Pirate city?

I have never played or run Apocalypse World before, but may be about to MC for the first time. My players mentioned the idea of a floating pirate city, ala Armada in China Mieville's The Scar. Could this work? What would happen to the Driver play book? Could it be converted to boating, and has this already been done somewhere? A search didn't yield anything. Any thoughts or ideas welcome.

I was briefly involved in a flooded city game a while back. The stats for things are generic enough that its easy to go boats instead of cars. You just change up some of the descriptors. Chopper would have jet skis, I guess. The main thing to consider in my mind is that transport of some type is a lot more useful in a water game. There's no way you're swimming to the next hold, or anywhere worth going that's above water. So the Driver becomes much more important.

The main thing to consider in my mind is that transport of some type is a lot more useful in a water game. There's no way you're swimming to the next hold, or anywhere worth going that's above water. So the Driver becomes much more important.

Putting a makeshift raft together and going away at sea doesn't seem to me less accessible or safe than trying to cross the Burning Plains or the Breeding Pit on foot. I'd say it's on par.

Its down to the MC's vision of the world, I guess. To my mind its a lot easier to walk between two cities 20 miles apart by land than it is to swim the English Channel, or even to build a raft. Its a combination of factors but the main ones to me are that a raft is a lot harder to direct than your feet and if you run out of water, you're screwed. I kind of assumed by default that the ocean had gotten worse in direct proportion to the land. So for every burn flat there's a giant man-eating shark or something. There's also a lot fewer landmarks to work from in the ocean. Obviously YMMV but maybe something like this:

When you try to get somewhere by water, roll cool. On a 10+ you get all three. On a 7-9, pick 2. On a miss, you're lost at sea. For all other purposes, this is considered Acting Under Fire (No Shit Driver bonus, 12+ on an Advanced move etc)
You find what you were looking for. (an island, another floating hold etc)
You get there without any major trouble (pirates, mutant sharks, tsunami etc).
You get there before getting dehydrated and/or exhausted.
On a 12+ if you have Act Under Fire advanced, you also know how to get home and may automatically take a 10+ success to do so from here.

So on a 6 or less you find major trouble and by the time you realize that you're lost are either exhausted and/or dehydrated. Once all that's dealt with, someone can try again.

I was actually thinking that the base city might be large enough for the Chopper to remain largely unchanged. Picture an aircraft carrier, or maybe more than one, lashed together, with auxiliary boats, flotillas of rafts, etc. in ever changing configurations. Some are permanent, many come and go. Could be a sizable enough city to have bikers. The Driver could maybe be converted to the Captain?

Do you foresee any other major glitches with the AW-verse if we make it a water world?

If you are literally just filing the numbers off of The Scar, I don't think you'll need to worry too much about boat travel except in unusual circumstances -- the Armada contains numerous hardholds already, and is basically self-contained to the point that once you get on it, you mostly just don't get off. I would say that the extreme density of holds and people is a much greater obstacle to the viability of the Driver than the car = boat swap (the last Driver I played used boats, it worked flawlessly.)

Part of what makes the Driver interesting is his/her ability to move more freely between 'holds/places of interest. If the vast majority of your places of interest are interior to this pirate flotilla, and it is as densely lashed-together as the source material, it will require some additional effort on the MC's part to make sure that having a boat (and being a badass while in the boat) is a major resource. So emphasizing off-flotilla contacts & resources, for example. The problem here is that if they are truly off-flotilla, none of the other PCs might have any interaction with those resources/contacts at all, which really neuters a lot of the dynamic, NPC-triangle-potential that usually comes from the Driver moving all over the place. I'd say overall it would depend on how the Driver's player saw the character operating.

Chopper seems an easier fit, as a sort of raiding/roving gang that helps keep the flotilla supplied -- though the Driver could fill a similar role, minus the overt violence, operating as a go-between for important political/economic negotiations.

I would not try to keep the Chopper both 'on land' and on vehicles, but obviously that's your (and the player who chooses the Chopper's) call -- I think honesty will soon demand far more places that actual bikers 'can't go' than you would run into in a land-based game (though I guess like super-mobile dirt bikes could be awesome.)

On the other hand there is really no reason that the Chopper's gang needs to have vehicles at all; they work just fine as a gang of toughs wandering the streets, or on pogo sticks, or flying with psychic powers, or whatever makes sense. As long as they still have something similar to the 'out' that driving off to the next town provides -- and in a populous, politically-dynamic-enough flotilla, it seems like there would always be a neighbourhood/holding willing to take them in in exchange for their 'physical labour'.

Isn't the bike a major, well-nigh necessary to the Chopper playbook? So wouldn't something have to go in its place? If it's a steampunk world, maybe there are amphibious vehicles they could use? Which could be called choppers, of course. The Drivers could have access to the larger boats.

Isn't the bike a major, well-nigh necessary to the Chopper playbook? So wouldn't something have to go in its place? If it's a steampunk world, maybe there are amphibious vehicles they could use? Which could be called choppers, of course. The Drivers could have access to the larger boats.

I don't think it's particularly necessary. More important is that the gang still has a roving/raider-like presence in whatever the world looks like -- that they aren't tied to a particular holding, they go where the Chopper goes, and they are the Chopper's responsibility. In most settings this is going to look like vehicles of some kind, but in an extremely delimited, dense, urban environment (whether it happens to be floating on the ocean or not) the vehicles are not necessary. The physical mobility of the Chopper/gang is important because it allows for political/personal mobility -- in the case of a less-physically-mobile gang you just have to play up the political mobility. The sense of the Chopper/gang as a (potential) free agent.

I think the bikes could also be replaced by some other similar resource shared by the gang -- including both other types of vehicles or also non-vehicular things that are a distinctive gang resource. Maybe they all have working cellphones or walkie-talkies, for example. Maybe they have access to a series of secret tunnels or are ultra-badass parkour nuts who can consequently traverse the flotilla-scape at breathtaking speeds. Maybe they all have nice-looking suits. The key is to find something that is not immediately mechanical, but creates fictional opportunities in the same way the bikes do in a more expansive setting.

They ride pterodactyls instead.

What if they had, you know, choppers? Like, helicopters? Hedrigall had one in The Scar, a little one-man copter. That would work brilliantly I think.

Can there  be supernatural creatures, like vampires, other races, etc., in Apocalypse World? Can the players play them, or should they be human the exotics are NPCs? Or are there no real parameters as long as the spirit of the game is preserved?

My first thought is the latter. There's nothing against vampires, for example, as long as you don't lose the feel. In the backplot for Fabulous Lost Vegas (my demo setting), there used to be vampires, there are zombies, sand leviathans, giant sentient bipedal rats that have human slaves, the machine men of Area 51 and walking spectral blast shadows left by The Big Bang.

They're all on the outskirts of where people go and no one's too sure of what's up with them. Some of them are essentially human in that they have motivations and can be reasoned with. Some of them are environmental, wild animals or forces of nature. I doubt more than one of the above would ever feature in a given game because they're also geographically separated from each other. They're for color but the real focus is on the people: the wasteland tribes, the casino dwellers, the LA tourists (raiders) and so forth. All of them have a lot of room to find out, as opposed to being deeply detailed already.