Translating theme/feel into Moves?

Hello all,

I was wondering if you could share your wisdom on how to translate the intend theme of a hack into a set of actual Moves. Is it as simple as figuring out what the PCs will spend most of their time doing and making Moves with those things as triggers, or is the process more complex?

I'm currently working on a hack that focuses on post-apocalyptic scavengers venturing into "ruins" (military bases, research facilities, spaceports, &c.) in search of lost technology. It's essentially an old-school dungeon crawler with post-apoc fluff: the focus is primarily on dealing with environmental hazards (radiation, automated defenses, structural instability), avoiding or escaping combat with rival scavengers, making judicious use of limited resources, and stealing everything that isn't nailed down (and maybe a few things that are nailed down). Because of the dungeon-crawling aspects, I'm also borrowing liberally from Dungeon World as far as Moves are concerned.

My main dilemma at this point is whether to have a multi-purpose Avoid Bad Stuff move (a la Defy Danger) and then more specific moves for fighting, searching, etc., or to follow the lead of Ghost Lines and just use more broad "do it with power" and "do it with finesse" moves. Following from this question, of course, is the question of what else should get its own Move.

I'd appreciate any insight/feedback/suggestions y'all can dish you, and I'm happy to provide any extra information about what I have so far or what I'm going for overall. Thanks in advance!

You're on the right track by asking yourself "what activities or actions are the characters likely to take?"  and concentrating your efforts there first.  In some broader sense this boils down to "what is my game about?"

But an equally important question (and one that needs to be considered simultaneously) is "who are the characters and what makes them special?"  Apocalypse World does a very good job of building barriers around the key character concepts, at least when the game starts.  You might be the hardest hardass, but you'll never be as good at killing people straight out of the gate as the Gunlugger (with his 2-armor and boatload of high-damage weapons from the jump).  And the Gunlugger might be hard, but when it comes to talking his way into (or out of) a situation, he can't hold a candle to the Skinner.  And while both are Weird, the Hocus and the Brainer both feel very different, partly because of gear and partly because of tone.  Yes, the Brainer can get a cult as an advancement, but it's not the same, and will still feel different.

So, if this is a "scavenging through the ruined carcass of a collapsed civilization" game, you might want to give some thought to the kinds of playbooks you want to include.  Once you've done that, you'll want to think about ways to more clearly distinguish their roles, and this is what will lead you to creating moves that will capture the theme more distinctly.  What is involved in scavenging?  What are the dangers?  Can anyone do it, or is it elaborate suicide to go into crumbling ruins without a trusty Engineer by your side?  Can the RatBoy get in and out just as easily, and if so, how does that work?  And once you have the goods, will having a dedicated Fence help you turn those scavenged items into something useful?  With whom might you be trading, and are they violent enough that having a Hulk around to dissuade any funny business might be handy?  You talk about managing resources - does every really successful team have a dedicated Mom whose role is conserving what you have and finding new and inventive ways to stretch those resources?

It sounds like the environment is going to be one of the major threats in your game, so you need to come up with ways that characters with different strengths can handle those threats in ways that are successful.  This is why Dungeon World's defy danger is written the way it is - so long as you can come up with a fictionally appropriate justification, you can use whatever stat you need.  In Apocalypse World, it's why so many playbooks offer stat substitution moves for act under fire, because if they didn't, Battlebabes and Operators would be the only ones really good at doing generically dangerous stuff.  So if you're going to break "do dangerous stuff" up into multiple moves that hit different stats, make sure that all of the characters have access to at least some of them.

The other thing to keep in mind is that ultimately you will want to distill the basic moves down to the barest minimum, and further that those moves are all going to come up for all of the characters.  Make sure that your moves aren't so numerous that there are some that never get used (or get used only by one character type).  Essentially, the basic moves are there to cover the stuff that comes up all the time.  That's why generic social interaction moves (like manipulate) and generic "do dangerous stuff" moves (like act under fire) are so key - they'll get used repeatedly throughout the session by everybody.