The Marshes

This is a custom move that I just made up for the creepy marshes on the edge of town. It's kind of inspired by echo bazaar. I'm kinda excited to see it in play, but I'd be interested in ideas for making it even better.

When you catch one of the strange creatures that lives in the marsh, roll +weird. On a 10+, it will tell you secrets of someone you knew who recently died. On a 7-9, it will babble random secrets from dead people, which may or may not be useful. On a miss, it's just an frogeel, and not very chatty.

Cool! I think eventually it would be neat to see an ApW bestiary, with pigmaggots and frogeels and whatever-the-heck.

And somewhere along the way Apocalypse World transformed into the ultimate end of Avatar: The Last Airbender universe.

"A pack of crocodyenas and spiderats are already gathering around the edges of the street, smelling the fresh blood spilled only minutes ago."

Haha! Except for bears. They are just bears.

I think weird mutant gene-splicing combos make for good creepiness. I saw on Animal Planet yesterday that there are mice that have been given genes for phosphorescence. That's totally worthy of ApW:

"She's got a little pet mouse on her shoulder that glows a soft green. It's eyes are dark and bright."

I'd love to see someone flesh out a whole "setting" with tidbits like this.

Hah! I want a cult that worship the glowing mice as the pinacle of Golden Age tech.

And oh look, there's a gap on my Front Sheet...

Love the move Simon. It's gorgeous. Do you let the players know what they're rolling for?

To be honest, the characters haven't been to the marshes yet. I think they're scared.

For one of my other custom moves (I wrote it up in the "Images" thread), I didn't tell them what they were rolling for, though it became pretty obvious. I think if it was something you could spend hold on, you'd want to tell them, otherwise there's no compelling reason to do so, especially in pretty low-stakes things like this.

To be honest, the characters haven't been to the marshes yet. I think they're scared.

Ha! More like, who has time to go fishing for mutant frogs when there are bike gang dudes to kill and refugees to worry about and everyone is wounded and I think that pretty much covers it.

Simon, did you notice that our first two sessions have not even covered a whole 24 hours yet? No chance of these characters' lives being boring!

And somewhere along the way Apocalypse World transformed into the ultimate end of Avatar: The Last Airbender universe.

"A pack of crocodyenas and spiderats are already gathering around the edges of the street, smelling the fresh blood spilled only minutes ago."

Avatar did that? I've never really seen the show.
It reminds me of Oryx and Crake. Snats (snake/rats) are fucking scary.

Yeah, it's sort of a running theme that all the "natural" animals of Avatar were crossbreeds of two or more earth-animals, from cute little duckturtles to dragonfly-winged snakes to large rolly armadillo-tigers. They even poked fun at it at one point, let me wiki up the exact quote:

Katara: The King is throwing a party at the palace tonight for his pet bear.
Aang: Don't you mean platypus bear?
Katara: No, it just says, 'bear'.
Sokka: Certainly you mean his pet skunk bear?
Toph: Or his armadillo bear?
Aang: Gopher bear?
Katara: Just, 'bear'.
(short pause)
Toph: This place is weird.

Which is why "pigmaggots and frogeels" made me think of it.

Of course, you could do worse than that for AW: stick to scavengers, vermin, and poisonous/dangerous things, and you've got a strange and twisted mutant ecology just waiting to inflict hardship upon your PCs!