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RPGs have long used maps to keep track of what is important to game play. The most common map is of course the physical terrain, be that the graphed layout of a dungeon, the floor plan of a single room, the vast sweep of landscape surrounding the protagonists, or the details of a clearing in a forest. Maps visually organize information that exists in relation to the other elements on the map. The desk is in this corner, next to the standing lamp, and the fireplace is over here. With that information, reasonable and consistent decisions can be made about the fiction by anyone privy to the map.
If a game demands the use of maps, those maps should be critical to game play. For a dungeon crawl, the dungeon is the game. The GM can’t change their mind and move rooms around at will. To do so would not only be unfair to the players but would also break the shared reality being constructed during play. Other games may not care about the physical terrain except in the most general terms, but instead care greatly about who is connected to whom and who owes whom what. Relationship maps connect those dots by laying out complex matters in a visual landscape. You can tell what is important to a game by what it chooses to map. You can tell even more by what it needs to have mapped. Now to Apocalypse World. We are advised in the Master of Ceremonies chapter to “[m]ake maps like anything. Have the players make maps like anything too. And sketches, and diagrams, and any kind of ephemera that seems good” (93). Sketches, diagrams, maps—these all ensure that the players are on the same page of the fiction as it is being created. But none of this mapping is required: “They’re just good practice, and I recommend them” (93). The only map demanded by the game is the Threat Map. In the passage we are looking at today, we are specifically concerned about the tiny threat map that appears on the individual threat summary sheet, but what is said here applies equally to the larger threat map that is to be consulted during play and revised between sessions. Mark on the map the threat’s location and, if it’s moving, its direction. • The innermost circle is for the PCs’ gangs, holdings, vehicles, etc. • The first ring out is for threats near the PCs. • The outer ring is for threats at and past the PCs’ horizons. • Mark notional threats, rumors, fears, “here be monsters,” outside the map. • N, S, E, and W are the cardinal directions. • U and D are up and down, for threats above and below the characters. • I is inside, for threats within local landscapes and populations, like cults, diseases, parasites. • O is outside, for threats originating in the world’s psychic maelstrom or even elsewhere (116-117). The threat map is wonderfully well-conceived. The PCs are always at the center and the crazy world whirls about around them. Visually, it is a reminder that the PCs are the protagonists, and as much as you might love the threats you have created, their movement and existence are only important insofar as they affect the characters at the center of the wheel. Moreover, every direction from which a threat can come is covered in the chart, from the cardinal directions, to above and below, to within and without. In a lot of ways, the threat map is very much like a dungeon map, in that it tells the MC at a glance where the threats are in relation to where the PCs are and what directions they are moving. A dungeon map tells us that if the PCs go here, they will encounter these bad dudes. A threat map tells us that if the PCs take actions affecting these things, these bad dudes will have a reaction. Aesthetically, I love that the threat map echoes the radar screens we see in movies (and in real life, of course), in which the green line sweeps around the central point to reveal all the objects in the detectable vicinity. This resemblance is especially true for the individual threat sheets, in which a dot is placed in the appropriate quadrant, like a blinking danger on the screen. On a final note, I love the aesthetic similarities between the countdown clock and the threat map. Both are circles with radiating lines. Both are used to physically track the possible dangers to the PCs, the threat map detailing threats spatially while the countdown clock details threats temporally. I realize that those radars upon which the threat map is based are not unique to the 80s, but in my mind they are very reminiscent of cold war suspense films, which makes the threat maps physical design doubly echo the countdown clock, which is based on the nuclear alerts in America from the 1980s (see page 293). All these similarities give the game a pleasing graphic and thematic consistency.
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Two of the recent RPG Design PanelCast podcast episodes have featured Vincent Baker talking about Apocalypse World and GMing, and in both episodes he makes a distinction in the rules between orientation and instruction. I think it’s a fascinating distinction not because it gets at the heart of why the MC rules in Apocalypse World have spurred so much discussion, I think.
