AP: Careless Whisper

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Bret

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AP: Careless Whisper
« on: August 25, 2010, 10:54:00 AM »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAquRuqyQQc

So I was rereading the rules and there was an audible 'click' in my brain and I feel like I get moves harder than I did before, and I finally get moves snowballs. Some friends of mine were visiting for the weekend and we ended up playing something like two six-hour sessions of Apocalypse World.

The cities are ruined. Acid rain comes down constantly. People stay inside old ruined buildings and subway stations. If you go outside for too long you get sick. The only people who seem to constantly trudge around the city are the Hazmats, the boogeymen, trudging around in groups and dragging away anyone who they notice. And then in the subway system you have the Hacksaws, rolling around in old subway cars and emerging howling and screaming.

People are organized into clans or tribes based on the building they live in. Glenview is one of those clans, in a giant tenement building holding over 100 souls. They're lead by a council of elders based on the old tenants' association. The elders make decisions for the good of Glenview, enforced by the Violent Fuckers, who are named descriptively. Glenview has a water filtration system and an old pool that they keep their fresh water in.

The cast.

Boo is a strange man. At night he sometimes steps out of the building or into an abandoned subway station and plays the saxophone. The only song he knows, though, is the saxophone part to Careless Whisper by George Michael. He listens to old vinyl records on a handcrank phonograph and earns his keep by delivering babies and patching people up. He says that angels taught him how to do this.

Burroughs lives on the roof under tarps held up by poles. He eats rats that come to him, seemingly willingly. He is mostly left alone, but sometimes the elders ask him to look inside people's brains to find out what's inside them, but they only do this when a crime has been committed like when Jakoby killed his wife. People who are found guilty of these crimes - violence, murder, thievery, etc. - are thrown from the room. He wears an old fireman's suit, complete with hat and mask.

Dusk is sex. She travels around to nearby apartment buildings and meets with men and women. She sleeps with them and they give her the plastic pretty things that are used as currency and trade. She doesn't sleep with the people in Glenview. It makes things too complicated.

More later.
« Last Edit: August 25, 2010, 10:58:14 AM by Bret »
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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #1 on: August 25, 2010, 12:27:33 PM »
Love it. Really great characters you've got there. Can I ask how much of your time you all spent in the "1st session" mode of asking questions and defining characters before you got to present day play?

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Bret

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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #2 on: August 25, 2010, 12:41:28 PM »
Maybe two or three hours. We hit a point after some day-in-the-life stuff where I could have kept just improvising, but I wanted to get some hard threats down so I told everyone to grab some beers or whatever while I created some Fronts real quick. I have those in a notebook at home so I can type them up here too.

Also, in Burroughs's blurb it should say the guilty are thrown from the roof, not the room. Big difference.
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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #3 on: August 25, 2010, 07:21:13 PM »
Awesome stuff Bret, very cool!

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Bret

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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #4 on: August 25, 2010, 07:43:50 PM »
So there's a strep virus going around and Boo's been the one treating it. Table's taken a turn for the worse, though, and her mother Stoop asks Boo to take a look. She's got a fever and things are deteriorating. Boo injects her with some Chill which is a temperature normalization agent but she starts thrashing and spasming in reaction to it. She's okay! It just looks real bad. So that's when Stoop grabs a gun that's hanging off the wall and is all, "YOU'RE KILLING MY BABY." Boo, cool as a cucumber, just pushes the gun out of the way and hugs her. Stoop starts crying and Boo says Table will be all right, it'll just take her a few hours to come to. Stoop asks him to stay and he says he will.

