Thanks for all the great advice, guys.  I was going to try asking the hoarder a bunch of questions and then making his hoard creepier and more fucky tonight, but the player didn't come to the game.  I'm still a little baffled about the archives, but the player ended up choosing another improvement so I didn't have to deal with it (but it's probably coming one of these days).

There's a hoarder and a quarantine in my game.  I'm wondering how to use the conscious and archives traits that they have available.

So the hoard is conscious and can speak into the hoarder's mind.  So what?  What does a hoard want, except more stuff?  I'm curious how other people do it.  Do you make the hoard like a character, offering advice and opinions unrelated to "Feed me, Seymour!"?  I'd love some examples.

And archives for the quarantine... does this answer all questions about the time before the apocalypse?  What's the point of the quarantine's before-game roll to remember stuff if he has all the answers on disk?  And I suppose it's also got all the plans necessary to rebuild the world before the apocalypse?  I realize this isn't automatically success, but it seems sort of un-fun.  Answers in a box instead of answers discovered during play.  How do you guys play this one?

It didn't cost much at all, but it took a long time to prepare... maybe six hours total?  I did it over the course of four evenings while watching movies with my wife, though, so it wasn't too painful.

I don't know if you guys are talking from the same point of view, here.  Mean Liar seems to be saying that the NPCs aren't real people.  Well... obviously.  I'm not sure that's an issue with the system in Apocalypse World.  NPCs aren't real people and there's no real consequence for not treating them as real people except that your game might kind of suck.  It's as true in D&D or Shadowrun or Burning Wheel or Star Wars or whatever as it is in Apocalypse World.

I think certain players approach the game as a problem to decomplexify.  In their point of view, the end goal is to have a system you can control.  Be the king and have only loyal subjects and plenty of resources for that number of people.  See, that's a simple system.  Because there are only loyal subjects, there will be no attempts to subvert your rule or muck up your resource situation.  How do you get there from a complex field with multiple powers in play and limited resources?  The easiest way is to kill everybody who's not a loyal subject (and take their resources).  It's not really roleplaying unless you're playing high-functioning sociopaths, but it is a game.

It's not a game that AW plays well, I suspect.  To have a satisfying game of "kill all the opposition" you probably want stats for them so that so-and-so can be too powerful to kill by just ringing his doorbell and blowing him all to hell.  AW doesn't do that naturally.  You could give him a large 4 harm gang with 2 armor and bunkers and have him hide there like a bitch, but what's the point?  Even then, the PCs can probably sneak in or subvert his gangers or whatever.  You could make a custom move like this:

When you fight Mary Sue, roll +Hard.  On 10+, choose 1.  On 7-9, choose 2.  On a miss, the MC will kill you in a spectacular fashion.

• You lose a limb or your genitals.
• You cry like a little baby.
• You are horribly scarred and no one will love you again.
• You can breathe okay as long as the machines stay on.

But, you know, your players might whine.

AW isn't made to describe the high-functioning sociopath game.  The players, like the MC, have to make Apocalypse World seem real.  Real people don't execute everyone around them to simplify their lives.  Real people get involved in relationships and try to make other people happy, often at expense of their own wishes, and stuff like that.  If you buy in, you get a fun game.  If not, that's okay, just find something more "gamist" and less "color-first" or whatever that phrase Vincent uses is.

Yeah, probably, but the default setting uses modern firearms.  You don't want to be the guy with the musket in that setting, right?

Have any of you used custom moves where high stats were disadvantageous?  For example:

When you meet Circe for the first time, roll +Hot.  On a 10+, she decides to keep you prisoner on her island, permanently.  On a 7-9, she won't let you go until she gets a taste of you.  On a miss, you're free to go.

or...

When you enter Ground Zero, roll +Weird to see if the psychic phantoms are drawn to you.  On a 10+, the MC holds 2.  On a 7-9, the MC holds 1.  On a miss, you have escaped their notice for now.  The MC may spend 1 hold while you are in Ground Zero to cause an accident, inflict ?-harm directly to your character, or have your equipment malfunction.

I'm no chemist, but thinking about AW has gotten me curious about how certain things could be done at the end of the world with supplies of everything running out.  Here's a neat one I was putting together this morning.

Did you ever read The Mosquito Coast?  There's a guy who makes ice with fire in a big machine he builds in the jungle.  I don't know how he did it in the book, but I think you could do it this way...

The basic idea is to make an evaporative cooling unit with ammonia as the evaporative agent and salt as the absorber.  You get a tank of ammonia and salt with a condensing tube (like a still) connected to a collecting tank.  Light a fire under the tank of ammonia and salt - the ammonia vaporizes and the vapor flows through the tube and condenses in the collecting unit.  Put water around the collecting unit and leave it overnight.  The salt will draw the ammonia back up through the tube, which will draw loads of heat out of the water and freeze it to ice.  In the morning, remove the ice and put in more water.

It's supposed to be a closed system where the ammonia can be reused over and over.  Of course, some ammonia will escape and will have to be topped up.

Where do you get the ammonia?  Fermented piss!

Anybody else have some neat apocalypse science to share?