Tim Powers' brilliant Last Call. 

What happens to the Radio if the antenna he's riding gets killed?  You know that's going to happen. 

Other thoughts: I'd make the Radio's sex move work one time only on PC's.  That's still nicely fraught but doesn't totally disempower the other character, especially since they can show up to get revenge without risk of getting puppetted all over again.