Thoughts on Alas for the Awful Sea

Alas for the Awful Sea marks Hayley Gordon’s and Vee Hendro’s entrance into indie TTRPG publishing.  The game was Kickstarted in 2016 and saw print in 2017.  While it does not use the powered by the apocalypse branding, it does use “The Apocalypse World Engine,” as credited on the copyright page.  In fact, the game hews pretty closely to Apocalypse World in moves and play, not especially surprising for a freshman effort by designers.
 
The real and lasting draw to Alas for the Awful Sea, for me at least, is the setting. Players take on characters who crew a ship through the British Isles sometime in the mid-19th century. The weather is cruel, the sea is dangerous, and the people and times are equally hard.  In preparation for the game, the GM creates a town with two or more groups in conflict with a number of “currents”—“connected and interwoven problems and situations, exploring one centra conflict.”  The GM is encouraged to tie the PCs into the town by creating connections, and then the PCs interact with those conflicts and currents as they see fit.  In classic Apocalypse World fashion, GMs are encouraged have a set of backstories and concerns, but no plot, playing to find out what the PCs make of the difficult situations presented them.  Over the course of the game, PCs visit various towns as the world of that group is slowly fleshed out.  The advancement system is designed to anchor the characters to the developing world, to call on previously gained knowledge and previously encountered NPCs.
 
The setting is thoughtfully reduced to six bullet points to guide the GM:

• - People here are poor
• - People here have no say
• - Times are changing for the worse
• - Those who can fish, fish
• - Those who can’t, go outside the law
• - People here are set in their ways

​Each one of those points is expanded upon following a short introductory chapter.  It’s a powerful description of the world, and as I said earlier, one of the most compelling parts of the book. Between that section and the later chapters on folklore and the history of the times, Gordon and Hendro do an admirable job bringing the world to life quickly and easily.  You do not need to be a historian to understand the troubles and challenges of this world.  You are encouraged to take this historical setting and fictionalize it, a job made easier, by the encouragement to bring regional folklore into your game, not as colorful background, but as present reality.  For the most part, the presence of selkies and ghosts is the job of the GM, but the mechanics do make it all tangible for the players through the game’s version of Apocalypse World’s psychic maelstrom: the beyond.  PCs can use the move “sense the beyond” to apprehend the other worldly mysteries GM’s are prompted to include in their scenario.  It would be nice to see the folkloric aspects integrated more fully with the rules and procedures of the game, but there’s nothing lost by setting all that on the GM’s shoulders.  The chapter on folklore is just a collection of creatures, spirits, and places that you can bring into your games.
 
As has been popular in a few other games inspired by Apocalypse World, the PC character sheet has two halves to it.  Each player picks a position on the ship (captain, boatswain, sea dog, stowaway, etc.) as well as a “descriptor,” a narrative background or impulse that defines the character (the lover, the kinsman, the believer, the creature, etc.).  These two selections give you your special moves and a set of prompts for creating the relevant details for engaged play.  The moves are competently made, but there is nothing in here to surprise or advance the art.  Where I think the game does do something innovative and interesting with regard to the PCs is the advancement table.  An advancement is given for each PC at the end of each “tale.”  At that point, they get a pre-determined advancement (such as an improved basic move, a familiarity, or new bonds with other characters), and one of their choice, including the option to create a new move for that character.  The list shows that the designers had a clear understanding of what they wanted to accomplish through advancement and how they wanted play to develop over time.  Each option makes the previous tale mean something going forward.  Your character learned something knew, met someone important, improved in a skill, or changed significantly in some way.  As a result, future tales will involve reaching back to the experiences that have come before in order to be more effective going forward.  Importantly, improving stats is not an option in advancement. This is not a game where the characters will become smarter or stronger.  It’s one in which they will learn and grow.
 
The other aspect that I think is will done is the half-page GM sheet, and specifically, the list for “Making Things Worse.”  Instead of telling players to “be prepared for the worst” as the Bakers do in Apocalypse World, Gordon and Hendro tell players that “The GM makes things worse,” a phrasing that I did not think improved upon the original.  However, they broke down GM moves for making things worse in an interesting and productive way, noting that the GM can “complicate the moment,” “change relationships,” or “complicate the future”:

Complicate the moment

• - Turn the move back on them
• - Let them succeed with bad consequences
• - Make them promise
• - Split the party
• - Trap them

 
Change Relationships

• - Make an enemy
• - Shatter faith
• - Create rumours and tarnish their reputation

 
Complicate the Future

• - Tax their resources
• - Deal out harm
• - Introduce a complication from another current
• - Introduce an off-screen complication

​That’s a clean and useful guide for thinking about ways to, indeed, make things worse.  It shows a clarity and vision that we see develop and grow further in the games that Gordon and Hendro go on to make after Alas.
 
The book comes with a pre-made tale in the final section of the book.  This tale, which shares its title with the title of the game itself, makes it clear that Gordon and Hendro have a talent for creating scenarios, but it also shows that the GM tools provided with the game are limited and will need creative expansion by the GM to be fully playable.
 
As I mentioned earlier, GM prep involves creating a town and a number of “currents.”  There are sheets to aid the GM in creating them, as well as a list of appropriate conflicts to sit at the heart of all these troubles.  Interestingly, we are never given the town or currents sheets for the included tale.  Instead, we are presented the tale much as you would find in a purchased module for any number of other games.  We are presented narratively what the PCs will encounter and how NPCs will react to them. We can deduce the various conflicts, but they are never named.  We can piece together what the currents might be, but they are never laid out for us.  That’s because, I’d argue, the town and current sheets are merely organizational tools, and incomplete ones at that.  The reason I call them incomplete is that the final tale of the game does much more than you are ever prompted to in the worksheets. Namely, you have to create a relationship map.  The reason Alas for the Awful Sea works so well as a tale is because all the characters and relationships cross the various conflicts and concerns. 
 
Relationship maps were first introduced in Ron Edwards’s Sorcerer supplement Sorcerer & Soul.  In it, he proposed that open-ended scenarios could be created by structuring not a plot, but a background story full of characters needs, wants, and baggage.  That is precisely what Gordon and Hendro put together here.  I anticipated running the scenario for a friend I’ll be introducing to roleplaying soon, and to get a better grip on the tale, I turned it into a relationship map, and everything ties beautifully together.
 
Ideally, the GM tools of the game would give you guidance if not tools for tying the various threads together via a web of relationships.  What we are given is certainly workable, but it reminds me of that joke about the old instruction for drawing an owl, in which you first draw a circle and an oval; then a couple of lines for the shapes of the wings, legs, and eyes; and then in the final step you are told to draw in all the details that make this collection of lines into an owl, the caption of which in the joke is, “draw the fucking owl.”  It is probably too much to ask first-time designers to create such tools, but without an innate understanding of them, GMs will most like just draw their adventures from the published tales or work through trial and error to see what works.
 
I haven’t got to play the game yet, but I’m hoping to soon. I’ll start with the included tale, and if it goes well, I’ll venture into creating a town and currents for myself and see what it takes to go well.  While there is nothing to amaze in this short volume, there are a few treasures that make it worth the reading, assuming you are already interested in its basic offering.