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So I’ve been thinking about threats in Apocalypse World lately, as you may have noticed, and in gathering my thoughts about Brutes, I took a look back at the “essential threats” that you create “after the first and second sessions.” Those threats are:
• For where the PCs are, create it as a landscape. • For any PCs’ gangs, create them as brutes. • For any PCs’ other NPCs, create them as brutes, plus a grotesque and/or a wannabe warlord. • For any PCs’ vehicles, create them as vehicles. • In any local populations, create an affliction. • What kind of threat is the world’s psychic maelstrom? (102 & 107) So the thing that strikes me is that the essential threats are all anchored to the PCs. I realize that’s obvious when you’re looking at it, but in my mind you were also creating things exterior to the PCs as threats. Of course, you do create things exterior to the PCs as threats, but those things are not essential threats. The grotesque and the wannabe warlord are not external to the PCs but are chosen from among the NPCs “belonging” to the PCs. You can make up all the external gangs and warlords you want, but this wannabe warlord comes from the NPCs connected to the PCs, presumably referring to the ones created by the various playbooks and character moves. The drama of Apocalypse World comes first and foremost from the community of characters that surround the PCs. Your essential threats are the landscape you stand in, the gangs that follow you, the NPCs that maintain your workspace or patronize your establishment, the vehicles you operate, and the populations you mingle with. With friends like these, who needs external threats? You can play out the entire game just watching your immediate surroundings explode and implode. I love that.
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An affliction threat isn’t a person, it’s something threatening that people are doing, or that is happening, or that has come to be (110).
This is our first threat that isn’t a human being. Afflictions affect and are perpetuated by populations. As such, they make for a whole different type of problem for the protagonists of the story being played out. Warlords and grotesques are individuals (with or without gangs) who can be confronted head on, battled with, bargained with, or undermined. Afflictions potentially have many more vectors for drama. How do you address a disease? How do you deal with the holding’s water filtration breaking down? How do you deal with the violent customs or an entire people? Or a poisonous opinion held fast by the people? You can’t shoot your way out of those problems. You can’t bargain with an individual and be clear of affliction. Hell, not all afflictions can even be “solved.” Customs and delusions can easily become background threats that are constantly haunting and harassing the protagonists. As much as I love the very notion of afflictions, it’s the threat moves that make afflictions awesome: • Push reading a situation. • Someone neglects duties, responsibilities, obligations. • Someone flies into a rage. • Someone takes self-destructive, fruitless, or hopeless action. • Someone approaches, seeking help. • Someone approaches, seeking comfort. • Someone withdraws and seeks isolation. • Someone proclaims the affliction to be a just punishment. • Someone proclaims the affliction to be, in fact, a blessing. • Someone refuses or fails to adapt to new circumstances. • Someone brings friends or loved ones along. The threat moves are awesome because they focus not on the affliction itself but on the people’s reactions to the affliction. The disease, condition, custom, delusion, sacrifice, or barrier is made present by the way the individuals in the community (the “someone” of each move) create trouble, seek to comfort, attempt to make sense of the affliction, or fall apart in the face of it. By focusing on the people, the game makes the affliction threat effectively a bipartite threat. A disease threatening a population is bad enough, but someone taking the political stage to declare the disease a just punishment creates a whole new facet to the threat. The broken down water filtration system is an immediate danger, but someone taking self-destructive actions because of it threatens the protagonists that much more and possibly spreads them that much thinner. Every one of these threat moves draws attention to all the individuals that make up the community, to all the NPCs the MC has at their disposal, and together they hand the MC an unending set of flash points to pressure the players’ characters. Of course, as beautiful as each threat is individually, bringing them all together during play keeps the narrative landscape tilted and dynamic. In a world with warlords, grotesques, afflicted populations, brutes, and landscapes, there is no way to create a status quo even if you tried. That is the gift of these threats. I’ll admit that my textual evidence for this claim is embarrassingly thin, but I’ll make it anyway: grotesques hold a special place in Apocalypse World. They are an “essential threat,” but I think their importance goes well beyond that. In fact, I think they are pretty central to the game, thematically and mechanically. I’ll explain.
