Toning down the weird harshness of the world

One of my players suggested playing in a rather straight northern-american environment, think The Postman. I'm feeling sceptical. I feel that would lose the inherent brokenness of the world, the strangeness of it all - And I like that. I have a hard time imagining people named Rolfball and Dog Head and Mother Superior in a pine forest outpost.

What are your thoughts?

I can't see why it would cause any problems. To be honest, it seems like that setting is perfectly in keeping with the game as is.

Changing the names available isn't really going to break anything, so you might as well do that if it fits your conception.

Now, if you want to not have a psychic maelstrom, then you might be getting into ground where more work is needed.

One of my players suggested playing in a rather straight northern-american environment, think The Postman. I'm feeling sceptical. I feel that would lose the inherent brokenness of the world, the strangeness of it all - And I like that. I have a hard time imagining people named Rolfball and Dog Head and Mother Superior in a pine forest outpost.

What are your thoughts?

Arvid, I think it's fine. Our Appalachia game sacrifices NONE of the strangeness, and stuff lurking out there in the deep woods and down in the wet hollows is plenty creepy.

Just populate it with weird and broken people and places nestled among the trees. Frankly, given the militia movement, meth labs, and Unibomber crazies, some parts the rural backwoods look pretty Apocalyptic ALREADY.

-JC

Yeah, check out my recent AP (updated in 10 min).  I'm pulling from very down to earth sources but I still really charged about the oddness and I'm making all my characters highlighted stats Weird. When are you running it?

-Don

Arvid, I think it's fine. Our Appalachia game sacrifices NONE of the strangeness, and stuff lurking out there in the deep woods and down in the wet hollows is plenty creepy.

Just populate it with weird and broken people and places nestled among the trees. Frankly, given the militia movement, meth labs, and Unibomber crazies, some parts the rural backwoods look pretty Apocalyptic ALREADY.

-JC

Totally. Just watch the FX show Justified and you can see where things are well on their way in KY. Another good source for plots and characters for AW.

Supernatural weirdness is all relative when we've got genres like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Weird.

Dial it up or down at will.  Some games have tentacled zombies, some don't.

Arvid,

Our first game took place in a rural pot-farming town in the West Kootenays (BC, Canada). I've lived in that area most of my life, and we kept it very grounded in the geography and practicalities of the area.

And we also have a crazy death cult who controlled the water supply, and at one point Johnstone (the MC) introduced zombies who were appearing from some infested mine. It didn't break my immersion or the sense of believability that the setting had. Instead, I thought to myself, "A mine? I wonder if those zombies are emerging from Sandon, or down from Greenwood?"

You can have both, they can both exist. You can hand-pick the weirdness you want, and layer it overtop of the mundanity you want.

Yeaaaaaah, of course pine forests can be weird. This stuff is great, guys. Keep it coming if you got more.

Eruditus, we're playing tomorrow. I'll probably have some spare time at work before that, so I'll make sure to check out your game.

Thanks!

Arvid,

With names in particular, there are a few routes to take to make them feel less jarring, if that's an issue for you in play.

1.) Ground them. You know what Rolfball is, right? Rolf is a new moniker for weed, in the future. Rolfballs are the sticky buds that form, when it's harvest time. Rolfball's a pot farmer, that's why he calls himself that.

They call him Peppering because that's the model of RV he sleeps in. People would always call him Peppering, because that's the name above his door, and it was easier to just go with it than correct them. Goes to show you what degree of pushover Peppering is.

2.) Replace the list of MC names with your own. Pick a place in the world where your game is going to be set, and then research. Pick names of famous politicians, towns/regions, common brand names, bastardizations of common words. Create your own, more plausible list of scavenged names.

For the game I am MCing set near Hoover Dam, I just wrote down the names of towns and counties in the nearby states and I'm using those as names and its working really well, especially if I eff with the names just a touch.

We played it, and it was awesome.

Weirdness include: A brainer posing as a doctor, feral maelstrom-claimed people out in the forests, maelstrom-claimed wildlife (wolves with an eerie intelligence for instance), "Pa's Farm", irregular seasons and insane thunderstorms.

Here's the thing about the names.

They signify a complete break in cultural continuity. All these things are names of things and the people of Apocalypse World know it but they don't know what they used to be the names of. It says it in the book because I said it to V: They're cultural references that have lost their referents.

It's telling you that the apocalypse wasn't just material - it was psychological.

If your AW isn't like that, well, change it.

Here's the thing about the names.

They signify a complete break in cultural continuity. All these things are names of things and the people of Apocalypse World know it but they don't know what they used to be the names of. It says it in the book because I said it to V: They're cultural references that have lost their referents.

It's telling you that the apocalypse wasn't just material - it was psychological.

If your AW isn't like that, well, change it.

I grok it completely!

What I was asking was, will the psychological apocalypse feel convincing without the environmental apocalypse? As nature-loving scandinavians, this environment was a lot more familiar and closer to reality than in our last game, set in a blasted and surreal desert landscape. Thus, the people might feel closer to us and our lives as well.

In the end, we did add some surreal quality to the physical world. The maelstrom is there, of course. If you stay out in the woods for too long, it'll get to you. The animals are acting weird, and the seasons are irregular.

We just used the names straight off the lists.

The weirdness and the realness mingled real nicely. This feels like a world where people are cold and hungry rather than hot and crazy. People like us. Of course, they are still lost - They do fucked up things, they're missing basic know-how. The savvyhead might be the guy who figures out how to make brick buildings again, rather than the guy who rebuilds a plasma cannon. There is a brainer, posing as a doctor to avoid trouble, but she also has some high tech-gear, of course.

The first scene was Barnum the hardholder waking up in the hold/workshop. Everybody in his gang huddles together for warmth when they sleep, but the morning cold has still eaten into his bones. He pushes himself out of bed, into the cold air. The firewood hasn't been chopped up properly, so he starts chopping it, cussing loudly so his gang wakes up and starts working the fire and breakfast. Outside, it's the first morning frost of the year. This, I know exactly how it feels.

The last scene was the three characters finding Twice who went missing yesterday, fighting off an unnaturally large bear on the way. Twice is naked, dead, stabbed a dozen times and hir genitals have been cut off. This is a weird experience from a world strange to me.

I actually have a different take on the AW names.

When I run (a PG-rated version of) the game to a group of a teenagers, I use the names in first session sheet, maybe slightly changed to better fit Hebrew phonology. However, since the players themselves usually don't know the referents of the names, they're just names, and convey no special meaning.

When I GM for adults, I use a combination of "normal" names and weird nicknames. I use it to highlight the lack of the State. The names we have now are ours only by the grace of the State that registered us under these names. Without the State, your name is whatever name people give you for whatever reasons. This is also why many low-ranking NPCs have insulting and degrading names.