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Sometime after every session, before the next, get out your threat map and look it over. What’s changed? Have any threats come closer? Have any receded further into the distance? Have any notional threats proved real? Have any moved, circling the characters or acting on the world outside their bounds?
Flip through your threats’ listings and update them. Who was killed? Whose stakes questions did play resolve, and what do you wonder about now? How have their countdowns progressed? Create any new threats you’ve introduced. Remember that the purpose of your prep is to give you something interesting to say when the next session starts. Remember that your NPCs are just not that complicated. You’re not holding back for a big reveal. You’re not doling events out like you’re trying to make your Halloween candy last until New Years. All your threats have impulses they should act on and body parts leading them around, so for god sake, have them act! The real power here is that final paragraph. There is a lot implied about your threats up until this paragraph, how to prepare them and how to use them during play. They give you things to say. They have spatial trajectories and temporal trajectories. They are whizzing across your threat map like balls on a pool table waiting for impact with the PCs. But here it is explicitly stated that you need to actively drive those threats and NPCs. Since you are not creating a story through which the PCs can travel, there is no “big reveal” for you to make. The drama comes from the players’ and characters’ decisions, not from some plot twist you’ve been preparing. The analogy with Halloween candy is fantastic—don’t dole them out! The game’s design lets you as an MC push hard with everything you have at the PCs to see what they do. In fact, if you don’t push hard, you will have a flat game with little dramatic tension and action. Your tools are your NPCs in Apocalypse World and you must use them aggressively without concern about what will happen next. Indeed, you have to have a big fat question mark about what will happen next. You need to not know and need to want to know! The example threat maps that close out this chapter beautifully show what you can expect if you MC the game according to its own rules. We begin with a bare outline of what’s in the world and what direction things are heading. We know that the Water Cult is exerting some pressures to join them, that Dremmer’s raiders are to the South, and that the Barge People are to the East. There are apparently refugees from the Barge People heading toward the PCs. By the end of the second session, threats have been fleshed out and numbered. Members of the cult and gang have been defined (presumably through play). An emissary named Rothschild has approached the PCs looking for something in particular. The refugees from the Barge People are knocking on the PCs’ doors and also heading north toward the notional refuge (the “ha!” of which tells us its existence is dubious at best). Dremmer has installed a slaver over the Barge People, explaining the refugees. A hunting pack has appeared “outside,” either from the world’s psychic maelstrom or way elsewhere. By the end of the third session, threats have been fractured and re-detailed. The refugees are spreading, the furnace pits have entered the picture, and the troubles surrounding the PCs are expanding. In every map, we can see what the MC is curious about, what they have sworn to themselves to find out through play rather than by decree. (As a side note, I’m in love with Schroedinger’s Village with is simultaneously to the South and to the West, and only ever notional.) The maps prove to be a single-sheet tool for the MC to see at a glance all the growing pressures on and questions for the PCs. The world and threats develop and grow through play, and every addition gives the MC more “things to say” and more actors to “have them act!” The threat chapter has more graphics and physical examples of play artifacts than any other chapter. Threats are not a suggested means for MCs to get the best play. No, threats are a designed part of the game, a subsystem that exists to guarantee that the game plays the way it was designed to play. The examples show that the authors are well aware that this is a tricky and possibly daunting part of play and they try to make it all as clear and non-threatening (no pun intended) as possible. It is no coincidence that the threat chapter is the chapter that has undergone the most revisions from the first to the second edition. Before I move into the Moves Snowball chapter, I will have a couple of other posts covering some odds and ends, such as revisiting the concept of hard moves, looking at the use of natural language vs. jargon in the text, and the way MC moves are structured and presented in the text. But before I cover any of that, I need to wrestle with a bunch of work projects that have stacked up while I have buried myself in RPG texts and theory. It will probably be a month or more before I can get back to posting regularly, but I will be back!