Here’s what Vincent says in episode 120, “Game Master Techniques,” at about 46:30: Q. ”Is it more useful for you to say ‘the GM must do this’ or is it more useful for you to say ‘the GM can’t do this’?” A. I have feelings about that. I think it’s not useful to say either. I think you have to make it inevitable that the GM do that. You do that by arranging the GM’s interests so that that is what the GM chooses to do every single time. And that’s challenging stuff, but I don’t think a game text can ever actually give you permission or actually put expectations on you just by saying, “here’s what you’re allowed to do” and “here’s what you’re expected to do.” . . . In Apocalypse World it says “Always Say,” but that is a piece of orientation to how the system works; it’s not an instruction. You know what I mean? . . . Nobody can possibly know what I mean when I say nonsense like that. Let me try again. . . . When you say, “This is what we’re playing to find out,” at that moment the GM buys into that or is playing a different game, and so at that moment it’s either a done deal or it’s out of your hands, right? And so once the GM has bought into what you’re playing to find out, then you can say, “And here’s what this system requires of you.” And it’s appropriate to say the system now expects you to always speak the truth or make your move without speaking its name, or whatever. . . . But that isn’t instructions to the GM that you have to follow; that is what the game expects you to do as you’re pursuing your agenda. And so once the GM has bought into that agenda, all the rest of your design falls into place behind that. And if the GM doesn’t buy into that agenda, there is no amount of . . . “Always say what your prep demands” that can make the GM do that. . . . And In episode 119, at about the 47:20 mark: ”So, in the GM chapter, the MC chapter in Apocalypse World, some of that is orientation and some of it is support, and some of it is structure. And so, I want you to be sure to understand that. Like . . . when it says, ‘Look at NPCs through crosshairs,’ part of that is an instruction to you, but much of it is just this sort of warning that says, ‘These rules will kill your NPCs. They really, really will. If a player character decides to kill an NPC, there is really nothing you can do about it by the rules.’ And so, there’s this element of just orientation that says this is what you should expect the rest of the rules, the player-facing rules, to do to your ideas. And then the other half of it is structuring your ideas so that you’re making fun, interesting, useful decisions. But the whole point is to allow you—to put you in this mindset where you’re curious to know what will happen, and you don’t want to sway it one way or the other. So you can just say whatever you think is interesting; you can ask any question you want to know the answer to, and you can play very freely within these wide bounds of playing to find out what will happen. So that’s why the MC in Apocalypse World works that way.” This distinction—and the natural muddiness of the distinction that makes the distinction pretty indistinct—is at the heart of what makes the MC section in Apocalypse World so fascinating. We are used to thinking of rules as purely instructional: “When a character gets hurt, the player marks segments in her harm countdown clock”; “When a player marks her fifth experience bubble, she improves her character”; “The rule for moves is if you do it, you do it, so make with the dice.” The MC section, on the other hand is presented as instruction—and it is—but it is simultaneously orientational. You must do it this way and you must be prepared for things to happen this way. You must engage in these behaviors because doing so will align your perceptions and expectations to make the game run the way it needs to run and wants to run. And as you align your perceptions and expectations, your behavior will naturally follow what is outlined. The rules attempt to shape both what you do and what you think simultaneously by giving guidance in the form or commands and commands that act as guidance. These are based very closely on stakes in Ron Edwards’ game Trollbabe.
Write a question or two about the fate of the threat, if you’re interested enough in it to wonder how it will turn out. You can write your stakes questions at a wide range of scales. Start here: • A person’s or a small group’s circumstances or living conditions. • A person’s life or the lives of a small group of people. • The safety, success, failure, growth, or decline, in some particular, of an organized group of people. And if one of the players is playing a hardholder, include: • The safety, growth, or decline, in some particular, of the entire holding. Examples: I wonder, will Birdie get a better place to live? I wonder, will Roark live through this? I wonder, who will join Tum Tum’s cult? I wonder, will Foster break Uncle’s holding? Stakes should be concrete, absolute, irrevocable in their consequences. People’s lives. Maybe not necessarily their lives or deaths, at least not every time, but always materially significant changes to their lives. Resolving the outstanding question means that nothing will ever be the same for them. It may seem backwards, but it’s especially important to disclaim responsibility for the fates of the NPCs that you like the best. It’s the central act of discipline that MCing Apocalypse World requires: when you write a question as a stake, you’re committing to not answering it yourself. You’re committing to letting the game’s fiction’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters, answer it. That’s the discipline and also the reward. Your control over your NPCs’ fates is absolute. They’re your little toys, you can do anything to them you choose. Raise them up and mow them down. Disclaiming responsibility for the two or three of them you like best is a relief. And when you write down a question you’re genuinely interested in, letting the game’s fiction answer it is uniquely satisfying (115-116). Let’s start at the beginning, with Ron Edwards’s Trollbabe. In Trollbabe stakes are part of the adventure the GM sets up for the PCs. In the who-what-when-where-why-how of the scenario loosely constructed for the PCs to encounter, the stakes are related to the why. Someone in the scenario wants something of someone else. The stakes tell us not only what that something they want is, but the two possible outcomes of that trajectory if that want is met or not. The stake is what puts the story into motion; without it, you have NPCs standing in a location with nothing to spur them to action. Stakes in Apocalypse World are indeed based upon those in Trollbabe. They are both concerned with scale, with concrete and irrevocable consequences, and they both demand that the fiction played out by the game determine the outcome of the stakes. But the difference between the two games is revealing. In Trollbabe, the players must become aware of the stakes and decide whether and to what