Messing With Assumptions: No Gas, No Bullets

As the text for the Chopper states, AW in its default state has enough gas and bullets. But what about a game where that is not the case?

The idea of the postapocalyptic world being one where cars and guns are not only ubiquitous, but also necessary for survival, is deeply rooted in the genre, but I also feel that it speaks to a certain set of assumptions: masculine-coded, akin to the fantasies of the stereotypical American reactionary. When everything came crashing down, those city dwellers with their bicycles and gun control laws must have been the first ones on the skull pile, while the new world belonged to the true men, those who stocked up on guns and made sure their car had four wheel drive. However, these are also mostly resources that don't get replenished. How about an apocalypse set in a world where they've mostly dried out, and people have adapted to their absence? We'd have to ditch the Chopper and Driver, and I don't know if the Gunlugger would remain the same with a big fuck-off crossbow instead. A bunch of other playbooks would probably remain unchanged, though, except for the weapon choices. Would the tone of the game change if one of the initial premises was the rejection of the myth of the car and the gun?

You don't have to have gas to have a Chopper. I ran an AW game where there was no gas, and the Chopper's bikes were all electric. In the setting's main settlement there was an aging Tokamak reactor and electricity was plentiful, but out in the wasteland the gang needed to stop every so often to roll out solar mats to recharge their bikes. In this case, it flipped your reactionary assumption backwards - it was the people in the city who had all the good stuff and the people outside were basically fucked (as the reactor also maintained the "grid" that kept out the "ghosts," elements taken from riffing off provocative questions to the players).

But bikes could just as easily be horses. FWIW, the Viking-flavored medieval fantasy re-skin of AW that I run at conventions turns the Chopper in "the Bandit," the leader of a group of mounted thugs. It's literally just filing the serial numbers off, almost nothing needs to change.

Similarly, the Gunlugger becomes "the Huscarl," and is still the baddest motherfucker in the valley. Without HMGs there's less ability to do massive damage at range, but the feel of the playbook is exactly the same - whether you're using a magnum with AP ammunition or a rune-enchanted great-axe, you're still going to mess people up.

For the record, from a realism perspective, women are actually a lot more screwed in an apocalypse without guns, which makes calling one with guns a 'masculine power fantasy' a bit odd to me. Men are physically stronger and the return to muscle-powered weaponry (even crossbows need muscle power to load) gives them a much larger advantage over women than they enjoy in a gun-using apocalypse. It's certainly not an insurmountable advantage, but a bigger one than men usually have in Apocalypse World.

That's all from a pure realism perspective, of course, and of minimal relevance in some versions of Apocalypse World. I just felt the need to note it.

Now, on to the question:

Have you read Dies The Fire and the subsequent novels of 'The Change' by SM Stirling? It's an excellent novel (and extensive series) about a world where all modern technology ceases to function...which quite naturally causes an apocalypse, and the series as a whole goes through three generations. It'd be easily run in Apocalypse World, actually (or the medieval hack mentioned previously). Great inspiration for this sort of thing.

As noted, dropping playbooks doesn't seem necessary. Even Driver could be modified to have a wagon or the like if you wanted (though dropping Driver is also a solid option). Nothing else really needs to drop, and personally I think the aesthetics change but not the core themes of Apocalypse World (which are admittedly a bit variable depending on how you define the world).

That said, to do away with guns you really do need some sort of change in the laws of reality. Guns are actually super easy to make with even the barest knowledge of what you're doing, and bullets even easier. Going downhill technologically from automatic weapons is certainly possible, but not all the way to guns not being a thing. Cars are a little more complex, and you can certainly run out of gas in 50 years, though. So a car-less apocalypse is a lot easier and more likely than a gun-less one, again if you care about realism.

I mean, sure, why not. But I think there are two things being proposed here: an Apocalypse based on a different set of genre assumptions, and an Apocalypse without gas or bullets. Just taking away cars and guns is not going to turn AW away from its roots in the distinctly American version of post-apocalyptic fiction, even if it might push players towards a less trope-heavy implementation of the same.

Which is super-fun and a worthwhile thing to attempt, of course, but if you want a genuinely different genre (or version of the genre) I think you are going to need to do more than adjust the technological veneer -- AW is designed in accordance with a lot of pretty specific notions of violence, community etc. that are, IMO, fundamentally engaged with the exact sort of genre tropes and themes that you describe. And while 'engaged with' is very, very different than 'unquestioningly in favour of', if you want a game that is not about that kind of apocalypse you are probably going to need to start changing the Moves and the Principles and everything else before you're likely to get all that far.

Personally I would love to see variations on the genre that aim for something closer to the British tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction, or other things entirely. But they would be very different games, and it's not even obvious that they would be best as PbtA games.