A random question about your Apocalypse Worlds.
How much physical weirdness is there?
There’s a lot of psychic weirdness baked in, given how Weird works. However except for some color examples, physical mutations and so forth aren’t really present.
Do you have much physical weirdness in your games? By which I mean mutants, bizarre physical effects of Weird uses, things that may impair your apparent humanity if you encounter it (like other post-apoc games).
I’ve been involved in games which have run the whole gammut from fairly realistic physical effects of living in a post apocalyptic environment to Gamma World Powered by the Apocalypse style games.
My games tend to trend toward more psychological weirdness/horror. Just my personal flavor.
i like weird weather, sentient sandstorms and mutated animals. Mutated people too if players are interested in that.
Tim Franzke, do you have overtly mutated PCs?
only if someone plays a Grotesque.
No, it didn’t come up yet.
I normally pick a a low number of them.
e.g.
First game had some weird oil-like stuff that you pumped out of the ground with big derricks. They called it “fuel” or “black” and mostly bought it wastelanders (sometimes called muties for some reason). These guys said the fuel was the blood of dead gods. Fuel made cars and generators go, but it also started spawning weird horseshoe-crab/trillobite things. That got big. Nothing’s going to help you if you are stupid enough to keep a big old pool of fuel around under your hold either…
(this also connected well with my “how do cars run?!” logistical pedantry)
I like messing with mutated animals and plants and stuff all the time. The last hold I ran had weird slugs as a primary protein source, and the less said about the pig-maggots the better. As far as human mutation, I’m always open to it in my player’s PCs, but the furthest anyone’s gone is to really embrace gender ambiguity or push toward weird albinism. Except for brainers. Then all bets are off.
I pretty much ran it as science-fictional: one AI secretly running a city, a metalstorm emplacement guarding a former drug-lord’s compound, and the maelstrom was a metastasized social media network running off networked nanites in everyone’s bloodstream. So weird, but all technically feasible.
Wow, that is pretty weird.
Haven’t done any physical weirdness yet (for people at least) apart from strange scavengers in the rivers and wastes. I’m ramping up the psychological weirdness though
Mark DiPasquale that sounds a lot like what our MC for our sci-fi skinned “Apocalypse Sector” is doing. “The Medium” supported a galactic civilisation in the Golden Age but now the equivalent of checking your email can download rampant AI onto your meatware so there are all sorts of of cultural inhibitions about communications technology.
(Which are great btw because cellphones ruin a lot of tension in games I think!)
It’s been an equal mix, I think. We’ve had weird teleporting psychic trees. Physical manifestations of wolves of the maelstrom. Talking fish. Radioactive sentient ooze. A character that excretes shit from their pores. People with gills and fins.
Cool and weird stuff.
How much has been introduced by players? I ask as one of the look options for the grotesque implies to me an ability to change playbooks and ‘finish’ developing, or pupate into something else. Which shouldn’t just be limited to them, I can imagine a whole lot of character advancement suggested by players that is damn Weird, even though I’ve never seen it in any of the games I’ve been in.
I was playing a Grotesque who “excreted shit from his pores.” So that was me.
The rest of that stuff either came from our MC or from me during one of the one-shots I ran. So mostly comes from the MC in my experience.