First, an in-game definition: A grotesque is a person - remember fundamentally a person, human, not a monster - whose humanity has been nevertheless somehow crippled. Choose which kind of grotesque: • Cannibal (impulse: craves satiety and plenty) • Mutant (impulse: craves restitution, recompense) • Pain addict (impulse: craves pain, its own or others’) • Disease vector (impulse: craves contact, intimate and/or anonymous) • Mindfucker (impulse: craves mastery) • Perversion of birth (impulse: craves overthrow, chaos, the ruin of all) (109) Grotesques are defined by that missing or damaged piece of humanity, and that damaged or missing piece is expressed by their craving. The word “craving” is a perfect word choice because it captures the sense that that need exists at the cellular level of the grotesque’s existence, a near animalistic drive. Grotesques are the only threat that have a craving instead of an infinitive verb connected with their impulse. I made some noise in my last post about the infinitive verb tying the threats’ impulses to their actions, that their nature is made real only through their actions. For the grotesque, then, it appears that their grotesqueness is anchored to that very craving. When that craving is expressed, it is expressed as a violation of social norms. Cannibalism is taboo in human cultures the whole world over. Even at its most metaphorical level (and the categories should most certainly be interpreted metaphorically as well as literally to let them fill the space of their limitations), cannibalism is to feed on your own. The mutant isn’t just mutated; it clearly blames its mutation and the difficulties that arise from it on the world and community surrounding it, demanding restitution and recompense for its lot in life. The disease vector needs to be among others to fulfill its craving. Even the pervsersion of birth, who wants to watch the world burn, needs a community to overthrow. (As a side note: “perversion of birth” is a delicious phrase all around—so much for the imagination to chew on!) From this list we see that grotesques exist within the social structure but violate one basic tenet or another of that society because of its damaged or missing piece of humanity. Literarily speaking, grotesques are never simple villains or monsters, and Apocalypse World continues that tradition by emphasizing the humanness and humanity at the core of the grotesque. Let’s look momentarily at the dictionary definition of the noun “grotesque”: a style of decorative art characterized by fanciful or fantastic human and animal forms often interwoven with foliage or similar figures that may distort the natural into absurdity, ugliness, or caricature (Merriam Webseter online dictionary) a very ugly or comically distorted figure, creature, or image (online Oxford Dictionary) The grotesque is about exaggeration, about the nexus of what is human and what is inhuman, about how thin the line is between human and beast--all as a way to point to the fragility of humanity itself. A single exaggerated feature can throw off the delicate balance that defines us as human, and a single exaggerated aspect of character can do the same. Grotesques are haunting because their differences always remind us of just how similar we are. We see that difference as absurd, comical, or ugly to explain the uncomfortable union of similarities and dissimilarities. That, I think, is the power of the grotesque in Apocalypse World. The grotesque tells us what we may become, physically and socially, living in this is post-apocalyptic landscape. The players’ characters are given awesome power and competence but only a limited set of tools and abilities with which to wield that power. They can lug guns, pry into minds, manipulate and seduce, seize shit—it all requires force and struggles of both will and strength. The characters kill, sacrifice others, and measure the worth of lives in order to make the difficult decisions they have to make. The rules guide the MC to force the characters into hard decisions, and the characters are given a list of compromises to choose from, to forever turn that screw a little more. And the rules of the game make it so that everything has consequences, both successes and failures, so your actions keep compounding. The game only gives the characters shovels to dig, never a ladder to climb. To some extent the badassery of the playbook characters is a lure, a finely baited hook. Come play and be powerful, they say. Let’s see where that power takes you, the game asks. Because how long can your character continue before they too lose a key piece of their humanity? How long before they too become grotesques? Will they even recognize their own grotesqueness? If I were to guess, I’d say those are the questions the game is designed to play to find out. That’s why I think the first two MC moves associated with the grotesque threat are so well chosen: Threat moves for grotesques: • Push reading a person. • Display the nature of the world it inhabits. • Display the contents of its heart. • Attack someone from behind or otherwise by stealth. • Attack someone face-on, but without threat or warning. • Insult, affront, offend or provoke someone. • Offer something to