extent to interfere. In Apocalypse World the players are left out of the question entirely. The MC might wonder if Birdie will get a better place to live, but neither the players nor the characters have to give two shits about Birdie. The MC might wonder if Roarke will survive, but the players neither have to care nor ever know that Roarke’s survival is of interest to the MC. To disclaim decision-making when setting the stakes of Roarke’s survival, the MC must push Roarke into the PCs’ paths and let their actions and decisions determine whether Roarke lives or dies, but the players’ interest in or knowledge of the stake is irrelevant. In short, stakes are a game the MCs play with themselves during the game, which is an incredibly interesting approach. I have been saying for many a post that the MC is positioned in Apocalypse World as the primary audience of the story unfolding through play, but this section takes that idea to its full extent. Traditionally in RPGs, the GM has been focused on the players, whether that is as an antagonist bent on playing against the players or as a caregiver responsible for everyone’s happiness and well-being during play. We have seen since the days of the Forge a healthy reexamining of the relationship between GM and player and have moved toward GMs and players being equal and independent participants, each responsible for their own happiness and comfort, with everyone being mindful of the other people at the table. What we see in Apocalypse World, I propose, is an effort to give everyone at the table the tools to drive the story exactly where they want and to build the interaction of the mechanics so that the collisions of those desires creates a productive and interesting story in its wake. Apocalypse World is certainly not the first RPG to take this approach. Universalis, for instance, depends on everyone at the table working aggressively for what they most want to see in the game in order to create a story larger and better than anything one mind would create on its own. But of course Universalis is a GMless/GMful game. In a game with a GM, the power dynamic is usually such that if the GM wants something to happen, it can happen. The trick of any game with a GM-player split is to make the GM behave responsibly. The efforts in Apocalypse World to limit the power of the MC is to allow them to push as hard as they’d like without ever upsetting the game or overpowering the player characters. The first part of that approach is to limit when the MC can speak and what the MC can make happen on their turn. The structure of moves—both of the characters’ moves and of the MC moves—takes care of that. The second part of the approach requires the fine tuning of that attitude and perspective of the MC. That’s where agenda, principles, and the always-say bullet points come in. By saying everything you say as the MC needs to accomplish one of these goals and needs to be in line with all of these principles, the game attempts to shape the MC’s desire and purpose. The balance that the principles and agenda attempt to strike in the MC is the simultaneous presence of intense personal interest and curious detachment. I need to be a fan of the players and be willing to beat the shit out of them, as a fan. I need to be invested in my NPCs even as I look at them through crosshairs. I need to want to keep my thumbs off the scale to see what happens, and to do that I need to know that if I make as hard a move as I’d like on a miss, the game’s mechanics will catch us all as we plummet into the unknown future. Stakes is an important part of this mental conditioning of the MC. The Bakers know that as an MC you will fall in love with some of the NPCs you create. The principles and agenda can address nearly every aspect of the MC’s approach to the game, but how do you keep those personal attachments from interfering with the position of curious detachment? Stakes. As the text says, stakes are there especially for (exclusively for?) the NPCs you love the most. And to get you there, the text promises rewards sweeter than the power you are ceding to leave the fates of your darlings up to the actions of the players. Try it, the text promises, and you will find the whole experience, “uniquely satisfying.” And of course it is uniquely satisfying. Once the game can get you to see that, to believe that, then you can go forth as the MC, armed with and conditioned by the principles and agenda and push as hard as you like against the PCs knowing that the rest of the mechanics will take care of story no matter what happens. Bangs are Ron Edwards’s suggested method for the GM to push players toward compelling play in Sorcerer:
Bangs are those moments when the characters realize they have a problem right now and have to get moving to deal with it. It can be as simple as a hellacious demon crashing through the skylight and attacking the characters or as subtle as a voice of the long-dead murder victim answering when they call the phone number they found in the new murder victim’s pocket. In order to get to the Bangs if the players are being dense, or if the GM is letting them flounder around, the GM should begin to ask leading questions or remind them of things they might check out. Every group is a little different in terms of how much prompting they need; it’s best to err on the overgenerous side at first. The amount of ‘What do we do next?’ should be very low compared to ‘Oh, crap, I try to convince him we’re on his side!’ or ‘I tell Frick to grow big and rip the car door off!’ (77). What occurred to me this weekend while looking through the threat moves is that MC moves in Apocalypse World are a way to take Bangs from being a suggested way for GMs to act to being built in to the very structure of the game. As we know, the rules of Apocalypse World structure the conversation happening at the table. When the MC looks over their lists of possible moves, picks one, and clothes it in fiction to present to the players, they will in essence have created a bang, something that calls for the players’ attention. Some moves will obviously be more pressing and immediate, but even announcing future and off-screen badness are bangs. What is Edwards’s example of the long-dead murder victim answering the phone if not announcing off-screen badness? It has been said many times by many people: one of Apocalypse World’s strengths is that it turns solid GMing techniques into mechanized rules for the MC. Bangs are the gold standard for creating drama during play when the players themselves are responsible for driving the narrative, and MC moves allow those bangs to happen even when an MC is unaware that that is what they are doing. Moreover, the lists of moves ensure that the bangs created are interesting contributions to the conversation and appropriate to Apocalypse World. I have been forthcoming in my love for this text not just as a manual or a played game, but as a piece of written art. It is capital-L-Literature. I will stand by that claim all damn day.