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I’m looking at the example threats today (pages 119-121), and specifically at threat number 3, the Water Cult threat (120). All of the example threats are educational and great demonstrations on how to make playable threats, but I am particularly struck by the water cult, primarily because they are not given the Cult type as a bunch of Brutes. The other examples are all Brutes, but the water cult are created as an Affliction, a Delusion of the people with the impulse “to dominate people’s choices and actions.” It’s an interesting choice.
By giving each threat type a name and an impulse, the threat lists work to capture your imagination on several fronts. Perhaps you are attracted by the notion of a Breeding Pit, or Sybarites, or a Pain Addict. Perhaps you are compelled by the idea that a threat “craves contact, intimate and/or anonymous,” or has the impulse “to riot, burn, kill scapegoats,” or the impulse “to leave people bereft.” Whatever it is that gets your motor revving, it’s the impulse of a threat that will determine its actions and its role within the unfolding drama, and the example of the Water Cult acts as a gentle reminder to think about how you see that threat fucking up the world you all have built. As a Cult threat type, the Water Cult would have the impulse “to victimize & incorporate people,” but as a Delusion, they instead seek “do dominate people’s actions and choices.” The line might be a fine one, but by picking Delusion, the MC here sees the Water Cult as primarily wanting to control the populace more than simply grow by incorporating more and more of the population. The joining of the cult is about ceding control to it, not about adding to its numbers—and that distinction tells the MC how to play the cult in the game. Many of the threats have potentially cult figures. The Prophet Warlord, the Mindfuck Grotesque, the Delusion and Sacrifice Afflictions, the Cult Brutes, and more—they can all form the basis of a cult in a game you play, but each option offers not only a different flavor but a different trajectory and set of goals and desires. By making the Water Cult a Delusion, the example subtly drives that point home. It’s worth taking a moment to look at the example countdown clock on the Water Cult threat as well, to see how the MC creates a clock that “list[s] things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control” (118). Before 9:00, the cult swells with the addition of NPCs. The cult becomes particularly relevant to the players when someone from Uncle’s Gang joins the cult, but that can be done without demanding anything from the PCs. The crisis point at 9:00 comes when the cult approaches the PCs and demand that they join. And join or not, the cult will lead a revolt against the hardhold to fill in that 11:00-12:00 slot. The PCs can interfere at any time and throw the clock off, but the MC has put forward a vision of what will happen if the PCs keep out of the cult’s affairs. It’s a great example of how the clock makes no demands on the PCs while simultaneously crossing their paths and potentially involving them if they are interested. In the end, the climax will force an interaction and choice from the PCs—who will they side with? Will they talk the cult out of revolt? What will they be willing to do to prevent a revolt, help the revolt, or fight against the revolt? There are so many juicy and difficult questions that are created because of the countdown clock. There is an entire chapter devoted to making custom moves in Apocalypse World. In interviews, Vincent Baker has said that it became immediately clear to him that people were going to hack the game, so he wanted to give them the proper tools for doing so, even going so far as to create a variety of moves to demonstrate different ways to build them.