someone, or do something for someone, with strings attached. • Put it in someone’s path, part of someone’s day or life. • Threaten someone, directly or else by implication. • Steal something from someone. • Seize and hold someone. • Ruin something. Befoul, rot, desecrate, corrupt, adulter it. To use the grotesque to display the nature of the world it inhabits is to display the nature of the world that the PCs inhabit. To display the contents of the grotesque’s heart is to reveal something potentially lurking in their own hearts. Revealing its heart is to reveal something repugnant and familiar, alien and yet so much like our own. Those two moves anchor the grotesque’s roll as an offshoot of the world itself, a naturally occurring phenomenon in this unnatural world. The grotesque exists within its context and the larger community shared by the PCs. God damn, I love that. In addition to all that – to all the importance I think the grotesque holds in the game – they are just thrilling in play. They come with apocalyptica pre-barfed upon them. Pain addicts? Perversions of birth? Mindfuckers? Attacking someone face-on, but without threat or warning? Befoul, rot, desecrate, corrupt, adultery something? Get the fuck out of here—I want to see that play out every time. It seems only reasonable that warlords should be the opening threat presented in the text. Warlords are people of power and responsibility. They have gangs they can wield like a weapon, but that also means they have people that they are responsible for. And in a game that uses scarcity as the fuel for its external drama, having someone who needs things and has the power to get them is a vital tool for the MC.
A warlord threat consists of the warlord, plus the gang and other people under the warlord’s control. Choose which kind of warlord: Slaver (impulse: to own and sell people) Hive queen (impulse: to consume and swarm) Prophet (impulse: to denounce and overthrow) Dictator (impulse: to control) Collector (impulse: to own) Alpha wolf (impulse: to hunt and dominate) So let’s talk for a moment about the beauty of that word “impulse” in this context. Grabbing the Oxford Dictionary’s definition, we get “impulse” defined as “a sudden strong and unreflective urge or desire to act.” Impulses are sudden. Impulses are strong. Impulses are unreflective. In short, there is no choice involved in an impulse. As such, the impulses are related to giving your NPCs a body part to follow around; both are visceral compulsions. My favorite aspect of “impulse” is that it connects to an infinitive verb (to own, to consume, to denounce), which says these threats are defined by their actions, not by what they think or want, but by what they do. Those actions are what gives each threat its own trajectory. They are in motion, they are actively seeking, they are hungry. Now let’s look at the threat moves. The threat moves for the warlords alone nearly double the amount of moves an MC can make: Threat moves for warlords: • Push the battle moves. • Outflank someone, corner someone, encircle someone. • Attack someone suddenly, directly, and very hard. • Attack someone cautiously, holding reserves. • Seize someone or something, for leverage or information. • Make a show of force. • Make a show of discipline. • Offer to negotiate. Demand concession or obedience. • Claim territory: move into it, blockade it, assault it. • Buy out someone’s allies. • Make a careful study of someone and attack where they’re weak. I love this list. Even if you weren’t advised to “push the battle moves,” a huge majority of these moves invoke violence and force. Attacking, seizing, claiming, outflanking—these warlords are aggressive motherfuckers. My particular favorite is “offer to negotiate. Demand concession or obedience.” That kills me. The warlord can make overtures of negotiations, but once that discussion is underway (or hell, before that discussion is underway), nothing short of obedience and you giving in to them will satisfy. That one move points to all the things you can’t do as MC. There is no move that allows you to make your warlord sue for peace. No move lets the warlord surrender. Or share their power. Or hold an election, or put something up for a vote. Your slaver cannot turn their slaves loose, not unless doing so is a way of announcing future badness, or the result of making a careful study of someone in preparation of attacking where they’re weak, or putting someone in a spot. The game compels you down certain paths. Referencing the list of moves (both in play and out of play) is a subtle form of mind control in its way. Each move suggests something you can have happen in the fiction. You might not have thought about having the warlord buy out someone’s allies, but that move sure gives you an idea. The list opens up all kinds of possibilities, and ideally, you are so excited by those possibilities that you don’t even think about all the possibilities the list points you away from and even denies to you. There are 7 categories of threats in Apocalypse World, and within each of those categories are 6 subcategories and a varying-length list of moves that the threat opens up for the MC. Altogether, the threats are presented as 6 pages of lists (108-113).