Please indulge me, then, as I take a moment to be a literary geek and direct your intention to the motif of bullet-pointed lists. They are a stylistic decision that is part of the very aesthetics of the text. Flipping through the pages, the little bursts of lists catch the eye like little poems breaking up the blocks of text that surround them. I propose that they don’t only look like poems; they act like poems too. They are discrete aesthetic packages with their own varied rhythms and line lengths, phrased and ordered as much for their sound as for their meaning. This notion first struck me as I was pondering the MC’s principles and moves. Why are they presented in this order? Why are they phrased in this way? Surely there are easier ways to say “Make your move, but never speak its name”! “Never speak its name” sounds like the insistence of an old witch who has entrusted you with powerful magic that can have catastrophic side-effects if not handled properly. Phrasing it that way not only gives a dramatic flair to the last half of the principle, it also allows the principle to exist as a visual couplet with the preceding move, “Make your move, but misdirect.” And look at that alliteration there, all those Ms mumbling over each other. These are phrases created for their sound and music as much as for their meaning. Nowhere is the bullet-list-as-poetry more apparent than in the threats chapter, the first half of which is practically a collection of small poems. Here is the Afflictions Threat Moves poem: • 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 (110). Look at those first two lines. The first line is metrically the longest of the stanza, matched by the penultimate line. Everywhere in between there is a kind of rollercoaster ride of rhythm supported by couplets of repeated phrases. After the long climb of the first lines, the reader is given a short and metrically regular line: “Someone flies into a rage.” Those are two dactyls that land on a single hard beat: SOME-one flies IN-to a RAGE.” (Yeah, I love that.) There are the “less”-es in the next line, “fruitless” and “hopeless,” followed by the syntactical couplet of the next two lines. The line following the couplet is a thing of beauty as it opposes “someone approaches” with “someone withdraws,” but keeps the notion of “seeking.” In this case, Vincent and Meguey could easily have written “seeking,” but chose not to. Why? It could be for the sake of variation, which is a good enough reason. But in this case, “seeking isolation” is a much less rhythmic phrase than “seek isolation.” The emphasis for “isolation” falls on the third syllable, so the hard “seek” helps us find an early rhythmic foothold where as “seeking” gives us four un-emphasized beats in a row, which feels weak and wandering. Also, the “and” in that line gives “withdraws and” the same metrical weight as “approaches,” so “seeks” falls metrically in the same place as “seeking” in the previous lines. Then the line lengths build up again with another high-count couplet before coming to a resolution of dactylic feet, echoing the second line of the poem, er, list. SOME-one re-FUS-es or FAILS to a-DAPT to new CIR-cumstances. By not ending on a hard beat, the line feels unfinished and lingering, a whimpering end that leads us into the final line, which echoes but varies the dactylic feet and ends on the emphasized “long” of “along.” I’m not shitting around here. If you think this list was not labored over to get the rhythm and movement of the words and sentences right, you are not paying attention. For those of you who think I am going to far, just look at the threats lists for brutes and landscapes. You’ll note that the Bakers condense opposites into one move in the brutes list: “Rigidly follow or defy authority,” and “Cling to or defy reason.” But in the landscape threat moves list, the different notions are given different lines: “Bar the way,” and “Open the way.” Those two could easily have been condensed into “Bar or open the way,” but they were not. The music of the list demanded the short lines to bounce off each other like you are tumbling down a verbal mountain. Seriously, pull any bullet-point list out of the book and read it aloud to yourself and you’ll hear the music in the language and feel the importance of short lines and long lines as they pull you through the list with sometimes-coasting and sometimes-bumping rhythms. Hear the assonance and consonance and feel the weight of repetitions and echoes. The Bakers pay just as much attention to their regular prose in Apocalypse World but the poetry of their language is nowhere as apparent as it is in their bullet-point lists. Brutes are the last of the human threats. The good book defines them as such:
A brutes threat is a group of people, with or without a leader, acting in crude, perhaps provisional, concert (111) Warlords and grotesques are individuals (though of course they can be associated with gangs). Afflictions are about an entire population (though of course they can take the form or individuals within or without that population). Brutes bridge these two poles to define social units, groups of two or more people with a shared identity. At a purely mechanical level, brute threats exist to give guiding impulses to gangs and groups to let the MC disclaim decision making and say what honesty and prep demand when the paths of the PCs and group cross. Thematically, brute threats support Apocalypse World’s tension between the individual and the society that resides at the heart of the game. NPCs not only following their leading body parts, but they exist in a social context as well, feeling the tug of those social impulses. According to the essential threats, all PC-generated NPCs should be categorized as brutes (unless they are already a warlord or grotesque). So the individual has their own body part to lead them while at the same time existing within a group which in turn exists within the larger population, which ultimately exists within Apocalypse World. The social identities can co-exist and crossover without ever erasing the individual identity. Back to the text: An individual person within a group of brutes might not share the group’s impulse, and might even fight against it. It’s the group’s impulse, not necessarily any person’s. Individual NPCs can even exist within multiple social groups. In the Moves Snowball sections we’ll see that Plover, Church Head, and Pellet belong both to Isle’s family and to Keeler’s gang. In a way, this layering of social organization mirrors the PC-NPC-PC triangles as a technique for creating three-dimensional characters out of a collection of one-dimensional impulses. Plover has his own drive, the drive of the Isle family, and the drive of Keeler’s gang all pulling at him, and following or rebelling against any of those impulses is perfectly in character. Each of those impulses is positioned to interfere with or aid the PCs at any given crisis. Here are the 6 classifications of Brutes: • Hunting pack (impulse: to victimize anyone vulnerable) • Sybarites (impulse: to consume someone’s resources) • Enforcers (impulse: to victimize anyone who stands out) • Cult (impulse: to victimize & incorporate people) • Mob (impulse: to riot, burn, kill scapegoats) • Family (impulse: to close ranks, protect their own) There are a couple of recurrences here that deserve a brief discussion. The first is the heretofore unused “anyone” and “someone” (at least they are unused in defining impulses). There are no direct objects in the impulses of the warlords and grotesques, and the affliction impulses only speak of “people” and a “population.” “Anyone” and “someone” cast wide nets, making the targets of the brutes’ impulses singular and broad. Anyone who is vulnerable is at risk of a hunting pack. Anyone with resources can fall victim to sybarites. Anyone who stands out can find themselves targeted by enforcers. And let’s be honest, everyone will be vulnerable, stand out, and have some resources at some time, which makes all these brutes looming and indiscriminate threats. Which brings us to the second recurrence: the word “victimize.” Half of the brute threats are driven to victimize people, and those who aren’t victimizing are consuming resources, shutting outsiders out, or rioting, burning, and killing scapegoats (which is simply another way to victimize). The thematic revelation here is that more likely than not, when a group of people identify as a group in Apocalypse World, horrible things are going to happen. What I find interesting is that the threat moves both back up and soften this view of group behavior: Threat moves for brutes: • Push reading a situation. • Burst out in uncoordinated, undirected violence. • Make a coordinated attack with a coherent objective. • Tell stories (truth, lies, allegories, homilies). • Demand consideration or indulgence. • Rigidly follow or defy authority. • Cling to or defy reason. • Make a show of solidarity and power. • Ask for help or for someone’s participation. Bursting out in uncoordinated, undirected violence and making a coordinated attack with a coherent objective show the violent actions that lead directly to the victimizing of others. Rigidly following and defying authority and clinging to or defying reason define the all-or-nothing attitude that drives unswervingly toward trouble. But amidst those options is one of my favorite moves: tell stories. “Stories,” of course, covers a lot of things from lies and cautionary tales to origin myths and rumors of the world. Stories are a way for a community to talk to itself, to reinforce its way of life and its strongly held beliefs. Whenever two people gather they will tell stories. For goodness sake, telling stories is precisely what we do when we gather to play Apocalypse World. Having that little move tucked in this list humanizes and reveals the vulnerability of the very group that is bent of victimizing the vulnerable. “Ask for help or for someone’s participation” has the same effect. They don’t demand help or extort other for help; they ask for it. “Ask” is such a docile word. And when the brutes make demands, it is for consideration or indulgence. Together, the threat subcategories and the threat moves exist in beautiful tension, revealing the brutes’ humanity and monstrousness simultaneously. In Apocalypse World, it is often our pursuit of our own survival and tribal identity that allows us to deny the humanity of those we victimize, use, scapegoat, and close off. 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. 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. Just because it’s the first session doesn’t mean you can’t.
