141. Further Thoughts on the World’s Psychic Maelstrom

It is technically possible to play a series of Apocalypse World sessions without any reference to the world’s psychic maelstrom. If you’re inspired by the Mad Max movies or any number of the books and films listed in the “Immediate Media Influences” on pages 291-292, you might not even give the world’s psychic maelstrom much thought heading into the game. For you, it’s about hard times in a hard world where brutal characters have to make the best of a shitty situation. If no one plays the brainer, or the hocus, or the savvyhead, and no one opens their brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, your game can conceivably go from start to finish without ever accessing the weird and wonderful maelstrom.

But I’ve never heard of that happening. Have you?

What I’m interested in today is how the game ensures that the world’s psychic maelstrom is a part of the game without ever making it a requirement. In a lot of ways, the thrill of the world’s psychic maelstrom is discovered through play unlike any other element of the game. We know what violence is going to look like in the game. We know what hotness and seduction are going to look like in the game. The range of possible acts of violence and social interactions are naturally limited, which is why the moves involving them can have a few reliable picklists and fail to create appropriate and rewarding fiction only rarely. Augury (162-163), on the other hand, has to outline five different ways a character might interact with the world’s psychic maelstrom and four variables of how that interaction could play out. Opening your brain can’t even create a pick list because the move has no real limits but the players’ imaginations. You ask a question and get asked questions, and that’s about as close to nailing things down as the game can get (or rather wants to get). It’s the same on the MC’s side of the game. There are 7 kinds of threats, and they all lead to potential violence or social interactions. The designers couldn’t (or wouldn’t) even create a generic threat type for the world’s psychic maelstrom, asking the MC instead to think about “what kind of threat is the world’s psychic maelstrom” (107).

But for all the vagueness surrounding the world’s psychic maelstrom in the rules of the game, the text itself – both for the MC and the players – is constantly reminding you what the world’s psychic maelstrom is there. The back of the book, the two-paragraph introduction at the front of the book, the “Why to Play” section, the character creation chapter—they all put the world’s psychic maelstrom front and center in their description of what Apocalypse World is.

Another way to make sure the world’s psychic maelstrom naturally comes up in play is to make sure that the playbooks bring it with them. The three characters who naturally have weird+2 are very different in nature, increasing the possibility that someone will play one. There’s a huge gap between the brainer and the savvyhead in both flavor and playstyle, not I think coincidentally. And even if none of those three playbooks is chosen, there are weird-based moves on the angel’s playbook (healing touch and touched by death), the skinner’s playbook (lost), and the battlebabe’s playbook (visions of death). So six of the playbooks draw your attention to the world’s psychic maelstrom and invite you to choose moves that call upon it. Moreover, because the way the playbooks are chosen from a pile at the start of play, even when players don’t choose any of the playbooks that have weird moves or that have a weird+2 stat option, those players have seen the playbooks that do and are made aware of the existence of the world’s psychic maelstrom.

No matter what playbooks the players choose, the MC is encouraged to have the world’s psychic maelstrom intrude upon the characters’ actions. In addition to all the ways that the book naturally gets you thinking about the maelstrom as an MC (e.g. examples, threats, etc.), the game makes weirdness one of only three ways to effectively interact with Apocalypse World. There are five basic stats. Cool is almost entirely reactive, responding to the fire of the world. Sharp is all about perceiving and assessing what is going on. So when characters take action to shape the world around them, they are relying on hard, hot, and weird. Hard is the road of physical violence, and hot is the road of social manipulation. Imagine if these were the only two options available to characters in Apocalypse World? Weird gives the characters a third and critical axis to interact with the world. And of course, it is a third and critical axis available to the MC to apply pressure to the characters.

In a thread on the Barf Forth Apocalyptica forum, Vincent talks about the trap that the hardholder presents to players who believe that the apocalypse can be fixed by an individual with a plan, a bunch of guns, and an iron rule. Here’s what Vincent says about why that’s a trap: “Then in play, for the hardholder to actually make her hierarchy function on her own strength, (a) she has to roll 10+ on every single wealth roll, AND (b) the MC has to present no threats that violence can't solve, AND (c) the MC has to offer no opportunities that violence can't seize. As soon as there's a threat or an opportunity that hot or weird is better for than hard and sharp, the hardholder's relying on the anti-hierarchy - the skinner, the brainer, the hocus, the savvyhead - for help” (see reply #9 at http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=5823). The MC has to present no threats that violence can’t solve and no opportunities that violence can’t seize. The three prongs of the game – hardness, hotness, and weirdness – give the MC enough angles to always apply pressure and dangle opportunities to propel play in difficult and enervating directions. So even if no players choose playbooks that embrace the weird, the MC is encouraged to exploit the weakness naturally present in the characters.

My point is that you cannot separate the world’s psychic maelstrom from a game of Apocalypse World any more than you can remove violence or social interactions. But unlike violence and social interactions, the expression of the world’s psychic maelstrom and what it reveals will always surprise you. Opening your brain takes both the MC and the players into unexpected and unforeseeable territory. Augury will likely “call for you to make snap decisions about the workings of the world’s psychic maelstrom,” and the game encourages you to embrace that: “Do” (162). The text to augury calls the move “big exuberant fun,” just as the text to open your brain tells you that “you want everybody to be opening their brains” (148). Neither move pressures you to use it; they both want to entice you instead.

Why do that? Why have the world’s psychic maelstrom be something the players discover in play, knowing that once they begin the process of discovery the more they will lean into it? It seems to me that that’s part of the point of play. No, not just part of—it may be the main point of play. You learn about who the characters are by the choices they make to individual pressures, but you learn about the world and the apocalypse and the themes of your own game through the choices you make as players about the world’s psychic maelstrom.

In that same thread on Barf Forth Apocalyptica, Vincent says something else worth quoting: “In the first ever playtest, after a few sessions the players asked me when the Apocalypse had come. Like, 10 years from now, in (then) 2018? 20 years from now in 2028? I said that nah, I figured it had been Reagan-Bush” (see the footnote to reply #5 in the same link above). The apocalypse of Apocalypse World was never really about the physical dissolution of society, but about the moral and spiritual dissolution that came with trickle-down economics, the repeal of regulations that insured people’s safety, the growth of our private prison system, and the insistence that ketchup could be considered a vegetable. And that dissolution doesn’t play out primarily in the physical violence and manipulative social interactions of Apocalypse World. That’s what’s howling away in the world’s psychic maelstrom. As Vincent and Meguey write on the back copy of the book: “the world’s psycic maelstrom, the terrible desperation and hate pressing in at the edge of all perception, it is the world now.”