Workspace Feedback

I haven't had the opportunity to run with a Savvy head yet in my games, nor an Angel. However there is interest cropping up around my table in in terms of getting garages, making their next character use workspaces, etc. I've a good feeling form the book at how to make it work, but I'm really interested in learn how other people have made it work in the past.


If you have any really solid examples from your own games on the Savvy head working on tech or life-support working on people, I would love to hear about them. The more the merrier. I want to see what others have done, and maybe it'll broaden my perspective or provide some insights as to how it might creatively come into being. The more world details you are willing to share, the better. I know how the workshop functions mechanically.

I have a Savvyhead in my game, but she has not yet done much with her workspace, and has certainly not pushed it to its full potential (she's a new player and only just getting the hang of AW).  But once she starts to get into the groove, I'll revisit this topic with some examples.

I can tell you this - the options she chose were: a truck or a van, skilled labor, and a junkyard of raw materials.

She decided that it would be interesting/useful to make her workshop mobile, so we decided that she has an ancient military surplus, Korean War era 2.5 ton truck (affectionately known hereabouts as a "deuce-and-a-half") and a large trailer, which contains most of her tools and junk.  For right now it's parked in the hardhold where they're posted up, and she has unpacked/expanded into an adjacent vacant lot, strewing her junk about to make it easier to get to for various projects (last session she fixed the main pump assembly that provides the hardhold's water supply).

Her skilled labor are Trudy, Minx, and Wild Bob.  Trudy is handy with a wrench but is a trouble-maker, frequently and easily getting emotionally entangled with the locals.  Minx is Ghislaine's (the Savvyhead's) protege.  She's very young and learns extremely quickly, and Ghislaine is torn between wanting to nurture her fire and being threatened by her potential (player's idea, and a totally awesome one!).  Wild Bob is extremely creative, especially when it comes to jury-rigging things, but he is a wide-eyed conspiracy theorist.  In particular, he'll go off on lengthy diatribes about how electricity is somehow "broken," and how it had to have worked differently before the Apocalypse.  His eccentricities are tolerated because he's good at his job.

Her latest project is to rehabilitate an old two-way transistor radio that recently came into her possession.  Her workspace doesn't include transmitters and receivers, so it's taking her either time or a fuckton of jingle because she has to purchase all the (relatively rare) spare parts she needs or cobble them together from the junk in her stash.  I suspect that this bit of gear will eventually figure strongly in her Augury once she takes reality's fraying edge (a move in which the player has expressed an interest).

I played a Savvyhead last year.  While my character didn't get to build that much due to hostility among the other PCs and several kidnappings, it was pretty fun when I could.

My best run of Workshop work was when Spector was captured by the hardhold next door.  She attracted the attention of the leader's freaky lieutenant and put to work building a 'Brain Cage': a device for extracting and modifying memories. He outfitted her with a makeshift workshop (some scrap, machining tools, and a dentist chair as the basis for the cage). Along the way she built a shiv out of some spare metal (1-harm intimate) and zip gun with a bullet and some scrap (2-harm intimate refill).

The MC posted the Brain Cage here:

http://jwokalypseworld.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/1/4/14148728/the_brain_cage.pdf

I think it requires some time, a dozen tries (on some diseased slaves...), and exposed my character to danger.

Later I used it to remove a horrible evil from Spector's mind (pulling a Walter Bishop).  It was pretty fun.

I played an Angel in Sunken Sydney once.  I'd figured out a way to cure the brain worms, but it needed a ton of Bliss, the local recreational drug of choice.  That meant making a deal with the Maestro'D (who had the recipe) and figuring a way to motivate the Faceless (who collected the ingredients).  Of course, the Maestro'D wasn't down with the idea of free public health care, and the brain worm cult figured out what I was up to, and the Faceless was too busy harpooning the sub people to really care, so it got dramatic and messy.  Good times!

I played a Savvyhead awhile back in a barren-desert-wasteland sort of apocalypse, where everyone lived in ruined, inverted arcologies, and the local hold was roughly divided into engineering/warrior/grower castes. My workshop was a renegade vegetable garden. My first advance was the Skinner move 'Artful & Gracious', with my gardening being the art in question. I thought this seemed an apt model for the sort of reaction someone might have upon encountering a ripe, freshly-picked tomato after twenty-five years of apocalyptic wasteland living.

Despite loving the general concept of the character, my workspace saw very little use, as the in-fiction social situation led to my foolishly (foolishly on a player level) deciding to keep my garden 'secret' -- and there is nothing worse in AW than a Savvyhead with a secret lair. The game did eventually come around to the garden, etc. but by then so many things were going wrong that its general workshop-ness didn't get much play.