This seems like a good time, then, to discuss lists as used in Apocalypse World. Lists are first and foremost a way to limit and control the fiction and the conversation. These are the things that can appear within your fiction in order to keep it within the prescribed genre of the game. These are the types of names that are appropriate as the game envisions itself. These are the types of things characters can do within the fiction. These are the types of threats that can put pressure upon the characters. In the second edition of Apocalypse World, the 7 categories of threats are: Warlord Grotesque Affliction Brutes Landscape Terrain Vehicle But these limitations are also a gift. They 1) lessen the cognitive load required to play the game by providing ready-made answers to the questions that arise during play; 2) reduce down time and pressure during play because starting from a list of options is much easier, quicker, and less daunting than coming up with something from scratch; and 3) present possibilities that might have been overlooked. In the case of these 7 threats, the MC is given essential threats for each game, so they cannot forget to give each individual population an affliction. They cannot forget to have a warlord or wannabe warlord threatening the PCs. They cannot forget to have some NPC play the role of the grotesque. They cannot forget to consider the nature of the landscape surrounding the PCs. You might not have thought to have one of those elements, but the list puts the possibility right into your hands and your brain. The final aspect of the lists that I think is important to understanding how they are used in the game is that the items on the list not only place limitations on the borders of the fiction but should open up imaginatively the space within those borders. What I mean by that is that any item on the list should suggest and inspire a breadth of ideas. To speak in specifics, let’s look at the 6 subcategories of warlords: Slaver Hive queen Prophet Dictator Collector Alpha wolf Each item on the list is immediately recognizable. We all know what a slaver is, or a prophet, or a dictator. The hive queen, however, is one that gives us pause. We of course know what that is, but what it looks like in play isn’t immediately clear. It’s a phrase to ponder on and play with and roll over in our mind. And once we start doing that, prophet reveals itself to have all kinds of undertones. And collector! What kinds of things might a warlord seek to own and how might they display or categorize that collection. There’s a meticulousness to collecting as opposed to a hoarder who wants to own for ownership’s sake. Mine that difference and see where your thoughts take you. In this way, each item can expand to fill up the imaginative space, serving as a leaping off point rather than a termination. To this end there is a kind of poetry in the lists that demands the author pick each word carefully and judge the individual notes that make of the chord of its meaning. Each of those individual notes must find their own resonance in the reader’s mind to inspire and lift a mundane idea into something unique and powerful within the fiction being created. Like any piece of genre fiction in any artistic medium, the work must simultaneously be similar to the other works in the genre and unique, separate from the preceding works in some exciting way. Otherwise you are just creating a pastiche. The lists of Apocalypse World are designed to allow you to create a story both familiar and new practically on the spot, for anything you say that follows the list will be within genre, and the poetry of the list inspires and encourages you to consider the dynamic range of options available to you, giving you ample opportunity and motive to not settle for something hackneyed. The purpose of your prep is to give you interesting things to say. As MC you’re going to be playing your threats, which means saying what they do. It means offering opportunities to the players to have their characters do interesting things, and it means responding in interesting ways to what the players have their characters do (106).
