2. The Basics: apocalypse world

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to look at Chapter One, Verse One of Apocalypse World: The Basics: Apocalypse World. Here’s our text:

Nobody remembers how or why. Maybe nobody ever knew. The oldest living survivors have childhood memories of it: cities burning, society in chaos then collapse, families set to panicked flight, the weird nights when the smoldering sky made midnight into a blood-colored half-day.

Now the world is not what it once was. Look around you: evidently, certainly, not what it was. But also close your eyes, open your brain: something is wrong. At the limits of perception, something howling, everpresent, full of hate and terror. From this, the world’s psychic maelstrom, we none of us have shelter. (page 8, 2nd edition; page 6, 1st edition)

First, that’s a kick-ass way to introduce the setting for your game. I love the immediacy of the tone and voice, as though some old, hardened apocalyptic survivor is speaking directly to us, telling us first to look around and then to open our brain. There’s a fantastic mix of straightforwardness (“Nobody remembers how or why”; “Now the world is not what it once was”; “something is wrong”), poetic phrasings (“families set to panicked flight”; “blood-colored half-day”; “At the limits of perception, something howling, everpresent, full of hate and terror”), and unexpected sentence construction (“evidently, certainly, not what it was”; “we none of us have shelter”). It’s powerful, full of imagery, and succinct. Is there another RPG text that dispatches with introducing its setting as quickly as AW?

These opening 8 sentences of the text make up just about the entirety of AW’s discussion of setting. Admittedly, the title already prepares you for an apocalyptic setting, but no words are wasted here. To play this game, you need to know that we are two or three generations into the apocalypse; that society as we knew it collapsed; and that the damage to the world was as emotional, spiritual, and mental as it was physical. Every other detail about the apocalypse is left wide open, and you are free to create any setting you want. The Bakers waste no time (theirs or yours) throwing out ideas of possible landscapes and maelstroms.

This is my favorite opening sections of any RPG text.