World on the Edge

So, Over the Edge was one of my formative roleplaying experiences--I didn't encounter it until college, but it busted so many of my gameplay and game design paradigms that I can honestly say I wouldn't be the gamer I am today without it. The only more significant event in my roleplaying history is discovering Vincent's blog and the Forge.

I GMed an OtE campaign from about 2000-2009. It was awkward at its best and miserable at its worst. Part of that was a complete mismatch of play agendas and expectations across the group, but it's also clear to me that I simply didn't have the techniques and vision to helm the ship at all, much less navigate it into the region of play that would have been fulfilling for me.

And then came Apocalypse World. When I read it, the thought hit my brain like a lightning bolt: principles like these could've made OtE work for me!

So here we are! Welcome to World on the Edge, the Over the Edge hack of Apocalypse World. I'm going to use this forum (as well as my Google+ account) to publically and collaboratively share my design process. If you've a love or curiosity for OtE and/or Apocalypse World, I hope you'll join me and pitch in to the conversation!

To start with, I'm reading through my OtE book and noting what it actually says about its rules and play practices. I suspect that simply reading the text mindfully, the way I read an indie text these days--that is, taking everything it says seriously as principles of play, not just fluff or advice--will get me halfway to what I'm looking for.

The other purpose of the read-through is to check for compatibility with the AW rules and principles--seeing where they line up, where they clash, where one could be adapted to fit the other, and where something on one side or the other just needs to be slashed.

So!

Beginning at the beginning, here's the back of the book blurb:

Welcome to Al Amarja, the mysterious mediterranean island that is home to all that is sinister and bizarre. If it troubles you in your dreams, if it scares you, if you hope it isn't true, you'll find it here. This is the setting of Over the Edge, the roleplaying game of surreal danger.

So, mysterious, sinister, bizarre, troubling, scary, surreal, danger. Pretty evocative, but also vague. I remember rattling off a bunch of adjectives like this to my players, but for some reason they didn't really pick up on the seedy, messily human element of the setting that I was hoping to bring out. Instead they played it more or less like D&D, except that the dungeons were neighborhoods and the goblins were street gangs. I'll need more to go on if I'm gonna rise above that. Let's see what the Introduction has to tell us:

The game pits the player characters against all manner of decadent, evil, twisted, mind-boggling, blood-curdling, soul-rending, ego-shattering experience. The Game Moderator (GM) is called upon to evoke an atmosphere of surreal danger. The players are called on to deal with the danger to body and soul, to thrive and accomplish their own goals in spite of it. Enjoy.

Again with the adjectives! But we seem to be getting somewhere. There's a GM job and a player job, right there. The GM'sa first duty is to evoke an atmosphere of surreal danger. That's still a little vague, but it's a start. When I GMed, if I'd had this mantra as a fall-back, I might not have been so lost all the time. "Man, I have no effing idea what to do right now. Oh, right--'evoke an atmosphere of surreal danger!' Got it!"

The player role is what really stands out to me, though. Deal with the danger to body and soul, to thrive and accomplish their own goals in spite of it. At first it seems pretty basic and obvious: the GM evokes danger, you deal with the danger. But the word that jumps out to me is "thrive." Thriving means more than surviving, more than escaping danger, more than beating bad guys. Thriving implies a very human yearning. Thriving means defiance and nerve. Thriving means joy. Thriving means making a life for yourself, carving a little piece of happiness out of all that mind-boggling, blood-curdling, soul-rending, ego-shattering misery.

To thrive in spite of surreal danger to body and soul. Now THERE'S a game premise. That's going to be my central principle as I proceed.

Thoughts? People who've played OtE, how does that match up with your experience? AW-savvy folks, do you see fruitful avenues to travel with this? Anything else about the text jump out at you?

I think you've got the right of it.

I've never played OtE but it's suppose to be like Burroughsean madness right?
Looking over the prime at Atlas Games, a few things jump out at me:

Make the world seem surreal.

Fronts -> Secrets and Conspiracies

Barter -> Swaps

No medics, just NPCs at the hospital.

Down play violence.

Have basic ways for the players to bring and investigate the weirdness.

So, AW's end game is hope and finding out what's wrong with the world and maybe trying to fix it. WotE's end game is what? Thriving in surreality. To me this means going native and becoming part of the scenery.

Perhaps that means that new campaigns and character's always start as foreigners arriving at the airport and they end by becoming what amounts to citizens. What you could deal with here is culture shock and assimilation as reality shock and normalization. The point where the secrets are uncovered and the surrealness everyday (and, as such, no longer dangerous or strange) is the point when they retire.

Mechanically, I'd like to see someone make a serious go at strata and qualities (perhaps I'll try to do it in the Eschaton Beta?). Their startings are over in the defunct Knife and Candle forum. Nothing like IP touchiness to make development go dark and vaporous.

Just some thoughts and looking forward to the hack.
Cheers,

Yeah, fronts are something that instantly seemed like they'd map easily to OtE.

"Down play violence" is an insteresting point. The whole atmosphere of danger thing really worked in my game to create a sense in most of the players minds that things were so deadly dangerous that they could give no quarter. Many groups, even just regular gutterpunks, became "kill on sight" to them. It felt liks such D&D/videogame thinking. I always wished I could get them to treat this more like modern life in a big city, even a strange and fucked up and dangerous one. I wanted more focus on day to day life, and less focus on which enemies would be slaughtered in the streets today. I whined about it somewhat, but never found an effective way to reinforce that.