But here in the Threats chapter, Vincent and Meguey don’t just give permission to the reader to build new moves, they actively encourage it, even insisting upon it: Whenever you make a disease threat or a disease-like threat, you should create a custom move for it like “when you use an angel kit to treat someone infected . . .” (119). In this section, the text makes it clear that building custom moves for threats is an integral part of being an MC. The primary explanation is that you’ll want to “punch . . . up” some threats: For some threats, you’ll want to punch them up with their own custom moves. You create them. Punch them up is a way of saying breathe life into them. Punch them up is a way of saying give your idea and flavor mechanical weight. Punch them up is a way of saying use the language of the game to make your threats a structured and interactive part of the conversation. The examples show us that a custom move takes a facet of the threat and puts gears and teeth on it: When you go into Dremmer’s territory, roll+sharp. On a 10+, you can spot and avoid ambush. On a 7–9, you spot the ambush in time to prepare or flee. On a miss, you blunder into it. When one of Siso’s Children touches you, roll+weird. On a 10+, your brain protects you and it’s just a touch. On a 7–9, I tell you what to do: if you do it, mark experience; if you don’t, you’re acting under fire from brain-weirdness. On a miss, you come to, some time later, having done whatever Siso’s child wants you to have done. If you drink the water out here, roll+hard. On a 10+, spend a few minutes barfing but you’ll be fine. On a 7–9, take 1-harm (ap) now and 1-harm (ap) again in a little while. On a miss, take 3-harm (ap) now and 3-harm (ap) again in a little while. What’s the thing about Dremmer’s territory? It’s crawling with Dremmer’s gangs ready to ambush invaders. The move turns that idea into a mechanical reality. What’s the thing about Siso’s Children? Damn, they can exert a kind of mind control on those they touch. The move gives you a way as MC to make that idea happen within the rules of the game. What’s the thing about this landscape? The water is dirty and dangerous. The move lets the players interact with that fact rather than just being told, “hey, the water out here is brown and nasty – you have to be pretty desperate and hardy to drink it.” The basic and character moves that form the backbone of the player-facing rule can cover just about every typical situation, but threats are unique to your game and cannot be anticipated by the designers. You as the MC need a way to make your threats more than narrative elements, and the custom moves give you the means to do that. In this way, custom moves are the equivalent to the OSR refrain, “rulings not rules.” The notion behind “rulings not rules” is that a game cannot cover every action players might take. Instead, the game gives you the basic rules and it’s the GM’s job to extrapolate rulings from those rules to cover the uncovered situations. Custom moves accomplish the same goal. There is no move for drinking dangerously contaminated water? Make it up. There’s no rule for spotting an ambush? Make it up. In the context of this section, custom moves are created in between sessions when you are working on your threats, but there is nothing prohibiting an MC from making up a move on the spot when the situation calls for it. How can everyone at the table be sure that a move is fair and just? First, you have the repeatable structure of the 10+, 7-9, 6- division so that a move provides for hits and misses. But more importantly, the strictures of the MC agenda, principles, and always-say demands apply to everything the MC says as her part of the conversation. If your move doesn’t make Apocalypse World seem real, make the PCs’ lives not boring, and allow you to play to find out what happens, you can’t say it. As a final note, the other thing these example custom moves do is serve as inspiration to the reader, to give them a glimpse of all the wild ways you can take the game. I don’t know what a “hollow daughter” is, but damn, I desperately want to bring them into the game! My favorite move in this section is this one: When you try to read Monk you have to roll+weird instead of rolling+sharp. Fucker just does not have normal body language. That fucker not having normal body language is so evocative and intriguing that I want to see how an MC plays Monk in a scene to communicate that. The simple act of changing which stat to roll with has a huge impact on the fiction that unfolds from the move. After reading that move, you can’t help but think about how the different basic moves change merely by switching the stat rolled. That’s the kind of inspiration that leads you to reexamine the rules and the possibilities. That’s hot. Countdown clocks are first raised in the Master of Ceremonies chapter when discussing the principle “Sometimes disclaim decision-making” (86-87). There they are described as a method for having a “considered and concrete plan” for making decisions “instead of just leaving it to your whim” (87). Thirty pages later, the entirety of the threat chapter is about giving the MC the tools for keeping their thumbs off the scales when determining how and when PCs and NPCs collide during play. The threat map is concerned with the spatial trajectories of various threats while the countdown clock is concerned with the temporal trajectories.
