Who's playing who

As we are playing with a set list of names, would it be a good idea to have a place to list our characters, since my hardholder Alison is going to be different than any other hardholder Alison? I also think having a place where we get to say "my character is *so cool!*" would be fun, if we kept it short.

That stuff is exactly apocalyptica, wholly suitable for the Apocalypse World forum.

-Vincent

May we put it here? Move at will...

I played Mary the Brainer. Note the spelling. Let's just say that she was illiterate, and when Rourke taught her to write her name, he spelled it Marie. She was not cool. She was creepy as all hell. I'd love to know if other players played Brainers as creepy as she was.

She took Victorian mourning rites to a whole new level, made sculptures with people's brains, and a coat with her dead lover's skin. She had a thing about contracts, too. She also had another holding beyond a door that only she could see (which was funny because she was probably blind). She accidentally put her little servant girl Birdie into Rourke's head, which is why she eventually poisoned him with dandelion wine, took his eyes for her own, and made herself a leather coat.

She had a strong dislike for Angels. They weirded her out.

In our current game, my character is Rose, a Maestro D'. That's how he started. He's now the Hard Holder. He ran The Garden in the Luxor, a restaurant/brothel where you could get a salad, and mystery meat (or have Rose cook up your dead enemy for you). And sex, and drugs. Anything to make you happy. We haven't seen Rose as the Hard Holder yet. Rose used to be a woman, but when she was a teen, she woke up one night and she was a he.

I played Cal, an angel in the same game Margolotte played Alison and Parthenia played Mary Jackson.

Cal was a skilled healer, who used his abilities as a shield and a bargaining chip. He seemed to be holed up at Alison's hardholding (having a nice situation being Alison's lover while there), but would wander at will and provide his services to whatever holding he felt like visiting. In my mind, saying "I'm an angel" gave him free ticket to go where he wanted and be exempt from conflicts. Didn't always work that way, though he was welcomed in at least one other hardholding.

Re bargaining chip: In at least two conflicts with others, he threatened to take his skills elsewhere if things didn't go his way. Usually to save someone or get info on crimes. He healed Mary at one point, and she got him to promise that if she ever died that he would not revive her. She freaked him out too.

Playing Cal brought me into a broad mindset of trying to save the most lives. His philosophy was that so few people were left, much less capable of reproducing, that each live lost was too many.

Cal left play when his story arc got fulfilled, in my book. During a fight, he shot and chose to kill someone. Apocalypse World conquered my little idealistic Cal.

He was a great character to play. I miss him.

None of my players really dug the set names!  We've had Sparrow the battlebabe, Jesus W. the angel, the Chinaman the operator, Puma the skinner, Doppler the savvyhead, and Yusuf bin Rahman al-Ahmad the driver, among others.

If anything, all the players I've played with have been incredibly turned off by the fact that there was a list of set names to choose from, and immediately branched away. After going through multiple games and mining the 1st session worksheet over and over, I got into the habit myself of just conjuring up weirdness from thin air.

What was cool was Sparrow was a battlebabe in our first game, and he had an adoptive parent figure - an operator named Finch. Well, when we played a second game some months later, we decided that this game was sort of a prequel to the other, and we had Finch appear in that one as one of the players' characters. I've come to realize this is a really bad move, as it's basically pre-planning plot points, and has sort of pigeonholed the story a certain way. Still coming out cool, though!

I'm playing an Operator named Berg. The slickest person in the room, but not as slick as he thinks he is. A short butch who looks like a sixteen-year-old boy (i.e. looks = "man"), he is trying to find a place to live that, in his words, "doesn't suck and isn't run by sociopaths." He grew up in A Little Tikva, a heavily-guarded compound where engineered bacteria actually grows food for you, rather than just destroying the ecosystem. But his parents got kicked out in a messy combination of religion and politics and one by one, his family got picked off until he was left. That was ten years ago, and it's only starting to sink in that it's not just him - the whole world is a harsh place.

Berg's best friend in the world is Brace, a brainer with some serious problems surrounding getting dirty and not treating people like toys. Berg likes Brace because Brace is smart, needs Berg but keeps distance, is also androgynous and because Berg just feels disappointed by most people.


Opinions of the operator class:

I like playing a drifter/grifter, but find that the operator as a class lacks focus. From the introduction in the playbook, it's not clear what they *do.*

I'm not sure what "crew" does. As an operator, you can use experience to gain a gig and change your crew, and most of the other classes don't have a crew (although the Angel can take one as a special), and it seems to matter who is in it, so I assume it's important. But neither our MC nor myself can find what exactly a crew is or what it does. I assume that crew is staff? As in "more trustworthy than a regular NPC, but not a gang or a group of followers?" if it doesn't do anything special, then why can't a crew's composition change without an advancement?

