124. The World’s Psychic Maelstrom

I concluded my last post by observing that the world’s psychic maelstrom occupies an interesting place in the game in that it is simultaneously unnecessary to play with (by which I mean the game functions fully if the maelstrom is never accessed or explored) and vital to the nature and feel of Apocalypse World as created in the text of the rule book. Vincent and Meguey have said in several different interviews that the first thing Vincent wrote when starting on Apocalypse World was the Brainer playbook and the descriptive blurb that introduces the Brainer: “Brainers are the weird psycho psychic mindfucks of Apocalypse World. They have brain control, puppet strings, creepy hearts, dead souls, and eyes like broken things. They stand in your peripheral vision and whisper into your head, staring. They clamp lenses over your eyes and read your secrets” (17). The world’s psychic maelstrom is central to the creative vision of Apocalypse World, so let’s take a moment to look at it up close.

Let’s start by breaking down the phrase itself.

You’ll notice that for the most part I’ve been using the full phrase “world’s psychic maelstrom” without abbreviating it; that’s because it’s seldom abbreviated in the book, which tells us that the entirety of the phrase is important. First, it’s a maelstrom. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a maelstrom as “a powerful often violent whirlpool sucking in objects within a given radius” and “something resembling a maelstrom in turbulence.” Cool. The maelstrom is chaotic and turbulent, and I love the idea that it is “sucking in objects within a given radius,” the “given radius” being all those who open their brains to it, and “objects” being the thoughts, memories, and mental space of those same people. Remember that the maelstrom is described as always being eager to flood the brains that are opened to it (“waiting for you to open your brain so that it can rush in” (14)), and that the maelstrom is one of your “essential threats” (107). If your version of the maelstrom is not “sucking in objects,” it is at least a danger to the PCs that cannot be ignored without risk.

Second, the maelstrom is psychic in nature. Let’s return to Merriam-Webster and see that psychic is defined as “lying outside the sphere of physical science or knowledge : immaterial, moral, or spiritual in origin or force” and “of or related to the psyche,” the psyche being the soul or personality of an individual. The text of Apocalypse World points to this definition when it instructs you to “ask questions about the characters’ . . . psyches, souls” (148). This isn’t just about mental powers and supernatural chaos; it’s about moral and spiritual turbulence.

Finally, the psychic maelstrom is “the world’s.” That little possessive says that the moral and spiritual turbulence hovering just on the edge of perception is unique to our world within the game. This isn’t some cosmic level psychic maelstrom; it’s specific to this place and this time. Either the moral and spiritual turbulence brought about the apocalypse, or the maelstrom was born from the even that shattered our world, but either way, it’s ours. As the text says, “It caused the apocalypse, or else the apocalypse caused it, nobody knows” (71). I have been tempted several times to refer to the maelstrom as “otherworldly,” but the very title reminds us that it is not otherworldly, that it is uniquely of this world. (I feel like there is also a pun in the homophones of “world” and “whirled” as it is paired with maelstrom, but perhaps that is going a step too far. And writing that makes me want to puzzle over the very title of the game, which is a strange one. I have not read anything about the how the Bakers settled on the title Apocalypse World and why. Would be interesting to know, no?)

All together, then, the world’s psychic maelstrom is the moral and spiritual turbulence that is part and parcel of the physical apocalypse in whose remnants our characters struggle. And of course, this moral and spiritual turbulence is at the thematic center of the game and what we are playing to find out, even if we as players have never thought about it like that. It is, after all, the fifth reason we are given for why we should play this game: “Because there’s something really wrong with the world, and I don’t know what it is. The world wasn’t always like this, blasted and brutal. There wasn’t always a psychic maelstrom howling just out of your perception, waiting for you to open your brain so that it can rush in. Who fucked the world up, and how? Is there a way back? A way forward? If anybody’s going to ever find out, it’s you and your characters” (8). Even if your characters never struggle with those big questions, and even if they don’t often open their brains to the world’s psychic maelstrom, it’s there all the same, and it impacts the nature of the apocalypse and the world the players play in. Just as the sex moves say something about the characters even if the moves are never triggered, the presence of the world’s psychic maelstrom says something specific about this post-apocalyptic world even if open your brain is never triggered. The want and shortages of this world are not just the physical things that keep us alive – shelter, food, protection, raw material – they are the moral and spiritual things as well, like justice, love, support, camaraderie.

Like humanity in a game of Sorcerer, the nature of the world’s psychic maelstrom is unique to each game of Apocalypse World, and the nature of the world’s psychic maelstrom is intimately bound up with the specific themes of that specific game. Unlike humanity in Sorcerer, the nature of the world’s psychic maelstrom is created during play rather than from the outset of the game. The rulebook speaks of the maelstrom only in vague terms, and the MC is not prompted to come to the table with a prepared notion. Moreover, no one person can dictate what the nature of that game’s world’s psychic maelstrom is because it is developed through questions as characters open their brain. The players each get their say, and the MC gets to put her bloody fingerprints and fuckery over the whole thing. The maelstrom can even mean and be different things to the different character, so that a unique psychic maelstrom develops from the interactions of all the players so that the unique themes of the game are entirely and unavoidably emergent through play.