Thus far I've been assuming no sex moves for Necrology.  I believe that in Wraith, a ghost's corpus was enough like a real living body to other ghost's that sex was theoretically possible and maybe even common, but regardless, sex doesn't seem like a major part of this game, and therefore sex moves would be pointless.  Right?

If that's right... should I replace the sex moves with something else?  I'm open to suggestions!

Okay, so I had some thoughts this morning.
I was thinking about my (possibly unfounded) concern that the ghost playbooks as I'm currently imagining them will be a bit too narrow.  It occurred to me that one thing I could do to ease this a bit would be to allow players, when they come to the "pick moves" phase of character creation to select one move from another playbook, if they wish.

Does this seem like a reasonable idea?

Another related idea I had was that I could write up a short list of... let's call them something like General Moves.  You wouldn't get these moves automatically like you do basic moves, but they aren't tied to a specific playbook either, so anyone could choose from them when they take improvements or select one of them instead of a move from their playbook at character creation.

Does that sound decent?

This sounds like a dumb question but: after I send a private message, is it then supposed to show up in my outbox?  I just tried to send you a PM, Vincent, and it doesn't show in my outbox, so I'm wondering if it actually got sent.

Sweet!  With a sub-forum, now I'm not concerned about starting a bunch of threads on multiple topics.

So for anyone paying attention, I have a question.

I feel like I want a type of ghost that can infiltrate dreams and mess with them.  Obviously the living will be the primary victims of this power, but should ghosts be eligible as well?  Do ghosts dream, or is that one of the big differences between the living and the dead?

I'm hoping my previous thread went as ignored as it did because I didn't include a tag in the subject indicating what it was about... and said almost nothing inside the post as well.

Like everyone else, it seems, one of the things I love about AW is that it has a very cool, basic, flexible structure.  It's not that this game takes a low amount of WORK to hack, but that the rules text makes it so obvious how to pull parts out and change them or replace them.

So anyway, I've started idly working on a hack to do a Wraith-esque (that is, a game in which the PCs are spirits of dead humans, a la White Wolf's Wraith: the Oblivion) game.  I started by making up some new stats, then I attempted to write a playbook for a character type but when I got to the part about picking moves I had to stop.  It seemed clear I needed some Basic Moves before I could figure out moves for a particular playbook.  And then I got a little stymied on the Basic Moves.  But anyway!  Here's what I've got so far.  I'd love feedback or input from anyone who's interested.

----------------------------
Stats:
Quick, meaning spry, fast, nimble, and in-tune with the world of the living
Dead, meaning numb, tough, unyielding, and in-tune with the, yeah, world of the dead
Passionate, meaning fiery, volatile, angry, joyous, and in-tune with your creative-self
Spiteful, meaning hateful, strong, violent, ruthless, and in-tune with your destructive-self
Centered, meaning focused, calm, thoughtful, zen-like, and in-tune with your higher nature
Ties, meaning connections and shared history with other ghosts
----------------------------

Ties is basically renamed Hx (and I'm not totally stuck on the names of ANY of these yet) but the rest don't have direct analogs to any of the standard AW stats.

the moves I have so far I'm even less convinced about (except for the first one, which I feel is pretty solid) and the last two I haven't even thought of any mechanics for at all yet... but still, i offer them for consideration...

----------------------------
Basic Moves:
Communicate with the living
When you communicate with the living, roll+quick.  On a 10+ choose 3. On a 7-9 choose 1:

• They can see you
• They can hear you
• They aren’t terrified
• You convey your message clearly

Hold your form together
When you try to hold your form together, roll+dead.  On a 10+ you are rock solid and unalterable, eternal as death. On a 7-9 choose: either suffer harm (as established) but hold your form, or suffer form breakdown and go unharmed.

