Time for a bibliography thread! Post titles (links even better!) to books you have read that seem perfect for Apocalypse World and why.
Two of mine are:
When there is no doctor
For the obvious reason of thinking about medical care in the post-apocalypse.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1934170119?pc_redir=1402313544&robot_redir=1
Miss Peregrin’s Home for Peculiar Children
For the psychic maelstrom, a Hardholder with a high weird, and several other cool things that would work in an AW game.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1594746036?pc_redir=1402442393&robot_redir=1
Watership Down struck me immediately as being perfect for AW. Fiver so totally opens his brain. It’s a game about imperiled communities and scarcity. There are really obvious fronts.
Watership Down by Richard Adams
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0743277708/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1402626090&sr=8-1&pi=SY200_QL40
Tales from Watership Down by Richard Adams
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0307950190/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?qid=1402626090&sr=8-6&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70
Marshall Miller That’s so true.
A nonfiction book about what would happen to the physical artifacts of our civilization if humanity disappeared tomorrow. Its tone is melancholy, but it helped give me vivid ideas of how and how quickly cities would decay.
The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman.
http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Without-Alan-Weisman/dp/0312427905
Three could maybe serve. It’s one the outskirts of a post-fall megalopolis where most people are born “connected” (the can PM or “pim” eachother, contact satellites for GPS, etc.), some folks have strange powers based on that, and being “disconnected” is a last-ditch punishment considered second only to execution in severity. There are “hard holds,” mercenaries, gangs, and signal-sniffing tech zombies called weir who haunt the formerly populated areas in large numbers. Old systems built to last often continue to function even in the empty parts of “the Strand,” scavenging is fruitful, etc.
Look at Marshall stealth-plugging The Warren…
The Drowned World is AW with the languor turned up to 10. A good model for a “your city after the apocalypse” game.
Riders of the Purple Sage is a Western about Mormons, so your first thought might be DiTV, but there’s also a gunlugger (actively feared because he’s “a gunslinger”) and a hardholder and bandits and romance and scarcity (of food, ammo, horses…). It’s kind of the opposite of The Drowned World: big emotions, grand landscapes.
The Bloody White Baron
So this Russian guy in the 1920s opens his brain to the Maelstrom, becomes convinced he’s a Buddhist messiah, and he conquers Mongolia at the head of a nomad army. Non-fiction, by the way.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6344018-the-bloody-white-baron
Lord of the Flies by William Golding has some strong archetypes, scarcities, and drama.
The TV show Jericho helped me find Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. Both have a strong AW vibe with survivors setting up complicated webs of interreliance and disdain and dealing with outside threats. Stephen King’s Under The Dome too..
Paolo Bacigalupi’s stuff strikes me as pretty AW, especially some of his short stories. Shipbreaker and The Drowned Cities are “young adult” novels that feature harsh apocalyptic landscapes with shifting alliances and interpersonal tension.
St. Gregory of Tours’ The History of the Franks. The Franks at the time of Clovis were living in their own version of a PA world – St. Gregory apologizes for his poor Latin in the beginning, and while they don’t talk about ‘the fall of Rome’, it’s long gone…mostly. The casual brutality, the back-and-forth struggles for power and glory, the family, political, and cultural dynamics, all would be great fodder for an AW game. Beats the hell out of Game of Thrones. Clovis starts as a brilliant Chopper, and by the end is a very successful, ruthless Hardholder.
http://www.amazon.com/A-History-Franks-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140442952/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402635614&sr=8-1&keywords=gregory+of+tours+history+franks
(Thorpe’s translation is the best, in so many ways. Clovis, addressing his warband: “Lusty freebooters!” Whee! 🙂
On the Beach. Submarines, Australians and Armageddon.
The Postman – the book, not the movie.
Post apocalyptic, great examples of diverse communities for different Fronts, great examples of different playbooks (some not yet written, probably).
“Riddley Walker” by Russell Hoban.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/776573.Riddley_Walker
Set in a post-apocalyptic England thrown back to the Iron Age and generations after The Devastating Event, the entire book is written in a devolved form of English which has slipped from its geneological bearings. If you love AW, you will love this book, although I promise you’ve never read anything like it and you never will again. It will give you ideas. Just read it. [Tip for those challenged by the altered English: sound the words out loud. While many words were invented by Hoban for this book, most of them are either portmanteaus, or contain suggestive morphemes when spoken aloud.]
“On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, “Your tern now my tern later.” The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, “Offert!”
The woal thing fealt jus that littl bit stupid. Us running that boar thru that las littl scrump of woodling with the forms all roun. Cows mooing sheap baaing cocks crowing and us foraging our las boar in a thin grey girzel on the day I come a man.”
the stand. by stephen king. maybe pretty obvious, but whatever.
Kameron Hurley’s BEL DAME APOCHRYPHA series (God’s War, Infidel, Rapture) is possibly the most post-apocalyptic set of books I’ve ever encountered on my 39 years on the planet: endless global war fought with bugs and plagues, bounty hunters, shapeshifters, doctors with abilities so weird and advanced they are called magicians, people selling their tongues for cash or smuggling monstrous creations in their wombs, aliens (read: humans from somewhere else arriving in the sky) and on top of it most of her main characters in each book are women and the world is predominantly non-white.
Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. Nonfiction about people building community after disasters.
The Southern Reach Trilogy (the first two have been released) by Jeff Vandermeer. This book does a good job of “barf forth apocalytica”. A strange patch of land where the flora and fauna have evolved and been transformed by an unknown force. A group of researchers are sent in and experience a slew of strange entities and structures. The author has referred to its genre as “Weird Nature”.
Áine ní Dhonnchadha Seth Harris Thank you both, I have some new summer reading!
Jeff Noon’s Vurt and Pollen.
The Vurt, in Vurt is a great psychic Maelstrom. And the Big Sneeze, in Pollen, is a sudden apocalypse.
Both books take place in the same psychedelic sci-fied Manchester (UK). I need a game about that.
I picked up this one today and am having trouble putting it down:
Last Train to Paradise; Henry Flagler and the spectacular rise and fall of the railroad that crossed an ocean.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16007.Last_Train_to_Paradise
The setting for my next AW game is so the ruins of this!!!
If you can still find a copy, Neo Ruins by Motada is AWESOME.
http://hisaharumotoda.com/Home.html