Burroughs is on his roof, eating rat. Kroupe comes up on his roof. She's the eldest elder, and she's a hard woman. She remembers the end and has done a lot of things since then to stay alive. So she tells Burroughs she needs him to come look at something for her. He wants to know what it is before he'll leave his dinner so she says fine, fuck you, I knew this was a mistake. He's all like baby be cool, and there is apparently something strange and compelling about Burroughs because then he is fucking a sixty year old lady on the roof. This lets him see into her mind. He sees her prostituting herself to get into Glenview back when things first went to shit and he feels her pain for every person who came begging to be let into Glenview because its dangerous and sickmaking out there and he feels her loneliness that is so deep and sharp its cracked her and keeps the corpse of her long-dead man in a bed and whenever the pain gets too great she sleeps next to it. He goes with her. She takes him down to the pool that's being guarded by a few Violent Fuckers and she shows him a corpse, half in and half out of the water with a jagged gash for her throat. It's Jay, the caretaker of the water filtration system. Nobody knows who did it, but this is bad and Burroughs needs to find them so they can walk off the roof.

Dusk is over at Hightower which is a nearby holding. She has a client there named Helix whose kind of a technical person. She keeps all the old photos she can find plastered all over her room which also has a workbench in the back where she can work on fixing and building things. Her and Dusk have a spat. She wants Dusk to stay, give up her lucrative sex life. Dusk refuses and Helix flips out a bit. Dusk leaves. Things are getting too complicated. She gets back to Glenview and she gets called in to see some of the elders. Mainly Killerby. Killerby is a serious fucking asshole and is like where have you been, it's dangerous out there. She explains herself and he gets more pissed and bans her from leaving the building for two weeks basically to be a power-tripping asshole. She gives up and is like fine is that all? No, we need you to find someone who knows how to work machines. There's Bojangles, he lives in the building, but he only likes to work on guns. They've tried to get him to work on the filtration system before but he's refused. Dusk is persuasive. Can she persuade him? She says yes but only if Killerby gives her his watch. It's old and shiny and it still works. He agrees and hangs it on a nail. She can have it when Bojangles agrees to work the filtration system.

My two players were impressed at how far sex can get you in this game. I think the Brainer fucked his way out of as many situations as the Skinner did, maybe more. And unlike the Skinner he was not picky. Boo, however, got no tail.
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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #5 on: August 25, 2010, 11:43:42 PM »
 I played Burroughs in this game and had a great time.  I remember Bret saying at one point that he hadn't gamed this long in one session since high school.  The whole thing really worked well for our group.  I think we had a great mix and even coming into the game completely new to it I had it figured out really quickly.

An hour into it and I felt really comfortable with the game and was having a blast.

Burroughs was played using the idea that he was desperate for physical affection.  That is specifically why he was not choosy in his hook ups.  I also played him as fanatically loyal to Glenview because they had taken him in and given him a home when others probably wouldn't have. 

Game play wise I enjoyed that every time I did something my character was awesome.  He was not a chump, he was a scary bad ass who people were afraid of.  Even when I failed, I didn't really get my ass kicked things just got more complicated for me.   I'm not saying Burroughs was invincible, but he felt capable at all times of totally wrecking shit and that's something that I don't always feel when I roleplay.  I felt like failure was just as cool as success was in most cases.

Overall a great session and I look forward to doing something myself with the game.   


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Bret

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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #6 on: August 26, 2010, 09:13:52 AM »
It's interesting you say that! I posted a write-up of Boo's encounter with the subway hacksaws elsewhere on the internet and there was some concern that I had made him Not Awesome.

And yeah, I think the game does a good job of making characters who are competent and badass but are more Bruce Willis in Die Hard than Bruce Willis in Live Free or Die Hard.
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lumpley

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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #7 on: August 26, 2010, 09:28:05 AM »
That's nuts, and I don't care what Wilson says. Nuts! Boo was totally awesome in that scene. Sometimes, getting away with your skin = awesome.

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Bret

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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #8 on: August 26, 2010, 09:34:16 AM »
That's reassuring! I do think there's been points where I've been too harsh as an MC but I think this time was okay.

I internalized two more things about Apocalypse World this weekend:

- What do you do? after a move.
- How? when someone says they make a move.