Adapt your form
When you want to adapt your form to new circumstances, roll+passionate. On a 10+ choose 3. On a 7-9 choose 1:

• Hardened form: +2armor
• Dangerous form: +2harm
• Harmless form: take +1 ongoing when you communicate with the living
• Fluid form: take +1 ongoing when you remember who you are
• Destructive form: take +1 ongoing when you destroy something beautiful
• Calcified form: take +1 ongoing when you hold your form together
• Regenerative form: hold 1. Spend at any time to reset harm to 6:00, then lose this form
• Standard form: lose all adapted forms and heal 1 harm for each.

Destroy something beautiful
When you try to destroy something beautiful, roll+spiteful.

Remember who you are
When you need to remember who you are, roll+centered.
----------------------------

I have a few other thoughts as well that I haven't written down before yet.  Such as I suspect I will probably base the equivalent of "passions and fetters" from Wraith on AW gigs and probably call them something like "chains."  It seems like it should work quite well.  After all, gigs are something that can give your character a useful,  spendable resource, but can also complicate your life, especially if it goes wrong.  A ghosts continued attachment to, say, his house, where he died, could function similarly.  If you spend some time hanging around the house, you may get points of some kind of resource (which I haven't thought of a good name for yet) but it could also create problems.

Okay, so I MCed my second session of the game tonight.  For a few reasons, I was MUCH more stressed out/concerned about this session than the first, but I think it went quite well, over all.

Warning, this is a really long post.  I'm doing it half just to work out my own thoughts about how things are going, but feel free to read and respond if you're interested.

For the first session I just went in with playbooks, character sheets, and a page I'd typed up with some apocalyptic imagery some of it stolen (like pigmaggots) and some of it made up myself.  A lot of the stuff on this sheet ended up becoming initial threats.  Due to me trying to do fronts "right" I ended up with 4 different fronts for the second session.  I figured "No big deal, better to be over- than under-prepared.  I'll probably only use one or two."  But nope.  I used a little from every one tonight.  Oh well.  Eventually one or two will probably become the most urgent and the others will fade into the background until the most urgent ones are resolved.

But anyway.  As a quick rundown:
There are 3 PCs: A savvyhead named Gears, a driver named Beemer, and a gunlugger named Crille.
Gears is an overweight man in his low 30's with no family or close friends.  He's lived in the holding most/all of his life, but doesn't even really live in the holding proper (more on that later).  He kind of "inherited" his workshop/garage from his adoptive father who is now dead.
Beemer is also a 30ish man.  He's also lived in the area for a long time, but as a driver, he kind of wanders around some.  Again, no close friends or family (though that's probably fairly appropriate for a driver).
Crille is a 20ish girl.  She was captured by a gang of raiders a young age and abused/kept as a slave for several years before she managed to kill the gang leader and escape.  She's fairly new to the area, so she also has no particularly close friends or family in the area.
if it matters to anyone, all of the players, myself included, are men around 29-30 years old.

The landscape of the local holding was original based on my local area, which is the Quad-Cities region of Iowa/Illinois.  I say originally, because one of the players (of Beemer) started getting into nitty-gritty talk about the highways and where there are places in real life he could the huge vehicles he was interested in.  I said, "Okay, screw this, this isn't the Quad-Cities anymore, I don't want to get bogged down in this," and I turned the map ninety degrees and said, "That's north now.  This isn't here.  This isn't now.  Let's move on."  But anyway, the key point is that there is a major river that is a feature of the area.  Most of the people of the holding live on an island in the middle of the river.  The hardholder, his wives, his closest cronies, and his bodyguards live on barges anchored near the island.  There is a market and manufactory on the island, but some other important things like the farms and Gears' workshop/garage/salvage yard are off the island, on one side of the river or the other.  Weather in my Apocalypse world is very rainy with frequent,. violent thunderstorms.  The land is very muddy in most places.

