For the Gunlugger it's quite easy, you just point them at stuff to go and fuck up. In my experience, most people who pick a Gunlugger do so because they like playing characters who go and do that very thing.
The best time I've ever seen anybody have playing an Angel was when she decided to make her into a mad scientist kinda person and ended up going all Herbert West - Reanimator. There were zombies everywhere - that made the other players sit up and take notice!
Not had many Savvyhead players, I would try and push them into making cool machines that end up doing bad things. Badly.

I ran this at a nice little one day convention a couple of days ago.
I've ran AW at a few cons and always try to do at least a 2 slot game - purely so the players can come up with the setting and characters, this was the first time I had gone for pre done setrting with fronts and limited character choice.

The slot was a 4 hour one, 4 of the 5 players had played before and 2 of those had MC'd as well. It took just over an hour to go through the character gen, backstory and setting so we had 3 hours to play things through.

I really enjoyed running this to be honest. The players all seemed to have fun, although everybody rapidly ganged up on the Hocus and his character was killed. Rather than let him gen up a new one I decided to let him play the conciousness of the brainworm, which he seemed more than happy with doing!

Everything came to head around the MaistroD's establishment, with Barbarossa's gang, Brainworm Cultists and even some of the submarine dudes all laying seige to the occupants at one time or another.

By the end we had:
Hocus - had his head split open by the MaistroD - attempting brainworm extraction via the medium of a fire axe doesn't work very well.
Chopper - Fully absorbed into the conciousness of the Brainworm, despite his best efforts to fight off it's influence.
Angel - Captured and forcibly indoctrinated into the cult.
Faceless - The only character to escape - very unheroically swam off and left everybody to a massive gang of cultists in the final seige.
MaistroD - went down in a truly awesome Scarface moment - holed up in his office snorting Bliss and shooting at Cultists.

I found the adventure has quite a good set-up, everybody has some reason to be doing something right from the get go, even the Angel has stuff to do, regardless of whether other characters decide to go off and get shot up!

What is stopping you from just saying you don't have the guns?

I don't really see the problem here.

I would go for something like this:

When you try to resist Blind Blue's mind control roll +weird

On a 10+, whether you carry out Blind Blue's suggestion is up to you. If you do, mark 1 experience.
On a 7-9, whether you carry out Blind Blue's suggestion is up to you. If you don't you are acting under fire until Blind Blue tries to control another victim or he's dead.
On a miss, whether you carry out Blind Blue's suggestion is up to you. If you don't take 3 harm AP.

Nice list, I'll be sure to steal some of those next time I'm MC'ing!

I always like "Who has something you want? What is it?

Since I got the playbook, every game somebody has chosen the Maistro'D.
Which always really surprises me, even though it's a great playbook and is always really involved.

For quite a while now my brother and a few mates have been thinking about a writing a steampunk RPG, but have been struggling with system design.
I've been GM'ing Apocalypse World at every UK convention I've been going to for a few months and really dig how quick the system runs.
Could a hack be the perfect design choice?

Problems I have:
Weird and the psychic mealstrom are pretty integral to AW, there is going to be an etheral aspect in EoS called "Steam" but it's probably not as pervasive as the mealstrom and not accesable to everbody.

Combat in AW is (IMO) pretty lame when it comes to PC vs PC and also against NPC's that the GM may want to have some kind of plot for. Does the AW system totally fall apart if you remove the whole not pre planning plot and putting NPC's in crosshairs aspects? There's no real reason why steampunk requires a GM to pre plot anything any more than post apocalyptic settings but it's just the way I see the game coming together. There's going to be a setting in place already for starters.
I've already come up with some ideas myself about how I want to modify combat and the moves system but I do like the way AW works with the 2d6 + stat, 7-9 success with a little bit of GM fuckery, 10+ success.

As for setting, it's not straightforward Victorian Steampunk, more a mix of post apocalysim and steampunk, with a heady dose of Empirialism thrown in for good measure. The mystical "Steam" is going to allow the building of steampunk style artifacts and get around the whole real science hangups. Setting after a massive apocalypse, instead of in alternative history, also allows us to add whatever stuff we want into the mix, without having to worry about history buffs contradicting us on what real people may have been doing at the time!

As always, the trickiest thing is going to be coming up with iconic archetypes and good moves for them. here's what we've got so far-

Articifer/Engineer
Black Widow
Bounty Hunter
Clairvoyant
Crime Lord
Dilettante
Detective
Gyroscope Rider
Harlot
Law Man
Mercenary
Officer
Scavenger
Sky Pirate
Spy
Steam Priest

Anyway, here's some of the imagery that my bro has come up with so far-
STEAM PRIEST

SCAVVIES

MERCS

HARLOTS

DETECTIVES

BLACK WIDOWS

SKY PIRATES

BOUNTY HUNTERS


If anybody's got any cool ideas for steampunk architypes then feel free to chip in!

More posts on system changes and setting to follow soon!

Cheers! I notice it's already doing the rounds on the underground market. Lucky for me I got barter spare!