If you have sex with someone, an operator gains them as an obligation gig. Success means they're happy and failure means "you blow it" but it's not clear what ignoring he gig in favour of paying work does. Or is that just the point - you try to make your former lover(s) happy, or just ignore them and move on?

Wow, Amy Fox, my Brainer Mary/Marie had no friends.

Here's how the Operator sex move worked in our game. When the Maestro D procures something for someone, be it sex, drugs, food, or sumptin' sumptin', it invokes the other player's sex move (That's the Maestro D's sex move). Rose acquired a truckload of veggies for Lafferty, an Operator, and *poof*. She had a new gig: Make Rose happy. Since Rose spent his time seeing to other people's happiness, he immediately became smitten with Lafferty. ("Wow! Someone cares about my happiness!") The first time she took it as her gig, the way she could make him happy was to actually have sex with him (and dress up in fancy clothes, and meet his horrible mother, and go on a date with him.) She did, and they were a cute little couple by Apocalypse World standards.

In the next session, Lafferty blew it. In story time the next day they had a big misunderstanding and she stormed out of his establishment. This made Rose quite unhappy. One of his enemies kidnapped her and eventually killed her.

In two unrelated scenes, but all in the same session, Rose's son was killed in a shootout at his establishment by a Battlebabe, and Rose poisoned his mother with tainted Cheetos. Tough night.

I played Lafferty in the game Parthenia mentioned; she was a very repressed, proper sort of young lady that made deals and tried to stay above reproach. She was the sole survivor of a suicide cult that had kept to themselves and been good people, and thought the way out of the hellhole that is Apocalypse World was ritualized death— that it would take you somewhere better. After Lafferty's big fight with Rose, Lafferty was kidnapped and held by someone who wanted to use her as bait to lure Rose and kill him. When Lafferty realized the deal, she immediately convinced her kidnapper that Rose would never come for her, and goaded her kidnapper into killing her— all to ensure Rose wouldn't fall in the trap. Lafferty had been a big scaredy-cat all game, but when it came down to the wire for the man she loved, she had no compunction with sacrificing herself; after all, she'd known since she was a baby that there's a better place than this when you die.

I was also in the game with Alison, Mary, and Cal. I played Damson, the seriously disturbed Battlebabe. She was an attention whore with daddy issues and a deathwish. She made snap judgments, demanded respect without giving it in return, and liked to spend her time firing sub-machine guns from battered school buses. The plan that seemed the craziest was always the plan that occurred to her first and seemed the most logical. She eventually got a gang of her own and her threat level decreased as she became more of an unhinged den mother than a rebel without a cause. Damson had no friends or lovers; total batshit Wolverine complex.

Right now I'm playing Ammanuel (the same game with Rose and the late Lafferty), an obsessive daredevil of a Savvyhead. She's from The Airport, and wears a flight suit. She's obsessed with puzzles and can't stand not knowing something. She's very easy to get along with if you have a sense of adventure, doles out advice, and can generally be relied on. Her big downfall is that she can really hold a grudge. A satellite (and "some dude" called "The Voice of EOS") shot her out of the sky in a helicopter, and despite nearly dying in the crash, she's now trying to build a new one— with guns. Why? Fuck him, that's why. She's more reasonable than Damson and less uptight than Lafferty, but way more single-minded than either of them. All she really cares about and understands are machines ("Why do you need parts?" "Because they're PARTS! How can you NOT need them? They EXIST!"), although she can develop soft spots for people who show a similar affinity.

I played Kim in our AW game. Kim was an Angel by training but made her living mostly as a prostitute. She could channel the dead while having sex, though it generally wasn't something she did on purpose.

Kim had been raised by the local Cult, whose influence over the area -- founded in their access to and knowledge of advanced medical training and supplies -- was considerable, and the initial focus of our game. Kim left the cult a year or so before play began, for unspecified reasons that probably involved them trying to run her life and marry her off to a cult 'father.' The Cult's ideology consisted primarily of an interpretation of the Psychic Maelstrom -- they believed that the maelstrom was the aggregate of the spiritual and emotional state of everyone who had ever died. The cult believed that the apocalypse was the result of human suffering -- too many unhappy people died, and the maelstrom became contaminated and eventually lashed out. They wanted to reduce suffering and therefore restore the maelstrom to a preapocalyptic state. The Cult's methods were the usual cult methods: hierarchy, control, and sex.

Anyways, my guiding principle for playing Kim was that when people asked her for something, she would give it to them. She was smart enough most of the time to make sure that they paid, or to negotiate sensible terms, but if push came to shove in the end she would always say 'yes.' This really solidified for me in the third or fourth session, when the group's Brainer managed to Deep Brain Scan Kim and asked me 'In what way are your mind and soul vulnerable?' The answer was a paraphrase of the above: if someone asks for something, sincerely and with genuine emotional need, Kim will always say yes.

