I’m trying to come up with a good set of prompts to help establish how the world’s broken at the start of a new Apocalypse World game, and thought I’d maybe try out a “pick 3 options” approach to collaborative world-building.
I’m trying to come up with a good set of prompts to help establish how the world’s broken at the start of a new…
I’m trying to come up with a good set of prompts to help establish how the world’s broken at the start of a new…
what is the main reason power (electric, steam, horse, man-, etc…) is unreliable or reduced to the responsibility of individuals?
what is the common disruption of news, correspondence, and entertainment networks?
Somebody once said to me that the difference between Order and Chaos is 3 meals a day. As soon as people can’t eat, it all goes wrong.
Yeah, scarcity is a given. These questions are more about how the food supply is inherently dangerous or difficult to acquire, on top of being scarce.
So, if we don’t pick problems with food, water, and air as the interesting things to describe… then it can be assumed that general scarcity is involved with these basic human needs; but, they are not inherently dangerous aspects of the post-apocalyptic environment.
OTOH, we could choose to describe the reasons power infrastructures, regional communication, and social interactions are constantly threatening to common survival and sanity — by picking the three questions; What is the reason machine-power is unreliable? What is the major disruption of communication networks like? Why can you never let your guard down?
Reposted from a related conversation I had with Nathan Hawks;
How much effect on the reconstruction is there — was it;
a singular impact?
a cascade of secondary anniversary occurrences after a significant impact?
a carpeting of deep impacts around the globe over many undefined years?
There are some good questions to ask about the aftermath environment;
http://powerframe-rpg.blogspot.com/2014/03/breaking-world.html
to these I have added;
What reason is common use of mechanical-power hindered?
What makes communication networks unreliable?
It might be good to keep in mind, that the problems for survivors in Dallas, Texas; may be very different from the problems of the survivors in Pretoria, Gauteng.
Related to my previous comment on food underpinning a stable society; the film ‘The Road’ springs to mind. Although the nature of the apocalypse is left vague, it is obvious that the food chain has collapsed forcing the decreasing numbers of survivors to feed on one another. Using this theme in an AW game would be pretty nasty.
In the world of The Road (the film, in combination with the novel of origin) I certainly got the impression that; a carpeting of significant impacts, cascaded into escalating anniversaries of deep impacts over the course of a decade…
Just over a decade since the initial impact of some undefined instance which presumably escalated into severe scarcity and war, and there is only the barest sense of any return to survival and psychological stability in the smoldering aftermath.
However, there is still only a small sliver of the world revealed, and the effects and related struggles over the decade long global fall, could vary in depth and detail considerably over larger distances. Some locations may have suffered only from a single anniversarial impact near the end of the cascading decline, and faired much better with a recovery in relative isolation from further disruption.
I could see The Postman leading from this, and Deep Impact leading into it… making a trilogy covering two or three decades.
By the philosophy of The Rule of Three for human survival.
In any extreme situation you cannot survive for more than;
3 seconds without hope
3 minutes without air
3 hours without shelter
3 days without water
3 weeks without food
3 months without luxury
3 years without companionship
Without these things, the human dies…
…even if the body sometimes survives.
While not absolute, these guidelines — oftentimes heard like mantras repeated by survival experts — are reasonable and appropriate to keeping the stresses of survival in perspective. Remember; with Wilson the Volleyball and a few games, Chuck still barely survives as a human without serious damages to his psyche.
I like your use of a list, if you need something to get your group’s creativity flowing. I’m preparing to MC an AW campaign myself and struggling about how much I want to predetermine the world. I think my plan is to go in having the answers to all those questions, but be ready to scrap them if my players are being creative and giving me good material. I might have something like your list ready to throw out though.
Sure, and the other cool thing about the list is, it can be a springboard for other stuff. Once you’ve all worked out some details about the the three broken things they have to choose, you can probably extrapolate other things about the world caused by logical extension and the interactions of the various elements.
Also, the conversation may lead to the players coming up with other cool ideas you can use, and maybe introducing other “broken” elements completely off their own bat.
Hopefully, anyway!