Accordingly, when you create a threat, follow your own inspiration. Choose the things that are suggestive to you, that put you in mind of apocalyptica, romance, violence, gore, danger, trauma. Choose the things you’d just fucking kill to see well done on the big screen, and skip the things that don’t spark your interest. Here we are with to the final two paragraphs of the section. In the last post, we looked at how threat decisions are instrumental in keeping the MC’s thumbs off the scales during the PCs’ encounters with NPCs in order to truly play to find out. The other benefit to making “real” and “binding” decisions is to “give you interesting things to say.” If the medium of any RPG is conversation, then the rules of the RPG direct the flow and control the parameters of that conversation. The key word, then, in the first paragraph quoted above is “interesting.” It appears three times and in all but one sentence. Threats are your half of the conversation, and in playing them (“saying what they do”), you are creating opportunities for the players’ characters to do “interesting things”; in turn, you respond to those “interesting things” in “interesting ways.” And back and forth, on and on, action and reaction, creates, ideally, an interesting conversation at every turn. The MC keeps the conversation grounded in the fiction, which allows the players to trigger their moves by constructing the fiction on their end. When it’s the MC’s turn to speak, they have to take their move, which exists outside of the fiction, and clothe it in the fiction to send it back across the table for the players. So there are two halves to the MC’s action, the move itself and the fiction into which it is packaged. The threat-creation process is designed to give you interesting things to work with for both halves of what you are doing. As we break down the different threat options in future posts, we’ll be looking at how the game achieves that. But nothing is just interesting on its own; it must be interesting to someone. And the direction given again and again throughout the text is that what you create as the MC needs to be interesting to you. I have called this direction positioning the MC as the primary audience for the narrative that unfolds during play. Now it’s time to ponder what a bold move this direction is. Often in RPG texts, the GM is directly or indirectly made responsible for everyone else’s fun when playing. GMs have been tasked in the past with learning what everyone wants from play and trying to dish out a little something for everyone. But not Apocalypse World. If “interesting” is the key word from the first paragraph, “you” is the key word from the second: “follow your own inspiration,” “choose the things that are suggestive to you, that put you in mind of apocalyptica,” “choose the things you’d just fucking kill to see well done on the big screen,” and “skip the things that don’t spark your interest.” How does that work? How can everyone be assured of a good time if all the MC is concerned about is what they want to see? The playbooks allow the players to construct the characters they want to play. The move selections let the players choose the abilities and the types of narrative moments they’d like to see in play. Because the players have total freedom to pursue what their characters want to do, the MC cannot force their hands and railroad them. All the MC can do is present possibilities, and the characters can react according to their players’ desires. Moreover, as an unquestioned fan of the characters, the MC is going to want to see the characters do all their cool tricks, so the MC will want to set them up to see how they choose to be awesome. With all these other systems in place, the MC is free to chase after their own questions and wonderings. No, they are more than free, they are expressly urged to do so. It is precisely because of that back and forth between character moves and MC moves that the MC needs to create situations they want to see resolved. The more both sides push for what they want, the more dynamic and “interesting” the game will be—to everyone. During play, you leapt forward with named and motivated NPCs, you barfed forth landscapes and details of society. Now, between sessions, it’s time to go back through your notes and create those people, places, and conditions as threats.