Here’s a fun thing to do: ‘Keeler, this person named III corners you that night. She’s fucking pissed off, she comes straight at you, fists first. What did you do to her?’ Maybe Keeler’s player will answer with something. ‘Dude, sure, I’ve been sleeping with her guy.’ Great! Away you go. Or maybe she’ll say ‘what? Nothing. I don’t know.’ That’s cool too, must be a case of mistaken identity. Maybe Dog Head stole a can of pineapple from III but she thinks that Keeler did it. Say, ‘great! You don’t know why. Here she comes, though. What do you do?’ Just keep all your NPCs’ motivations simple and you can have them do whatever you want, fights included (101-102). As I’ve been reading it, a lot of this chapter, even as it accomplishes separate instructional goals, is about demonstrating how to use moves to set up scenes. This only makes sense because in order to do everything required of you in the first session (finding where they are not in control and pushing there, putting them in scenes together in different combinations, finding out what interests you about these characters) you need to establish scene after scene to see how things play out. While there are no explicit instructions given, the suggestion created over the course of the chapter is that you needn’t worry about some grand narrative in this first session, or worry about flowing logically from one scene to another. Make jump cuts, put the characters in spots, follow up on whatever leads interest you from character creation. Having a smattering of disconnected scenes is perfectly fine for this first session. As the text says early in the chapter, “You have the whole world to create, you get the whole first session to create it in. You’re supposed to make their characters’ lives not boring, you get a whole session to get to know them” (96). This particular passage is a great example for MCing the first session because it shows you that any answer a player gives to a question is going to work out well. Earlier we got the example of Marie and Bran put in a spot by the MC outside of the hardhold near some of Dremmer’s gang. The MC asks, “What are you two doing out here, anyway?” This is a similar setup with an in media res scene and a question for the character to justify the scene. Whatever the answer, you can roll with it. The player might use the opportunity to create backstory, or she might balk. What’s the answer to balking? “Great!” Man, I love that. The reason that any answer is okay is that the NPCs’ motivation has been kept simple. III wants to beat the shit out of Keeler. It doesn’t get much simpler than that. The why, when it’s discovered, is going to be just as simple. I slept with her guy and you think I stole from you both come down to the simple motivation, I want revenge because you hurt me. The more you complicate III’s emotions and desires, the more difficult it is to let the players create answers for open questions and the more you force meaning and backstory into the play. Everything in this example is still open. III might be an incredibly generous and sweet woman when no one has slept with her guy or no one has stolen her pineapple. We don’t learn details about III, which gives the player a blank canvas to throw paint at if she wants. And the more the players throw the paint, the more you know what conflicts they’re interested in having and the stories they’re interested in telling. The more room you give the players to create, the more likely you are to spot those darting fish beneath the surface that will interest and delight you. And that all starts with simple motivations for NPCs and MC moves that open up questions for the players. “Scrimp comes into the room. He’s been out scouting and he has something urgent to tell you, Keeler, but he gets distracted. He looks at all three of you and he’s got this look. Jesus, you know he’s speculating which of you might let him show you his dick” (101).
