fealoro:

My familiarity with Apocalypse World tells me that it's 2 armour flat (if you have 0 physical armour, you get 2 armour. If you have 1, you get 2. If you get 3 physical armour, then you keep the 3), not +2. "Dragons in the earth" doesn't mean anything aside from provide a kind of thin layer of fictional plausibility to the move, as far as I can tell. It'd probably still work when all of the dragons are out of the earth.

kkibrick:

As far as I can tell, DA 'herald' playbooks are not about seeing the truth or the terrible future, they're about bringing it about. The War Herald wages war, the Dragon Herald brings forth dragons. So dragons and prophecies call forth two different aesthetic promises:

Dragons: you will be terrible and powerful and terrified of the power that you wield.
Prophecies: you will be terrible and powerless and terrified of the truth that you see.

I would be down for a game with or about prophecies anytime, but I'm not sure an AW-engine game works that well when they're the core focus of the playbook - as far as I can tell, the game is always a little bit of a power fantasy in that you are always the unquestionably cool guys that the story's all about, and all of the non-trivial limits to the things you can do come from having to deal with the other unquestionably cool guys. Which is not nothing, of course - but I can't ever see an AW-engine game being about true things you know but are powerless to stop.

But the terrible consequences of power? Rock right on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Ddraig_Goch

Or it could be a metaphor for a sort of crypto-nationalism. That's certainly how it's used in, say, GoT. A War Herald is a vassal or a mercenary, fighting out of loyalty or for coin. An Outlaw Heir has no beef with the system, he just want his stuff back. The Dragon Herald is the only playbook right now that comes with a creed, a promise of power and change through a thing that "has always been here, but sleeping."

Would it be possible for you to show a picture of your map?

I have a good reason for this request!

The first thing that hit me after reading DA is how less 'clean' it is in terms of how much more stuff there is and how less obviously connected to your character a lot of it is. [For example, a Gunlugger has his guns on him - a Trollslayer has a lot of his weapons "somewhere else"; a Chopper hangs with his crew - a War Herald separates from his band as seasons change.] This leads to a complicated mess of ownership relationships, obligations and possibilities - which is very Dark Age, as far as I know. Unfortunately, it also leads to lots of lists and keeping track on how population changes by percentage, apparently?

My intuition tells me that the only way to offload all of the property management stuff from your brain but still keep it close enough by that you can easily look it up is to have a good map.

One thing I couldn't help but connect the mechanic of the maelstrom was this post by Vincent, specifically this bit:

If you don't provide seed content yourself, you're not leaving it up to the group, but to the random media crap-soup we all swim in.

The implication being that there's always shit ready to invade your brain, and the more 'weird' you are, the better you can end up on the good end of that process, avoiding mental scars as well as pulling out real, useful, interesting things.


The psychic maelstrom might be the bit of AW that's all about real live human nature. Which is a fun sentence to write!

There's one other option that I didn't see anyone mention.

Create new advancement options, like house-ruled special moves and stuff. If the game goes on as long as to have "but I don't want to be forced to retire my character", you can probably get away with some stuff that wouldn't make much sense at the start of a game.

"Hey Hardholder, would you like a dragon?"

And other such things

That'd be great! I'm all for stealing custom moves and making playbook moves out of them.

A theme I kept in my head but didn't really put into writing is the possibility of an Abacus profiting from other people's crises (by virtue of being prepared and having a network to call on). So he makes money when people lose things, get injured or go hungry.

That was a bit difficult to turn into a mechanic in terms of which crises count? And why should other people care?

I like the two-barter flat idea, but having things like that stop other people from attacking the Abacus through his money, which would be fun times if it happened.


It should ideally be fun to hate the Abacus.