The former prompts the players to make moves and take actions and the latter really feeds the fiction.

I'm enjoying the fact that this is a game that requires some realignment of my GMing style, and that I'm getting better at it over time by really learning the rules.

I still need to remember harm rolls, though. They always slip my mind.
« Last Edit: August 26, 2010, 09:36:16 AM by Bret »
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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #9 on: August 26, 2010, 10:26:16 AM »
That's nuts, and I don't care what Wilson says.

I heard Vincent got the idea for the psychic maelstrom from the BSG finale.
"I don't care what Wilson says." -- some slanderous bastard on the internet

Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #10 on: August 26, 2010, 12:52:26 PM »
It's interesting you say that! I posted a write-up of Boo's encounter with the subway hacksaws elsewhere on the internet and there was some concern that I had made him Not Awesome.

And yeah, I think the game does a good job of making characters who are competent and badass but are more Bruce Willis in Die Hard than Bruce Willis in Live Free or Die Hard.

I think Boo got his butt kicked in that scene, but he was still pretty cool doing it.  Plus, he did have an out he just chose not to take that out.  Overall the Hacksaws were a big threat for one person to take on by themselves.  I would've had Burroughs run from them too.

Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #11 on: August 26, 2010, 02:27:02 PM »
Is there a link to this awesome boo:ness?
My real name is Timo

Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #12 on: August 26, 2010, 02:37:40 PM »
Teh Story Gamez

(also a good thread overall)

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Bret

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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #13 on: August 29, 2010, 09:38:48 AM »
So what else happened.

This guy Toker shows up on Stoop's door and he's got this bleeding puncture wound in his shoulder. He asks Boo to treat him. Boo tries to do it with a healing touch. He blows his roll. He sees that he's staring at his own body and his own body is staring back and it flips the fuck out and runs away and his shoulder is bleeding. Boo scrambles around for a bit trying to find Toker but gives up and ends up going to Elm Station to clear his head. It's an abandoned subway station. Nothing but dust and darkness. He's sitting and thinking and feels a train coming.

Meanwhile Burroughs opens his mind to the psychic maelstrom to find out what happened with Jay. He sees Jay's ghost there and she's screaming and screaming. She's screaming a name. It's Toker. Burroughs goes looking for Toker. He runs into Frum at the exit to Glenview. He asks where Toker went. She knows Burroughs is a weirdo fuck and doesn't know he's on council orders. He tries to threaten her, she pulls a knife, so then he touches her to scan her brain and he relives a moment where was in love with a girl and tried to give her a gift and she rejected him (I think). The girl was Frum. When they come out of the brain scan Burroughs is crying and Frum is freaked the fuck out. She lets him through and tells him she saw Toker headed to Elm Station.

Dusk goes looking for Bojangles to ask him to work the water filtration pump. She finds him and walks in at an awkward moment. She sees feet sticking out from behind one of his workbenches and he is pacing. He points a gun at her and shuts the door and is like, "You gotta help. Things have gotten crazy. I think my son killed Jay and the elders will make him walk off the roof if they find out. Also, Boo came in here screaming and said he was my son and I hit him in the head until he got sleepy." Dusk says she can get Toker out of getting executed if Bojangles agrees to take over repairing the water filtration system. Bojangles agrees.
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Re: AP: Careless Whisper
« Reply #14 on: August 29, 2010, 10:31:29 AM »
Yeah that's what Burroughs remembered Bret you have it right.  He saved up as much barter as he could when he was a kid basically and used it to buy Frum something really nice in the hopes of winning her heart.  She savagely rejected him because he was still a weirdo even back then. 

Burroughs came out of the memory weeping and Frum knew what he'd done because she'd seen the memory too.  Either out of revulsion or pity she gave him the info he wanted. 

I loved this moment in the game for my character.  At first I was going to say it was just some other generic girl who lived in Glenview, but then I saw a chance to make the connection with Frum and went for it.  It made that scene a lot more poignant I think.