The Limits of the Maelstrom

So I had my players at one point ask if they could use the physic maelstrom to communicate without someone who was some distance from them (other side of a prison court yard), at the time I said no they couldn't use the maelstrom for that purpose but after having thought about I'm not sure that was the correct response. Basically do you guys think the maelstrom should be able to do something like that or do you thing it depends on what the maelstrom "is" in your game?

This can go whatever way you and your group think is most fun, rewarding, and awesome. Although, I personally would say that opening your brain to do something isnt the move, that's another move. Like any weird move in the game, they're all aspects of opening your brain for an explicit purpose. More to the point, Open your Brain is something that is done all by itself. What do you do? I open my brain. I let the maelstrom in and hope it reveals something to me that is useful or meaningful and does so in a way that is potent and in true ApocWorld style.

Thus. In a world where your maelstrom is the dead souls of the living haunting in the shadows of unwalked places and in the cracks of things that once were... Opening your brain might let you hear them whispering, or might help you remember something you never saw but they did, or maybe one of them gets into you and you see something horrible and that changes everything about the moment. Opening your brain is a passive ability, something you let occur in order to facilitate MC input into a scene, designed to aid or inspire the moment while at the same time reinforcing the narrative.

So if your maelstrom is about weird radio waves or other oddness, maybe you can listen in on another persons thoughts, or maybe you can project your thoughts towards another. But keep in mind that the Brainer has to take an advance to do that and it only works when he's listening to the thoughts of someone that can see him. I would consider embracing the idea of radio transmitting certain people, or the frequencies of thoughts, but I feel that still would be a better place for a Reality's fraying edge.

Unless it has been established for whatever reason that this is something the Maelstrom specifically allows for, then it seems unlikely. If a player wants to be able to do so specifically, that seems like a great time to write up a Custom Move of some kind, that they could purchase with an appropriate advance.

It does depend heavily on what the Maelstrom is like, though, for sure -- my experience with the game is that as the fiction of the Maelstrom gets more and more developed, it becomes easier for players to justify more esoteric or specialized uses of it even as part of a non-custom, Open Your Brain type move. E.g. if it has been established that the characters actually project their consciousness 'into' the maelstrom when opening their brains, then it becomes feasible that two PCs who have opened their brains at the same time might also communicate somehow while doing so -- because, in the fiction, that means they are both in the same 'place.'

But suggesting the same thing in the first or second session, before that in-depth fiction has been established, would seem like a kind of over-reach -- like Ebok says, it all depends on your group, but my own preference is to keep the Maelstrom simple and _specific_ to begin with, to help avoid turning it into a sort of swiss army knife of 'psychic stuff' that just kind of does whatever the players find convenient.

When I'm the MC, I always say "yeah! Roll!" and then I put my bloody fingerprints ALL over it.

-Vincent

Thank you for the input Vincent and others but yes I do think part of my struggle with the event was that the maelstrom has no been well established yet. For my game I have the idea as the MC that is Maelstrom is a sort of all seeing being but not an all knowing one because it is a new created entity but as for specific limitations and such I am still conjuring ideas. I think my plan will be to bring up this fact and allow it occur but not perhaps exactly as they want, basically the bloody finger prints Vincent has said.

Definitely a good way go about it. A tip for building the maelstrom: Connect the maelstrom to the unique aspects of the world, with some priority set to how it ended. If it's a nuclear apocalypse, maybe the maelstrom is a mutated thing risen from the irradiated earth. If it's a volcanic triggered ice age that's wrapped itself around the world, maybe the maelstrom that which came up from below.

Just a single line can do wonders to get you started. Your players can be involved in that too. The real cool part for me comes when I ask myself, okay. That's where it came from... Now what does it want? What does it need? What is it drawn too? That's my way anyway.

Would have been a good place to "ask questions like crazy" of the Brainer and the other players. Have you done this before? Why doesn't everyone do it all the time? What makes it risky? Etc.

Augury is a really cool peripheral move, which has been used for all kinds of manipulation and use of the maelstrom in my games. It's been my go-to for a lot of this kind of thing.

Man, I love augury. I especially like how the first time people use it, they're like, "Hmm. It's stable, no bleeding. Bleeding? Jesus, that sounds bad. Maybe I should pick that." But then when they look at all the other delicious choices, they're usually end up like, "Fuck it, let it bleed. What's the worst that could happen?"

Then, the inevitable bloody fingerprints.  :)