How do you like your apocalypse? Where do you find inspiration for the mood and tone you give you your game of Apocalypse World? What’s the visual you go for in your games? Does it change often?
I haven’t had the opportunity to run the game myself, played a few times. My time will come I’m sure. I know I have an healthy love of gonzo and genre-mashing. Luckily, this game lends itself well to both.
I once ran a game in a World that was frozen over. Ice, snow, blizzards, and people going mad from cabin fever. Pretty strongly inspired by Lost Planet, and some promotional art for Fallout 3’s Alaska expansion.
Honestly, it was also inspired by the Atlanta blizzard a couple years back — trapped on campus, no power, roads covered in snow and ice and no one driving. No classes, obviously. Just a thousand people with intermittent electricity, mostly candles, jury-rigging electronic doors to keep then open so we wouldn’t be locked out, drinking all the alcohol, and generally being forced to talk to one another. Occasionally hiking on foot down the frozen five-lane road to get to the strip mall which had power, restaurants, and liquor stores. Seven days.
I’m pretty sure most of my game was inspired by that week.
You might find this thread really helpful.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/111023399555426942490/posts/3F5Z1eW2cLD
Makes me think of the ice-storms of 1998 in my home-town. The city was frozen solid for about a week. You could find trees encased in two inches of ice. It was kind of surreal.
I also distinctively remember kids ice-skating in the streets.
I know I kind of want to push for some extra sci-fi trappings in my next game. Maybe have it set in a derelict crashed yet still kind of operational space station. Everybody loves evil AIs and predatory alien presences, no?
Oh, cool, thank you Meguey Baker !
Sure thing.
And oh my goodness, space stations are wicked cool in AW! We had one that was running a quarantine around the area, and it could talk via radio signals to some players, and it maybe was the world’s psychic maelstrom – so cool.
In a recent game I ran, it was all mountain-top removal in Appalachia. No birds, lots of polluted water, some really messed up stuff down in the pits. Another game was set in the swamps of what used to be Louisiana, with alligators and lots of little islands that were maybe old buildings. We had swamp boats and there was a hallucinogenic moss that figured heavily.
I think I heard from… was it Todd from the Jank Cast? Anyways, someone had pictured the Maelstrom to be the remnants of the internet, to which the character could connect with his mind.
That’s super cool.
I’m trying to choose an aesthetic for my upcoming AW game. I considered doing a straight-forward “reclaimed city” like out of I Am Legend or The Last of Us. I’m just not sure.
I tend to get my inspiration from movies or games that I’d like to explore more of.
I like to start from specific scarcities driven by the Apocalypse. What is gone that is normal for us? What is restricted that is plentiful for us?
For instance, a tunnel based game–natural light and open air spaces is gone. What is restricted is room, plants, and all of that.
So the aesthetic differences that will key the players in are now clear. Switching that around, I think about what is prevalent that is scarce for us and what is new–besides the maelstrom.
Keeping with the tunnels, hand held lights may be very common–now I know that most people only have one hand free, or are otherwise dealing with illumination issues. What’s new? Different sorts of evolved vermin, or vermin versions of things that once lived on the surface. Tunnel birds perhaps–they roost more like bats and they venture to the surface. So they’re dangerous because they carry back dangerous things and seeing them means you are near a place where the surface and tunnels interface.
Once I have that, I start looking for art and images and ideas that fit with that. For the tunnels, I’d look at maps of underground malls and paths through cities, as well as abandoned train stations and so forth. I’d look at mushrooms and things that need minimal to no light. I’d probably borrow from the ocean floor and look at what might make the surface inhospitable to people. I wouldn’t decide on any of that stuff, just grab images and notes. It would help guide questions. I’d probably ask about experiences with the surface and the like to help firm up what it is like–if everyone is all about cowering and not ever having gone up there that’s a different direction than if some are making scrounge dashes or whatnot.
I take a lot of inspiration from the music I listen. I’m not very visual, so movies very rarely stick with me, aesthetically speaking. But I paint landscapes and characters from songs all the time. I’ve been on a downtempo bender lately, hence the space theme. I’m also pretty heavily influenced by noir and cyberpunk, I blame my love of nu-jazz and instrumental hip-hop.
Also, my group is easily bummed out by the classic “Wasteland” apocalypse, so I stay away from that as much as I can.
Yeah, Wasteland can get old fast. I tend to enjoy the transformation into a more alien landscape that isn’t inherently more hostile, it is just that the structures for taming nature have broken down.
I vaguely recall reading an actual play–where I can’t remember–that had the Apocalypse be just social breakdown on a wide scale due to something like wealth inequality and so on. The end result of the wide spread social disorder was loss of key infrastructure, but the rediscovery of the maelstrom. Instead of flinching from it, people embraced it, and the weirdness started creeping in to a greater degree. It seemed like an interesting starting point, and the play focused a lot on restructuring society. There were lots of competing visions and so forth that seemed to be driving the game.
Those two questions of Tim Groth’s are really good. I’d add: what is still plentiful and what is still normal? I find apocalyptic settings to be most effective when there’s the contrast. The way the light and plants and animals were in I Am Legend is a good example – totally normal sunlight, totally normal critters and greens, contrast with utterly freakish stuff.
I always figured the first question one should ask about the setting is “So… What’s fucked up about this place?”
The Road (novel and movie) is my biggest inspiration.
If I want to tone it down a bit, I think that Fallout 3 is pretty good.
Btw, Alfred Rudzki That snowpocalypse was pretty insane! I also lived through it.
I played in a game that featured only the tops of the tallest buildings in Boston protruding from the sea and played a driver with a swiftboat with sinking instead of damage. There were things living down in the bases of the buildings, bad things.
Metro 2033 (book or videogame) would be a pretty strongly imagined tunnel apocalypse.
In the game I’m currently Mc’ing I decided not to come in advance with an imagery of my own, but instead I build up the world following the input of the player and what they’d like to see in play or creating parts of the world as the player created their pc’s.
I have only an image (literally) in my mind: the japanese island of hashima, google it if you want to know more about.
Sometimes I felt as I completely lost any compass and I really didn’t know how things could make sense together.
So I regreted my choice of building up the world completely on my players…
…but now (session 9) everything seems to find naturally its own place, and we all really play to find out. As we play things happen and shape the world around us.
I just put myself completely in the unpredictable hands of the fiction and it’s logic.