I believe that that is announcing future badness. Bring them onscreen in pairs and triples, in obvious groupings and unlikely ones too. Play with their natural hierarchies and bring them into circumstances where they might have something to say to each other. Here are a few ways you can do it:
Build on what the players said when they introduced their characters. “So Keeler, Marie, you two have this raiding thing out on the wilderness road, where Marie stands lookout and Keeler attacks travelers in the night? Let’s see that. It’s before dawn…” Invent bad news for one character to give to another. “Marie, you’re walking past the armory (Keeler, you’re in charge of the armory, of course) and you notice the lock’s been smashed off. What do you do?” Make a pairing or tripling that you like, then ask the players to justify it. “Marie, Bran, you two are trapped outside of the holding, you’re hunkered down inside an old gutted RV. Outside, six of Dremmer’s gang are setting up camp, looks like they’re settling in. They don’t know you’re there, they just blundered in on top of you. What are you two doing out here, anyway?” It’s common knowledge of course that you need to make sure every character gets good screen time in any given session. The important phrase in this title is “with other characters.” Remember our “Why to Play” section back on page 14? The number one reason is that these characters are fucking hot. The number two reason is that “hot as they are, the characters are best and hottest when you put them together.” This bullet point is about putting them together. Apocalypse World is a game about community and relationships, and the only way to get at those themes is to play out those relationships and that community. There are a lot of hierarchies built into the character playbooks. If there is a hardholder in the group, odds are most other character are under her leadership. Characters have not only relationships with each other but responsibilities to each other. “Play with their natural hierarchies” is about seeing how that status relationship plays out when it’s more than just a note in a playbook. The situation you put the characters in, according to the text, is important not because the situation itself is important but because the situation makes it so the characters “might have something to say to each other.” Situations in Apocalypse World are about revealing and propelling character, not about creating plot. As those characters are revealed and propelled, a plot will naturally emerge and take care of itself. This of course ties into our other bullet points. Playing with their natural hierarchies is another way to see where the characters are and are not in control, giving you things to push at and wonder about. It is all part of the grand experiment being conducted by the MC through play, looking for interesting chemical interaction within the group as well as from outside the group. Bringing them together gets them to trigger those Read a Person and Read a Sitch moves as the interactions and situations become charged. And of course we are springboarding off character creation, as evidenced in the first example with Keeler and Marie performing one of their raids. The paragraph here that gave me the biggest thrill when I first read it is the last one. I was like, What?! You can just put characters in a scene like that and then ask them to explain what they’re doing there?! This takes us back to how there is no independent scene-framing mechanism in Apocalypse World. Here the MC has put Marie and Bran in a spot to kick off the scene. The players playing Marie and Bran are going to come up with a much better answer to the MC’s question than the MC could have come up with, and just think of all the great information this scene will bring forth. We’ll learn about Marie and Bran, both individually and as friends/lovers/rivals/whatever. We’ll learn something about what they do in the group that would get them here in the first place. We’ll learn something about their relationships with any of these six gang members. PC-NPC-PC relationships might be revealed. Grudges might develop. No matter what happens, this set up will give the MC material to pursue and wonder about. What more can you hope for from a first session scenario? And all that from one MC move. Wow. As a final note, one thing putting characters together in interesting combinations makes room for are PC-PC-PC triangles. Just as NPCs have different relationships with different PCs, PCs have different relationship with different PCs. These two might be lovers, and these two might be sisterly with each other, while these two might have a mentor/mentee relationship. Such triangles reveal complexity of character for PCs and NPCs alike, so mix them up and see what develops. Start with the characters with beginning-of-session moves: the hardholder, the hocus, the savvyhead, if you’ve got them. That’s now, the first beginning of the first session. Have them make those moves and follow what happens.
Then throughout the session, remind everyone to look at their character sheets to see what moves they might make. Especially, listen in on the characters’ conversations. As soon as you hear a note of tension, jump in and have everybody read everybody. “So that was kind of a sharp thing to say. Anybody want to read anybody?” Situations too: “hey, this situation seems kind of charged to me. Want to read it?” I almost skipped this section. Nudging the players to have their characters make moves only makes sense. It’s the first session, possibly even the first time they are playing the game, so use the first session of get everyone used to how it works. Get those moves triggering and dice rolling and everyone will quickly learn how the fiction and the moves go together. Of course you do that. But then I started thinking about the suggestion that “as soon as you hear a note of tension, jump in and have everybody read everybody.” What an especially great thing to have the players do! I have already spoken about how the character creation process is about learning to negotiate our conversation and our assent to the fiction being created (see posts 27-30). Here in the first session, we players are learning about the conversational possibilities that Apocalypse World presents, and one of the coolest things the game does is allow us to ask personal and insightful questions of our co-players’ characters through Read a Person and Read a Stich. Having everyone read everyone else means that characters will be asking each other what their really feeling are, what they intend to do, what they wish the questioning character would do, and what one character can do to influence the behavior of another character. With everyone talking to everyone, that would make for a meaty and revealing conversation, not only showing the players how insightful their characters are but showing them how they can engage with and think about the other characters in the scenes, PCs and NPCs alike. The conversation reveals desires, goals, inclinations, preferences—all the inside things that make a character exciting to us and that are sometimes difficult to reveal to others. Yeah, go and do that in your first session. This bullet point does not contribute to the tilting landscape constructed in the first session. Instead, it helps create an exciting and exploratory conversation that will help the characters maneuver through that tilting landscape and identify charged situations and interactions. . . . but do . . . Look for where they’re not in control.