Creating them as threats means making decisions about their backstory and motivations. Real decisions, binding ones, that call for creativity, attention and care. You do it outside of play, between sessions, so that you have the time and space to think. As I was saying last time, the game makes it incredibly easy to leap forward with named and motivated NPCs. It’s equally easy to barf forth landscape and any details about the world you want. You open your mouth, say it, and it is part of the fiction. The work comes later, between sessions, when you create them as threats. Creating them as threats is an interesting phrase. Since you’re already created the characters during play, the phrase could easily be “Re-creating them as threats.” As it is, the phrase suggests that the NPCs are less solid, more phantasmagorical, before they go through the hardening process of being created as threats. Before they are created as threats, to what extent are they even created at all? We’ll look at the formal threat creation process down the line. For now, let’s look at how this passage defines threat creation. Primarily, it’s about “making decisions about their backstory and motivation.” Those decisions that you make must be “real” and “binding.” You must make them with “creativity, attention and care.” And it’s important that these decisions be made when you have “time and space to think,” presumably so that you can devote the attention and care that is demanded of you. It seems clear why you would want to be creative in your decision-making and why you would want to be attentive and careful. The question at hand is why do the decisions you make need to be “real” and “binding”? To be real and binding is to be final and unchangeable. What in the game requires that all the threats have a motivation and background that you as the MC are not allowed to fudge during play? I’ve mentioned this before, when discussing the MC “always say” rules that command the MC to always say what their prep demands and what honesty demands, and both the demands are related to the real and binding decisions that you make during threat creation. But that doesn’t answer the question why. In the latest “RPG Design Panel podcast,” Vincent Baker and Jason Pitre discuss GM mechanics in RPGs, and Vincent said something that is pertinent here: Q. One of the things that I really love about [Dogs in the Vineyard] is that the constraints that it places on the GM allow the GM to swing for the fences against the PCs without worrying about killing them all in a supremely unfun way. . . A. Well that all, I think, hinges on what you are playing to find out. The game is at every stage—and I didn’t have this vocabulary when I wrote Dogs in the Vineyard to say, “Here’s what you’re playing to find out.” And I’m not positive I would have told you the truth in the text. I’m not positive I’m going to tell you the truth now about what you are playing to find out when you play Dogs in the Vineyard. I’m gonna tell you the truth: it’s can the player characters reconcile their actions with their faith. . . . Like the whole game is designed really to that, and there’s nothing else for that design to do than to drive play toward that question. And so with that focus in mind as I’m designing it, there’s sort of no choice but to provide ways for the GM to swing for the fences; there’s no choice but to create those systems of conflict resolution and escalation mechanics to make that possible, because you know the one thing that design can’t do is put its thumb on that scale (0:26:00 – 0:27:56). Several times during the talk, Vincent makes it clear that the driving principle of his designs is what the game is asking the players to play to find out. Once that is known, the game needs to give everyone involved the tools they need to do that and to structure play such that that discovery is reliably made during play. To that extent, the game cannot place its own “thumb on the scale,” nor can it allow the GM to place their “thumb on the scale.” That thing that is being played to find out can only result from the players’ actions and decisions. That brings us back to Apocalypse World and threats. These real and binding decisions that the MC makes between sessions when creating threats is a way of keeping the MC’s thumb off the scale during those crucial moments of play that the rest of the game is designed to build up to. The reason the MC must always say what their honesty and prep demand is to keep their thumb away from that scale. Each NPC (and landscape, and vehicle, and population—in short, everything the MC controls) must be given its own internal logic, its own momentum, its own desire, and as a result of all these things, its own trajectory. Then, like billiard balls, the PCs encounter these other elements on a crash course (because the game has set up a tilted landscape that guarantees crash course as well as enough balls that it will never be long before there is a collision). It is concerning the course and result of that conflict that the MC must keep their hands away from the scales. Play your NPCs as you have committed to playing them and watch what happens. Crosshairs are there to encourage you not to save your own game elements if the conflict says they are destroyed. Untenable Life decisions are there to let the PCs meet their own defeat if that’s what’s in the cards. Everything in the game is designed to make these collisions happen and then to allow them to happen honestly and naturally without your interference. The natural follow-up question is this: now that we’ve discerned what moments the game creates and protects, what are we playing to find out? Surely it’s not just a matter of “what happens when these forces collide?”! Surely it’s something as monumental and important as the question answered through play in Dogs in the Vineyard as described above! Is it can these characters navigate this hostile world to a successful retirement? Is it can a place of hope and love be found amongst the detritus and rubble of this rotten wasteland? Is it can peace and beauty be achieved through violence and war? I hate to say it, but I have no idea. Well, I have ideas, but no answers, and certainly nothing I’m confident enough to say out loud. That’s alright. This collection examines the text for all the wonders it holds. We’ve come a long way so far, so maybe we’ll be able to answer that question in another hundred posts. If not, no big. In some ways the Dogs in the Vineyard example shows us that that question is what Vincent designed the game to find out, even when the individual players are not thinking about that question when playing the game. So do you know what Meg and Vincent designed Apocalypse World to reveal through play? In the end, would it affect your own experience playing the game? People are motivated by scarcity. Scarcity creates and distorts their societies. The landscape itself is hostile, ungiving, full of hate and hunger (106).