In the bit of actual play we did in session 1, after character creation, Beemer was driving back from another holding (one of the closest ones, that takes a full day to travel to or from) in his armed and armored dump truck with a delivery for the hardholder.  He had an NPC trader who was the hardholder's representative for the trade, and Crille was riding in the back, manning the truck's machine guns.  About an hour out from the holding they were attacked by strange people who kept their faces covered and didn't talk, but they fought them off pretty easily.  Gears, back at his own garage, was harassed a little by some thugs from the local gang/security force on the orders of their boss, because Gears was supposed to be fixing his machine gun.

We kicked the second session off with Beemer delivering the supplies and dropping Crille off at the infirmary (she'd gotten hit with a grenade in the fight but as she was wearing pretty heavy armor she only took two harm).  This gave me a chance to introduce Gabe, the medic.  Gabe is another 20ish girl.  Her mother had been the medic before her but died a few years back with some mysterious illness.  Though her assistants are older than her, having grown up in the infirmary she had more experience and quickly took over.  Crille got looked over, though only being at 6:00 on the harm countdown, I said Gabe couldn't really do anything much for her.  Crille (and her player) expressed some sexual/romantic interest in Gabe, asking her out for a drink after she was done for the night at the infirmary.

Beemer took care of the deliveries then headed to Gears' garage to get the superficial damage to the truck patched up.  On the road he picked up one of the members of the local gang who claimed he saw a mutant skulking around Gears' salvage yard (the garage and the salvage yard are located quite close to a really huge fenced off area called the Junk Fields.  For a long time, every year or so, someone in the holding is born with some kind of visible mutation.  These people are seen as cursed and generally abandoned or chased off.  Many/most of them hide in the Junk Fields).  Gears' used the "workspace move" to find out what he needed to fix the gang leader's gun (I told him he needed to use some of the machines at the holding manufactory) so he hitched a ride back with Beemer to talk to the factory foreman.

At the factory, a 12 year old kid (the son of the foreman) talked to Beemer, excited to be talking to a "real driver!" and the foreman told Gears' that he was closing up for the night and it would be "his ass on the line" if anything went wrong while he wasn't there so he needed to come back the next day (Gears blew a manipulation roll).  Beemer gave a ride around the island to the kid and Gears headed home on foot.  Meanwhile, Crille took Gabe out for a drink, to the only "club" in the holding, a place run by a beautiful woman who was currently the gang leader's woman.  Nothing much came of it though.  Near the garage, Gears saw a group of people with electric lights looking around but they spotted someone else and took off after them.  There was a note for him from the gang leader saying, essentially "Where the fuck is my gun, asshole?"

While asleep, Gears dreamed about a strange whispering voice.  I asked him if he wanted to listen to it (this was for a custom move I'd written for a landscape threat I'd written up called The Maw, a huge crack in the earth to the north of the holding, that some people claim to hear whispering voices coming up from at times).  He did, and it gave him advice on how to deal with the gang leader "Stand up to him, don't be his bitch." but also implanted an urge in his subconscious to listen to it more.  So in the morning, he went to the factory, fixed the machine gun, but also removed the firing pin, then dropped it off at the guy's home with a note saying, "You know who to ask if you want this fixed."  The gang leader got the point (Gears got a 7-9 hit to manipulate) and paid Gears to put the firing pin back in the gun and told Gears that he should realize that he, the gang leader, is the one who REALLY has the pull in the holding and things are going to change, so he should make sure he's on the winning side.

At the infirmary, the people that raised the pigmaggots and mudworms started coming down with a strange fever, but Gabe, the medic, didn't know what to do about it.  Crille was the only PC to eat any fresh meat lately, and she's been infected with a disease, but she's proving to be quite resistant to it.

Beemer wanted armored panels installed onto his truck that could be closed over the back.  Gears used his workshop move to figure out about it, and I told him that he could do a cheap, unreliable version easily, or he could go scavenge in the junk fields for the parts he needed to do it right.  After Crille and Beemer joined him, they agreed to all go into the junk fields to look for what he needed.