If yours are like mine, they’ll want to be in control of everything, all tidy and secure. Of course they can’t be. What’s on their perimeter, on their borders, their horizon? What reaches into their little slice of world, what passes through it? What does it depend upon? Who do they need, and who else needs what they have? “I wonder what they’ll do when their neighbors get hungry.” “I wonder what they’ll do when the weather goes wrong.” “I wonder what they’d do to protect their well.” “I wonder what will happen when Dog Head stops taking orders from Keeler.” “I wonder what would happen if Bran couldn’t get power to his weirdshop.” And . . . Push there. The MC move for pushing is announce future badness. “Audrey, you’re down collecting the day’s water from the well and do you feel like reading a charged situation? Something seems off this morning.” “Keeler, Dog Head does what you say, but, it’s like, he keeps looking at you for a minute after you give him the order. What do you do?” “Bran, while you’re working, just for a few seconds all your lights dim and the constant low hum of your workspace? You hear it just start to slow. Everything kicks back in after just a second or two and you can keep working. What do you do?” (99-100) There is no drama or mystery in those places that the characters have control. Those are their spaces to control as they please. But through the playbooks and Hx, everything the players construct at the beginning of the first session, a world beyond the characters’ control comes into being. The game makes it so that we always open on “a fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangles, untenable arrangements” (97). That is necessarily a world in which the characters have very little control. It’s a world of vulnerabilities, interdependence, and resource scarcity. That gives the MC a near endless supply of places to “push.” The list of MC wonderings is a beautiful thing. It’s like watching Act I in a movie or the first episode of a TV series and noting all the plot potential of the story about to unfold. There are all these places that things can go wrong, paths that the story could follow. But unlike those other art forms where the story is crafted long before we actually experience it, here everything is still wide open, and each possibility is as likely as any other to make it into the story. So we are encouraged to write it all down in this first session and even to start pushing right away on that which is most interesting to us. And it’s an intuitive process turning your wondering into a push; what would they do to protect their well? To find out all you have to do is threaten their well. Done. That’s the heart of playing to find out what happens, yeah? By structuring the MC’s engagement with the emergent story as wondering observation, the game demands that the MC play to find out what happens. You have questions, the answers to which can only be discovered through play. The MC may surprise the players by threatening the well, but then the players get to surprise the MC by their reaction. “The MC move for pushing is announce future badness.” This is one of those statements that seems super obvious once it is said. Of course you push on characters by announcing future badness. The question this statement (and paragraph) raises for me is how scenes are framed in Apocalypse World. There are no explicit scene framing rules laid out in the text. And since the MC’s powers are governed by the text, it seems odd that scene framing power is not a designated authority given to the MC. This passage seems to suggest that “announce future badness” is a scene setting tool as well as a move to pull out in the middle of a scene. To say, “Audrey, you’re down collecting the day’s water from the well and do you feel like reading a charged situation? Something seems off this morning,” is to set the scene via announcing future badness. Presumably, when the time for a scene change comes the players will look to the MC to say something, which lets the MC make a move. That move can simultaneously set a new scene. In fact, I suppose any move can be incorporated into a scene setup, though “announce future badness” seems like it would be the most common move to use in this way. You could also slide into a scene with a question (say, “okay, where do you go looking for Dog Head?”) and then introducing some future badness in response to the answer. Either way, it seems interesting (I really want to say “important,” but I’m not sure that’s right) that scene framing is approached in this way. . . . Ask questions, but also . . . Leave yourself things to wonder about.
You’ll know it when it happens. A player will say something and you’ll be like, hey wait, there are fish swimming down there. So you’ll ask, and the player will answer, but you’ll be like …I don’t think that’s the fish I’m after. I think the fish I’m after is still down there, deeper than I thought, and bigger than I thought too. Sometimes it’ll happen with one of your own NPCs. You’ll be talking along, and you’ll suddenly be like, hold on, this guy Scrimp is kind of a weasely fuck, but he isn’t afraid of Marie at all. How can that be? You don’t need an explanation right now! Don’t look too deep, this is just session 1. Nod to yourself and back away, fixing the spot in your memory. (Which means to note it down on your threat map under “I wonder.”) This is one of my favorite passages in the First Session section, and I think one of its beating hearts. The fish metaphor is incredibly evocative. The darting of fish beneath the reflective surface of the water always presents itself as a possible trick of light and mind. Did I just see that, or did I imagine it? So the MC stirs the water and studies it. It positions the MC as both observer and active participant, a fisher looking for fat and feisty drama darting beneath the characters, setting, and situations playing out. And better yet, the players themselves are unaware of the fish beneath the surface because they are involved in playing their characters; they don’t have the luxury to sit back and observe as the MC does. This is, I suspect, one of the reasons that Apocalypse World has a traditional MC. Someone is wanted to watch for fish as the active observer. Then, as the players pursue their own dramatic goals, the MC can sculpt scenes in pursuit of answering the questions they have asked themselves as audience members. The difference in goals as player and MC makes for the emergence of a richer narrative with the ability to surprise and delight everyone at the table. A powerful metaphor can cover a lot of ground and spark a lot of thought in just a few sentences, and that’s exactly what the Bakers accomplish here. It is equally powerful to note that these same fish can be observed by looking at your own instincts when playing NPCs. The one sentence about Scrimp tells us so much about how the MC of AW is supposed to play their NPCs. We know that you are supposed to pick a body part and let it lead the NPC. We know that you are supposed to create triangular relationships. But here we learn that you can let your own NPCs surprise you. Instead of playing your NPCs as a one- or two-note characters, don’t be afraid to let them wander afield. That’s not an error. When it happens, don’t force the NPC back in line; ask yourself why you did that? What’s behind the NPC’s rogue behavior? This happens to authors all the time. Again and again in interviews you’ll hear authors say that their character just didn’t want to do what the author wanted them to do. Eventually the author has to let the character go and explore what they’re all about. In a game in which plot is emergent, we are all authors, and we have to let the characters do what they want to do when they voice an opinion. This brief paragraph says let that happen, trust it, and make a note of it to explore why it happened. How does that not sound like awesome fun? Of course it does, and it’s why it’s so cool MCing Apocalypse World. The advice to “back away” is important too. The first session is, as defined here, a reconnaissance mission. Play, collect information, start noting questions and seeing what about these particular characters in this particular world under these particular circumstances is exciting and interesting. (The phrase “back away” is yet another evocative one. It calls up the image of one who has stumbled upon something dangerous or fragile or glorious; they don’t want to disturb the scene, but neither do they want to stop watching, so they back mindfully away.) And they give you a specific section on the first session worksheet to simply “wonder”! You are not writing down stats and figures and information about the characters—you are writing down all the things that are interesting and promise to be dramatically fruitful. You are observer and mad scientist (-slash-fisher? I’m lousing up the metaphor)! You get to throw characters together and see what each combination reveals. Get a whiff of a chemical reaction and separate them, noting your observations and questions. Make plans to push those experiments later, for as the text says, “Don’t explain everything . . .” There are so many fun aspects to MCing AW, but this short passage gets at the heart of what is both special and exciting about MCing the game. . . . but you can’t know everything, so… Ask questions all the time.