This is a sort of thesis statement for the chapter. In the real world, there are a lot of reasons for people to be horrible to each other. In Apocalypse World, what motivates everyone to one extent or another is scarcity. Either you have something they want, or they have something you want. This paragraph orients you to everything that follows, connecting the MC tools for wreaking havoc with the wants and needs generated by a world that has too little to give to too many. The characters’ enemies are their most obvious and immediate threats, but their allies too, their crews, gangs, their people, they’re threats too. They’re theirs now, but they can turn on them, and will, just as soon as their hunger and desperation outweighs their loyalty. And meanwhile, they’re still threats to everyone else. Scarcity makes threats not only of your enemies, but also of your friends and followers. Everything Apocalypse World does with NPCs prepares you for this moment. When playing NPCs, you are told to pick a body part and have them follow it wherever it leads them. That single desire tells us that the NPC is always acting in their own best interest, driven by a deep need or habit. If the PCs benefit, great; if not, tough shit. Making PC-NPC-PC triangles shows us that the NPCs want something from everyone. Looking through crosshairs tells us that anything the MC controls is disposable, and all the NPCs are under the MC’s jurisdiction, friendly and hostile alike. The game makes no distinctions between NPCs aligned with the PC and those aligned against them. So unless the Battlebabe chooses “get an ally” as one of her improvements or any character rolls a 12+ after advancing their seduce or manipulate move—unless one of those things happen, the NPCs will remain potential threats to the PCs. NPCs are the number one tool given to the MC of Apocalypse World for creating play and finding those darting fish that make them wonder. Because NPCs require no stats or numbers of any kind, they can be created on the spot. Grab a name from the MC worksheet and boom, the NPC exists in the fiction. This design allows the MC to fill the world with named, human NPCs at whim. Doing so provides not only color and a kind of realism, it gives the MC a way to poke and prod at the PCs at any given time. Players just as easily create NPCs. The playbooks bring NPCs into play as gangs and crews and staff and labor and gig-folk. Every one of those helpful souls becomes a threat in the prep time between sessions. Every NPC the players narrate into the fiction are like fire: they light up the space, can serve the PCs well, and will always threaten to burn them if the proper conditions come along. I love the ominous sound (and meaning!) of “They’re theirs now, but the can turn on them, and will, just as soon as their hunger and desperation outweighs their loyalty.” That sentence does a beautiful job of capturing the precarious position the PCs are in vis-à-vis the NPCS. All friendship and support in the apocalyptic wasteland is conditional. There’s a lot of great text in the opening section of the Threats chapter, so we’re going to take our time going through the next 7 paragraphs. Let’s start with the opening paragraph and sentence:
Everyone and everything in Apocalypse World is a threat. This is one of those sentences that ring in my ears for its simplicity and power. If I were to have my body tattooed with the critical sentences from the book Memento-style, I would put this one in the center of my chest so that it would be the first thing I’d see when I looked in the mirror, right below “Barf forth apocalyptica”. (Okay, I had never thought to do that before, but I must admit, I really love the idea now that it’s out there. Maybe a Photoshopped job of Guy Pierce’s tattooed torso would suffice. I’ll think about it.) This sentence is what makes the image chosen for this chapter so brilliant. As I said way back in post No. 33, most of the images in the book are of badasses perpetrating badassery. It would seem obvious that one of those badasses would appear on the title page to a chapter called “Threats”?! Instead, we get the image of a woman breastfeeding a child. The woman’s eyes are sunk and give the impression of her being tired. The word “Threats” is across the woman’s breasts near the child’s face. What better way to drive home that everyone and everything in Apocalypse World is a threat than to make the cover image an unarmed woman seemingly minding her own business? I love it because not only does it suggest that the woman is a threat to anyone who stands between her and what she needs, but that the baby itself is a threat, possibly even to their mother. And is the mother’s milk not a resource? Are not children themselves a valuable resource to a community? And the ability to bear children? So this one image combines people and resources to say that even those things that look most benign and common are both valuable and dangerous in Apocalypse World. Damn that’s good. 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. This is where the chapter begins transitioning us to the next chapter, the one on threats.