I'd written up the junk fields as a landscape threat with a custom move attached "when you scavenge the junk fields, roll+sharp.  On a 10+ choose 2, on a 7-9 choose 1, on a miss none: You find what you need, you avoid the inhabitants, you don't get lost."  He got a 10+ and chose to find what he needed and not get lost, meaning that some of the exile mutant tribe found them while he was busy cutting the doors off a freight train car with a cutting torch.  A fight ensued during which Beemer was bitten by a rat controlled by an intelligent mutant rat.  He blew it into a fine red mist with his pistol but the bite implanted him with the urge to "protect the rats."  Later he took a shot to the gut from an exile's hunting rifle.  Crille managed to take the exiles that had caught them out, but also took some serious damage, leaving it pretty much in Gears' hands to haul them back in the little tractor and trailer they'd brought in.

Gears took them to the infirmary immediately (Beemer was at 11:00, Crille at 10:00).  Gabe asked him if they'd been doing a job for the hardholder at the time.  She is basically on retainer for him, so if Gears had lied and said yes, he probably would have gotten them patched up for free.  But he was honest, so she told him she had to charge him for expenses, since Crille and Beemer were out of it at the time.  In an effort to get out of paying for the other PCs, Gears' player told me he wanted to try to seduce Gabe.  At first I was thinking "What?  No, you're an older, overweight, unsocial dude.  Who's to say she's even attracted to him?"  But then I thought, "Ya know, it'll just be more interesting even if he DOES succeed."  So he rolled and got it with a 7-9.  I told him she took him into the backroom with her after getting Beemer and Crille stabilized and told him that if they couldn't settle their bills, she'd expect Gears to.  And apparently the sweet little medic has a thing for anti-social mechanics.  This is just fine with me, especially when we decided that was as good a place as any to wrap the session so we moved onto the session end Hx adjustments and Crille's player told Gears' player to lower Gears' Hx with Crille by 1 because he fucked the girl Crille was interested in right there while Crille was laid up on a cot in the next room.

So yeah, I'm not sure how much Gears and Beemer give a shit about any of the NPCs so far, but Crille is kind of into Gabe, and now Gabe might have a bit of a thing for Gears, so that should be fun.

I still think maybe I made too many fronts, and I'm not positive I made them "right," and I'm also not sure I've been following the principles and MC moves like I should (I don't have them anywhere like ingrained in my brain, and I never have time to remind myself of them during play) but I'm pretty sure everyone is having fun (myself included) so that's pretty awesome.  I'm excited for the next session and I think and hope that my friends are too.

So none of my three friends decided to play a brainer.  This disappoints me and I feel that psychic weirdness is crucial to what I want AW to be.  Of course I know that everyone can open their brain (and the gunlugger even took the move that lets her use hard to open her brain when she's in a fight) but I'm thinking of putting some kind of weirdass psychic dude (or chick, i'm not sure yet) into the game as an NPC and I'm curious about how others have handled that sort of thing.  Do you do anything special with them?

I always end up doing one of these threads, it seems.
I MCed my first session today, with three players.  They didn't pick some of the playbooks I thought would be coolest, but thats okay, I'm pretty sure it's still going to be a cool group.  We've got a Driver, a Gunlugger, and a Savvyhead.

Most of it went pretty smooth, but I've got two rules-type questions right now:

I think Vincent mentioned that one of the stat lines for the Driver was weird, and my friend noticed it.  One of them only totals to +1 instead of +2.  Vincent, did you ever decide for sure that was how it was meant to be?  He ended up not picking  that line (because it totaled lower) but I guess part of it looked tempting.

Secondly, how do people generally handle healing when none of the PCs are angels?  Do the PCs just have to do favors or pay barter for healing from an NPC medic and then I, as MC, just say, "Okay, he narcostabs you, you're out for a few hours and when you wake up you're covered in bandages and your wounds have been stitched up. Clear your clock to 6:00."?  Or something along those lines?