A countdown clock is a reminder to you as MC that your threats have impulse, direction, plans, intentions, the will to sustain action and to respond coherently to others’ (117). As much as the clock is a mechanical feature, its primary goal is to serve as ”a reminder” that the threats are not yours to manipulate at your whim. In this way, clocks straddle that hard-to-define line between orientational rules and instructional rules that I discuss in post #82. The clocks work mechanically while simultaneously orienting your own behavior and attitude as MC. Even when clocks aren’t given to a threat, the knowledge that they might belong there is itself orienting your attitude. So when do you put a clock on a threat? When you create a threat, if you have a vision of its future, give it a countdown clock. You can also add countdown clocks to threats you’ve already created. I love the phrase “vision of its future.” If you create a threat and you see how it might unfold in the future, that’s when you clock it. Countdown clocks are a way for the MC to put down a bid on future events without scripting or mandating those future events. More on this below, after we look at the mechanical structuring of clocks in Apocalypse World. Around the clock, note some things that’ll happen: • Before 9:00, that thing’s coming, but preventable. What are the clues? What are the triggers? What are the steps? • Between 9:00 and 12:00, that thing is inevitable, but there’s still time to brace for impact. What signifies it? • At 12:00, the threat gets its full, active expression. What is it? At a purely instructional level, this breakdown of what each stage of the clock means is incredibly useful and clear. Preventable, inevitable but with time to brace for impact, and full expression are great divisions, and the questions associated with each stage are great ways to coax out of you the expressions of the threat at each stage of the countdown. If you just look at the clock as six segments, the time of preventable consequences and inevitable actions are equal in each section, but the visual of the clock tells us how these things work as units of time. The preventable approaching of events is slow and ponderous compared to the speed and weight of the thing once its progress is inevitable. Visually, the clock tells us that the last three units take up the space of only a third of the previous three units. The clock graphic orients us to the pacing of the threat. As you play, advance the clocks, each at their own pace, by marking their segments. Countdown clocks are both descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive: when something you’ve listed happens, advance the clock to that point. Prescriptive: when you advance the clock otherwise, it causes the things you’ve listed. Furthermore, countdown clocks can be derailed: when something happens that changes circumstances so that the countdown no longer makes sense, just scribble it out. For the most part, list things that are beyond the players’ characters’ control: NPCs’ decisions and actions, conditions in a population or a landscape, off-screen relations between rival compounds, the instability of a window into the world’s psychic maelstrom. When you list something within the players’ characters’ control, always list it with an “if,” implied or explicit: “if Bish goes out into the ruins,” not “Bish goes out into the ruins.” Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions, not (and again, I’m not fucking around here) NOT future scenes you intend to lead the PCs to. This brings us back to the notion that countdown clocks are proposals for what might happen in the future. The inviolable tenet behind the game is that the story must grow from the actions and desires of the protagonists, and as such, the MC cannot pre-determine any future scenes or happenings—none whatsoever. Twice the authors have told us they are not fucking around here, so we best take them at their words. Countdown clocks are a tool for letting the MC prepare for possible futures without ever declaring by fiat that they will be so. Instead, the MC maps out a temporal trajectory that can be interrupted or diverted at any time if the PCs get involved. Like the rest of the delicate dance the game demands of the MC as a person who is both an eager participant and a detached observer, the countdown clocks ask the MC to be interested in what will happen without being invested in what they hope will happen. How much weight clocks have in determining the future can be seen in the casualness of the phrase “just scribble it out.” The nonchalance of “just” and “scribble” reflects the attitude the MC must have when a countdown clock becomes irrelevant. Nothing about the clock is set in stone or worth worrying about if it becomes irrelevant. This casualness of phrase is driven home by the direct tonal contrast with the phrase “not (and again, I’m not fucking around here) NOT.” Side note: I’ve always liked the defining of a game element as both descriptive and prescriptive. Those things that are prescriptive and descriptive are where the meta-concerns of the game and the fiction of the game overlap. Just as fictional occurrences make the players mark up their playbooks to reflect the change, so the fictional occurrences cause the MC to mark up their threat sheets to reflect the change, and vice versa. So much of the play in Apocalypse World happens at that intersection, I think, which is one of the reasons why the fiction can roll on without getting caught up in metaplay concerns and why nothing that happens at the meta-level will bring the fiction grinding to a halt. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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