Ask about the landscape, the sky, the people and their broken lives too, don’t just tell, share. Turn a player’s question over to the group: ‘I don’t know, where DO you get your food?’ But especially, anything you want to know, ask. Anything you think might be interesting later, ask. Anything a player says that sticks out, anything that seems like the tip of an iceberg, or like fish moving under water, ask. Start to cultivate an apocalyptic aesthetic in your players too (99). The first sentence of his paragraph is a callback to the second paragraph under “Describe. Barf forth apocalyptica” on the page before. There we are urged to “talk about the landscape, the sky, the people, and their broken lives.” Using the same words in the same order is a fantastic way to connect the “asking” and the “telling” to the same act of MCing. As the MC you will make declarations and decisions about certain things and you will ask the other players and defer to them about certain things—but there is no difference between those things. It’s not that one realm is the MC’s and the other is the player’s. Which brings us to the key word of the sentence: “share.” The MC might moderate the conversation at times by asking and talking, but the whole conversation is one of sharing. The MC has already been dreaming up apocalyptica as part of their prep, so they kick things off by telling, but once that tone and feel has been offered up, it is time to “start to cultivate an apocalyptic aesthetic in your players too.” By asking and adding on and probing and distributing the creation of the shared imagined space, we all cultivate an apocalyptic aesthetic together that puts us all on the same fictional page. So part of asking questions is about that cultivated aesthetic. The other part of asking questions has to do with the MC’s role as audience. What do you “want to know”? What “might be interesting later”? What “sticks out” or “seems like the tip of an iceberg, or like fish moving under water”? You are sussing out what is happening in this first set of scenes you construct and seeing what interests you, what you feel like prodding in the future, what bits of meat on these bones will be most tasty. Those questions and observations you make in that first session will determine where you push and poke in the upcoming sessions, and they are critical to you playing your role as MC in Apocalypse World. So as the text says, “ask questions” . . . . . . and remember to . . .Springboard off character creation.
The players’ characters are made of interesting details you can build on. Look at the hardholder’s gigs, for instance: each of those gigs has people responsible for it, crews that answer to the hardholder and have names and relationships and all kinds of loose ends. Name everyone! Make everyone human! Look at the chopper’s gang, the maestro d’s regulars, the hocus’ followers. Look at what the players created when they were doing Hx with each other. Look at where they come from and what must be around them (98-99). This bullet point narrows in on some of the specific “good material” you have “to work with” mentioned in the first bullet point. The majority of this passage is concerned with where NPCs for the first session come from to start naming and creating PC-NPC-PC triangles. As we’ve noted before, the playbooks don’t just define the characters but also provide suggestive details of the world in which the characters exist. This passage tells the players to look not only at what is on the playbook but at what is implied by the playbook. The hardholder’s gigs is a great way to make the point. The gigs all have mechanical effects in the form of surpluses and wants. Extra barter afford the hardholder extra funds to make things happen; wants on the other hand all dictate narrative events or background activity that affect or color the lives of the characters. The gigs are all performed by inhabitants of the hardhold, and these jobs become places to anchor NPCs and tie them into the community that the playgroup is constructing. The basic gigs mentioned in the playbook are “hunting, crude farming, and scavenging” but depending on the options chosen you also have raiders, collectors of protection tributes, workers in the manufactory, merchants in the bustling market, operators of the armory, gang members, mechanics in the garage, and weaponsmiths. Damn, that’s a rich world with a ton of places to originate specific and named NPCs. NPCs are a critical part of Apocalypse World, and to run it right, the game requires you to come up with relevant and potent NPCs. And the game is designed to give you the tools to do the things it requires you to do. That’s why every playbook suggests background activities and participants that are ripe for the MC’s choosing when looking to tie an NPC into the fiction. Of course, NPCs are not the only springboards for the MC to strike during the first session. Backstory fiction and relationships are sketched out during Hx as are some of the physical features of the world surrounding them. All this fictional material is ready to act as the skeleton structure to be fleshed out through your fiction. So as the text says, “Look closely . . . “ As a side note, I love the way this whole section is structured so that each of the first six points are connected with transitional sentences to show how they are all interrelated, all part of the same process: “Say everything, and remember to . . .,” “Look closely, but you can’t know everything , so . . .,” “Ask questions, but also . . .” The entire first session is about making connections and bringing strands of ideas together to begin to weave a complete fictional world. It seems perfectly fitting, then, that the language of this section should do that exact same thing. These first six points might have different titles, but the structure here makes it clear that they are all inseparable when MCing that first session. |
Jason D'AngeloRPG enthusiast interested in theory and indie publications. Archives
July 2020
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