So I know that the Savvyhead is the main crafter -- maker of things -- in the game. The Savvyhead is a Weird character; the world's psychic maelstrom is what's allowing human beings to keep pre-apocalyptic artifacts running, when by all rights they wouldn't be able to by their own wits and knowledge. There are no schools anymore, no libraries, no Wikipedia; and the graying shreds of paper Owner's Manuals, or flickering corrupted files on screens wired up to fading car batteries, don't really contain enough information for a person to know how to fix a loom or a carburetor or a mechanical LP jukebox -- never mind an iPod or a violation glove -- without opening her mind to the world's psychic maelstrom.
However, not every hardhold has a Savvyhead magicking up tech, and yet somehow some things are getting made and fixed. And in my game I have a Touchstone whose inspiring vision of hope is all about weaning ourselves from salvage, returning to technology we can understand, and creating something sustainable in the ruins of the unsustainable -- going back to the loom, the plow, the kiln, and the forge. In game mechanics terms, this Touchstone stands for the proposition of rebuilding the world by rolling Sharp rather than Weird. Naturally he is therefore all about bows and arrows and hand-forged machetes and living off the land.
I like this angle and am happy to take the game in that direction (especially since there seems to be a fruitful tension on this question between the Touchstone and the scornful, salvage-addicted, Golden-Age-worshipping Hoarder). But it seems to call out for a special peripheral move -- not belonging to the Touchstone character in particular, just answering the question "what happens when someone who's not a savvyhead tries to fix or repair a thing?"
First off, I thought I'd divide technological artifacts into four types, because it seems to me that there are four levels of technology implied by the game's backstory. I'll quote at the end of this post what I wrote the players about that, but for now, let's just say bows and arrows are "From Scratch", forging a blade with a hammer-and-anvil-and-salvaged-propane-blowtorch is "Tinker", an M-16 is "Golden Age", and a painwave projector is "Pre-Collapse".
So here's the proposed move, which is a hybrid of the Savvyhead's workspace rules and the "when you go into a bustling market" move:
When you try to fix or craft a thing, and it’s not obvious whether you should be able to just like go fix or craft one like that -- for one thing, you've never done it before -- roll+sharp, with the following modifier by tech level:
+1 for From Scratch
0 for Tinker
-2 for Golden Age
-3 for Pre-Collapse
On a 10+, the MC chooses one of the following. On a 7–9, the MC chooses 2-3:
- it’s going to take hours/days/weeks/months of work;
- first you’ll have to get/build/fix/figure out ___;
- you’re going to need ___ to help you with it;
- it’s going to cost you a fuckton of jingle;
- the best you’ll be able to do is a crap version, weak and unreliable;
- it’s going to mean exposing yourself (plus colleagues) to serious danger;
- you're going to need a dedicated workspace first, and it'll need to have ____ in it;
- it’s going to take several/dozens/hundreds of tries;
- you’re going to have to take ___ apart to do it.
The MC might connect them all with “and,” or might throw in a merciful “or.”
On a miss, you're never going to be able to fix or craft that sort of thing -- this is a job for experts.
If it's a new thing, and you manage it, the MC will stat it up.
What do you think? Overly complicated? The idea is that an ordinary non-savvyhead person can act somewhat like a Savvyhead with a workspace on a hit, although they are at a serious disadvantage with regards to sophisticated technologies; on a miss, they're going to need a Savvyhead....
Here, as an addendum, is what I wrote to the players about how the different tech levels figure in our campaign:
From Scratch (Neolithic)
If your access to salvage is totally cut off, or your salvage has run out, and you're living off the land, you're basically in the stone age. Much of daily life is at this level, particularly agriculture, which in many places involves a lot of hunter-gatherer activity.
Tinker (medieval through early 20th c)
This is salvage which you can understand without special insight or complex knowledge: analog stuff. A sharp tinkerer who finds a record player and some LPs is probably at some point going to figure out how it works; she may have to bypass the electrical system and crank it by hand, but simply running the needle through the grooves and amplifying that sound (eg by means of a gramophone bell) is going to produce a recognizable sound. It's discoverable. (Try that with a CD.) You can't blow glass or smelt iron or make tubing, so you need salvage to create a still or a blacksmith's forge or a plow or a barbed wire fence, but if you have one of those around, you can pretty much inspect it and figure out how to make another one out of salvaged raw materials.
Golden Age(late twentieth to early twenty-first century)
This is the stuff we have today, and, in my imagination, it's relatively common in Apocalypse World, more common than the subsequent category. Of course the functional categories don't necessarily map to time periods; a ballpoint pen is Tinker even though it's a modern item, because you could probably make a second one by inspection (using anything staining for ink). But cars, guns, and iPhones are in this category because nobody's really up to making them (there are no examples of front-loading muskets and black powder lying around to copy from -- so Tinker armament is limited to the bow, knife, etc) or even, really, fixing them without Savvyhead weird insight or some painstakingly preserved pre-Apocalypse tradition.
Pre-Collapse(future tech)
This is the freaky stuff in the rulebook -- painwave projectors, violation gloves, temporal transmitters, and so on. Clearly, the Apocalypse happened sometime after now, because Pre-Collapse civilization had a chance to make this suff. You may wonder, then, why I say this stuff is rarer than the Golden Age stuff. I offer one out-of-game reason and one in-game reasons.
The out-of-game reason is that I think that the game is more concrete, vivid, and interesting when most of the stuff the characters are using is stuff we all have the same image of. When someone pulls out a sawed-off shotgun we have an instant common image, set of associations, etc. Pain wave projectors are also cool, but it's good, I think, for me to insert them a bit sparingly, as spice to the meat. Since they're freaky and awesome to us, it doesn't hurt if they're also freaky and awesome to the characters.
The first in-game reason -- and this is, at this point, just a guess, a suggestion I glean from the backstory -- is that AW is set in the United States of America, and in late Pre-Collapse times the USA may not have been at the leading edge of tech. If the collapse happened in 2013 and the campaign was set in a remote area of Gambia or Pakistan, there'd be plenty of stuff lying around that was 10, 20, 30, 50 years behind the current technological standard (as well as some stuff, like some of the cell phones, that was cutting edge). The US was perhaps in decline long before the Apocalypse hit, and so most of the pain wave projectors and brainer violation gloves are import -- and sometimes the instructions are in Cambodian, Javanese and Estonian, another barrier to the non-Savvyhead tinker.
The second in-game reason that the backstory suggests is this: a lot of these pre-Collapse technological items actually use "the world's psychic maelstrom". They are connected to it, designed for it. That says to me that the maelstrom wasn't something that just showed up one day and boom, the next day society collapsed. There was a period of coexistence. Whether the maelstrom, including its apocalyptic effects, came from the outside but not everywhere at once, so that some areas adapted to it and produced goods exploiting it before succumbing -- or whether the causal relationship is the other way around, and human experimentation with something which was, produced, or presaged the world's psychic maelstrom was the cause of the Apocalypse, isn't clear. (Though it's suggestive that an apocalypse that happened in 1960 would have been an Atomic Age apocalypse, leaving radioactivity as its calling card, and the apocalypse we expect today would be all about climate change; of course, in AW the climate may be screwed up and there may even be radioactive traces of small-scale tactical nukage, but those are secondary effects of the real Bad Thing That Happened -- our descendant's chickens, as opposed to ours, coming home to roost). In any event, pre-Collapse tech, as opposed to Golden Age tech, is from a time when limited areas of humanity were producing maelstrom-ready goods, while many other places were already reverting to wilderness.
Show Posts