I think that's going to be a crucial issue to navigate as I proceed. I am supposed to evoke danger, but I think it's not so much action-movie danger as the everyday terror of modern life, magnified and distorted.

Perhaps that means that new campaigns and character's always start as foreigners arriving at the airport and they end by becoming what amounts to citizens. What you could deal with here is culture shock and assimilation as reality shock and normalization. The point where the secrets are uncovered and the surrealness everyday (and, as such, no longer dangerous or strange) is the point when they retire.

That's a fascinating take and I'm not sure how I feel about it. The original game stipulates that all starting characters are newcomers to the island, and when a player changes to a new character, then they have the opportunity to create a native.

I've been wavering on whether to preserve that for WotE, because the playbook structure pushes me more toward delineating some of the more iconic subtypes of Al Amarjan weirdo--mutant, psychic, gangbanger, conspirator, fringe scientist, etc, with newcomer ("Burger) in local slang) being but one variety. It would feel weird to make a bunch of playbooks that are all Burger. I'll get more in-depth into that as I proceed through the book. For now, I think I'll reserve judgment. Once I've got all my groundrules in place, I'll be able to better make that call.

Peace,
-Joel

This is a fascinating idea, I'll follow with interest.

I'd agree with what's been said previously, that all characters should be newcomers to the island; I think having playbooks for The Mutant, The Ganger, etc, would remove too much of the essential strangeness of the setting by making all those familiar things.

Maybe playbooks should be based on motivations rather than 'professions' in this hack? Every character is Burger, but they are all on Al Amarja for different reasons, e.g. The Seeker-of-Truth, The New Employee, The Co-Conspirator, The Vengeful, etc.

I guess my question becomes variations on these: "What changes in WotE / OtE? What's up for change? The characters? The setting? What opposes that change?"

In AW, it's that the characters are fighting to figure out what's wrong with the world because everything shouldn't be this scarce and suck this much. In a structural sense, the characters antagonize the setting as much (more really) as the MC uses Fronts to antagonize the characters. AW can work with perfectly static PCs but not with a perfectly static world. There are no status quos as Vincent puts it.

In my own hack, the idea is that the world, as a particular arrangement of things, is ending and thus the PCs with it. The arc of the PCs is to go from more or less human to some kind of non-human state (death, rapture or otherwise). There are no status quos because everything is sliding of the edge into some unknown beyond. Likewise, the PCs could (as a theme) try to desperately maintain the status quo and remain static as the world ends. The world can't remain static because there are no status quos and ultimately that's where the traction and the movement of the story come from.

They're both about spitting in God's coffee, either before or after the apocalypse. A kind of fuck you for ending the world. They're both about the how and the if of that struggle. The way that I read it is that the MC plays the world as a protagonist that should change by the end of the campaign or end of the session; as such, the characters are the antagonists who act as foils for her. This is an inversion of much of role-playing and of typical Western narratives, wherein the world is either merely a scene or obstacle populated by characters meant to cause the characters to change through the arc via its antagonism. Changes to the world in these narrative are either without consequence, incidental or only serve to cause change in the protagonists.

Fr'ex: We overthrew the tyrant! But that was just a pretext for the lead protagonist to grow up and learn about courage and sacrifice, and also reproduce heteronormative love-relations. Maybe in our next adventure there are other tyrants! Turns out the world is the same but I am now a man!

But in AW, fr'ex: We overthrew the tyrant because we already believed in freedom. In fact, that belief in freedom was never challenged! It was the world that learned about freedom and changed because of the static beliefs of the characters. Maybe half of them died. Whatever! Incidental to the world learning about freedom. Even if the characters do nothing, my count-down clocks mean for sure that the world is going to change and answer my stakes questions.

However, so far as I can tell, OtE is primarily about the setting as a thematically fixed thing. It's not a narrative about the characters making Al-Amarja different but rather  the opposite: Al-Amarja making the characters different (i.e. prompting them to thrive).

This means that lots of that MC stuff needs to change. There totally are status quos in WotE, fr'ex. You need to be a fan of the setting and put the PCs in the cross-hairs. The PCs need some kind of count-down or spiral that let's them know when they're thriving. Etc etc.

Interesting thoughts about "the world" in Apocalypse World, Nathan. It's true that Al Amarja is a bit more static than the post-apocalypse--there are monolithic and secretive institutions as old as humanity, and they're not budging anytime soon.

Except...the PCs are expected to be able to affect them, just not easily. There's a section in the book where he talks about ways to justify these random rubes wandering in and toppling massive power structures (The PCs are random elements the conspiracies can't account for, the conspiracies have grown old and brittle, etc). Figuring out just how easy or hard to make the conspiracies to topple was a balancing act I could simply not get a handle on. The campaign swung wildly between PCs being unable to affect anything, and the power groups being so impotent as to appear incompetent.

So I'm gonna have to think long and hard about where the focus will be in MY Edge. The book is frankly a bit schizoid on this issue, assuming at some points that the PCs will live day to day lives, and at some points that their aim is to take down vast conspiracies. As I continue my reading, I'm going to keep an eye on these issues, and figure out where I'm going to land.

Peace,
-Joel

Also: I set up a design blog for World on the Edge! I turned the first part of my OP here into a Welcome post for the blog. I'll probably conduct most of my design work there (and you're all welcome to join me!), and leave forum posts for when I've got a particularly thorny problem or need more crowdsourcing.

Groovy.

Well, the world is not exactly easy to change in AW. So, the AW method could very well work for surreal conspiracies, A kind of more freaking and bizarre X-files, sans the FBI agents.