69. After the 1st Session

Not, like, immediately after. Give it some time to sink in. I generally think about it idly all through work the next day (104).

You go into the first session with some daydreams of apocalyptica and come out with a set of players’ characters, a whole host of NPCs (all of them with desires and demands), a hostile environment, an afflicted population, and a psychic maelstrom that is roaring just beyond the edge of the senses. Now is when you have work to do. When the MC is commanded to always say what your prep demands (81), threats are primarily what that prep is about.

See the list of resources? Considering each threat’s available resources will give you insight into who they are, what they need, and what they can do to get it. It’s especially useful to give some threats resources that the PCs need but don’t have.

In the first edition of Apocalypse World, all the threats were categorized by what resource scarcity compelled them. While the threat map has been totally revised, the importance of resource scarcity remains in this short paragraph. Resources – who has them, who needs them, who controls them - are valuable ways to keep that landscape fractured and tilting, to keep inequalities from equalizing, to keep interests incompatible, and to keep arrangement untenable. When the PCs have a resource others need, trouble will come to them. When others have resources that the PCs need, they will have to go cause trouble. Both problems are good for the drama and good for the MC. There is never enough to go around in Apocalypse World, so the MC is encouraged to keep those resource lists on the MC worksheet in mind when doing their prep work.

Now go back over it all. Pull it into its pieces. Solidify them into threats, following the rules in the next chapter—so now, in the cold light of day, are Uncle’s raiders really a hunting pack, or are they sybarites instead? Are Bran’s crew a family after all, or are they something weirder, like Carna is a hive queen and Pamming and Thuy are her drones? Are the burn flats a furnace or a breeding pit?

This is all stuff we will be diving into when we look at the next chapter in detail. What’s important here is the sense of exploration and play that the text assigns to the MC’s prep. You aren’t trying to slap a label on Uncle’s raiders, Bran’s crew, or the burn flats and be done with them. You’re trying different things on and seeing how they look, thinking about how they play out. Carna as hive queen sounds like an intriguing concept! Play that out in your mind—how does it affect your understanding of her relationships and what she wants? How would that affect how you play her and how she would interact with the PCs? Yes, we are being analytical (looking at it all “in the cold light of day”), but we are also daydreaming again (thinking “about it idly all through . . . the next day”). Prep is exploratory and fun when approached in this way.

And when we meet up again for our second session, we are still doing all the things from the MC chapter and all the things from the First Session chapter, only now we can say what our prep demands as well:

Do much the same—give all the characters time, look for where they’re not in control, leap forward with named, human NPCs—but now you’ve got threats prepped, so bring them into play too. Ta da.

Yeah, ta da.