The first three paragraphs walk the reader through the threat map, what its various parts denote, and where to put NPCs and other parts of the world that come up during play. We’ll just skip over that and get to the part and tells us how threats fit into the first session: Be sure to get a start on your essential threats. They are: • For where the PCs are, create it as a landscape. • For any PCs’ gangs, create them as brutes. • For any PCs’ other NPCs, create them as brutes, plus a grotesque and/or a wannabe warlord. • For any PCs’ vehicles, create them as vehicles. • In any local populations, create an affliction. • What kind of threat is the world’s psychic maelstrom? (102) Threats are not central to the first session (hence not being mentioned until two pages from the end of the chapter). Just because they aren’t central, however, doesn’t mean that we can ignore them altogether. We are told to “work on” the threat map and to “start on” our essential threats. Threats will become very important in the following sessions, but here in the first session, we simply want to be mindful of the threats, to have them rolling around in the back of our mind. So let’s take a look at that word “essential.” In a book that chooses its language very carefully, “essential” is a word that doesn’t mess around. Why are they essential? Well we know that there are no status quos in Apocalypse World. We know that the playbooks, Hx, and the process of character creation as a group sets up a “fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests,” and “untenable arrangements” (97—and no, I will never get tired of quoting that line). But setting up those elements is not enough to ensure that there is never a status quo. The players will work tirelessly to bring things to a balance, which will bring the evolving narrative to a dull standstill if they ever succeed. The only way to ensure that the landscape is forever tilting is to put everything on that landscape in motion and beyond the PCs’ control. When you make the landscape itself a threat, and the PCs’ gangs threats, and every NPC a threat, and every vehicle a threat, and give every population an affliction—when you do all those things, you ensure that there are more forces cascading across that tilted landscape than the PCs could ever possibly hope to stop. Because to make those elements threats is to give them energy and a direction which sends each off on its own trajectory, giving the PCs endless material to bounce off of and rub against. So these threats listed here are the bare minimum, and the more you are aware of their status as essential threats from the first session, you can keep your eye out for who might be your grotesque and which of the NPCs is looking like a wannabe warlord. What kind of hostility do you find the terrain itself putting forth? What does the central population seem to be suffering from? You ask all these questions and keep your eye out for answers as you play your first session. There will be time enough later to solidify them; for now, just “start on” them. The only thing left to look at in this passage is the psychic maelstrom. The chapter thus far has been pretty quiet on the subject of the psychic maelstrom. This might seem odd since opening your brain is a basic move. In fact, open your brain isn’t even mentioned in the bullet point commanding us to nudge the players to have their characters make moves. It makes sense that the psychic maelstrom is somewhat danced around in this chapter because the move makes the MC tell the PCs something new and interesting about the current situation. On the one hand, everything (ideally) is new and interesting in the first session. On the other hand, and more importantly, threats and your prep work are the tools that the game gives MCs to be able to come up with something new and interesting to say in the first place. As such, the psychic maelstrom can easily make an appearance in the first session, but it won’t be a fully functioning part of the game until the second session and beyond. All the same, you want to keep the psychic maelstrom in mind so that if and when a player triggers the move, you can pay attention to what kind of threatening behavior it displays. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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