60. springboard off character creation

 . . . and remember to . . .Springboard off character creation.

The players’ characters are made of interesting details you can build on. Look at the hardholder’s gigs, for instance: each of those gigs has people responsible for it, crews that answer to the hardholder and have names and relationships and all kinds of loose ends. Name everyone! Make everyone human! Look at the chopper’s gang, the maestro d’s regulars, the hocus’ followers. Look at what the players created when they were doing Hx with each other. Look at where they come from and what must be around them (98-99).

This bullet point narrows in on some of the specific “good material” you have “to work with” mentioned in the first bullet point. The majority of this passage is concerned with where NPCs for the first session come from to start naming and creating PC-NPC-PC triangles. As we’ve noted before, the playbooks don’t just define the characters but also provide suggestive details of the world in which the characters exist. This passage tells the players to look not only at what is on the playbook but at what is implied by the playbook.

The hardholder’s gigs is a great way to make the point. The gigs all have mechanical effects in the form of surpluses and wants. Extra barter afford the hardholder extra funds to make things happen; wants on the other hand all dictate narrative events or background activity that affect or color the lives of the characters. The gigs are all performed by inhabitants of the hardhold, and these jobs become places to anchor NPCs and tie them into the community that the playgroup is constructing. The basic gigs mentioned in the playbook are “hunting, crude farming, and scavenging” but depending on the options chosen you also have raiders, collectors of protection tributes, workers in the manufactory, merchants in the bustling market, operators of the armory, gang members, mechanics in the garage, and weaponsmiths. Damn, that’s a rich world with a ton of places to originate specific and named NPCs.

NPCs are a critical part of Apocalypse World, and to run it right, the game requires you to come up with relevant and potent NPCs. And the game is designed to give you the tools to do the things it requires you to do. That’s why every playbook suggests background activities and participants that are ripe for the MC’s choosing when looking to tie an NPC into the fiction.

Of course, NPCs are not the only springboards for the MC to strike during the first session. Backstory fiction and relationships are sketched out during Hx as are some of the physical features of the world surrounding them. All this fictional material is ready to act as the skeleton structure to be fleshed out through your fiction. So as the text says, “Look closely . . . “

As a side note, I love the way this whole section is structured so that each of the first six points are connected with transitional sentences to show how they are all interrelated, all part of the same process: “Say everything, and remember to . . .,” “Look closely, but you can’t know everything , so . . .,” “Ask questions, but also . . .” The entire first session is about making connections and bringing strands of ideas together to begin to weave a complete fictional world. It seems perfectly fitting, then, that the language of this section should do that exact same thing. These first six points might have different titles, but the structure here makes it clear that they are all inseparable when MCing that first session.