Interestingly enough, this did not turn out to be a major handicap in Apocalypse World. Kim's overall trajectory was from a sensible, pleading, frustrated/disappointed Angel to an angry, demanding, ass-kicking Battlebabe -- but I never really felt like she ever compromised the core of her personality. It seemed inevitable, really, but over our fourteen+ sessions I just kept helping people and giving them what they wanted as best I could -- and then pursuing what I felt to be everyone's best interests as aggressively as possible, in the meanwhile. The fiction constantly revealed that Kim felt guilty about almost everything, and took on more and more of other people's sufferings and responsibility -- but at the same time I found myself confronted with the surprising fact that she could take it. It was fun to play someone with all the characteristics of a martyr, but who ultimately had no interest in martyrdom.

I was so close to naming my operator Wilson, but man you just know he was going to lose an eye in four minutes if I did that.

So he's Proust. He looks kind of like this:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/104/293251068_db915d5391_o.jpg

Except he wears an old firefighter's coat as his 1-armor. and probably, you know, he looks more apocalypticky.

His gigs are surveillance, infiltration and scavenging. His stat block is the one with -1 hard, because that sounded the most weasely to me.

We haven't really gotten into play yet, so I can't tell you much about him except he seems to be a real asshole. It's going to be fun.

All Dog Washington the Chopper Alpha wanted to do was cruise the waves with his chopper gang, raid the rich, spread the wealth, party hard, and stay free. It didn't work out that way. See, Dog leads a charmed life. Barter just falls into his lap. First he saved the rig, and that paid OK. Then he raided the freighter, which made him rich. Then he stole a war train full of food, which made him the richest man in Apocalypse world. He traded some of that food for a gang made up of the Iron Coast's badded ass cirminals, backed up a by load of slaves. And they're all buying Dog's line about freedom and liberty. So now Dog's tooling around the wastes with a sure 'nuff army, looking for someone badass enough to take it away from him.

I was Iris, the Brainer.  He started play as this sort of enforcer figure in the holding of Willis (the NPC hardholder who had taken Iris away from his parents as a child).  Willis and Iris had a pretty strong father-son thing and to parallel it he developed a weird affection for Kim, Daniel's character (though, Iris could never quite sort if he wanted to fuck Kim or make her his mom). 

Iris spent the initial 9/10ths of the game as this creepy, fucked-up kid who was desperate for attention and the approval of the rest of the hold (or, shit, anyone).  Right near the end I started taking Hocus moves and got him good and obsessed with the maelstrom.

By the end of the game, he'd become the messiah of a suicide cult.  Which was just awesome.  Poor Iris.

I've played a battlebabe (Tavi) and an operator (Waters) in fun one-shots with Harper and Rigney, respectively.  But my main character is my brainer Brace.  I adore her.  Enough to subject you all to "let me tell you about my character."

http://greenland.wikidot.com/brace

Brace lives in a corner unit on the third story of the Waverly apartments.  Once grand, they look like they've been mortared into a kind of quiet acquiesence.  Her unit is missing much of the ceiling.  Its dominant features are a large pre-apoc movie projector, rows of film canisters, various army trunks and a low four poster bed.  Grimy, weathered movie posters adorn the walls: Casablanca, White Heat, Chinatown.  

I did a vignette thing about her from a our first session:
http://greenland.wikidot.com/session-1

I'm trying to play her as a non-menacing brainer.  She doesn't like reading people who don't want to be read but does it reluctantly for barter from the hardholder Partridge.  Sometimes she lies to him about what she reads.  She's done it other time but rationalizes "good reasons" why.  She'll give up her million rationalizations if she can just find someone to connect with in a real way.

When she opens her mind to the psychic maelstrom it smells like burning cellophane and the visuals are of grainy, sepia colored old movies.

She just took the Angel's Healing Hands move.  I'm saying she's had it all along but the first and last time she tried it prior to now she rolled snake-eyes and hurt someone.

I play Snow, the Battlebabe.

Trying to describe her in few words, she is the ultimate survivor. She would probably do anything to just keep going. But on the other hand, she is a kind of cast-away, always running - not even knowing where or why.

Most of her life she was working as a mercenary, and she is willing to take any job. She don't seem to have any regrets or moral dilemmas.
I see her just slipping on the surface of life, seeming not to be affected by anything, or involved in any way.

On the other hand, she seems to be almost pure, sterile, not affected by dirt and pain that surrounds her.

ATM I am participating in the second campaign playing Snow, and  must say she keeps evolving in some interesting way. But she is still a mystery to me, keeps me wondering - what will she do? Is there any limit for her, any barrier, that she can't cross?

Or any that she will not want to cross.