We had 3 players + MC (me). The players knew each other to varying degrees, but I was actually new to the crowd. However, we all had a lot of PBTA experience, and it wasn’t hard to get in a common groove.
I enjoyed the experience and I think they did too—at least we agreed to come back next week and continue.
I had read the whole packet once and all the instructions and generic moves a second time, although I always find it hard to just read playbooks and process them. My eyes kind of start to glaze over after reading 5 or 6 playbook moves. I never really ‘get’ all the options for a playbook in any game until I play or GM for that book in play. One player had seen the ‘pre-alpha’ version and drew on that knowledge to help us clarify some conceptual things, like ‘people.’ (He drew some Venn diagrams at one point.)
I had printed out everything and made multiple copies of the things I thought I would need multiple copies of. The one thing I missed was not printing extra copies of the instructions for making a people. That was the one sheet we sometimes had to wait on. Therefore, I’d suggest making a people sheet that includes those instructions right on it.
I don’t know that the players paid any attention to the different people sheets or formed an opinion. At first I thought I wanted the one that had the section for war company info on it, but then I ended up transferring all of that to a war company sheet. So probably the most useful versions for me so far (in different situations) were the one with “notables” at the bottom and the one that just let you get two peoples on the same sheet.
Building the holding presented no serious difficulties. (Note: the instructions call it “holding” but the sheet calls it “stronghold.”) We did puzzle briefly over the armory options with two circles, but quickly decided those things just had a higher “cost.” One player said that the improvement items were connected to a playbook move, which due to eye-glaze I just accepted as true. I still don’t know under what circumstances a “want” might be marked, or why they have 2 circles (though I have a guess about that).
We built an island, threatened by sea-raiders and a wrongful ruler. Building the dominant people (a “vassalage”) wasn’t difficult, and the name lists were appreciated. We did have to keep reminding ourselves that the dominant people weren’t necessarily the only people, which meant our sense of how big the total population was stayed fuzzy.
Players dove right into sorting through the playbooks like the old pros they are. At one point: “We don’t want to have all of them based on Weird.” This less to some negotiation, easily resolved with “It’s an Apocalypse World game; I’ll have fun no matter what I play.” Ended up with Keep Liege, Court Wizard, Outranger.
Note: several of us were struck in a positive way by the outranger’s “step out of your earthly life” move, which we felt added some magic/weirdness/surprise to an otherwise fairly archetypal character. So that was popular with us—please don’t remove it!
I didn’t bring up co-MCing. I felt like I had enough to attend to with getting enemies made and keeping half an eye on the PCs, even though the players had few questions during creation.
The “anyone can make a people anytime” was cool and had a couple of interesting effects due to coincidence:
The outranger, though one of the islanders by race, had been raised and traveled with a different people, some sailors. He made them “golden creamy” and Hebrew. Meanwhile, not knowing any of that, I made the sea raider enemy: golden creamy and Arabic. So the island’s enemy and the outranger’s adoptive culture are easily mistaken for each other.
Similarly, the keep liege was of a different people than the islanders, one that traces its lineage more directly back to the empire of eagles. He gave that people suspicion of sorcery, and I (again unknowing) gave it to the people of the false ruler on the mainland. That similarity was cool.
On the question of whether I had enough to start playing, I would say yes, but just barely. It helped that we’d named enemies of the holding. But two of the season moves didn’t have much teeth. The liege did hearth and got himself a baby boy, and the wizard did rites and ceremonies (to insure the birth went well, he said). Both very genre-appropriate, but not a lot of edge there for me to latch onto in the moment. Fortunately, the outranger had been traveling and brought back news that the bad ruler was trying to make an alliance with the sea-raiders. That got his character started. Once that was moving, I brought in a representative of the bad ruler to congratulate on the birth and threaten with takeover.
So yes, we had enough, we got started—but I did feel relief when the outranger’s season move explicitly gave me an opening for some bad news.
Play went pretty smoothly from then on. As I reflected this week and imagined where we might go, I realized that this game doesn’t really have something like Act Under Fire / Defy Danger, unless “Undertake Great Labor” is supposed to be that. I was imagining a possible threatening situation that a PC might (if it happened) try to resist/get out of—and wasn’t sure what move that would be, if any.
A good moment came when the representative of the bad guy got thrown out by the keep liege. I realized that the court wizard hadn’t been involved much yet.
Me (to court wizard): There’s something weird about this guy, something other-worldly.
Court wizard (to keep liege): He’s possessed.
He then did “consult other world” for confirmation, but I totally took his statement and ran with it, and it drove a lot of what followed.
Moves we rolled during play: take stock, single combat (almost did it wrong but fortunately the player read it more carefully than me and saw what to do on a tie for position: that was a fun little mini-game for me as mc), the wizard’s demon/spirit move, consult other world, win someone over, and size someone up (on NPCs and once PC-on-PC, the latter went so smoothly I ignored it and went to talk to another player)
Handing out experience went fine. Because of a season move at the start, the court wizard levelled up and took healing (which the keep liege could already use due to the single combat)
Other notes and questions I jotted down:
I liked the “use your moves to” list for MCs.
Naming peoples was tough, for me at least. Any help or advice there would be useful.
My hardest/most confusing was building a war company, in several ways:
* It appears that selecting “specials” and armaments are just arbitrary, well really that the whole thing is arbitrary. This had me worried about unintentionally making an opponent that is too overwhelming or not really a threat at all.
* If a war company is made up of mixed groups, then the sheet says to use the highest war value, but what about different harm/armor values? I never did figure out how harm is supposed to combine.
* I was also unsure about the size of the war company. I could just take from the warrior numbers of the peoples represented, but picking those is arbitrary too, and since the PCs had picked the largest possible size, I felt like I had to pick the same to make them comparable, and I wondered if that was weird.
So I didn’t feel very confident about that part, but I did it—haven’t gotten to actual battle yet though.
Someone said “I like the experience system.” I agree, although I did notice it doesn’t provide (much) in-game incentivizing. You don’t have highlighted stats or anything. That’s not a complaint—just an observation.
Didn’t talk about it with the group, but I missed having explicit Hx or bonds or that sort of thing. The group quickly sorted those out, as they were generally a cooperative bunch, and by giving the outranger news that would be of interest to the other two, that bridged the one gap quickly. But I noticed their absence.
We initially had a question about what “a right of your own” meant, but we found it with some looking.
One question did come up in the single combat scene. We tied on position on the first pass, so then we took the 3 additional points and went again, which led to a situation where the NPC had taken 5 total harm. When I said that, the PC responded “I didn’t want to kill him!” So we left him hanging on to life, just barely—but I don’t know if I was ‘cheating.’ Can you not kill someone if you want? Or is the only thing you can do is not put any points toward harm and hope to win position before you kill them?
More after next session.